For the past couple of weekends I've been trying to get time to plant our leftover wedding favors--some Japanese Maple trees--in the yard, but opportunities keep coming up that get in my way... this past weekend the thing that came up was a work opportunity. A student that I've been getting to know, who heads up the Sustainability Club at Western invited me to a conference called "Powershift West" where students get together every other year to plan for campaigns and initiatives on campus that will educate and transform the way we work, eat and play ...and lobby our leaders. The conference covered progressive topics like land development, corporate power structure, and green energy, transporation and agriculture.
It was so good to be in the middle of a youth-led educational movement that addressed so many of my own interests. Some of the things that I'm hoping to look into more are: The Steady State Economy, The Global Footprint Network, the New Green Economy Conference, and the Move to Amend Campaign, which seeks to undo Corporate Personhood, which is a root cause and concern of the Occupy Movement, it seems. (Check out Annie Leonard's great cartoon-video "The Story of Citizens United." and while you're at it, today is the release of her new short video on US debt.)
Two weeks ago I had a tough call to make. I've been learning for years about Free Trade Agreements and the World Trade Organization and all of the bad that comes from this new globalized system of oppression that starts with wealthy western Multi-national Corporations and our banks and ends with stripping the lands of the globe of it's caring farmers and it's inherant value, dumping waste, and setting up factories everywhere that have no one to hold them accountable to being good to people or the land around them.
My least favorite stories about free trade exploitation come from the region where Taj's grandparents died, in Mexico. Human rights abuses are unending in Oxaca and the Southernmost parts of Mexico, where farmers have lost their ability to grow food for even themselves and their families, and when they unite to fight to get their land back in the way that has always worked before, they are killed with the weapons and mercinary training that come as part of a package deal from agreements made by the World Trade Organization. (The mercinary training part is why I have gone to the SOA Watch vigil in Fort Benning each of the last three Novembers--that's where Mexican soldiers come to get their training, as part of the package.)
I heard that Mexico's former president, Vicente Fox, was coming to the campus where I work, and I was compelled to raise my voice against his message in some way--this is a powerful man who became more powerful when he sold his own people into slavery through his cooperation with the World Trade Organization, and then he had the nerve to come to the place in the Willamette Valley where so many former Mexicans live and work and strive to become citizens because they want so desperately to get away from the effects of Free Trade in their homeland, and here he came, to show our business students about how "prosperous" free trade is, and all that it promises for our future as "united" North Americans. I was just sick whenever I saw the posters with his name and photo on them. And that so few people saw the incredible treatury in his words and actions made me want to shout and keep shouting.
I envisioned a vigil outside the hall where he was to speak. I spoke to a Sociology Professor that was interested in doing a demonstration too, and he said that he'd bring his whole class out in protest. I asked my supervisor what he thought about this idea. Having set up a non-violent demonstration-march on campus last Spring for MLK Junior Day, he liked it at first, but then on furthur consideration, thought it too extreme. He suggested a teach-in instead. I didn't fight him. I thought about how it would be hard for me too if I set up a vigil... I would have to cancel Taj's orthodontist appointment, and I thought about all of the school that she would miss if she didn't get her braces on the Veteran's Day Holiday as we had been scheduled to. I weighed her current struggle with her school work against her grandparents struggle to live, breath and hope, and I backed down.
Last Sunday we went to a new Friends church here in our town, and after the sermon, during the time of open sharing and silence, a man told a story of how God had moved him to act with compassion on a neighbor who had egged his guest's car. He said that he went over and washed the man's own dirty car because he felt that if he stopped listening to God's call to do these kinds of radical things, he might stop hearing them altogether. That was very profound to me. I know, you're thinking that I was feeling bad that I hadn't washed Vicente Fox's car, but really I was wondering if I had ignored God's call on my conscience, and if that would have consequences. And yet I know that God is not one who punishes. I know that if I was intended to start my career as a radical non-violent leader during Vicente Fox's visit to Oregon and chose not to because of two small obstacles, God will still keep working with me. So I'm letting it go.
It has been discouraging for me to be down here in the country when the Occupy movement is going on in Portland, but at the same time, I know that the Occupy movement is not one that I would do well with. I know that I would only be frustrated at the snail's pace of progress toward any kind of united set of goals or solutions that people of so many different backgrounds might really unite around. I know that the movement needs leaders, and I wonder sometimes if I couldn't help in that area, but I have to trust that there's a reason that I moved away right when it was starting up. I know that things like that don't happen randomly and accidentally. So I'm waiting to find some people that I can lead with where I am, and in the meantime I can keep supplying the Occupy movement with food and with prayer. This is hard, but I do feel that it is a call for me from God to be patient and wait for the right time and the right issue, just as I have waited for the right time to plant these trees--I won't let the time pass when it comes, and God won't let me, either.
When I was at the Powershift West conference, someone handed me a small flyer with information about a teach-in there at the U of O. That was encouraging. My supervisor had a good idea. That's something that I can work toward for now. Honestly, I don't think 98% of the studentbody of Western is any more ready to hear about my views on Vicente Fox than 98% of America is ready to run down and camp out in freezing weather as a way of envisioning a more effective democracy together.... probably both groups need to be lovingly educated quite a bit more. Maybe that is my call.
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