the term 'decolonization' as I use it in this blog is a metaphor

"In historico-geographical terms, colonization involves the conquest, inhabitation, possession and control of a territory by an external power. It is predicated on the deliberate, physical, cultural and symbolic appropriation of space. ..... Metaphors of colonization rescript this territorial incursion as an invasion and insidious habitation of the social and psychic space of oppressed groups, while decolonization becomes a metaphor for the process of recognizing and dislodging dominant ideas, assumptions and ideologies as externally imposed - literally of making a cultural and psychic place of one's own" - Katz and Smith, page 70-71

N. Smith and C. Katz, “Grounding metaphor: Towards a spatialized politics,” in Place and the Politics of Identity, ed. Michael Keith and Steve Pile, 1993, 66-83.

I would argue that those of us who are on the more privileged end of various systems of oppression also have an 'insidious habitation' of our 'social and psychic space' and that if we are truly going to work in meaningful solidarity across divides of power then decolonization is just as important on this end, inside the belly of the beast.

liberatory occupation?

There have been great articles on colonial patterns cropping up in the occupy movement and how to avoid them. Dissertation is looming so I'll just point to two:

• a good short analysis of this screwy stereotyped Indian image being used to argue against using the term 'occupy' is here. Talk about needing to decolonize our minds!
  
  
• a good overall analysis of the issues by Harsha is here.

If it were my home

Mamie and Richard, two accompaniers serving with the Presbyterian Church in Colombia, recently blogged about a fascinating tool called If it were my home which has me thinking again about how often these sorts of comparisons get made by solidarity activists.

As Richard puts it in his post, reposted here,

"So maybe it is our recent trip to the US, but I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the differences between living in Colombia and the United States. Of course there are lots of differences, and lots of them completely unquantifiable, but what can you quantify about living in another culture?

I came across a really interesting tool a while back which is a great help in thinking about this. It is called If It Were My Home and it uses demographic, health and economic data to compare lifestyles in different countries.

First – size. Finally, a wonderful size comparison of Colombia’s land size to the lower 48. Again, Colombia is not a small country! It is twice the size of Texas.

Second – the stats. What is fun about these is that after being here for a couple of years, I can actually check these out a bit more…

1) Have 2.7x higher risk of dying in infancy. It may be debatable, but I think I’m safe in escaping infancy unscathed.

2) Use 93% less electricity. Great! We can check this one. I looked back at our electrical use in the US and here. We averaged 470 kwh/month in the US; we average 291 khw/month here. That’s 38% lower. For reference, electricity here costs about 33% more, so that may account for some of it. But the facts shows that we end up using a lot less electricity here in Colombia, which is a good step for environmental sustainability!

3) Use 90% less oil. My guess is this one is pretty accurate. Without a car, using buses, taxis, and motorcycles as our primary transport, yeah, we probably use 90% less oil.

4) Make 80% less money. Hmm, we do make less money here in Colombia. I hesitate to put a % on it, but 80% is not out of the ballpark…

5) Spend 93% less on health care. Probably accurate… (e.g. I saw a blog post about the average hospital delivery in the US is $40,000. Ours here – about $2,500)

6) See a 30% more of a class divide. My impressions of this would be that the divide here is higher, but I think you are much more aware of class divides in cultures that are not your own.

7) Would be 29% more unemployed. Well, we did come here with a job, and have managed to keep it so far…

8) Have 28.42% more babies. Ahh! We can be concrete on this one! We have had exactly 100% more babies here in Colombia.

9) Will die 3.93 years sooner here in Colombia. We are hoping not to test this one out…"

putting hands together

I love this image - it's a great idea that could easily be repeated. Translation: no to sexual abuse - it's on the cover of the Amnesty report on sexual violence in Colombia, described briefly in this BBC article.

beautiful expression of solidarity

incredibly moving. well worth watching if you understand Spanish, my apologies to those who don't.

another take on the dangers of using empathy for solidarity

This is a segment of a longer post by Sahar Driver on the FOR site:

"Another job for a nonviolent ideological warrior is to honor the sanctity of difference. In my eagerness to meet the other of another history, culture, faith, place, gender, sexual orientation, class—. In my eagerness to look into the face of this other and extend my hand, I may look for similarities to which I can relate. This attempt at relating is of course a beautiful thing, but it too easily becomes dangerous when I make the assumption of sameness where it may not exist— or when I prioritize what is the same over what is different in ways that shut difference down, cap or suffocate it so that it can no longer breathe. What would it take for me to look into the face of another and accept the impossible difference it holds? What feeds a hubris so acute as to allow me to assume I could possibly know Other, the histories that shaped it, the legacies it inherited, the values it lives that have no words?

Not too long ago, I was chatting with a friend and shared a story with him about an encounter with a man who had physically restrained me in a way that shook me up quite a bit. He listened intently to me, and my explanation of what had been going on for me during that experience. I explained what I had learned and what the experience meant to me in the context of my life as a woman grappling with the very real physical and mental insecurities and threats to my safety that mediate every decision I make daily, what paths I will walk on my way home at night, whether or not I make eye contact with the man ahead of me in line, how often I ask a male acquaintance about his wife and kids to remind him of his place. To my frustration and surprise, my friend began to reinterpret my story for me, explain better what I had meant to say, and feed it back to me in the context of his own experience with women.

He wanted me to understand that my story was not about my experience as a woman but was very much like a series of other experiences he too was familiar with that had nothing to do with gender at all. He proceeded to describe some of those experiences to me. In fact, none of those stories resonated with me at all and not a single one even touched what I had been trying to explain to him about the struggles I face as a woman every day. The very real threat of rape and sexual violation that I must negotiate on a daily basis. I walked away frustrated, not because he didn’t understand, how could I expect him to? He is not a woman. How could he possibly know what it is like to be a woman in this world? I was frustrated and angry at his sense of entitlement, his arrogant assumption that he could understand, and his attempt to take my story and make it his own, to rewrite my story and project it outward as a representation of some universal human experience applicable to anyone anywhere regardless of the specifics of gender that I knew had mediated my experience.

And this happens so often. I know I fall into this trap sometimes, maybe we all do— and when I do it is because I was not thinking. So I am asking that we think. When we exoticize, naturalize or romanticize the Other, what we are doing is inflating or foregrounding certain aspects that are most interesting or appealing to us (such as religious or spiritual traditions) and thereby making less visible if not invisible other aspects. Suddenly rich traditions are disassembled, flattened, taken out of context or interpreted in ways that are at the very least unfair misrepresentations and at worst, the grounds for policies that violate their very being. In looking for what I wish to see or am capable of understanding, the world becomes a prism of the familiar. In so doing, I not only rob the other of his/her voice and space to exist, I do violence to myself, my possibility for imagination, for inspiration, discovery, creativity, surprise and beauty. To work hard to see difference and allow it room to breath; to work hard to allow room for the discomfort of not-knowing; to work hard to respect what I do not understand is the work of nonviolence. Would not a humble acceptance of the mystery of the other, and the limits of my understanding, be a beautiful act of generosity? Of nonviolence? Of alliance?

In my work as a social and cultural anthropologist, one of the things that has repeatedly come up in my research is the danger of universalizing certain Western values and assuming their relevance the world over. In many cases, the effects are relatively benign. But in other cases, they can be quite horrifying. A very simple and well-known example is article 17 of the universal declaration of human rights: the right to property. Of course on the surface of it this sounds good right? But would the first Native American nations or Hawaiian people have agreed that this is a universal right? These people found the notion of ownership of property absurd and signed away their lands thinking the white colonizer a fool. But decades later would witness the mass genocide of the indigenous people of the Americas, oftentimes under an assumption of property rights and a certain “manifest destiny,” a god-given right, that not all peoples impacted by it would be asked to weigh in on.

I am suggesting that the assumption of shared values is an assumption that a nonviolent activist should take very seriously and be very careful about. We cannot assume that what is good for us, is good for everyone— especially when so often, as in the case of the Congo, what is good for us has come at the expense of the Other."

[see the full post by Sahar Driver on the FOR site]

"We are not worth more, they are not worth less"

[this post was written by by Ken Butigan and is entirely reposted from the great blog Waging Nonviolence]

Twenty-four years ago this morning—September 1, 1987—Vietnam veteran Brian Willson joined a handful of peacemakers on the railroad tracks at Concord Naval Weapons Stations to begin what they envisioned as a forty-day fast and vigil to protest arms shipments from this Northern California military base to US-backed forces in Central America.

Instead, a 900-ton munitions train, traveling at three times the legal speed limit, plowed into Brian and dragged him under. Standing a few feet away, I saw him turn over and over again like a rag doll and then (as the never-slowing train rumbled on toward a nearby security gate) sprawling in the track bed, a huddled mass of blood.

Miraculously, Brian survived (thanks, largely, to the tourniquets applied by his then-wife Holly Rauen, a professional nurse), though both legs were sheared off and his skull was fractured.

Now, over two decades later, he has published Blood on the Tracks: The Life and Times of S. Brian Willson, a new autobiography available from PM Press. This book does not simply recount a horrifying event from long ago. It offers, more importantly, a vivid example of a still-unfolding pilgrimage for peace that turns on a burning question: “What is my responsibility to make peace and challenge murderous violence in a direct and meaningful way?”

At a critical turning point in his life, Brian allowed this question in and everything changed. Of course, this question is not Brian’s alone. It is meant for each of us in the midst of the storm of horrific violence that continually bears down on our planet and its inhabitants.

Brian’s memoir recounts his journey from childhood in upstate New York (born on the Fourth of July, he enthusiastically shared his family’s pro-military and anti-communist convictions), to his decision to go to law school, and then his being drafted and sent to Vietnam as an Air Force captain, where two incidents changed his life.

One was a rocket attack in which he was saved by a quick-thinking companion who pushed him to the ground and out of the way of the blast. Though they survived, another soldier was blown to bits a few feet away. The second event even more clearly seared his soul. He had been sent out to do damage assessment of US bombing raids on villages and found a blackened mess that used to be huts, littered with bodies:

My first thought was that I was witnessing an egregious, horrendous mistake. The “target” was no more than a small fishing and rice farming community. The “village” was smaller than a baseball playing field. The Mekong Delta region is completely flat, and the modest houses in its hamlets are built on small mounds among rice paddies. As with most settlements, this one was undefended—we saw no anti-aircraft guns, no visible small arms, no defenders of any kind. The pilots who bombed this small hamlet flew low-flying planes, probably the A-37Bs, and were able to get close to the ground without fear of being shot down, thus increasing the accuracy of their strafing and bombing. They certainly would have been able to see the inhabitants, mostly women with children taking care of various farming and domestic chores … The buildings were virtually flattened by explosions or destroyed by fire. I didn’t see any inhabitant on his or her feet. Most were ripped apart from bomb shrapnel and Gatling machine gun wounds, blackened from napalm burns, many not discernible as to gender, and the majority were obviously children.

I began sobbing and gagging. I couldn’t fathom what I was seeing, smelling, thinking. I took a few faltering steps to my left, only to find my way blocked by the body of a young woman lying at my feet. She had been clutching three small, partially blackened children when she apparently collapsed. I bent down for a closer look and stared, aghast, at the woman’s open eyes. The children were motionless, blackened blood drying on their bullet and shrapnel-riddled bodies. Napalm had melted much of the woman’s face, including her eyelids, but as I was focused on her face, it seemed to me that her eyes were staring at me.

She was not alive. But her eyes and my eyes met for one moment that shot like a lightning bolt through my entire being. Over the years I have thought of her so much I have given her the name, “Mai Ly.”

I was startled when Bao, who was several feet to my right, asked why I was crying. I remember struggling to answer. The words that came out astonished me. “She is my family,” I said, or something to that effect. I don’t know where those words came from. I wasn’t thinking rationally. But I felt, in my body, that she and I were one. Bao just smirked, and said something about how satisfied he was with the bombing “success” in killing “communists.” I did not reply. I had nothing to say. From that moment on, nothing would ever be the same for me.

Thus began a deep transformation, which led him in the 1980s to notice with deep alarm the connection between what he had experienced in Vietnam and the Reagan administration’s war in Central America. He traveled to the region and saw a vivid parallel between the two conflicts, especially the wanton attack on civilians, and became convinced that he had to take action.

“We are not worth more, they are not worth less,” he declared, and joined the Veterans Fast for Life on the steps of the US Capitol in 1986, where he and three other former members of the US military fasted for 47 days. One year later, he and others formed Nuremberg Actions—named after the principles of international law enunciated in the wake of the Nuremberg tribunal following World War II that defined crimes against humanity and the responsibility and complicity in such crimes—and organized a 40-day fast at Concord in which he and others planned to block weapons trains. A Freedom of Information Act request had yielded concrete evidence that ships leaving this base were carrying 500-pound bombs, white phosphorus, and millions of rounds of ammunition, and Brian wanted to stop such shipments in their tracks.

He expected the train to stop, at which point he would be removed and arrested—in effect compelling the military to demonstrate the kind of care that should also be accorded to those at the other end of the line in Nicaragua and El Salvador. Instead, the government ran the train (in spite of the clear communication with the Navy over the prior ten days), thus dramatizing with palpable clarity what those at the end of the line faced every day.

We are not worth more. They are not worth less.

Brian’s autobiography details the aftermath of the Concord attack, including his activism, his own inner and outer growth, his comprehensive and embodied choices to live simply (on this recent book tour, for example, he traveled by pedaling a special bicycle that uses his hands instead of his feet), and his thoroughgoing critique of the American Way of Life (AWOL). (Less than three months after being run down by the train, Brian testified in Congress about this event. You can read his engrossing testimony here.)

What can we learn, after all these years, from Brian’s journey?

One lesson is the importance of “finding your own tracks and taking a stand there,” as he has often said. A catchphrase we used at the time held that “Stopping the war starts here”—stopping it at a weapons base, but also in many, many other places. Brian did so by taking this action “in person”: using the most powerful symbol at his disposal, his vulnerable, resilient, determined, and spirited body.

We can do this, too. This is not to say that we are all called to sit on train tracks (such action requires much discernment and training). But there are many places to stand nonviolently, withdrawing our consent and pointing our communities, our societies, and even ourselves in a new direction.

The world begins to change when we find this place.

surprising quote about empathy

bell hooks,in “Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination,” in Displacing whiteness: essays in social and cultural criticism, ed. Ruth Frankenberg (Duke University Press, 1997), 164-179 quotes Spivak as saying:

"what we are asking for is that the hegemonic discourses, the holders of hegemonic discourse should de-hegemonize their position and themselves learn how to occupy the subject position of the other." (in the post-colonial critic, no page number given)

Finally! A solution for structural violence and poverty in Honduras

[this post is copied in its entirety from quotha.net - see also my previous posts on TOMS shoes]

Thank Goodness for NGOs, once again making the difference.

Or, as a friend who wishes to remain anonymous puts it:

SORRY WE OVERTHREW YOUR GOVERNMENT...HERE ARE SOME SHOES
(WITH NO ARCH SUPPORT)

Said friend, something of a shoe connoisseur herself, has a few pairs of the brand in question and notes that they are particularly quick to develop unpleasant odors and mold. I would never know these important ethnographic details on my own. She adds:

they are NOT conducive to walking from your soon-to-be-privatized elementary school through open sewage and maquila run-off to your house where your structural-violence-poor parents will not be able to throw them in the nonexistent clothes dryer

great coverage of the student movement in Chile

Roof Dancing from sitioquiltro on Vimeo.

I love teaching. One of the best parts for me is learning from and being inspired by my students. A former student of mine, Joe Hinchcliffe, has been in Chile for the last year and his blog is full of fantastic reports on the student movement, full of lots of fun short clips like this one.

If you haven't been following it, to quote Joe "its really exciting stuff. For the last few months students have taken to the streets to demand free and quality education. Hundreds of thousands of students. Many schools and universities have shut down and no one really knows what will happen next. Recently this movement has grown to include unions and many other protest groups. The movement enjoys the support of over 80% of the population and its fast becoming something much bigger, maybe the beginning of a new economic and political order for the country."

Want some inspiration? Read on!

resources on gender and accompaniment

One long:
Engendering Peace: Incorporating a Gender Perspective in Civilian Peace Teams
was published this year by the International Fellowship of Reconciliation's Women Peacemakers Program. It focuses on PBI's Indonesia team.

One short: (one pithy page)
What women in CPT want men in CPT to know
from the Christian Peacemaker Teams women

study argues stimulating empathy reduces racism

from the Greater Good blog comes this report

In the study, published in the June issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers showed participants a five-minute video depicting a black man named Glen and a white man named John. Both shopped in a department store, tried to buy a car, and interacted with police, but Glen clearly experienced discrimination.

Some participants were then asked to imagine Glen’s perspective—what he might be thinking, feeling, and experiencing. Others were asked to imagine what thoughts and feelings they would have if they were in Glen’s situation. A third group was supposed to remain objective; they weren’t told to consider Glen’s thoughts or emotions.

Then the researchers gave the participants’ a sophisticated test that measures unconscious biases.

The results show that participants in both perspective-taking conditions were less biased than participants who were asked to be objective. What’s more, it didn’t seem to matter how the participants went about taking Glen’s perspective: Participants who imagined Glen’s thoughts and feelings showed the same reduction in unconscious bias as those who imagined how they would feel if they were Glen.

In a variation on this experiment, the researchers found that participants showed less automatic bias even when they were simply shown a picture of a black man and asked to imagine his thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Another experiment in the study showed that perspective taking did not lead participants to ignore racial inequality, as previous studies have suggested.

and it goes on

Three strikes against the Empire

Joint Solidarity Statement by the October2011 Movement, the National Catholic Worker Gathering and SOA Watch South Florida/ SouthCom Watch (reposted from SOA Watch)

Grassroots resistance actions are being coordinated around the country [the US] in early October. Three efforts in particular share common cause:

The October2011 Movement in Washington, DC to decry the start of the eleventh year of war on the people of Afghanistan and the onset of the federal austerity budget, and to stand up to corporate rule and militarism;
The National Catholic Worker Movement and Nevada Desert Experience to demonstrate at Creech Air Force Base near Las Vegas, Nevada where armed drone aircraft are headquartered and controlled on their "hunter-killer" missions around the world, and at the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS, formerly the Nevada Test Site) where various experiments are conducted which perpetuate the US nuclear arsenal;
School of the Americas Watch South Florida / SouthCom Watch to march to the new headquarters of the U.S. Southern Command (SouthCom) outside of Miami, Florida, which is responsible for all U.S. military operations throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.

Our struggles are interconnected and we organize in solidarity with each other.

The nonviolent resistance actions in Washington, DC will start on October 6, 2011, on the 10-year anniversary of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. Thousands of people have pledged to gather on that day, to nonviolently resist the corporate machine by occupying Freedom Plaza to demand that America's resources are invested in human needs and environmental protection instead of war and exploitation. Nonviolent direct actions at the NNSS and at Creech AFB are going to take place on October 9 at the culmination of the 3 day Catholic Worker gathering, also being coordinated with the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space's annual Keep Space for Peace Week, October 1 to 8. The march on the U.S. Southern Command, with the intention to close it down and to reclaim the sacred land for the peoples of the Americas, will also take place on October 9, 2011.

These actions are united in the effort to build a world in which the values of justice, cooperation, and respect for the earth are upheld. We believe that people power and grassroots organizing are essential for achieving lasting socio-political change.

October2011 Movement, october2011.org

National Catholic Worker Gathering, www.lvcw.org

SOA Watch South Florida / SouthCom Watch, SOAW.org/southcom

don't send shoes

I recently posted about how problematic the TOMS shoe giving/wearing is.

Thanks to my friend Sarah for pointing me to the great counter-campaign: A Day Without Dignity.

Check out their counter video:

false empathy

In the fabulous article

Richard Delgado, “Rodrigo’s Eleventh Chronicle: Empathy and False Empathy,” California Law Review 84 (1996): 61.

(in a fictional conversation) Delgado describes false empathy this way:

"You've heard of Gramsci's concept of false consciousness?"29 "Of course," I said, a little sharply. (These impudent young pups sometimes think us old-timers haven't read anything!) "Gramsci coined the term to mean the kind of identification with the aggressor that a subjugated people can easily develop. They internalize the perspectives, values, and points of view of the very people who conquer and oppress them, thus becoming unconscious agents in their own subordination."30 "And so false consciousness is a danger for blacks, at least if we aren't careful.31 But have you ever wondered, Professor, if there is anything comparable for whites?"

"Comparable to false consciousness, you mean?" I wasn't sure what Rodrigo was driving at. "I think there is, and it's empathy. Or rather, what I call false empa- thy, in which a white believes he or she is identifying with a person of color, but in fact is doing so only in a slight, superficial way." "It is a kind of parallel," I said. "But I think I could use an example or two." "Sure," Rodrigo replied. "Consider the early Settlement House move- ment.32 The upper-class ladies who worked there professed to be highly concerned over the plight of the immigrants who lived in the houses. But their sympathies did not extend to learning their languages or ways. Instead, they taught them personal hygiene, housekeeping, English-how to be American.33 Lawyers make this mistake, too, even public interest ones. Maybe especially public interest ones."
....

"Someone who is in the grip of false empathy has a shallow identification with the other," I added. "He or she walks on the surface, uses the wrong metaphors and comparisons.47 It's a little bit like false piety, like those folks who go to church on Sunday but don't allow themselves to be seized by real religion." "The most unsympathetic thing you can do is to think you have empathy with those of a radically different background. You can easily end up hurting them."

the article goes on - it's an easy and fascinating read. If you're interested and don't have academic access let me know and I can send it your way. (photo is of the "empathy belly" - another 'let me play you for a day and then I'll know your reality' exercise)

solidarity based on .... ?

in the book 'People Power' Howard Clark argues (p. 153) that

some solidarity is based on a sense of common identity (eg gender, race)

some is based on common interests (he gives the example of workers and small farmers)

and some on common moral or political beliefs (he gives pacifism and socialism)

and some on religious faith.

I had never heard it put quite that way. But what about solidarity around similar visions of a better world, of equality, dignity, justice, respect for life - even if you disagree on exactly how to get there?

going silent for a day

Rather than go barefoot for a day (see previous post) I just got a facebook fundraising appeal from a friend asking me to sponsor him to go silent for a day (well, as he put it, to shut up) to raise money for Videa, a Canadian organization doing development work in Africa.

Certainly better than the TOMS barefoot day, but it makes me queasy that one of their tag lines is "What does it feel like to be silenced"? Doubt that my friend will know after his quiet day. And it doesn't seem like his being silent is making much space for those who are silenced - none of whose stories appear on the site.

speaking of shoes

talk about walking in another persons shoes. TOMS literally suggests that you do so. one for one. you buy a pair, they give a pair a way.

the TOMS shoe for a shoe thing feels more like charity than solidarity to me, as much as they attempt to get folks to feel a sense of connection with others.

can we think about why folks don't have shoes? and maybe, um, support their local shoe making instead of flooding them with these weird shoes they wouldn't normally wear?

this article makes many of those arguments. My favorite line:
“TOMS Shoes is a good marketing tool, but it’s not good aid.” She has a long list of reasons, including: “It’s quintessential Whites in Shining Armor. It’s doing things ‘for’ people, not ‘with’ people.”
Amen!

the weirdest TOMS phenomena is the barefoot solidarity thing. maybe you haven't been exposed to it, but once a year they urge folks to go barefoot for a day in solidarity with folks who can't afford shoes. commercialization of solidarity just maybe? but hell, they had 1,000 events in 25 countries. wow.

www.onedaywithoutshoes.com

am I being a curmudgeon? comments?

in *whose* shoes?

"Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes. That way, you'll be a mile from them, and you'll have their shoes." - Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts (via my friend Christy)

the current version of the last paragraph of chapter four of the dissertation, on why international accompaniment is a form of solidarity, and not 'non-partisan':

Walking side by side is such a clear embodiment of solidarity that it seems odd to have to argue for it. Perhaps the issue is different understandings of what solidarity means. Rather than engage in that broader theoretical debate here I have focused on the ‘doings’ of accompaniment and how these are and are not understood as solidarity by accompaniers. Yet I will end with a play on this image of walking together that the term acompañamiento conjures in Spanish. Solidarity does not mean walking in lockstep. It certainly does not mean walking ‘in their shoes’ (a phrase often used to describe empathy) – for then there would be no room in the shoes of the accompanied for their own feet. It does not mean the accompanier walking on top of the shoes of the accompanied, nor having the feet of the person accompanied ride on top of the feet of the accompanier - but rather simply walking alongside each other. Solidarity means walking together towards a broad vision of a different world that is possible, and accompaniment is a powerful way of doing that. To deny this and attempt to distance accompaniment from its social movement origins is to weaken a powerful solidarity strategy.

support the brave and inspiring folks in the peace community of San Jose with a quick signature

This is the community that I've posted about several times before. They could really use your support right now.