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THERESA
MARIE GANDHI
Activist
Poet
What
Would MK Gandhi Do?
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It
was truly inspiring to be one among more than 60,000 who
participated at the birth of a global movement for economic
justice in Seattle, November 1999. While our non-violent
civil disobedience in response to the World Trade
Organization was dismissed and demonized by the corporate
media, the Independent Media heard the many voices calling
for change. Various articles posted on Independent Media
discussed what to do next, when police can brutalize with
impunity and arrest citizens for conspiring to exercise
rights to free speech. Such articles inspired the following
thoughts to the discussion. |
“What
is today’s Salt March?” That has been my question since
June 1983 at the Congress for the Planetary Initiate for the World
We Choose. Gandhi’s issue was salt and the British
tax on it, a natural resource. Today there is an active global
movement by corporations to privatize water. Additionally, the WTO
attempts to legalize the globalization of poverty and economic
injustice instituting the New Corporate World Order. If these
trends are not stopped it puts humanity on a fast track to
extinction.
How,
specifically, can we communicate, activate to make changes, and
maintain our unique culture, individually and responsibly locally,
with a global consciousness and in a non-hierarchical way to make
consensus decisions?
We each have to
find the answers and ask more questions. As for demonstrating
against the media –yes, but let us do it non-violently. It gives
corporate reality spinners evidence to paint an even more
demonized version of non-violent civil disobedience. Police
tactics have tattered the Bill of Rights since Seattle. Protestors
are now arrested before they demonstrate. Before the Republican
convention walking on the sidewalk a city visitor was held on $1
million bail.
A
few of the problems that MK Gandhi had in mobilizing grassroots
support for economic justice from Colonial rule – Global Free
Trade 19 century British Empire style, now known and run as the
World Trade Organization was: the difference in language, since
there are 27 different languages on the Indian continent; finding
a common rallying point that affected everyone; getting everyone
to be non-violent in their non-cooperation with those in power,
and finally; getting the media to report the story.
Fasting
and Prayer
October
2, 1999, Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday, I began a fast I that lasted
for twenty-two days to bring attention to the world’s imminent
peril at the mercy of the WTO, a hydra head of capitalism, run in
a totalitarian way with secret central planning and with no ethics
for social responsibility. Communistic according to that
definition and so far from the Declaration of Independence and
Adam Smith as to be filed in different parts of a library.
I
broke my no WTO fast after 18 days. After reading MK Gandhi on
fasting I discovered that I wasn’t praying, meditating and being
silent enough. Instead, I was writing and editing social activist
poetry and alerting others to the coming event. MK Gandhi knew
that fasting is prayer and prayer is fasting. His Experiments
in Truth showed him that a regular period of silence of mind
is a key in achieving peace of heart, mind and action.
Communicating against a system without attacking the individuals
implementing the system of harmful laws, legal injustice and
environmental damage can be a challenge.
Economic
Boycotts
MK
Gandhi did not wear British shoes and kick down a British sign as
the small number of masked protesters did in Seattle. Instead he
wore what he could spin himself. He took the British cloths he had
paid for and burned his own property inviting others to join with
him to create a bonfire of British clothes to say they would not
spend local money on British goods but instead would support local
economies. Core principles of staying on truth, non-violence,
local self-sufficiency and local governance are what Mohandas K
Gandhi, known as Mahatma Gandhi, taught and lived.
Grassroots
Organizations
Let
us continue to organize grassroots, locally using community media
and global communications through the Independent Media Centers: www.indymedia.org,
www.FreeSpeechTV.org
and Radio for Peace International www.rfpi.org,
etc. Let us fortify these open windows on the world with funds.
Activate our own e-mail networks to communicate. Let us support
our non-violent brothers and sisters in jail for non-violent
protests with bail money and legal fees.
Let
Your Voice Be Heard
Write
letters to the editor. With whatever talents you have, communicate
to as many people as you are able. Individual reporters are often
overworked so prepare a complete press kit with issues clearly
defined, references and phone numbers and make it as small and as
organized and to the point as you can. Get your message/mission
statement into 7 –9 words with an activating verb whenever you
can. My mission and purpose is to: Activate Service, Education and
Peacemaking for Our Common Future! Let us do that by a process of
writing, ratifying and implementing a Bill of Rights for the Earth
globally via local governance.
Sustainable
Community
Create
local economic systems. Meso-American and multiple cultures have
prophecies for the Web of Life of We the Peoples to be connected,
activated and united for global justice, world peace, sustainable
environment and the emergence of a global constituency during
these years. Seeds planted now will frame the next generation and
beyond as we create a new way of being human. Humans right to
Life, Water, Seeds and Economic Justice are Core Issues! An
example of an Action Vision could be a Water Day focused on
economic justice supporting the Web of Life.
Maybe
Election Day could be a day of fasting, voting and celebrating.
Gather at your local town plaza, state capital or the Nation’s
Mall after having cast your vote. Millions could gather on the
Capital Mall and millions more at their local seat of governance.
A coalition of third parties having seen the truth behind special
interest rhetoric and having examined the record, holds debates
across the land, broadcast live on the internet, local cable
access and community radio stations. People know and understand
the issues and Election Day can become a day of celebration as
people across our land go to the polls to vote those that serve
Global Corporate Control out of office as we vote for Greens,
Labor, We the People and a Common Healthy Future.
Personal
Education
It
is personally profitable for all of us to know the record and
understand the language spin that leaves dangerous truths out of
the debate. Why are corporations passing laws that mandate
surrender of local own water systems to receive aid after
disaster? Why have the Chemical Corporations purchased water
systems worldwide? A global movement by corporations to privatize
water is active; please check it out.
Life
support systems, the commons of our ocean, air and forests on our
planet are crashing. “We are all Jews in this holocaust!” The
multiple hundreds of miles square dead zones in the ocean are the
result of making our waterways into sewers with hundreds of
millions of gallons of toxic chemicals threatening our drinking
water.
Ambassadors
of Peace
Mahatma
Gandhi and others like him spoke truth to power on the causes and
cures of disease, discrimination, poverty and economic injustice.
MK Gandhi said, “Be the peace you seek to achieve for the world,
in the world!”
When
I asked Mother Teresa how she had built such a work force of
compassion she wrote me and said, “Do a small thing but do that
thing.”
~Theresa
Marie Kothari Gandhi
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