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“Je Suis Human.”

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The ruthless slaughter of 17 French citizens by members of an international terrorist organization was a barbaric act, deserving of condemnation, retaliation and protest by more than the one million people who packed the streets of Paris this weekend. We are all humans, and should all be horrified by such inhumanity against even one of us. Terror, torture and murder, regardless of who commits it, or where it occurs, merits unrelenting opposition. It is the most fundamental of all human rights violations.

Yet, as more facts continue to emerge in the jihadist attack against journalists and Jews in Paris, the more it appears that the assassination of the artists & writers at Charlie Hebdo, a self-proclaimed “Irresponsible Journal,” may have been an enormous and deadly hoax perpetuated by the terrorists on a media-obsessed world, to cover-up a coldly, calculated plan carried out to kill more Jews across Paris, and anyone the murderers considered “infidels.” While one-wing of the jihadists were slaughtering journalists for negative portrayals of Mohammed and all Muslims, another terrorist cell was assassinating Jews in another part of Paris, with the intent and means to execute more innocents at Jewish schools.

Outside of the offices of the magazine, the Hebdo assassins rejoiced at their murderous act, and proclaimed victory for avenging Mohammed. Inside a Paris Kosher supermarket, the killers methodically murdered Jews while the world was horrified by the death of “free expression.” Even if one entertained the notion that Charlie Hebdo’s offensive cartoons of Muslims could be understood to provoke such violence against the journalists, what was the justification for the jihadists killing Jews? As usual, Jews were targeted by terrorists because they were Jewish.

“Je Suis Charlie,” may be a catchy hashtag and a social media sensation, but it does nothing to sympathize with the most important form of free expression, the right for human beings to live without fear of death because of who they are, or which God they worship, if they choose to worship at all. The more appropriate phrase of sympathy, solidarity and support—which covers Jews as well as journalists—is “Je Suis Human.”

In fact, with Muslims outnumbering Jews in France five million to five-hundred thousand, or 10-to-1, and with acts of terror against Paris’ Jewish community escalating over the past several years, Charlie Hebdo’s taunting of Muslims may have been tantamount to shouting “FIRE” in a crowded movie-theatre, or the classic example of irresponsible speech, not “free expression.” Honest journalists respect standards of independence, freedom, accuracy AND responsiblility. Hebdo’s self-avowed mission of “irresponsibility” moved them in the opposite direction, disqualifying them from the protection of the bulwarks of artistic license or free expression. Group libel is inherently dehumanizing, whether practiced by journalists, jingoists, or jihadists.

There is no justification nor defense for any act of deadly terror. All acts of terror, whether carried out by a fanatical group of religious fundamentalists, a state, or an ideologically-driven individual like the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh or Anders Breivik, the anti-Muslim, anti-Zionist Norwegian extremist who gunned down some 70 teenagers at a youth camp in 2011, deserve swift condemnation, counter-action and certain punishment.

Millions need not march because they consider an act of terror a symbolic act against free speech; millions need to mobilize because terrorist acts are terrible acts of violence against human beings, humanity and life itself. I am not Charlie Hebdo. I am a responsible, free human being who respects the dignity of all people. I am Jew, and Muslim and Christian; I am Buddhist and Hindi, humanist and atheist. “Je Suis Human.”

Mario Cuomo Dies, and Andrew Cuomo is Re-born…

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Mario Cuomo died this week, and Andrew Cuomo was re-born.

Andrew Cuomo’s simple and eloquent eulogy to his father on January 6, 2015, was a bold and loving seizing of the the torch of humanist leadership his father ignited 33 years ago. In a remarkable love song to Mario Cuomo, Andrew Cuomo became his father.

That chiseled, stately, large and determined face was the same look I witnessed up close on Mario Cuomo, many, many times. Snow falling on Andrew’s dark hair, and dark suit, dramatized the somber yet historic nature of what was about to happen even more. I witnessed Mario Cuomo prepare for, and deliver, hundreds of speeches during the eight years I worked with him; I studied each line in Mario Cuomo’s face as he read each line of his speeches, and as he black-lined out others. Getting what he “needed to say” just right was of great importance.

Up until this week, few of Andrew Cuomo’s speeches were memorable. Actions counted more to Andrew than words. Speech-making was often just another tool in the second Governor Cuomo’s operational repair kit for government. All that changed with Andrew’s eulogy for his father.

For once, Andrew Cuomo’s words and emotions moved us, and, more importantly, they may have moved him toward his father’s progressive, other-centered, enlightened form of leadership. Andrew’s words, personal and powerful, were a radical departure from his pedestrian prose of the past. His words were transcribed from his heart to the page from which he was reading, just as his father advised.

“Mario Cuomo was at peace with who he was and how he saw the world. This gave him great strength, and made him anything but a typical politician,” Andrew Cuomo said, after recounting his father’s advice about speechmaking to him. “Who cares about what the audience wants to hear; it’s not about what they want to hear–it’s about what you want to say.”

“And that, my friends,” Andrew Cuomo said to a church-full of mourners, including Bill & Hillary Clinton, “was the essence of Mario Cuomo.
He was not interested in pleasing the audience: not in a speech, not in life. He believed what he believed and the reaction of the audience or the powers that be, or the popularity of his belief was irrelevant to him.”

Andrew elaborated: “He wasn’t really a politician at all. Mario Cuomo’s politics were more a personal belief system then a traditional theory. It was who he was. Not what he did. My father was a humanist. He had strong feelings of right and wrong based on his religion, philosophy and life experiences. He was very concerned with how people were treated and that was the arena that drew him in….”

Then, Andrew Cuomo shared the essence of Mario Cuomo: “At his core he was a philosopher and he was a poet, an advocate and he was a crusader. Mario Cuomo was the keynote speaker for our better angels. He was there to make the case, to argue and convince, and,in that purist he could be a ferocious opponent and powerful ally. And, he was beautiful. He believed Jesus’ teachings could be reduced to one word, and the word was love. And love means acceptance, compassion and support to help people.

Then, Andrew Cuomo gave everyone insight into his relationship with his father: “It is this simple. I was devoted to my father, from the time I was 15 joining him in every crusade. My dad was my hero, my best friend, my confidante, my mentor. We spoke almost every day and his wisdom grew as I grew older. . But we carried the same banner. I helped him become a success and he helped me become a success and we enjoyed deeply each other’s victories and we suffered the pain of each other’s losses. My only regret is that I didn’t return from Washington to help in his 1994 race. Whether or not I could have helped, I should have been there. It was the right thing to do and I didn’t do it.” Powerful, and deeply personal, and unlike anything Andrew Cuomo has said before.

“Why didn’t he run for President, people asked? Because he didn’t want to,” Andrew Cuomo said. He was where he thought God wanted him to be. For Mario Cuomo, the purpose of life was clear — to help those in need and leave the world a better place.”

“I believe my father’s spirit lives,” the son said, citing family and community examples. “I will listen for your voice. You taught us well, you inspired us, we know what we have to do and we will do it. On that, you have my word, as your son. I love you pop, and always will.”

Saul Alinsky is My Yoda

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The Radical Correspondence of Saul Alinsky

One of the most talked about philosophical/political figures of the past several years (not counting the Right Wing’s agnostic, anti-social, failed fiction-writing muse Ayn Rand) is Saul Alinsky. Not bad for an Orthodox Jewish kid from Chicago who’s been dead for 40 years.

Well, I know Saul Alinsky, and few people on the Right or Left have done him justice. I was weened on his teachings; trained in the Alinsky Method of Organizing when I was a labor organizer for the National Education Association; and taught Alinsky’s book “Rules for Radicals” for 22 years for Cornell University’s ILR Schools’ Labor Studies Program. Saul Alinsky is my Yoda.

I taught teachers and Teamsters, truck-drivers and electrical workers all about the works and tactics of Saul Alinsky, who was never a Communist nor a Socialist because he hated all dogma and prized his independence and freedom of thought and action. Alinsky was an archeologist by education, a criminologist by training and an organizer of the “have-nots” by choice.

“As an organizer,” he wrote in his seminal work, “I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be. That we accept the world as it is does not in any sense weaken our desire to change it into what we believe it should be…that means working in the system.” For Alinsky, radicalism was not found in burning down ghettos, as happened across the country three years before he wrote “Rules” in 1971, but in organizing them. For him, the meaning of the word “radical” was elemental: getting to the root of the problem.

“One never reaches the horizon,” Alinsky wrote in one more philosophical paragraph, “ it is always just beyond, ever beckoning onward; it is the pursuit of life itself. This is the world as it is. This is where you start.” I followed Saul Alinsky to Rochester, New York, two months after his death, and several years following his successful FIGHT campaign in that upstate city where Blacks were marginalized and left out of the kindnesses of the Eastman Kodak Company, the Eastman School of Music and virtually every other opportunity in town. FIGHT: Freedom, Integration, God, Honor, Today–began to change that.

Corporations and right-wing politicians, then, as now, tried to paint Alinsky as a negative force. Yet, his work, his teachings, his tactics and his philosophy proved otherwise. “ My personal philosophy is anchored in optimism,” he wrote. It must be, for optimism brings with it hope, a future with a purpose, and therefore, a will to fight for a better world.” That may explain why leaders of Freedom Works, the conservative non-profit organization which supports the Tea Party, gives copies of Alinsky’s “Rule for Radicals” to all of its Tea Party Leaders.

Alinsky’s chapter of “Rules for Radicals” entitled ‘A Word about Words,” is a masterpiece on the use of language and semantics. In it, he exposes the tricks politicians play with words to lie and mislead, which is probably why deceivers like Newt Gingrich and Dinesh D’Sousa are alarmed by Alinsky so much. The little Jewish organizer from Chicago strips phonies bare, and, it’s often not a pretty sight. When Bill Mahrer admitted a few years back that he never heard of Saul Alinsky, nor read his work, he unwittingly presaged the basis for his ignorant and prejudiced remarks about Muslims in 2014.

What must greatly gall Gingrich, D’Sousa and other slippery types is Saul Alinksy’s Fourth Rule in the chapter of “Rules for Radicals” entitled “Tactics”: “The fourth rule is, make the enemy live up to their own book of rules”–an impossible standard for many to meet since they fundamentally believe, and act, as if no rules apply to them: on marriage, on lobbying, on examining facts, or telling the truth.

Forget about Alinksy’s allure for Cesar Chavez, Hilary Clinton or Barack Obama, all of whom were influenced by his writings, teachings and tactics to varying degrees. What the shrivel-souled gang Saul has galled can’t stand, is the clarity of Alinksy’s vision, especially as he foresaw the need to organize America’s middle class to achieve social good. “To reject them,” Alinsky wrote, “is to lose them by default. They will not shrivel and disappear. You can’t switch channels and get rid of them….” No one understands this fundamental Alinsky-truth better than Elizabeth Warren, and its why in her calm, fact-based, Midwestern, motherly way, she terrifies the Wall Street, banking and corporate interests who have pulverized the middle class over the past 30 years.

I know Saul Alinsky. He is, and has long been, my Yoda. And, corporate propagandists of the Far Right fear him still– more than 40 years after his death–because the truths he taught have gotten tougher and larger, and cannot be erased by changing the subject, buying the channels or the chattel Members of Congress who recite scripts written by Citibank or the folks at Fox News.

Does ANY Hate Speech violate Facebook’s “Community Standards?”

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Facebook Facilitates Hate Speech and Threats of Violence

Just three days after a deranged man in Baltimore boasted on social media that he was going hunting to kill some police officers, Facebook rejected my alert to them about hate speech appearing on a public posting concerning the NYPD assassinations as well as a threat of violence against NYC Mayor Bill DeBlasio.

The anti-social, social media writer, expressed quite clearly on a friend’s posting that he hated the “nigga loving” Mayor of NYC, who happens to be married to a Black woman and has bi-racial children. In the same conversation stream, the same writer said that his solution for how to deal with DeBlasio was to “kill him.”

Within a few hours of my reporting to Facebook the writer’s hate speech and threat of physical violence against a specific public official, the faceless Facebook arbiters of social behavior, too busy doing end-of-the-year feel-good-photo displays for everyone, sent me the following canned response:

“Thank you for taking the time to report something that you feel may violate our Community Standards. Reports like yours are an important part of making Facebook a safe and welcoming environment. We reviewed the comment you reported for containing hate speech or symbols (and a credible threat of violence) and found it doesn’t violate our Community Standards.”

If Facebook doesn’t find the term “Nigga Lover” antithetical to creating a safe and welcoming environment, what terms of hate speech reach that level? If Facebook doesn’t find a flat-out statement of “kill him” directed at the Mayor of New York City—just 72 hours after 2 NYPD Police Officers were assassinated following a social media warning—what constitutes a “credible threat of violence?”

Admittedly, I have zero-tolerance for anti-social behavior on social media. I “unfriended” my own brother on Facebook for comments that I believed were anti-social. I do not believe in facilitating hate speech against anyone nor the condoning of violence in any forum, especially a public one. But then, I don’t run a social media global outlet with over one billion subscribers, and a financial valuation in the multi-billions of dollars.

Perhaps I’m missing something, but when Facebook takes down a posting by a leading Russian dissident one day because of pressure from the Putin government, and then permits pernicious language like “Nigga lover” to fall within their “community standards,” things seem upside down.

As far as the Facebook subscriber’s threat to “kill him,” when describing what he’d do to the NYC Mayor, I guess Facebook’s facilitators are waiting for an assassination attempt on DeBlasio’s life to consider it a “credible threat of violence.” Until then, it falls within their “Community Standards.”

Welcome to “Radical Correspondence.”

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Welcome to Radical Correspondence, A New and Different Blog

I’ve looked at blogs from lots of sides now, and am never quite satisfied with their limitations.

In that spirit, and inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s term “Radical Correspondence” which appears in his Essay on “Nature”, I’ve decided to try something a bit different. Emerson defined a “radical correspondence between visible things and human thoughts.” Eloquently, he expressed it as: “A man’s power to connect his thought with its proper symbol, and so to utter it, depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, upon his love of truth and his desire to communicate it without loss.”

I’ve loved that pure and elegant expression of Emerson’s the moment I read it, and it linked directly to the profound influence which Saul Alinksy’s “Rules for Radicals” had upon me more than 40 years ago. Alinksy’s definition of “Radical”, like Emerson’s, was not political, but conveyed the necessity of getting to the root cause of “things and thoughts,” in all communications and actions.

This “Radical Correspondence” will be an attempt to express the simplicity of truth in the tradition of Emerson and Alinsky. I’ll use essay, poems, photos, artwork, guest blogs or any combination of them, to get the job done. There are, I believe, lots of paths to finding the truth, and “communicating it without loss.”

I welcome constructive suggestions about how we can better travel this path toward simplicity and truth together.

Thanks. I hope you enjoy our efforts.

Be well.

Steve Villano
www.socialvisionproductions.com

Social Responsibility, My Mother, the March of Dimes, and AIDS

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My mother’s birthday and World AIDS Day dovetailed each other for years, until my mother’s death at age 92, four December’s ago. She lived a grace-filled life, battling Polio for all of her existence, living with the disease as an example of courage, love and compassion for others. Two years before my mother’s death, I brought her an advanced-copy DVD of an HBO-produced story about FDR’s years in Warm Springs, Georgia, as he tenaciously did his physical therapy, day after day, to prevent further deterioration of his paralyzed muscles.

As my mother and I watched the HBO film together, she gave a stream of commentary about how she, born with Polio in the epidemic of 1915, was put into a crippled chlidren’s home, kept out of NYC’s public swimming pools, and as a New York Times Fresh Air Fund Kid, taken by bus to a special upstate summer camp for poor kids with Polio. On the ride into the Catskill Mountains, my mother remembered passing through town along the way with signs at their entrance that read: “No Polio Kids Allowed.”

“It’s the same as with AIDS,” this remarkable Italian woman, than 90 years old,” said. “Some people don’t give you a chance if you have a disease, but you can never let them get the best of you. And, it helps to have some powerful advocates like FDR and the March of Dimes.”

For years until the Polio Vaccine was discovered in 1954–some 60 years after the virus was identified–my mother dutifully dealt out her supply of dimes to the March of Dimes, convinced she was part of something far bigger than herself. Her help, she was convinced, would make it possible for medical researchers to find a cure for the disease that had paralyzed her on one side of her body, and spare another child from the same kind of suffering and stigma she endured.

My mother was right. Thousands of others with a strong sense of compassion and social responsibility just like my mother’s, contributed tens of millions of dimes, and kept the search for a cure for polio on the top of the public’s priority list of public health imperatives for decades to come.

“If only people would support a March of Dimes for AIDS,” she would say. “If only you had a fighter like FDR to find a vaccine for AIDS. And if only, you could convince the public that everyone has a responsibility to help each other.”

That was my mother’s recipe for social responsibility. She saw clearly the connection between Polio and AIDS, between caring and compassion, between love and social action. And she new, each time she lifted her paralyzed arm up with her “good arm”, to diaper four children, cook simple and delicious Italian meals for her family, or to write a small check to one of her many charities, that giving up was never an option.