For the last 18 years, I’ve been the director of a non-profit organization working with urban youth who are starting to get in trouble at home, at school, or with the law. I came to this position naive and inexperienced, so I had a pretty steep learning curve. The toughest lessons I had to learn were about what it meant to organize and lead other people. But running a close second to all of that are the ongoing lessons about racism and its impact on me, our staff, and most importantly, the youth and families we work with.

What is Pangea Day? From the web site:

In 2006, filmmaker Jehane Noujaim won the TED Prize, an annual award granted at the TED Conference. She was granted $100,000, and more important, a wish to change the world. Her wish was to create a day in which the world came together through film. Pangea Day grew out of that wish.

Pangea Day is a global event bringing the world together through film.

Why? In a world where people are often divided by borders, difference, and conflict, it’s easy to lose sight of what we all have in common. Pangea Day seeks to overcome that – to help people see themselves in others – through the power of film.

Starting at 18:00 GMT on May 10, 2008, locations in Cairo, Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai, and Rio de Janeiro will be linked for a live program of powerful films, live music, and visionary speakers. The entire program will be broadcast – in seven languages – to millions of people worldwide through the internet, television, and mobile phones.

The 24 short films to be featured have been selected from an international competition that generated more than 2,500 submissions from over one hundred countries. The films were chosen based on their ability to inspire, transform, and allow us see the world through another person’s eyes.

Every now and then change comes in like a tidal wave. Most often, however, it happens so slowly and incrementally that you hardly notice until one day, you look back and recognize the miles that have been traversed. It can be important every now and then to stop for a moment and celebrate the little things in order to keep up the energy for the long run.  

A few months ago, Edger introduced the idea of the “ripple” effect to Docudharma. As we all know and see every day, it has now been incorporated into the current banner.

I thought it might be interesting to talk a bit about those small changes that make up the ripple effect as it is being manifest in the hearts and minds of those of us here at Docudharma and spread out there into the world.

If you take a moment to think about it, what has changed in you or in how you live your life as a result of blogging here at DD or elsewhere that might have gone unnoticed if you didn’t take a minute to reflect? Some of those changes might be big enough that they spring to mind right away. Others are more subtle. And some might still be looking like internal changes that haven’t quite found a direct manifestation out there in the world. Others might have had a direct impact on how you live your life and the choices you make.

I’d be happy to share a couple of mine and then would love to hear from you in the comments.  

No, I’m not going to talk about the “end times” or Armageddon. Although, after years spent in fundamentalist churches, that is what the word “revelation” conjures up for me most days.

I’d like to talk about the process of revelation as we grow, learn and wake up. Sounds like a wonderful thing, doesn’t it? But here’s a piece of art by Gerry Bannan that captures the complexities of what it has often felt like to me.

Yesterday I was reminded again that I work with some really smart wonderful people. I was chatting with a few staff when one of them started ranting about a bill that is about to clear our state legislature in record time. I hadn’t heard anything about it because I quit paying attention to alot of the local news a while ago. Our tv stations and newspapers have gone the way of media consolidation are are pretty much worthless. And it just makes my blood boil to listen to them or read them…so I stopped.

Anyway, back to this new law speeding through our state legislature. As my title indicates, its known as the “Hannah Montana Law” and it passed the House on a 119-12 vote and the Senate unanimously.

One of the things I’ve noticed about bloggers is that, in addition to politics, many seem to be attracted to science fiction. That has never been necessarily true for me. But a few years ago I stumbled on a science fiction trilogy by Suzette Haden Elgin. The first two books in the series, Native Tongue and The Judas Rose really grabbed me. Here’s the publisher’s synopsis for Native Tongue:

Set in the twenty-second century, the novel tells of a world where women are once again property, denied civil rights and banned from public life. Earth’s wealth depends on interplanetary commerce with alien races, and linguists a small, clannish group of families have become the ruling elite by controlling all interplanetary communication. Their women are used to breed perfect translators for all the galaxies’ languages.

Nazareth Chornyak, the most talented linguist of the family,…longs to retire to the Barren House, where women past childbearing age knit, chat, and wait to die. What Nazareth comes to discover is that a slow revolution is going on in the Barren Houses: there, word by word, women are creating a language of their own to free them from men’s control.

So what Elgin does with these two books is to help us understand the role that language can play in both oppression and revolution. One of the very small ways I’ve experienced that is my frustration that our current language has only one word for the verb “to know.” Due to the patriarchal nature of our culture, Women’s Ways of Knowing have been ignored or discounted. I remember what an earth-shattering event it was for me to read that book as an adult and begin the process of reclaiming all that I “knew.”

My first disclaimer is that this is not going to be an essay about gas prices. I’ll leave that for someone else.

What I want to talk about is how, in the midst of one outrage after another after another (those are all just from the front page here yesterday and today) we keep our sanity. Lets not fool ourselves, after awhile, staying awake and paying attention takes its toll. If it didn’t, more people would join us. There are times I can’t really blame my friends who don’t want to “mess with their beautiful minds” because its frankly exhausting keeping up with it all.

For some reason, I reached a bit of a breaking point this week in watching the ABC debate. I think it was more of a last straw than just the sheer inanity of that event. But after all the “fuck you’s” at the tv screen, I felt pretty exhausted. I need to fill up the tank.  

Some might define power as being able to get what you want. But as Mick told us so many years ago…

I think many of us are feeling pretty powerless these days to affect change in our country. So I thought it would be interesting to have a little conversation about power and the different ways it works. I’ll share a little of my experience and hope you will chime in down below in the comments.

During my growing up years, I attended church at least 3 times a week. Always associated with church for me was the music. And organs have always been a big part of that. But somewhere in the mid-60’s rock-n-roll bands discovered organs and added them to the traditional instrumentation of guitar, bass and drums. Oftentimes, this combination provided some of the most powerful music of the 60’s. So today, I’d like to take you on a trip down memory lane with the organ.

Throughout I’ll provide wiki links to the songs because each of them was such a breakthrough in music that they are surrounded by intrigue and mythology.

The first is from The Animals and was recorded in 1964. Here’s House of the Rising Sun.

Yesterday I wrote an essay titled Women of the World, Rise Up. We had some interesting discussion and some fun in the comments. And then this morning, the synergy breaks out because I got an email forwarded by a friend from Eve Ensler (author of “Vagina Monologues”) about her “V to the Tenth” tour to stop violence against women. I wanted to share a bit of it here as a follow-up to our discussion yesterday.

I have seen the faces of hundreds of activated, vital, committed, diverse women and men who are literally giving their lives to end violence against women and girls. Women and men who have changed their cultures, told their stories and helped others do the same. I have met the V-Day activists who have raised money, raised hope, raised hackles, raised the V flag in community after community.

…

I heard the stories of three women in the military, April Fitzsimmons, Suzanne Swift, Dorothy Mackey, who flew in to Austin Texas to be honored at a V-DAY in an Enchanted Forest. I learned from them that one out of three women in the military will be raped and that very few men are every held accountable. I learned that there is something called Military Sexual Trauma. This is a condition in which, after suffering terrible trauma on the battlefield leading to PTSD, women, and some men, are then raped by their own comrades who they were trained  to trust. This secondary betrayal and violation throws them into multiple layers of trauma, often resulting in severe depression and suicide.