World Harmony: Can It Happen?

Day 12th of the Troops Home Fast




The highlight of the day was attending the World Harmony: Can It Happen? The show hosted by Stuart Thomas featured the Raytheon Six. These people where arrested for blocking the gates to the Raytheon missile factory here in Tucson. Many of the missiles being used in Iraq are made by Raytheon. Raytheon, the largest manufacture of weapons in the world, not only supply the US with weapons, but they sell them to other countries. Pat Birnie and Gretchen Nielsen, two of the people arrested, were on the show as well as Food Not Bombs cofounder, Keith McHenry.

I’ve written a lot about Raytheon over the years. I can only see a positive future for it if US policy changes and we being converting high-tech weaponry into high-tech sustainable survival technology to save us from global warming. With good leadership and vision, Raytheon could begin experimenting with and building solar powered satellites that could be used to beam solar power from Outer Space for our energy needs here on Earth. Raytheon could be instrumental in developing Solartopia.

I told the host that I was on the Troops Home Fast. He is interested in the fast and would like me to be on his show. World Harmony is really a neutopian question. It is not only the absence of war, but it demands we create an entirely new way of living. To do this we need a world government with the power to administer global justice starting with creating a Buckminster Fuller’s world energy grid.

To watch the program online, go to Access Tucson. Look for "NOW PLAYING" and click "Watch Online,"and finally click "Watch Channels 72/97".

Rebroadcasts of this program can be seen on Saturdays, July 22nd and 29th from Noon - 1:00PM on Cox Cable Channel 99, Comcast Channel 74.

For more information, contact Stuart Thomas, Talk-Show Host and Producer, at (520) 722-2837 or Humanharmony2005@aol.com

Raging Grannies and the Press

Day 11th Troops Home Fast

We gathered for the Raging Grannies one year anniversary of being arrested at the Recruitment Center on Speedway. It was a beautiful gathering. They sang songs and gave speeches. I held up my TROOP HOME FAST sign to the oncoming traffic.

Who didn’t show up was the press. Not one mainstream radio, TV or newspaper came, not one. Several days before the event, I talked to a lot of the local press on the phone asking them to come to the Grannies gathering and report on The Troops Home Fast. The Grannies also sent a press release. So, it was a total media black out.

Why do peace events rarely make the news? It seems as though someone has to either get arrested or killed to make the news. Bombings and war always make news. Kind actions towards global healing and love are not news in America. Dissenters go unnoticed even though they are there. There is no minority voice in main stream America except for Cindy Sheehan. The voice of Big Brother corporations reigns supreme.

If I was to carry this fast all the way and die, would the press then report of it? Wayne doesn’t think they would. I would be just be another nameless casualty in the movement towards global liberation. He is not the only one who has told me that fasting for a political reason works if you are famous. But if you are a nobody woman, who will care if you die are the few people who know you.

The one thing I wish they had at the Grannies gathering was an open mike. I would have liked to tell people about why I am fasting.

Tomorrow I’ll blog about why I am fasting and my new campaign Pounds for Peace.

Neutopia and Neutrino

Doctress Neutopia with LoveBird, Neutrino on her head.
10th Day of the Fast for Peace

photo: Wayne Sumstine

Justice Locally and Globally

10th day of the Troops Home Now Fast

Elizabeth, a CODEPINK faster came from Phoenix to join the peace vigil that occurs every Wednesday morning at the Speedway Recruitment center. When the peace folks started their vigil years ago, they experienced little conflict until the owner of the property where the recruitment center is located, started complaining. He didn’t want pro- peace protesters to park in the parking lot of his strip mall. He didn’t even want them to prop their peace sign on the bushes next to the sidewalk.

A year ago, the Raging Grannies of Tucson were arrested after they attempted to sign up at the recruitment center to go to Iraq and help rebuild the city using love and peace principles. Their arrest made national news. After that, right-wing pro-war protesters started showing up with their American Flags and huge signs saying things like “Support the Troops.” Several of the pro-war people were from military families. We found out that several of the pro-war protesters had sons who were killed in Iraq.

It was clear to us that these pro-war folks were somehow invested in the war and wanted to hold onto the illusion that the war was a noble cause. The pro-war folks started harassing and assaulting the pro-peace people eventually driving them to the opposite side of the street.

Wayne was assaulted by folks when we drove on a side street near the right-wingers. He was using a video tape to record the protesters when the right-wingers approached our car and demanded we turn off the video camera. When it kept rolling, a man came up to the car and with his sign on a stick hit Wayne who was in car. His blow hit Wayne's hand. Luckily, it wasn’t hurt. When we got over to the pro-peace side of the street, we called the police.

After 45 minutes, the police arrived. An over weight officer’s first question to me was, “Are you with the peace organization?” Then he asked me if I knew I wasn’t allowed to park in the strip mall. Since I drove through the mall, he said he could arrest me for trespassing since the owner didn’t want any pro-peace person to set foot on his property. So, you can guess, the police did nothing to the assaulter even after he viewed our tape of the attack.

Back to today:


After telling us a passionate story about convincing a young person not to sign up for the war in Iraq, Elizabeth said that we really need to talk to the opposition to try to teach them of the folly of the war. We crossed the street together to see what the other side was like. Immediately we were in hostile fire being shoot with insults and name calling at us for wearing pink and holding a sign that said Troops Home Fast. So, after a few photographs, we cross back over the street to friendly faces.

I wonder if these two camps/ two sides of the streets represent the polarization that is happening in the United States? Can’t we even talk to each other? Has communication broken down so much that all we can do is wave flags to each other, shouting at each other, “I’m the real patriotic one!”

On the way to the protest this morning I listened to the radio. I heard someone say that everything has changed except our way of thinking. He was paraphrasing the Albert Einstein quote. He said that technology, science, reproduction, woman’s position in society, child rearing, communication technologies have changed, but we still think in terms of war as a solution to conflict.

There is something else that hasn’t change, the housing hierarchy and property, the have and the have nots and the mass poverty it creates. So everything has not changed. Maybe we need to look at those things that haven’t changed to understand what keeps this militaristic mentality in place. Einstein’s quote is, “The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking --- the solution to his problem lies in the heart of mankind.”

After the Bomb was dropped, Einstein became an advocate of peace through creating a supra-national organization. He wanted the world to see the danger of nationalism and realized that atomic power needed to be managed by a world government. Bombs in the hands of nation states, isn’t a good idea. Howard Zinn’s 4th of July blog said the same thing, “we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed. Is not nationalism -- that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder -- one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred?”

Zinn goes on to say that “we need to assert our allegiance to the human race, and not to any one nation.” If the peace movement could only follow this allegiance and give up wanting to be patriotic, I think we would have better understand of each other. We need to move toward global understanding and global institutions that can fairly manage our 21st Century global warming reality.


So how do we reach this new state of politics? The United States is a rogue nation in the community of nation states because it broke the United Nations charter that it agreed to after WWII. The U.N. charter stated that without permission of the U.N. Security Council no nation can use armed forces against another sovereign nation expect in self-defense. In the case of Iraq, the Security Council sent in weapons inspectors to find the weapons of mass destruction before they would give the OK for the US to invade. Thus, the United States broke international law—the U.N. Charter-- and is guilty of the supreme crime against humanity.

Benjamin Ferencz, a former chief prosecutor of the Nuremberg Trials successfully convicted 22 Nazi officers. Ferencz, now 87, believes that humanity isn’t yet "civilized enough to prevent this type of illegal behavior." He said that while he believes the United States is guilty of war crimes, "the international community is not sufficiently organized to prosecute such a case. … There is no court at the moment that is competent to try that crime."

So our heroic question is to find a way to manifest the global consciousness and the organization it needs to bring justice locally and globally.

Lovolution Video and Access Tucson

Day 9 of the Troops Home Fast

I had a slip up last night. It was after my Access Tucson Community TV workshop. I received a full scholarship to take their studio production workshop, so I didn’t want to miss it. I made it through the entire four hour workshop, but I started to feel very hungry. Maybe it was because one needs a lot of brain power to learn something new. But it was the worst attack of hunger I have had so far. It was the first time I learned how terrible it was to be hungry and how it affects your ability to learn.

Wayne also was at Access Tucson because he had received a half scholarship to take the field production class. When we arrived at the station they directed all the workshop participants to gather in the same room. Wayne avoided sitting in that room and remained in the hall way I guess to avoid being near me. It hurt my feelings because deep down I wanted him to be glad to see me. It’s not like you can turn off your love for someone. Dreams take a long time to fade and to grow.

I made it through the first two hours feeling ok. During the break, I very much wanted to talk with Wayne. I searched for the room for his workshop thinking that maybe his class was also on a break. I found him in the basement. His class was still meeting, but I could see him through the door.

Should I attempt to communicate with him again? After all, he can be so crazy. But I went a little crazy with him when I started fighting back. If only I could be more Buddhist and NEVER fight back, never raise my voice to him. If only when he goes off the deep end, I could train my mind to go into a peace meditation.

Maybe it is the militant pacifist in me who wants to shout back and be the peace warrior. But with Wayne, fighting back doesn’t work. What works is for me to never get angry back. Keep on doing what I am doing, calmly, and don’t react to his anger. It is his anger that he has to deal with. It only makes the situation worse when I fall into the anger cave with him.

I went outside and located his car. Looking in my pocket book for a piece of paper to write him a note and put on the windshield, I saw a bumper sticker that I picked up at St. Francis in the Foot Hills church. It said, “Love Heals” and had a graphic of an angel holding a heart on it.

I went to St. Francis last Sunday to hear the minister David Wilkinson give a sermon on Mary Magdalen. He has been doing a series of sermons on ideas in Dan Brown’s The Davinci Code. From reading the book, David has been going through a transformation. He has come to realize how sinister Christianity has been throughout history. But he said so have all the patriarchal religions including Judaism, Hinduism, Islam, and even Buddhism. How much I agree with him. But it was also true that people throughout time have needed religions. They need a sense of worship of the mysteries beyond human comprehension.

What I am learning from the fast is that I need the strength of something beyond me to keep me going. The love for the planet, for Gaia, for the possibility of what a beautiful planet we could build if we got beyond this terrible war mentality is what keeps me moving forward on the fast. When I think of how the world could be if we embraced arcology and moved to building sustainable ecocities on Earth and in Outer Space gives me the will power to move on.

David believes that we don’t need a new religion. He thinks through accepting the dark parts of ourselves that Mary Magdalen represents, the knowledge of the divine feminine that has been oppressed for thousands of years, then we can find a way to transform Christianity into a religion that has the wisdom to remake our planet with love. A metaphoric partnership between Mary Magdalen and Jesus certainly gives the religion a sense of balance; however, as I wrote about in the Gaia Religion, cocreative partnerships are not enough to bring about our planetary salvation.

Key to making sustainable lovely relationships is a new environmentally sustainable relationship with Nature. This requires a new architectural plan, building car-free cities. Christianity talks about paradise on Earth, but it never describes it. What does the architecture look like? How do they care for children? What is the government structure like? So, Christianity fails to give us a blueprint. The task of the Lovolution Village video is to answer some of these questions.

Now back to my message to Wayne. I wrote on the bumper sticker, “Do you still want to work with me on the video?” The teacher in my video class told us that the most difficult part of doing video is finding a crew. Video is a medium that it is better not to do it alone. There is so much to be concerned with, audio, visual, lighting, actors, etc. It is hard for one person to do everything. Wayne was the beginning of my crew. It was up to me to take the first step in moving beyond the fight.

Access Tucson is scheduled to close it door because the government failed to stand up for it when they renewed their contract with the cable company. If something positive doesn’t happen to reverse the contract, Access Tucson Community TV will be forced to close down Sept 2007. We need Access Tucson to make our video. We don’t have a lot of time to make it come together.

By the end of class I was starving, painfully starving. I couldn’t stand it any longer. To learn video I needed food. I ran outside hoping to meet Wayne before he drove away. His class had just gotten out and he was just getting into the car. I yelled at him to wait and when I walked up to him, I asked him how his class went. He said it went well. We had more small talk before I said I was famished and could he take me somewhere to get something to eat.

We got into his car. It was 10:30pm. The only restaurants opened were the Fast Food Junk food restaurants. I couldn’t break a fast on junk. Here I was starving for food in America and the only places to eat didn’t have real food. America was starving. Finally, we passed Wild Oats Natural Food store. We rushed inside. We went to the soup section. We picked out a can of Amy’s Butternut Squash soup. It’s a liquid soup. We went home I heated it up and drank it.

This morning I continue the fast, sent out press releases to the media about the TROOPS HOME FAST and rested for tonight’s studio production class.

Inside and Outside the White House

8th Day of Troops Home Fast

I moved to Arizona from Massachusetts to work with the architect Paolo Soleri in 1991. As a graduate student in utopian thought, I thought that his design represented the best alternative to urban sprawl that I could discover. His idea of arcology excited my soul with the possibility of living in an entirely new way with nature. Through his ecological city design, what he calls arcology, I could see how the human species could not only live in balance with the ecology on Earth, but expand throughout the galaxy. I fell in love with his idea. When the opportunity arose for me to work at his urban experiment in the Arizona Desert, I packed up my things and moved out West.

Since that time, I have been working to bring together several very important movements and ideas, the arcology idea, the peace and environmental movements, and the movement towards conscious evolution and global democracy. Gaian (planetary) science and spirituality are also integral to this holistic approach. These ingredients make up the bases of lovolutionary change. The peace movement needs a well thought out plan for moving us away from a militaristic economy. Arcology could provide us with such a blueprint of action.

The problem I found with Soleri is that he doesn’t want to look at the social architecture within an arcology. Women’s and children’s issues are not important to him. He isn’t interested in incorporating his designs with solar energy except for passive solar energy design principles. Soleri also doesn’t want to look at community issues. For him, it isn’t part of the construction process. Neither is democracy.

So Soleri has a few big blind spots that block real progress in making his model more complete. Arcology isn’t just a City in the Image of Man, the title of his famous book because women hold up at least half of the arcology solution. Perhaps, then, he is only half a genius!

What I came to realize is that to build arcology requires a social movement of many different minds coming together from different angles or spokes of a wheel. Barbara Marx Hubbard calls it the wheel of cocreation. At the center of it, I see arcology for it would be the greatest cocreative experience one could be engaged in. Soleri’s arcology provides us with a container in which a culture of human rights could be the bases of our Great Work.

Today Soleri was recognized at the White House by Laura Bush because he won the 2006 Cooper-Hewitt Design Award. It is a Lifetime Achievement award that gives recognition to an individual “who has made a profound, long-term contribution to contemporary design practice.” As he ate lunch with Laura, Cindy Sheehan and the CODEPINK woman fast for peace.

Arcology is a dangerous idea in the hands of global corporations who could use it to build 21st century gated cities for the rich. But used in a people’s lovolution, the idea could build sustainable social palaces for the masses. How much I wish Soleri had the awareness to walk through the gates of the White House and give a lecture about arcology to the women in pink. If I was in DC, I could do it myself, except from a feminist point of view.

You can read the short speech gave on the Arcosanti web site.

Making History

In the Solar Age

With and Without

Resurrection

This poem was written during the Nuclear Freeze movement in the 1980s.

An Extremist For Love

7th Day of the Troops Home Now Fast

Martin Luther King said that we needed to be “extremist for love.” Our times call on us live for love, the love of the planet and its evolutionary process. How I wish Wayne had the courage, the heart, and the wisdom to embrace this love I feel for the wind of global change that is leading us to an entirely new way of life. Teaching and leading by example can only go so far. Then it is up to the individual to find the power within to cast out fear and become the Beloved. It seems to be much more difficult for men to embrace this paradigm shift towards the divine feminine than it is for women. After all, the patriarchy has been in control of the planet for thousands of years. Giving up power is frightening unless you have a vision of a better place in which you are moving towards.

There were moments that I believed that Wayne loved me, Neutopia, the visionary prophetess who carried in her womb a jewel of a new planetary religion. There were moments that I thought the actually admired my passion to find a way to get my message to the public. After reading my dissertation Gaia, The Planetary Religion, The Sacred Marriage of Art and Science, and numerous essays and poems, I thought he had a grasp on my world view.

Maybe the four years we have lived together that is what I wanted to believe. I wanted to believe that he was my soul mate, a partner in lovolution, a wise man who would act on behalf of global justice, no matter how small a deed towards that goal. It is not that I expected him to be a Moses, Christ, Buddha, or Mohammed or any other of the holy men who were the founders of religious systems. I just was happy with him being a faithful partner and caring for me, making me feel that I was a worthy person even though the rest of the world didn’t seem to think so. I wanted him to see me as a key figure in the making of our Lovolution video.

Like in all relationships, I’ve made mistakes that have hurt our union. I read a quote in The New American Spirituality by Elizabeth Lesser, by Voltaire. It says, “To understand all is to forgive all.” What is all? The God/dess Head? Is it the cycle of life and death, of love and eternity, the infinite universal wonders within us? Yes, I want to understand all. So, I forgive all. I forgive that Wayne can’t love me fully, holy, holistically and work with me even through difficult times. I forgive his violent rages against the very essence of my soul.

And I forgive the God/dess head for not providing me with the means to find my Beloved in the flesh on Earth to manifest the Lovolution. May the God/dess forgive me for being a failed human being, so far unable to actualize the creative ecocity designs that I can so clearly see in my mind’s eye.

One might wonder what does this have to do with the TROOPS HOME NOW fast? My goal here is not only to stop the war in Iraq, but to liberate the planet from thousands of years of ecocide and tyranny. The goal is to usher in a paradigm shift so that we create a morphic field necessary to begin reordering the world resources to bring the balance of nature back into our lives.

What I am starting to see is that lovolution is different than revolution because lovolution is a spiritual transformation of our architectural foundations where as revolution is political change. There is a politics to lovolution, but it is not traditional politics. It is about creating a sacred hierarchy or global meritocracy that is far deeper and wiser than the current political system. In my Gaian mythology, the hieros gamos, the sacred marriage, is what activates the Gaia Messiah consciousness. It is the enactment of a partnership society and the beautiful solar civilization it inspires.

Wayne never married me. He said he couldn’t officially marry me because he would loose his public health care for the poor and I didn’t have enough money to provide him with health care. But maybe he just didn't want to do sacred marriage ritual with me. I don’t mean a legal marriage, but a ritual in which we wed ourselves to world service. Maybe this is why it has been so easy for him to walk away from me over and over again because there was never a public commitment to our partnership to peace. He never made the commitment to go to the root causes of the violence and hatred towards me within himself that would periodically raise its monstrous head. I’ve had my moments of the monstrous head as well. For that, I need to be forgiven. But I certainly never abandoned him when he was making a stand against the Empire. I encouraged it and thought he was a hero for being a real man.

Stop Over the Line for Liberty