Tag: activism

A brief bit of activism, and then back to your regularly scheduled blog…

On By PaxIn Activist Alert, An Important Message..., Highest IdealsLeave a comment

Hey all,

Not a ton of time at the moment.  I posted this to my other blog, and thought I’d share here too.
A group cleverly mis-named the National Organization for Marriage, had spent $1.5 million dollars on an ad campaign spreading a lot of lies and misinformation about the issue of Gay marriage hiring actors to portray concerned citizens…

Information available from the HRC and from CBS news…

If you would like to support the cause of Gay Marriage, and of GLBT Civil rights in general, please feel free to check out these sites…

Freedom to Marry

Marriage Equality USA

Yes On Gay Marriage

Peace, and thank you for your time,

Pax

Rural Alaskans Choosing between Food and Fuel

On By PaxIn An Important Message..., everyday2 Comments

Hey folks,

As an Alaskan expatriate I try to keep up on things in the Great Land, the land of my birth, and Anchorage, where I was raised.  People in rural Alaska are having to make a choice this Winter between spending money on heating oil and buying food for their families.

I first became aware of this story from The Mudflats, a blog looking at Alaska news and politics.  Politics is the most popular spectator sport in the 49th State, and Gods know we’ve had a few interesting characters involved over the years!

Of course the fact that for the largest State in the Union we have one of the smallest populations helps, Alaska has been described by one frustrated friend of mine as the worlds largest small town!  At around 350 thousand people Anchorage, my hometown,  is the largest city and has a little under half the States population.

Most of Alaska’s towns and villages are out in the wilderness, or as we Alaskan’s call it “the bush”, accessible only by small plane or by river boats and barges.  Many of these are from old mining camps or are Native villages that sprang up when the U.S. government put up schools in a specific location and told many of the formerly nomadic Native peoples that they needed to stay in one place.

For the better part of the last several months rural people in Alaska have been facing starvation, and no one in the U.S. media seems to care.   They would much rather report on Governor Palins celebrity foibles and misadventures, rather than the humanitarian crisis in rural Alaska that Palin’s administration had every opportunity to face and help to prevent over the last couple of years.

Of course, she’s been busy, out of State.

Running for Vice President in the “Real America”, rural America don’tcha know?  She’s also been busy speaking at Republican governors conferences and forming her own Political Action Committee!

She has also been ignoring the serious problems with the Alaskan Fisheries were factory trawlers over fish various fish populations and devestate the sustainability of the fishery population.

Then, too, she’s been busy vetoing or ignoring any energy related proposals that don’t relate to oil development or rocket research; including detailed plans from some rural villages for alternative energy development on the local level to help provide plentiful heating energy for rural Alaskan’s and plans to develop some large Oil Tank farms to be shared between multiple villages.

It’s not her fault of course, she had to make her interviews with Esquire and gear up for the important things like that animal rights feud with Ashley Judd.

Luckily there are some folks helping out.   Alaskans are (normally) a caring people and a lot of grass-roots relief efforts have been going on in State and in Anchorage.  Folks in Seafood marketing industry have been doing fundraisers to help buy heating oil to help ease the financial crunch.  The Venezuelan Government is helping out, indirectly, as a U.S. subsidiary of their national oil company will be providing 100 gallon fuel vouchers in February.

It may be enough to get rural Alaska through this Winter, barely, one can only hope that the State of Alaska, and the U.S. government will be able to find a way to help solve this terrible problem.

Sadly the Governor of Alaska is too busy elsewhere to bother with it.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Where is the help Alaska villages so desperately need?

~Elise Patkotak, Anchorage Daily News

Village Crisis Update

~Linda Kellen Biegel, The Alaskan Standard

Opinion: Alaska Native villages desperate for aid

~Indianz.com

Salmon dining to help suffering Alaskan villages

~Hal Bernton, Seattle Times

“What Now?” ~ Pagan Community Builders

On By PaxIn Activist Alert, An Important Message..., Community Building, Food for Thought, Modern Pagan, Pagan Evangelical, Pagan Pride, Pagan Responses to Recession, Pax's Beliefs7 Comments

So Darkly Fey, from Live from the Red Leather Couch and I had some fabulous back and forth conversations recently via e-mail about Paganism and Pagan community.  We decided to share with the Pagan Community Builder’s Yahoo.  This stirred up a little bit of discussion, and some really cool questions…  This encouraged me to engage in some of the following ranting about Pagan community…

I don’t know if movement’s neccesarilly mature into institutions, but I would definitely agree with the idea that they can mature into communities.  As I have said here and elsewhere that is where I think Paganism is right now…

Paganism is a spiritual, religious, and cultural movement made up of different interwoven and overlapping religious and regional communities.

It is my hope that Paganism as a movement will move and grow and develop into a family of interwoven and overlapping religious communities.  I just don’t think we are quite there yet.  (in my ever so humble and correct opinion!) ~ 😉

Moving on, if I may quote you…

“What would a mature Pagan community look like? More importantly, what would it do?”

I think that we as individual faiths and communities are in a process of hammering that question out… I also think it is related to another of your questions…

“But Pagans– do we have a goal? Is it individual enlightenment, collective enlightenment, improving the world with the idea that with an immanent divine, one serves the gods by serving others?”

I would say that the goal of a Pagan depends on the particular religion or philosophy of the individual Pagan.  ( I know, obviously, but I am moving towards a point here so please bear with me…)

I would observe that for the different Pagan faiths and paths there seems to be an overall theme of development into being a better person (personal growth and perhaps enlightenment, although it is not neccesarilly phrased as such) by practicing certain rites, and developing our relationships with the Divine (or the All That Is) and with the Spirits of the World Around Us (Elements and Land Spirits), and living certain  (intertwining and overlapping) virtues and values, and by building our relationships with others in our groups and faiths and societies through those virtues and values and practices…

I think that his theme of growth and development leads us quite naturally into engagement with other branches of Paganism, and from there into engagement with the rest of Society.  I also think that fear of discrimination, and a lack of outside pressure in the form of legal or social restrictions on religious practice, has helped to hamper that process of engagement.  Of course the fact that Paganism, with its Pantheism and Polytheism (among other Theisms present under the Pagan umbrella) whose essential concept of “our way AND your way” is having to re-emerge culturally from an immersion in Monotheism’s predominantly “Our way or the highway” mindset has also hampered our development as a community…

I think that both of your above questions are being hammered out by different Faith and Regional communities within the Pagan movement.

My instinct is (or, admittedly, perhaps it is merely my deep hope) that we as a movement are reaching a threshold point of in-group and inter-group communication and networking and growth and expansion that we are ready to go towards the next stage in our development from a movement into being a community.

Of course, I have been accused of being somewhat of an optimist and idealist…

“In my thoughts, I’d figured finding other Pagans would be the hard part. After all that navel-gazing and contemplation, the theological musings and soul-searching, we’ve figured out what we believe. We’ve found each other!….

…what now?”

I, SO, hear you! I share some of your frustration and experiences at local Pagan groups and rituals.  Socializing, in and of itself, is not enough.  Rituals on the Moons and/or on the Seasonal Holy Days are not enough!

That is part of why I created this discussion group.  To start and encourage discussions of “what now?”

“What now?” is why I have written Invoking the Power of the Pagan Dollar 2.0

Because I believe we need to start supporting our own community members (by supporting them as business people, and not just the occult tsotchke shoppes either!)  and institutions (religious, community, and charitable).

“What now?” is why I support the Pagan Pride Project and Pagan Pride events of all sorts… despite my occasional misgivings about some of the modes of dress and behavior!

We need, as religious and regional communities within the Pagan movement, to start engaging and reaching out to our wider local, regional, and national communities; not to proselytize, but to show clearly and honestly who and what we really are and are about!

We need to start looking at celebrating open and public rituals and observances at CIVIC holidays, not only to show our lager communities who and what Pagans are and are about; but to also deepen and expand ourselves as Pagans and our relationships with the spirits of our ancestors and of our Nations, and of the World around us; and to further build and strengthen our communities!

That, at the very least, is “what now?”!

Beyond that, well let’s keep talking!

Peace,

Pax

PS- if you are interested in taking part in this discussion, or ones like it, you can post here, or even better yet sign up for the Pagan Community Builder’s Yahoogroup !!!

One Witches Journey… into activism and optimism

On By PaxIn Activist Alert, An Important Message..., Chrysalis, Creativity, Cross-roads, everyday, Food for Thought, Highest Ideals, Love Unto All Beings, Seeking, The Gifts of Giving2 Comments

So…

I am blogging a lot more on my other site.  Or at least I am working on the site, and adding links and adding to the blog roll and learning a lot about my LGBT community.  I am also learning a lot about myself.  I am learning about my ideals, and my hopes and dreams.  I am also seeing, once more, the parallels between my two communities… the GLBT (or LGBT if you prefer) and the Pagan.  I find myself trying to figure out how to balance my new found passion for standing up for the Highest Ideals, with the practicality of working an exceptionally part time job and looking for work in one of the worst economies in the last 100 years.  Yet I feel more alive, more truly myself, when I am working on my GLBT civil rights blog, and when I am contemplating similar projects within the Pagan community.

In re-reading this post and contemplating publishing it I looked again at that last sentence…

Yet I feel more alive, more truly myself, when I am working on my GLBT civil rights blog, and when I am contemplating similar projects within the Pagan community.

Hmm… I am reminded of my ideas about Beauty, and my thought that when we are striving to live our Virtues as Witches, and to live out our Highest Ideals is when we are most Beautiful.  I also find myself remembering some of the times where I have invoked the Lord and Lady, and how at those times too I have felt most truly alive (if not necessarily myself).

I know that the weeks and months to come will require me to keep a balance between feeding my pocket book and feeding my soul.  In the past keeping a balance between my professional (or job) life and my spiritual and personal life has been a difficult zig-zagging between priorities.  I would like to believe that I am at a point in my life where I can actually do this, seemingly simple, balancing act.  So many other folks make this sort of thing look so blessed effortless!

I know that in these times feeding oneself, ones family, and ones pocketbook, is becoming increasingly difficult.  I know that there are a lot of tough decisions and times ahead.  In the end though, I am not afraid.

I know that the Lady and Lord are with me.

I know that if I continue to tread the path they have laid out for me, if I continue to speak and live in accordance with Truth, and Beauty, and the Highest of Ideals, if I strive to find within myself Love for All Beings, including myself, if I honor Them, and remember to honor the Gods and Godesses of my heart and the Heroes of my Nation; if I do these things I will find a way through the troubled times and I will be able to keep my ballance and do right by my Gods, my family, and myself.