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Wednesday, October 9, 2024
Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Speech: Refraining from Malicious Speech
Via Daily Dharma: Rest in the Unknown
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Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - October 9, 2024 💌
"When my biological mother was dying back in a hospital in Boston in
1966, I would watch all the people come into her room. All of the
doctors and relatives would say, 'You are looking better, you are doing
well.' And then they would go out of the room and say, 'She won’t last a
week.' I thought how bizarre it was that a human being could be going
through one of the most profound transitions in their life, and have
everyone they know, and love, and trust lying to them.
Can you hear the pain of that? No one could be straight with my mother
because everyone was too frightened. Even the rabbi. Everyone. She and I
talked about it and she said, 'What do you think death is?' And I said,
'I don’t know, Mother. But I look at you and you are my friend, and it
looks like you are in a building that is burning down, but you are still
here. I suspect when the building burns entirely, it will be gone, but
you will still be here.' So my mother and I just met in that space.'
- Ram Dass -
>> Want to dive deeper with Ram Dass? Click Here to Receive a Daily Wisdom Text from Ram Dass & Friends.
Tuesday, October 8, 2024
Via White Crane Institute // Today's Gay Wisdom: Rev. Nancy Wilson, Our Tribe: Queer Folks, God, Jesus and the Bible
Today's Gay Wisdom
2017 -
"In such a toxic environment, the poor, the minorities, and the politically vulnerable populations will be the first to exhibit signs and symptoms of the deteriorating immunological picture. It is the canary-in-the-mines syndrome. When miners wanted to know if a particular mineshaft was safe from poisonous gases, they sent a canary in first. If the canary returned, the miners felt safe to go in. On our planet today, poor people, people of color, women and children, and gays and lesbians are the canaries (or sitting ducks if you prefer). Those who have any kind of privilege (gender, race, class, sexuality, age) are better able, for a time, to buffer and insulate themselves from the toxic environment — from AIDS, cancer, and other diseases. But not forever.
"There is also a moral and religious toxicity in reaction to so much upheaval, change, and worldwide political challenges. This phenomenon is called in many religions fundamentalism. In a century of increasing relativity in values, morality, and religion, fundamentalism provides absolutes and identifies the enemies. It is a kind of collective mental illness that includes obsessive thinking, tunnel vision, and functions much like other addictions."
- Rev. Nancy Wilson, Our Tribe: Queer Folks, God, Jesus and the Bible
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Gay Wisdom for Daily Living from White Crane Institute
"With the increasing commodification of gay news, views, and culture by powerful corporate interests, having a strong independent voice in our community is all the more important. White Crane is one of the last brave standouts in this bland new world... a triumph over the looming mediocrity of the mainstream Gay world." - Mark Thompson
Exploring Gay Wisdom & Culture since 1989!
www.whitecraneinstitute.org
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Via Daily Dharma: Underneath All the Drama
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Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Intention: Cultivating Compassion
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Monday, October 7, 2024
Via White Crane Institute //
1888 -
Henry A. Wallace, Vice President of the United States, born (d: 1965): No…the 33rd Vice President of the United States, under Franklin Roosevelt, was not a gay man. But his candidacy for President in 1948 marks a momentous turning point in Gay Rights in the United States.
On Aug. 10, 1948, Harry Hay first formulated the organizational and political call for what would become in just a few short years the Mattachine Society for “homosexual emancipation.” That was the night that Ray Glazer invited Hay to be one of 90 people at a public signing of presidential hopeful Henry Wallace’s candidacy petition in California. (rf: Stuart Timmons, “The Trouble with Harry Hay” White Crane Books)
Hay was thrilled about Wallace’s campaign. Henry Agard Wallace was running for president on the Progressive Party ticket against incumbent Democrat Harry Truman and Republican Thomas Dewey. Wallace had been Franklin D. Roosevelt’s secretary of agriculture during the Depression and then vice president from 1941 to 1945. Wallace was still publicly championing the “New Deal” reforms he helped craft for FDR’s administration — economic concessions designed to save capitalism from a potentially revolutionary movement of workers and oppressed people. As a third-party candidate, he opposed the Cold War already begun by the right wing of the U.S. capitalist class, which had emerged from World War II with military, political and economic supremacy over the world. He supported an end to segregation, full voting rights for blacks, and universal government health insurance.
Democrats became enthused and were registering as Progressives. And for many who hungered for progressive change, Wallace’s slogan of faith in “the quietness and strength of grass”— the grassroots — infused them with hope and energy. In virtually every campaign speech, Wallace denounced Jim Crow segregation — even in the rural Deep South. Wallace spoke to 16,000 cheering people in Louisville, Ky., in 1947 — the biggest unsegregated meeting ever held in that city. Students for Wallace at UCLA marched in protest against “whites only” barber shops near the Westwood campus. (Timmons)
That night of Aug. 10, still exhilarated by the signing event, Hay went to a party in which the two dozen guests were all men who he later said seemed to be “of the persuasion.” A French seminary student at the party asked if Hay had heard about the recently published “Kinsey Report.” Hay himself had been interviewed and become part of that study eight years earlier.
It was a bit of a code for a male stranger to open up with talk about the Kinsey Report. Timmons points out, “Its first volume, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, was the season’s most talked-about book, especially among homosexuals, with its claim that 37% of adult men had experienced homosexual relations. To Harry, that newly revealed number suggested the dimensions of an organizable minority. He voiced the idea. When his friend protested that organizing homosexuals was impossible, Harry rebutted him. There could be millions of people who might fall into a group that would find great benefit in organizing. Certainly it would be difficult, but it was not impossible.”
Others at the party were drawn to this debate. They reportedly disagreed with Hay: “There was too much hatred of homosexuals. Any individual who went public could be entrapped and discredited. There were too many different kinds of homosexuals; they’d never get along. And anyway, people belonging to such an organization would lose their jobs.”
As Hay batted away at each argument, he reportedly became more convinced himself that it was possible to organize homosexuals. He raised the idea of creating a “fast bail” fund and seeking out progressive attorneys for victims of anti-Gay police entrapment. This was an important concept, since getting caught in a sting operation by cops meant shelling out lots of money to shady lawyers and crooked officials.
Hay also suggested incorporating education about homosexuality in high school hygiene classes. Soon Hay was leading a discussion about building a Gay male organization to support Wallace’s presidential bid, which in turn might win a sexual privacy plank in the Progressive Party platform. By then, Hay was winning over some of his audience. They suggested some defiantly campy names, but Hay put forward a more subtle one: “Bachelors for Wallace.”
While still at the party, Hay wrote out all the ideas that had been discussed that night about homosexual organizing on a sheet of butcher block paper. Biographer Stuart Timmons offers the following detailed account of what Hay thought about and did that night after the party:
As he drove home, Hay thought about how the reactionary post-war period “was already of concern to many of us progressives. I knew the government was going to look for a new enemy, a new scapegoat. It was predictable.” African Americans were galvanizing a movement for civil rights, buttressed by world horror at the mass extermination of Jews by German fascism. But those he called “the Queers” would be a natural scapegoat.
“They were the one group of disenfranchised people who did not even know they were a group because they had never formed as a group. They—we—had to get started. It was high time.”
That night he sat up in his study writing two papers. The first was a proposed plank for the Progressive Party platform. The second was a proposal for an organization of Gay men that could continue after the party convention was over.
Timmons described the document concerning homosexual organizing in some detail. “This second, much more elaborate paper, based in a Marxist perspective, forged a principle that Hay had struggled years to formulate: that homosexuals were a minority, which he temporarily dubbed ‘the Androgynous Minority.’” Hay referred to the shared characteristics of what constitutes a nation to argue that homosexuals were a cultural minority. Hay wrote, “I felt we had two of the four, the language and the culture, so clearly we were a social minority.”
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Gay Wisdom for Daily Living from White Crane Institute
"With the increasing commodification of gay news, views, and culture by powerful corporate interests, having a strong independent voice in our community is all the more important. White Crane is one of the last brave standouts in this bland new world... a triumph over the looming mediocrity of the mainstream Gay world." - Mark Thompson
Exploring Gay Wisdom & Culture since 1989!
www.whitecraneinstitute.org
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