In 1985 Bono joined forces with a group of artists concerned about Apartheid in South Africa. Inspired by his meetings with several of them, he wrote "Silver and Gold"
"Yep, silver and gold. This song was written in a hotel room in New York City. 'Round about the time a friend or ours, little Steven, was putting together a record of artists against apartheid. This is a song written about a man in a shanty town outside of Johannesburg. A man who's sick of looking down the barrel of white South Africa. A man who is at the point where he is ready to take up arms against his oppressor. A man who has lost faith in the peacemakers of the west while they argue and while they fail to support a man like bishop Tutu and his request for economic sanctions against South Africa. Am I buggin' you?"
Well, I mean to bug you!
Anarchy is best understood as Rebellion against UNJUST laws. The Yang [male positive force] of anarchy resists authority and causes disorder and is socially and politically incorrect by the norms of the status quo for it seeks the higher ground of justice.
The Yin or feminine passive force of anarchy births a new order out of the chaos and chaos is creativity in action.
In 2004 the International Court of Justice ruled that The Wall is a violation of International Law because it cuts through the West Bank appropriating Palestinian land and destroying Palestinian villages and economy to make way for further Israeli settlements, all of which are illegal under international law.
Negligently unreported by corporate media are the thousands of indigenous Palestinians and hundreds of Israelis and internationals who have been waging a major grassroots nonviolent campaign of resistance to the route of Israel’s Wall.
In November 2005, this reporter attended the Gainesville, Florida, Anarchist’s Against the Wall Power Point Lecture by Ayed Morrar from the West Bank village of Budrus and Jonathon Pollak, an intense young Israeli and committed activist and organizer for Anarchist’s Against the Wall/AAtW.
Pollak: "I was six years old at my first demonstration and active on my own at thirteen. I am 23 now. When they started to build the Apartheid Wall in the West Bank I would go a few times a week and watch them deceive the world. The Israeli government successfully marketed the Apartheid Wall as a security barrier. But it is all about segregation, separation and ethnic cleansing. The Apartheid Wall has put 76% [of what had been the village of] Jayous on the Israeli side of the Wall."
"Not such a great shock when government lies to you.
"Civilian uprising and non-violent activism is not like the Gandhi movie. It's not carrying posters and saying we don't like your wall, go away. We stand in front of Caterpillar's knowing we will be shot and arrested. I was shot five times in the last two years by rubber bullets which are 1/2 inch steel bullets covered with plastic. I have been shot in the head and the more I experience I have the scarier it is. One learns to recognize the ritual of it all: when the IDF will begin using the billy clubs, when the tear gas will come, when the bullets will come.....We are not a dialogue group, AAtW is an Israeli organization and we are not colonial liberators. All the strategy is done by Palestinians, we are with them seeking justice and giving support. There is no price to high to pay for freedom, equality and universal rights. Without justice there can be no peace.
"Although Israel marketed the Wall as a security barrier, logic suggests such a barrier would be as short and straight as possible. Instead, it snakes deep inside the West Bank, resulting in a route that is twice as long as the Green Line, the internationally recognized border. Israel chose the Wall’s path in order to dispossess Palestinians of the maximum land and water, to preserve as many Israeli settlements as possible, and to unilaterally determine a border.
"In order to build the Wall Israel is uprooting tens of thousands of ancient olive trees that for many Palestinians are also the last resource to provide food for their children. The Palestinian aspiration for an independent state is also threatened by the Wall, as it isolates villages from their mother cities and divides the West Bank into disconnected cantons [bantusans/ghettos]. The Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem conservatively estimates that 500,000 Palestinians are negatively impacted by the Wall.
"We believe that, as with Apartheid South Africa, Americans have a vital role to play in ending Israeli occupation - by divesting from companies that support Israeli occupation, boycotting Israeli products, coming to Palestine as witnesses, or standing with Palestinians in nonviolent resistance." [1]
According to a UN report, Haaretz columnist Danny Rubinstein admitted that "Israel today was an apartheid State with four different Palestinian groups: those in Gaza, East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Israeli Palestinians, each of which had a different status...even if the wall followed strictly the line of the pre-1967 border, it would still not be justified. The two peoples needed cooperation rather than walls because they must be neighbors." [2]
"An apartheid society is much more than just a ‘settler colony’. It involves specific forms of oppression that actively strip the original inhabitants of any rights at all, whereas civilian members of the invader caste are given all kinds of sumptuous privileges." [3]
Producer of "30 Minutes with Vanunu" and "13 Minutes with Vanunu" Author of "Keep Hope Alive" and "Memoirs of a Nice Irish American 'Girl's' Life in Occupied Territory"
She has been to Israel Palestine five times since June 2005.
She is currently working on "The Boom Boom Benny Story"
That is a great Bono quote which sadly still applies to people... While driving back from California years ago, I stopped and played it all along the way. It got some good vibes.
Ya, Israel has to learn how to treat the Arabs driven from homes. Until that happens, it seems like Peace in the Middle East will not come about.
by
Michael Dewey (4 articles, 1 quicklinks, 3 diaries, 185 comments)
on Wednesday, July 23, 2008 at 12:36:54 PM
When THAT DAY we call 9/11 occurred, it was Bono and Bob that comforted me-NOT the MSM or the pols!
I was also writing fiction back then, and so I offer you this reflection i wrote which is excerpted from:
Chapter 10: THAT DAYfrom KEEP HOPE ALIVE
....Jack had been restless for three days. Julianne was in New York City at her sister’s home and wasn’t due back for three more. His knees began throbbing more the moment she drove out of sight on the morning of September 8, 2001.
After returning home on Monday night from the Brother Lawrence Addictions Center, Jack mindlessly ate two Lean Cuisines, then spent the rest of the evening trying to read. He fell asleep just before dawn and dreamt he was on the blacktop running track at the middle school where Julianne taught seventh grade English, where they both rollerbladed in the early mornings before the students arrived on campus.
Jack spent a ten-hour day at the BLAC, as its founder and administrator, and the mornings on the track were when the couple had their best conversations. He inhaled the aroma of tar as he wondered what was keeping Julianne from him. He bladed for what seemed like hours, when a silver spandex-clad apparition with a golden helmet flew by, sharply turned, and with a backward stroke, called out, “Hi, Jack, don’t look down; don’t look back; look out straight, Jack, look out straight, don’t look back!”
“Yeah, I can; I can do that,” Jack responded, but the apparition had already vaporized into the distance. Then Jack rolled onto an exquisite grace, knees freed from bone-on-bone grinding and not an ache in his fifty-three-year old body that had been abused by two motor vehicle accidents and hours of overuse syndrome. Jack glided on the blacktop effortlessly for what seemed like hours, when suddenly, a roar of thunder assaulted his senses, and his eyes were magnetized upward, to view two fireballs thrown down from on high, miles from where he stood. He saw them hit the ground; one traveled east, the other west, and then they circled back around, burning a path straight towards him. Just before they collided, Jack woke up, not believing he had only been dreaming.
Not until after he had downed a pot of coffee did the phone ring. “Jack? Are you watching TV?”
Maureen, the day supervisor at the BLAC asked, as she fingered the framed mission statement that sat upon every employee’s desk and on the north wall of every resident’s room:
‘Peace, peace, peace. God’s peace be upon you. But living today in a time of war, crying out peace, peace, peace, where there is no peace. Fearing age and death, pain and darkness, destitution and loneliness, people need to get back to the simplicity of Brother Lawrence.’ [Dorothy Day]
Brother L. was a monk in the 17th century, who lived in a monastery and was consigned to the kitchen. He spent his life baking bread, chopping onions, scrubbing pots and floors. He also ran all the errands, did all the shopping, and always brought back the finest of wine. He loved his brothers deeply, but they merely tolerated his many eccentricities, or he was totally ignored. Truly, I tell you, if ever a saint was born to bring hope to the addicted and those addicted with obsessive-compulsive tendencies, he is the one. For Brother L. learned that by continually re-remembering the Lord, no matter what the activity, or where one might be, the Lord was ever-present and a holy habit was born, just re-remembering that.
Jack thrived on curiosity and spoke as he reached for the remote. “Mo, you know I never watch TV in the daytime; what’s up?”
“Well, isn’t Julianne visiting her sister in the city?”
“Yeah, in fact, today’s plan was to meet her sister’s co-workers on Floor 101 of the North Twin Tower.”
“Jack, turn the TV on.”
“Oh, Mo, I just did; my God, is it the end of the world?” He spoke as he hung up the phone and never heard Mo say, “I don’t know.”
Jack knew in his bones that Julianne had been vaporized as he recalled a song he had first heard at a Bob Dylan concert in 1981:
See the massacre of the innocent City’s on fire Phones out of order I see the turning of the page. Curtain’s rising on a new age. See the Groom still waiting at the altar.
And then, II Chronicles 6:1 welled up within him: “The Lord has said that he would dwell in thick darkness.”
...Kat had been dancing in her loft studio in Panacea, Florida, all morning, ignoring neurological symptoms. She did not turn her cell phone on until 11:45 a.m., and then gasped, “Christ, who died? The entire Hunter clan has called me. I’ll phone Mom,” she said, just as “Let it Be” chimed from her cell.
“Hi, Kat, I have been trying to reach you.”
“Mom, what’s the deal? What’s going on?”
“Turn the TV on.”
Kat did and gasped, “Oh my God, is it the end of the world?”
“Nobody knows.”
“Mom, I am coming home. I’ll bring Bob; I think I’ll stay awhile.”
“Okay, okay, drive carefully.”
Kat packed three weeks’ worth of clothes, put Bob, her blue-eyed cat, in his kennel, and wrote a sign for the front door that read “KATZ STUDIO CLOSED UNTIL???”
She taped it to the door and never looked back again. “Bob, I have been dreading telling dad about my symptoms, because I don’t want to admit them. But, I have been summoned from the land of denial and must face the facts on the ground. If I have the dreaded Gehrig’s disease like my cousin Nick, I will be livid. He was a saint; I am not. I am not dancing as I once did; I don’t glide anymore, I have gotten clumsy, and all of these muscle twitches are driving me crazy! I am pissed! I am too young for this! Oh Christ, I hope it is just a bad cervical spine, like Dad’s. I can live with the pain, but I must be able to move about, or I’ll go nuts. Nick was a saint even when he couldn’t move, but I will be an unholy terror if I can’t dance. Bob, if I have ALS, will you please just shoot me and put everyone out of my misery?”
Kat sighed deeply and popped in a favorite mix she had burned of Tom Petty and U2, and then lost herself in the music until Bono began to wail:
If I could yes I would, If I could, I would let it go Into the half light and through the flame Into the light and to the day, Let it go and so to find the way, To let it go, and so to find the way.
I am wide awake, I am wide awake, wide awake If I could, you know I would: Let it go: Desperation, Dislocation, Separation, Condemnation, Revelation, In temptation, Isolation, Desolation, Let it go and so to find a way I am wide awake, I am wide awake, I am wide awake, wide awake!
Kat mused, “Strange, how seeing that horror on TV woke me up to some things, too.”
The Sunday after that day the world stood still, the Hunters’ seven children and eighteen grandchildren had gathered together. Everyone was down at the lake except for Jake, Terese, and Kat, who were in the family room.
Jake contemplated Kat’s chances of having ALS or a bad neck, and brooded.
Terese said, “There’s an interfaith gathering today in Shea Stadium, and I want to view it.”
She turned the TV on just as the shofar sounded in New York City, and hundreds of priests, rabbis, sheiks, and clerics of all kinds somberly filed into the stadium in front of a sorrowful nation. Kat became luminous. “Wow, look at how beautiful all of that is! All of those holy ones in their uniqueness and all the shades of people in the stands reaching out to each other--how blessed we are in America to live among such diversity, and how beautiful it is to see us coming together out of such sorrow. This is the way we can let the pain go: by reaching out to the stranger, we comfort them and heal ourselves. America’s worst day has brought us and the world together. Why, it’s only a few angry mad men who did the evil; the international community can confront this together, by confronting this evil as sister and brother. What an incredible opportunity America has been given to lead the world this way and not seek revenge. Imagine the dysfunctional family of Father Abraham building on this momentum, to confront the evil that is terrorism, by confronting it with good and unity among us. Didn’t St. Paul say that the only way to resist evil is with good? Imagine how much better the world will be when America chooses not to use military power, now that we all know our nuclear arsenal cannot protect us American’s will want to discover why these mad men did this evil and go after that! The global village is the community to address this issue; terrorism is everywhere, and now America has woken up to the fact that we are not immune. We are all in this world together; we will either learn to share this world as sister and brother, or we will blow it up.”
Terese responded. “Kat, human nature is to strike back and seek revenge, but we have the witness of Christ, Gandhi, and Reverend King how to effectively respond to violence. I hope and pray this president follows their ways, but I see hawks circling.”
Jake cleared his throat and intoned, “Another thing is that acting out of fear makes one do stupid, irrational things. You know I have always said to never ever react out of fear, for the gospel says fear not! And fear drives out compassion and hardens the heart.”
Kat was mesmerized by the TV, Terese sighed deeply repeatedly, and Jake brooded.
In a log cabin nestled within the thickly wooded mountains of upstate New York, Jack sat in a darkened room with the TV on, but he wasn’t watching. When the shofar blew and grabbed his attention, he froze until the ram’s horn went silent, and then popped open his sixth beer of the day, for Jack had fallen off the wagon.
by
Eileen Fleming (145 articles, 50 quicklinks, 266 diaries, 579 comments)
on Wednesday, July 23, 2008 at 3:42:43 PM
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