activists following the Jedi Code?

A climate justice activist I know has this as her e-mail signature:

There is no emotion; there is peace
There is no ignorance; there is knowledge.
There is no passion; there is serenity.
There is no chaos; there is harmony.
There is no death; there is the Force.
-The Jedi Code

Interesting to think of the Jedi Code as a code to use in a different kind of struggle. My friend is trying not to save a galaxy far, far away from an evil empire but to save our own humble planet Earth from a force that threatens to destroy all human life: the carbon cycle.

sexism and wild horses

Masked in gentility, your offer says, I possess the value of the abstract male. You do not. I have power and capability. You do not. Masked thinly in traditional old-fashioned common sense, he asks me if I need help with my luggage, in a demeaning voice, calling me “Miss.” I am not a child and I am not weak. I am certainly stronger than some old and futile man who barks at his wife, commands and instructs, and asks, “Who do you think you are?” All his wife can do is feed him and go to sleep, tucked uncomfortably into a generic blue seat on this train that I’m stuck on. He sits behind me and accuses her in ignorant bleats. He orders her to do the most minute tasks, criticizes when she doesn’t do things his way, instructs with the bloated words of a master. She complies, offers a few flat, defeated remarks and then escapes into a freer world behind her eyelids.

Don’t mistake me for some harnessed mount. I am a wild horse and my will has not been broken.

Often I forget that I grew up in a family where I was not as constrained as others, that I am privileged to have grown up in a world that allowed me to grow to my true size as a person, not clipping me back to shape me as a proper woman.

I grew up with a mother who allows herself to dream. She uses the power of her machines and her technology to propel her to new worlds. When I was a child, she used to pile my sisters and I into the family car and cruise ravenously down country roads, trying to find out everything about everywhere by going and seeing. She liked to go “exploring” behind the wheel of her automobile. She grew up as a wild country girl who drove the pickup truck around the farm by the time she was eight and would jump off the barn loft two stories high into big piles of hay. My mother makes websites now that she’s older, explores the online world ferociously and is the sole visionary and daily manager of a website that gets thousands of hits per week.

My mother was raised, for the most part, by her two aunts, strong old women by the time she was in her teens. One of my aunts, Edith Rogers, was the first woman to be in the local government, the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors. I never knew her, but look at photos of her and I’m proud to say that I bear her resemblance. And I have the strength, wildness and rebellious spark of my mother, too.

I’m also proud to say that I possess the quickness and ire of my firey German grandmother, a young teenager in Frankfurt during World War II. She escaped on bicycle from British soldiers who were firing on her and tightened her belt to survive. Later in life, when she could no longer suffer through the overbearing strictures of my grandfather, she had the strength to divorce him. My grandmother is 82 years old and not only living independently, driving herself and her friends around and climbing stairs, but volunteering with her local community theater.

I come from some very strong women.

So yes, I refuse your offers to saddle me, to put a rope around my neck and lead me into domesticity, I refuse to go quietly into your world in which you are the arbiter of power. I will buck you in an instant if you attempt to commandeer me. I refuse to let you deny me my own power. Make no mistake: You will have to shoot me if you want to dominate me, because you will never break my spirit.

The violent face of free trade: Government forces kill indigenous Peruvians defending the Amazon

As Peru wakes up this morning, many will decide whether to engage in strikes to stand against "free trade" and support indigenous people of the Amazon who were tragically attacked last week by their government. The official death toll from last week's police attack on indigenous people in Peru is 30 lives lost, though it is estimated that many more have died. They died while protesting the harmful impact of the US-Peru Free Trade Agreement on their forests, their families, and their ancestral lands.

On Friday morning of last week, police descended on encampments near the town of Bagua, where a peaceful blockade was in effect to keep private companies from indigenous forest lands. These ancestral lands had been recently opened up to private companies in unconstitutional, fast-tracked Peruvian laws pushed through as a result of the US-Peru Free Trade Agreement, which went into effect February 1, 2009. Some reports indicate that the government forces had initially given the indigenous people until 10 AM to decide whether to leave or stay, but then descended at about 6 AM, opening fire and tear-gassing while many were still asleep. The indigenous groups mostly appear to have been armed only with spears. At some point government forces also attacked people in the town of Bagua.

Survival International, a UK-based organization supporting tribal peoples, is calling this massacre Peru's "Tiananmen Square."

Alan Garcia, president of Peru issued a statement explaining why his government committed these acts. Ben Powless, Mohawk Indian from Ontario and blogger for rabble.ca, describes Garcia's statement:

Garcia declared the Indigenous elements to be standing in the way of progress, in the path of national development, wrenches in the gears of modernity, and part of an international conspiracy to keep Peru down.

“The president thought we would be docile in accepting plans that could completely change the way we hunt for food and raise crops, and we are not,” Juan Agustín told the New York Times, a Shipibo Indian and a leader of the Peruvian Jungle Interethnic Development Association.

Nelson Manrique, a political analyst with Catholic University in Lima, told the Associated Press that Garcia is trying to "deliver the Amazon to multinationals."

"We don't get anything from this huge exploitation, which also poisons us. We've never seen any development and my community lives in poverty," local Aguaruna leader Mateo Inti told The Associated Press in Bagua.

This tragic attack yanks the mask off of the true face of "free trade." These trade agreements are weapons in an all-out war. Corporate interests and governments of well-to-do politicians will use whatever violent means they can to steal resources from people so they can keep the global economic machine oiled and humming along so that they can get richer and richer.

We need local, living economies that work for everyone. Global justice means placing people, planet, and principle before profit. Unregulated trade does not work for the people. The Peru free trade massacre only exposes the true violence of unfair trade law... we mourn for them and struggle to ensure their lives were not lost in vain. Today the world will see that people in Peru are willing to wage strikes to stand behind our basic rights, the right to healthy ecosystems and intact communities, rights that "free trade" policies work against.

Photos: Thomas Quirynen