Sunday Easy Rider

Sunday mornings...the bike ride to the beach nearby my house in Boston. Welcome to the renewal of my Sunday commentary---SER(Sunday Easy Rider). The world may be in chaos, but the beach beckons all, the dog walkers, the elder Asian Tai Chi faithfuls, the lovers walking, the tan-seeking man who rides his bike to the beach collapsing into the diamond-glistening sand, the family dad helping his daughter build a sand castle. If you are a "water baby" you get the obsession-anything to be near the ocean. When I lived in land-locked Johannesburg for a year, I regularly rose at 4 or 5AM, hopped in the car, and drove the 7 hrs. to Durban just to smell the ocean, to see the sun transform the wave-capped ocean into day-twinkling stars, ebbing and flowing. If you had the misfortune of being in the car with me, you had only one potty-stop. Sorry. I needed to get their fast!
The reality is that genocide despots Charles Taylor (Liberia) and Ratko Miladic (Bosnia) are being tried at the Hague as the International Criminal Court confronts these  war criminals; several others are being lined up around the world and it seems we're finally getting the hang of making the bad guys pay for evil. Women and children have been some of the most vulnerable targets of war-related violence. This is one of many scenarios that reasserts the human struggle for social justice, punishment for immoral and illegal activities globally, and a war-weary species that desperately seeks a peace-loving future. One of the central shifts underway is the active repression of a level of masculine aggressiveness socialized into our national cultures and the even more active pursuit of feminine perspectives, voices, and activism arising from women and men everywhere from civil society agencies to the halls of government. Our globalizing identities seek a higher level of humane performance in all of our dealings, public and private. The long-term demand from traditional masculinity for sex trafficking, war as the ubiquitous problem-solver, and so many unexamined behaviors rooted in gender imbalances is asking us to re-examine 6000 of human evolution to remake our species, to think and do life differently. It's about time. Go to the beach and think about it.... I'll be back next Sunday. Meanwhile, speak your peace.....

Thoughts from the late Ralph Bunche on the Palestine-Israeli struggle

As history watches as Palestinians seek UN recognition this month, remember former UN Under secretary, Ralph Bunche. In fact, in 1936, long before the launch of a distinguished career, Bunche wrote: "And so, class will some day supplant race in world affairs. Race war will then be merely a side-show to the gigantic class war which will be waged in the big tent we call the world." Receiving the Nobel Peace Prize (1950) for his mediation of the Israeli-Arab/Palestinian struggle, Bunche was a political scientist and diplomat who was a central player in the writing of the UN Charter and worked with Eleanor Roosevelt on the UN Declaration of Human Rights. He was one of the most highly ranked American diplomats and, as a person of color, also mediated conflicts in Yemen, Cyprus, and the Congo. In fact the membership of numerous African and Asian states in a  post-war mid-2oth century UN was made possible by Bunche who helped to dismantle the old African and Asian colonial systems as they took their eventual place in the UN as independent states.
Despite a prestigious career, Bunche confronted racism in the U.S. throughout his life.

Remember his words in these perilous times:
"May there be, in our time, at long last, a world at peace in which we, the people, may for once begin to make full use of the great good that is in us."
-Raplh Bunche