Showing posts with label social justice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social justice. Show all posts

I Will Not Remain Silent


“We regret that the issue escalated to the heightened security level it did,” the airline said, “but we trust everyone understands that the security and the safety of our passengers is paramount and cannot be compromised.”

...however the dignity and humanity of your passengers only matters if they are not from the Middle East.

This story is the exactly why I wear my "We Will Not Be Silent" in Arabic shirt. Why must we go to amber alert every time we see a hijab or hear someone speaking Arabic? Success is ensured in our cunning plan our scaring all 1.8 billion Muslims away from this country by perpetually inconveniencing them especially when we pick on the lawyers. Great Job Americans. 

We Will Not Be Silent is a protest campaign organized by Artists Against the War as a call for action against the racism occurring against Arabs and Muslims worldwide. You can order a free shirt in Arabic, Farsi, Spanish, German, or Hebrew with Arabic. There is also a story about a gentleman who was harassed in JFK airport simply for wearing one of these shirts. My favorite quote is, "Many people called and complained about your t-shirt. Jetblue customers were calling before you reached the checkpoint, and costumers called when you were waiting here in the boarding area ..."We cant make sure that your t-shirt means we will not be silent, we don't have a translator. Maybe it means something else." Obviously! Terrorists have decided to stay away from technological communication and talking to each other; they have moved on to mass producing t-shirts with messages on them. How effective. 




Things it is not:

Saying "Merry Christmas" instead of "Happy Holidays"
Giving gifts
Giving to charity
Being Christian


Things it is:

Only assuming that all white people that do not 'look Jewish' celebrate christmas
Only saying 'happy holidays' around the 25 of December
[obvious] Having the 25 be a national holiday and not have ANY OTHER RELIGION recognized
Thinking about others only at this time of year
Thinking about 'the poor' as if they are not human
Millions of people excluded from identifying with our consumerist culture who's advertisements focus on christmas celebrators

I have chosen to minor in Peace and Social Justice, a minor that was created last year. I have now taken two classes that count toward it, one is Nonviolence in Action and the other is Intergroup Dialogue* Facilitator Training. I am most interested in talking about the prior. As a class, we noticed the lack of support or importance placed on us by the university considering we did not have a room for the 50 of us to occupy. We ended up having class in large lounge of the residence hall attached to the union.

...I have a paper to write, so I am cutting this short. Really short. All I wanted to say was that there is not a wikipedia article on it and I am in a bit of a wikipedia editing craze. I am trying to revamp the article Nonviolence, which means I also need to edit Nonviolent Resistance (Don't even get me started on this one), Pacifism, and several other articles with similar ideas. I also want to fix Social Justice and make an article for Intergroup Dialogue. Anyone want to help?

paper time.....less than a week left


*P once said the 'dialogue' sounded pretentious. Maybe it is, but there is a definite distinction to be made between debate, discussion, and dialogue. Dialogue is a particular kind of communication that is supposed to be the ideal learning conversation. When a group of people are in dialogue, members of the group are open with each other, take personal risks, share their social identities, seek understanding, etc. The term dialogue is used to convey a very specific kind of interaction. See "Intergroup Dialogue in Higher Education : meaningful learning about social justice" by Ximena Zuʹñiga, et al. I will loan it to you if you want it.