Tikun Olam-תקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place

Over the past few days, I’ve been trying to formulate a response to disaster that embraces my own devotion to world music and traditional cultures. Certainly, the most important thing we can do for the victims is donate money so that disaster relief agencies can bring to bear what the victims really need. But beyond that, what more can be done?

In my case, I author a world music blog which features the music of cultures and performers whom I find compelling. Due to my own lack of knowledge or life experience, I know very little about the music of the peoples who live on the Indian Ocean in areas hardest hit by the tsunami: Sumatra (Indonesia), Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Myanmar, south India and Somalia. I don’t own any music from any of these places. But I’ve just ordered a CD of the music of northern Sumatra (perhaps the area hardest hit of any in the world with a current estimate of 80,000 dead here alone). I plan to feature music from this CD on my mp3 blog just as soon as it arrives in the mail. Since time is of the essence, if anyone reading this would like to share something with me so I can get something up sooner, please contact me via e mail.

Wouldn’t it be powerful if we can show the world not just the horror and devastation facing these countries, but their enduring musical and cultural heritage as well? So here’s my idea: let’s call upon the world music community–record labels, websites, mp3 bloggers, radio stations, non-profits–to devote their websites and airtime to the traditional music of these nations. Let’s do it in as unified a way as we can. For example, let’s feature the music of northern Sumatra in our blogs and on radio. Let’s have the record labels that promote world music do special promotion of performers from Sri Lanka or south India. Beyond that, let’s provide ready means for those who visit the sites or listen to the music to donate to the organizations on the frontline of the fight against this disaster.

Over the past few years, we’ve heard much about the economic and societal damage done by globalization. Now, for the first time in memory we have a catastrophe that transcends borders and is truly global in impact. In response, we have an opportunity to muster a global response to this emergency that brings to bear the best of modern technology. Let’s use our blogs and our websites to raise cultural as well as philanthropic consciousness.

If you’re a radio DJ, if you’re with Calabash Music or Stern’s, if you’re an mp3 music blogger, if you run the World Music Institute, get hold of this music, feature it, provide people with ways to listen to it, and give people a chance to contribute to groups like Oxfam at the same time.

If you have related ideas of your own, I welcome your comments here.

I was visiting Julie Leung’s Seedlings & Sprouts, when I read something that made me quite jealous. Julie attended last year’s BloggerCon in Boston. When I first read about BloggerCon a year or more ago I felt so left out that such a wonderful concept was happening 3,000 miles away where I couldn’t participate. I wrote to Dave Winer asking if he’d consider a west coast conference. He never wrote back. Now, Julie tells me that there already has been a Silicon Valley BloggerCon. Woops! I missed it. But not to fear, Julie and several co-conspirators have banded together to create Northern Voice, a one-day blogging conference in Vancouver, BC on Saturday, February 19th at the University of British Columbia.

There will be sessions on blogging technology, publicizing blogs, blogging and politics, blogging & family life–the public vs. the private sphere, blogging in academia among other programs.

Blogging often is quite a solitary enterprise in which we are isolated from friends, family and even the world around us. A conference like this can be a great antidote to such isolation. If we really want to create a blogging community that extends beyond the virutal world, then we owe it to ourselves to go out and create networks and relationships based on meeting real people in the real world (well, not that the virtual world isn’t real–it certainly can be). It will make our blogging world that much stronger.

tags northern-voice, pacific-nw-blogging

U.N. Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland spoke true words when he was quoted in this NY Times article, UN Official Backs Down: Rich Nations Not ‘Stingy’:

Egeland, a Norwegian, pleaded at a Monday news conference for individuals and governments around the world to respond generously to the humanitarian disaster created by the tsunami that struck a broad swath of southern Asia on Sunday.

Asked about the response of rich nations to such crises, he said: “It is beyond me why are we so stingy, really.”

“If actually the foreign assistance of many countries now is 0.1 or 0.2 percent of their gross national income, I think that is stingy really. I don’t think that is very generous,” he said.

No sooner did he speak these stinging, but precisely accurate words than the U.S. UN-haters at Fox News and other right wing media outlets got themselves into high dudgeon and Egeland was forced to eat crow. But the damage was done and the Bush administration, reeling from crticism of its then $20-million commitment to tsunami relief upped the ante to a wonderfully generous $40 million (!) (Irate Over ‘Stingy’ Remark, U.S. Adds $20 Million to Disaster Aid). That’s probably half the cost of one of those F-16s flying over Iraqi skies! So pardon me if I’m still a bit underwhelmed.

We’ve just witnessed perhaps the greatest global natural disaster of this century and that’s all we can come up with? How meager and how pathetic. Imagine a tsunami engulfing Bush’s beloved Texas Gulf coast and how quickly and how generously our always charitably-minded president would respond.

Let’s resolve as private citizens to do what our government is too morally oblivious to do. Let’s see American citizens far outstrip the financial commitments of this niggardly government. Make your online contributions from this list provided by the Times.

Here’s some further background from the Times which puts the level of our global aid effort in further perspective:

The United Nations urged rich nations a quarter of a century ago to give away 0.7 percent of their gross domestic product every year in the form of development aid.

To date, however, just a handful of European nations, most of them in Scandinavia, actually meet that goal.

The United States, the world’s largest economy, earmarks 0.13 percent a year of its GDP to development aid. But that figure excludes aid to Iraq and Afghanistan as well as food aid, where the United States is the world’s largest donor.

So the U.S. donates one-sixth of the amount of aid that a 25 year-old UN guideline suggests. Now, that’s an ugly statistic!

We have a beloved yellow Labrador named Gede (Balinese for “first born”) who’s been with us for 5 years. She is the smartest, kindest, most soulful dog you could imagine. And while she’s usually in robust health, she does have her moments. I joke with my wife that she costs us $1,000 per year in a single medical emergency every year. This week, we got our latest $1,000 shock for the year.

I like to have a petting session with my dog once a day where we commune together and she gets some good attention (with a 4 year old and two newborn twins, Gede isn’t getting as much undivided attention as she did when we had no children–other than her of course!). I discovered a small lump on her side (this was the second such lump I’d discovered–the first was a benign fatty cyst). I marked it with magic marker and a few days later called the vet.

I brought her in for an exam on Monday. Dr. Don Canfield aspirated and later examined it under a microscope and determined it was a malignant tumor. The next day, a pathologist confirmed his diagnosis. Tomorrow, she goes in for surgery to remove the tumor. Dr. Canfield says that there are three classes for this type of tumor and they can’t know which class it is until they remove the tumor and can compare it to the healthy tissue growing around it. But he also said there is a 95% survival rate over three years for this type of tumor. That’s good, but I sure would’ve like an even higher rate. I don’t want to face any chance that we’ll lose her.

We already almost lost her two years ago when I stupidly placed toxic snail bait in our garden and my lustfully hungry Lab ate it up like it was kibble. The pain and agony I went through that day, not knowing if she’d pull through was unbearable.

We’re trying not to worry needlessly before we have to and planning for the best outcome possible.

Chalk another one up for the woefully ignorant and bigoted among us: Tariq Ramadan, who was named the Henry R. Luce Professor of Religion, Conflict and Peacebuilding at Notre Dame earlier this year, found that the Department of Homeland Security revoked his visa at the last moment before he left Europe to take up his teaching position. After the U.S. government invited him to reapply for his visa, he did so. But then no new visa came. Earlier this month, Ramadan resigned his Notre Dame position: Ramadan Resigns from Faculty.

This is indeed one of the blacker days in the post 9/11 era and shows the depredations that the USA Patriot Act can wreak on civil liberties in this country (DHS originally acted in denying his visa on the Patriot Act, though it barely explained its decision). For shame!

There has been so much good news regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict recently that I'm almost giddy with hope and excitement. My happiness increased when I followed a link in Jewschool to a September Haaretz article about a new Israeli-Palestinian radio venture, All for Peace. One criticism I had about Israeli cultural life when I lived there in 1972-73 and 1979-80 was that you never heard any Arabic or Palestinian music on Israeli radio (except for the Arab language broadcasts which most Israelis could not understand). I remember the frisson of excitement I felt when I heard ...

There can be no denying that what seems like decades of frozen ice are beginning to thaw in Israeli-Palestinian relations. Mahmoud Abbas publicly calls on Palestinian factions to turn from terrorist violence to political action to pursue the national struggle. Sharon frees 159 Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails in a gesture of goodwill. The New York Times notes that 560 Palestinian leaders have called for a renunciation of violence against Israel:In another development, Palestinian cabinet ministers, legislators and academics, issued a carefully worded call for an end to attacks on Israelis, saying that the violence was harming the Palestinian cause. "We reaffirm our legitimate right to ...

I've just had one of those giddy moments one sometimes gets through blogging and spending lots of time tracking down links and resources on the web. Those who read my blog regularly (the few of you that there are) know that I've written several posts in defense of Tariq Ramadan's right to teach at Notre Dame (the State Department renounced his visa for vaguely specified reasons connected to the Patriot Act). In my posts, I said it was a shande (shame) that more leaders and publications in the Jewish community have not spoken up on this ...

No, this site hasn't all of a sudden become a champion of the Palestinian struggle. But kudos to Dan Sieradski of JewSchool who appropriated the right-wing Israeli settler slogan, "the people is with Gush Katif," changing it to "the people is with Palestine." I say that'll give the settlers their comeuppance. The original slogan implies that the Israeli populace is "with" those settlers opposed to an Israeli withdrawal from the settlements. This slogan was recycled from its original: "the people is with the Golan" a short-lived slogan created by an Israeli political party whose sole issue was opposition to returning the Golan to ...

For at least two years, I've touted the idea of creating a discussion forum for progressives who want to discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The following websites host discussions of the conflict: MideastWeb, Middle East Information Center, CharlieRose.com, NewYorkTimes.com maintains a Mideast Forum and Tikkun Magazine. But there are various reasons why I find each site lacking for my purposes. A year ago, I compiled a directory of Israeli peace resources here in this blog. I wrote about my discussion forum idea:I’ve proposed to several peace organizations (Brit Tzedek V’Shalom, Americans for Peace Now, the New Israel Fund, Tikkun Magazine and Israel Policy Forum) that they initiate such a project. But none ...