Some recent stories of importance that the Arizona Daily Star hasn’t been covering:

Idle No More at Tucson Mall: “Over 200 people gathered around the throbbing drums and horns echoing through Tucson Mall on Friday, January 11, 2013 at 7:30 p.m. in unity with the Idle No More Movement’s call for a Global Day of Action. In what has become a signature of a movement only weeks old, the flash mob round dance at a mall was the result of a grassroots organizing effort using word of mouth and social media.” [Occupied Tucson Citizen, January 23, 2013. There was no mention of the event in the Star.]

Strike Debt’s Rolling Jubilee: “After months out of the limelight Occupy Wall Street is launching its latest venture on Thursday: a bid to buy up tens of thousands of dollars of personal debt. Rolling Jubilee, an offshoot of the street protests that saw thousands demonstrate across the world in 2011, will ‘forgive’ people of their debt once it is purchased. The project, created by Occupy’s Strike Debt group, says it will help people by paying off outstanding debt…” [The Guardian, November 15, 2012. Though Occupy Wall Street received considerable media attention across the country when it raised over a half million dollars and thereby retired over eleven million dollars of consumer debt (consumer debt is usually bought for pennies on the dollar), no mention was made of it in the Arizona Daily Star.]

Major banking scandals only back page news at the Arizona Daily Star

“That HSBC bank officials knowingly helped Mexican drug lords launder their money is bad enough. That the Obama administration decided not to file criminal charges against the responsible bank executives and instead only fined the bank is just as egregious. But what might be worst of all, since we have already come to expect little from our banks or our politicians, is that the media, which is to say, the corporate media, gave little coverage to the story of this sell-out of a settlement. And our own Arizona Daily Star was no exception, placing a short article on the story, ‘HSBC penalized $1.9B for its transgressions’ on page A14 of its December 12 edition…” [Occupied Tucson Citizen, December 30, 2012]

Thousands Protest Keystone Pipeline in Washington March: “Thousands of protesters marched to the White House yesterday in opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline, which environmental groups say would worsen the risks of climate change by encouraging development of Alberta’s oil sands. The rally attracted 35,000 people, according to organizers, who called it the largest climate-change protest in U.S. history. They said it marked the rise of a national movement demanding action on global warming as President Barack Obama weighs whether to approve the $5.3 billion pipeline…” [Businessweek, February 18, 2013. On the day following the demonstration the Star devoted their weekly editorial feature, in which they have a “for” and an “against” editorial on a specific issue, to energy exploration and exploitation, but made no mention of the demonstration.]

Mining Protests in Bisbee:

“To bring attention to the actions of [Phoenix-headquartered international copper and gold mining conglomerate] Freeport-McMoRan in Bisbee, as well as labor and environmental abuses throughout the world, a weekend of action was organized by Occupy Phoenix, Phoenix Industrial Workers of the World and East Timor Action Network. The weekend kicked off at Freeport-McMoRan headquarters in Phoenix on Friday, December 14th [and included a trip] to Bisbee to visit and hear stories from South Bisbee homeowners who are fighting to stay in their homes. Some of the people have lived there for 60 years. In June, 2012 Freeport-McMoran notified South Bisbee residents that they had five months to leave, and offered them $50 per square foot for their houses…” [Report by Lisa Wale of the Arizona Community Press, January 2, 2013. The Star has never mentioned the Bisbee controversy or protests, but does feature Freeport-McMoRan in such articles as "Phoenix-based Freeport buys pair of energy companies for $9B," "Freeport-McMoRan to host job fair in Pinal County" and "Freeport-McMoRan 4Q profit rises 16 percent."]

"Homeless Movement" by traguss

They stroll the hot side-walks
as the pavement sizzles
from the unwavering Sun.
Their survival means hope as their
bodies undergo never-ending
pounding of moving and shuffling
to keep from going insane,
grief deep as life or thought.
We see them often as microscopic,
and from a distance a faint light twinkles
in the depths of their hard black flat eyes
as bombs of misfortune drop around them 24/7,
from the open wounds of timeless dejection.
Thousands occupy combat-wearied minds
which has caused them to shut down.
Their government refuses to negotiate
a peaceful resolution
to end their madness.
The homeless have become a freak of war
wounded beyond repair.
They fall upon the thorns of life!
They bleed:
20,000 dead young and old,
15,000 tons of flesh,
25,000 gallons of blood,
920,000 years of life
that will never be lived,
and 50,000 children
who will never be born.
Societies limbs are shackled
to shameless/ hope, and the
streams of forethought stretch out in the distance.

© 1998 Bobby Burns—author of Shelter: One man’s journey from homelessness to hope

Community Vision for Ronstadt at the Rialto

In a week in which City Councilmember Shirley Scott proposed a two million dollar cutback to Tucson public transit, she and others who are tempted to start dismantling our already inadequate public transit system would do well to remember the April 2nd “Community Vision for the Ronstadt Transit Center” event at The Rialto Theater. At the event, which was organized by the Tucson Bus Riders Union, some 350 people packed into the Rialto to speak out and to take the initiative in the city’s planned survey of what to do with the Ronstadt Center. Councilwoman Scott was not there, so we present the following photographic essay to give her some idea of the range and energy of the event, which featured everything from poetry to a detailed history of Tucson public transit, especially in the downtown. It concluded with an extended speak-out. The message of the whole event to public officials was perhaps best summarized by Billy Lolos of Occupy Tucson, who pointed out, regarding the idea that the Ronstadt Center might be developed into a “multiple use” space: “No one can serve two gods, the consumer one and the public service one, and the Ronstadt Center therefore can’t be made to serve both of these gods either.” For more details see Pamela Powers Hannley’s “Ronstadt Transit Center: City, Developers Ponder Proverbial Political Football” at Blog for Arizona.com.

Signing in

Poetry

Speaking Out

From a presentation on the history of the Ronstadt Center

Ronstadt Transit Center

Obama last visited Mexico during the G-20 summit in Los Cabos last June. He and his entourage will touch down again today for talks with Mexico’s new president, Enrique Peña Nieto. Since his election, Peña Nieto’s team has worked to shift media focus away from violence related to the drug war and towards the economy, something that will likely be reinforced during this visit.

According to the New York Times, “In Mexico, Mr. Obama plans to meet with President Enrique Peña Nieto for talks that the Mexican foreign ministry said earlier ‘will cover competiveness [sic], education and innovation, along with border infrastructure, commerce, migration and citizen security among other subjects of shared interest.’”

Competitiveness

Competitiveness is a preferred term that governments use today to talk about privatization and regulatory reforms designed to benefit the corporate sector. Previously, competitiveness was known as austerity, structural adjustment, or privatization, terms that have fallen out of favor due to the harsh consequences of these programs on the population at large.

So with respect to competitiveness, what might Obama and Peña Nieto discuss? Well, for one, Mexico recently changed their labor laws in order to “increase competitiveness,” pushing down minimum wage to about 60¢ an hour and making it more difficult for workers to receive social security and regular workweeks.

Pemex, Mexico’s state-owned oil firm, will definitely be a topic of conversation. According to the Financial Times, “an opening of Mexico’s highly protected oil sector, which is dominated by state behemoth Pemex, could provide untold opportunities for US oil companies as well as the sort of technology-transfer Mexico desperately needs.”

With all the talk of the gains to be achieved through privatizing Mexico’s oil sector, the fact that 99 percent of the state owned oil company’s profits go towards the federal budget, representing about 40 percent of the total national budget, will probably be sidestepped. Full privatization of Pemex would mean harsh austerity throughout the country.

In addition, the US funds something called the Mexico Competitiveness Program through the US Agency for International Development (USAID). According to the agency, “USAID is working with Mexican partners to improve economic governance and increase private sector competitiveness by improving the business enabling environment and by building sustainable support for continued policy reforms and systemic changes.” This means funding Mexican think tanks and non-governmental organizations to promote business friendly policies, privatization, and US backed reforms to the justice sector.

Education & Innovation

On December 11th, ten days after taking power, the Government of Mexico changed two articles of the Constitution, resulting in what they are calling an education reform. The focus on mandatory testing for all teachers has generated controversy, as, among other things, it makes teachers into increasingly precarious workers who can be fired for failing a test. “What was approved isn’t an education reform, rather a labor and administrative reform in disguise,” wrote columnist Luis Hernández Navarro in La Jornada. In the same column, Hernández maintained that the legislation opens the pathway to the privatization of the education system.

There has long been pressure from organizations like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to change the education system in Mexico. In a December 2012 press release announcing the renewal of a $73 billion credit line for Mexico, the IMF called for reforms to the education system, among other things. Peña Nieto has already earned the admiration of the International Monetary Fund, whose leaders say they are “very impressed with President Peña Nieto’s structural reform agenda.”

Mass protests against the education reform have taken place across the country. On April 18th, a record 250,000 teachers, students, and their supporters are estimated to have marched in Guerrero against the reform and for free and public education.

The US corporate sector has a lot riding on innovation and education in Mexico. “With Mexico able to provide US companies with young, skilled and cheap labor, and with the US able to play a potentially crucial role in the transfer of technology and know-how to its southern neighbor, there is clearly plenty of room for the two administrations to push ahead with further economic integration,” according to a recent article in Financial Times. General Electric has an important center for research and design in Querétaro, which is fast becoming home to the country’s most important aerospace cluster. Engineers, 115,000 of which graduate in Mexico each year, are particularly sought after, as they can be hired here for less than $1,000 a month. This is a crucial element in Mexico’s ability to attract foreign direct investment in advanced manufacturing. According to data from Mexico’s Secretary of the Economy, the number of aerospace companies in Mexico rose from 61 to 249 between 2005 and 2011. Eighty-five percent of aerospace exports are to the United States.

Border infrastructure, Migration & Citizen Security

Obama will likely promote the immigration reform bill that is before the US Senate. The bill comes in at over 800 pages, and places immigration squarely within the context of national security. There are positives and negatives to the proposal, which aims to ensure an adequate and flexible labor force in the US. While some workers may eventually achieve the “pathway to citizenship” offered through the reform, other prospective migrants will be directly impacted by its political tradeoff, an expanded border wall and even more militarization along the US’s southern border.

There’s a demand from the corporate sector to build new border crossings and expand existing ones between Mexico and the US. “Financially, investment in border crossings and infrastructure has not matched the exponential increase in trade crossing the border each year,” reads a December memo from the Council on Foreign Relations. This border infrastructure is necessary for the maquila (assembly) industry in Mexico to expand, and the US requires Mexico’s cooperation on these crossings, the construction of which amount to huge subsidies for the US and other corporations with operations along the US/Mexico border.

In terms of “citizen security” it is plain as day that violence in Mexico has risen in tandem with the implementation of the Merida Initiative, a US backed strategy militarizing the transshipment and production of narcotics. Over 120,000 people have been murdered and at least 27,000 disappeared since the beginning of the “drug war” in December, 2006.

Many of the dead and missing are migrants and “non-citizens,” Mexico has increasingly become one huge border for Central Americans, where the enforcers are not only immigration police but also the army and organized crime groups. It’s likely the presidential talks will skirt the ongoing violence in Mexico and focus more on police training and community programs, which are the supposed positive aspects of the Merida Initiative. Talking about the “drug war” probably the last thing Peña Nieto wants to do while sharing the spotlight with Obama.

Dawn Paley is a freelance journalist and independent researcher. See more of her work online at dawnpaley.ca.

Savory offers a solution to desertification (and thus climate change) that can be accepted by the main stream. There’s an option that Savory doesn’t consider: allowing herds and pack predators to live freely. Of course, this unconsidered option is politically unacceptable (as well as economically unthinkable) to most.

Image by Alice Whittenburg

What began as early as 2004 when the PCCD Board of Governors coached then Chancellor Roy Flores on softening his administrative style has developed into a work environment so hostile that, even after Flores’ reign of terror ended amidst allegations of sexual harassment perpetrated by him and ignored by the Board, and threats of loss of accreditation, the culture of fear and intimidation endures.

Piling on the demands of every employee group at the college, pressure from civic and business leaders, a scathing report from the accrediting agency that has placed the college on probation, now students rise to demand that the remaining members of the Board Governors from Flores’ tenure step down to allow the institution to have a fresh start in hopes of becoming once again viable in service to their needs and those of the community.

The students invite members of the community to join them Wednesday, May 8 at 5:30 pm at University High School to march to the Board of Governors meeting to present them with petitions demanding their ouster. This may be the first major campaign initiated by student citizens of the PCCD to flex their political muscle in the community.

The student group is demanding that Governors Marty Cortez, Scott Stewart, Brenda Even and David Longoria step down immediately. They echo the demands of the faculty senate, the (non-teaching) Staff Council, the repeated calls of the Arizona Daily Star as well as the Coalition for Integrity, Respect and Responsibility (C-FAIRR).

C-FAIRR was one of two groups that, along with other individuals, initiated complaints in 2012 to the college’s accrediting body, the Higher Learning Commission (HLC). The other group was self-described as “Faculty and Staff at Pima Community College.” The HLC conducted an investigation into allegations, sending a fact finding team for an on-site visit in January, 2013 whose scathing report landed PCCD on two-year probation.

The report chronicles an environment within which several female victims who shunned unwanted advances of Flores were disciplined, demoted or transferred. Where “nearly all” employees “stated there was a culture of fear at the college” and “many individuals indicated that the culture did not disappear following the Former Chancellor’s resignation…”

The report details that “The Board was aware of the Former Chancellor’s unprofessional behavior as far back as 2004. At that time the concern was about his “tough” demeanor and his strong verbal language. The Board held “coaching sessions” for the Former Chancellor regarding the Board’s expectations that he “soften” his approach. Some of the leadership team indicated that he would appear to change his demeanor but that he would soon go back to his previous behavior. The Board never disciplined him for these actions.”

The report states that while the Interim Chancellors Cabinet “…expressed few concerns…” and no “…sense of urgency regarding the claims of the culture of fear and intimidation…,” Faculty leaders had “…presented information to the Board in 2007…” that showed 77% of Faculty surveyed felt they could not “…express their views openly without fear of recrimination.”

After detailing a litany of additional institutional failures including excessive turnover of administrative staff, arbitrary HR practices, questionable no-bid contracting, the administrations unilateral implementation of a new admissions policy which changed the “…makeup of the student body…,” effective suffocation of the Developmental Education program, and the Board’s failure to exercise its oversight duties, the report concludes with regard to the Board that:

“The institutional culture at PCCD was shrouded in the shadow of silence that was fostered through a pattern of protection created by members of the Board of Governors.”  They further concluded that the Board of Governors “…Failure to act quickly and with all due diligence on serious complaints against the institution’s CEO, lack of a structured review of its institutional policies and procedures, knowledge without action regarding the Former Chancellor’s inappropriate and unprofessional actions toward employees, failure to become aware of and to investigate an institutional sense of distrust and fear, and its general sense of being concerned more with fiscal outcomes than with the well being of its employees all delineate a Board which has become dysfunctional.”

For more information about the students exercise of their oversight responsibilities as citizens visit the Facebook Event Page for the Wednesday, May 8^th march. To sign the petition demanding the board resign and to find even more information, click here.

In the final weeks of a six month prison sentence for protesting remote control murder by drones, specifically from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, I can only reflect on my time of captivity in light of the crimes that brought me here.  In these ominous times, it is America’s officials and judges and not the anarchists who exhibit the most flagrant contempt for the rule of law and it is due to the malfeasance of these that I owe the distinction of this sabbatical.

As I share in the perspectives gained from residing in the federal prison camp in Yankton, South Dakota, it is important to disclose that as a political prisoner sent up on trumped misdemeanor charges for a few months, my situation is not the same as my fellow inmates!  All nonviolent “offenders”, most by far are prisoners of the war on drugs and most are serving sentences of many years.  I also try to avoid the temptation to exaggerate the hardships and privations I’ve suffered here.  Certainly, doing time in a minimum security camp is easier time than in most other kinds of jails.  If basic necessities are barely met, they are met.  I am in good company and time is passing with little drama and without fear.  For me, these months have been more a test of patience than of courage.

Still, this is a hard place to be in many ways and it would be wrong to minimize what people suffer here.  Among these are the basic humiliation of being numbered and then counted at intervals through the day, frequent shakedowns, random frisks (stranger’s fingers fumbling with a lacerated heart, Solzhenitsyn remembered) and strip searches, separation from family and friends, severely limited visits, intercepted mail and interrupted phone calls, incessant noise and overcrowding, petty rules arbitrarily enforced.

The regime here is one of omnipresent and unrelieved bureaucracy.  What I am experiencing over a few months as inconvenience and minor irritation, cumulative over years can amount to a crushing and ruinous burden.

“A concentration camp is the complete obliteration of privacy,” wrote Czech novelist Milan Kundera.  It is “a world in which people live crammed together constantly, night and day.  Brutality and violence are secondary, and not the least indispensable characteristics.”

At Yankton and in camps and prisons like it, the federal government has achieved the complete obliteration of privacy as the drug war has increased America’s already bloated prison population sevenfold over the last twenty years.  No country locks up more of its citizens for so long sentences as the United States and it can be said, too, that the government is taking strides to extend the obliteration of privacy to the general population.

What the government has not been able to accomplish by locking up suspected drug users and dealers by the thousands is any reduction in addiction or in the sale and use of illegal drugs.  There is little doubt that jailing drug related “criminals” causes more and not less drug use and crime and yet the so-called criminal justice system is expending an increasingly greater fortune in human and material resources on prisons, contrary to the ends of public safety or rehabilitation.

Before he retired, President Eisenhower warned of the emergence of a self-perpetuating “military industrial complex” producing weapons and provoking conflict for the sake of ensuring a market for more weapons.  Likewise, America is increasingly in the grip of what some call a “prison industrial complex,” building and filling prisons for the purpose of ensuring fodder for more prisons.

The United States government does not run its foreign policy on any more enlightened or humane premise than it does its prisons.

The refrain “we are creating enemies faster than we are killing (or capturing) them” is a bit of truth that gets leaked to the media occasionally in recent years.  Sometimes the sentiment is voiced by even the most senior military commanders and applied variously to any of several strategies, including night raids in Afghanistan, check points in Iraq, the prison at Guantánamo, and drone attacks in Yemen and Pakistan.

As with prisons, United States military and diplomatic policies run contrary to their stated objectives of peace and public safety and yet they persist with little question.  Prisons and the military, America’s dominant institutions, exist not to bring healing to domestic ills or relief for foreign threats but to exacerbate and manipulate them for the profit of the wealthiest few, at great cost and peril for the rest of us.

One of many discouraging moments of the presidential campaign that ended just before I surrendered to authorities here in November, was in a debate where Mr. Obama stated that Americans need to “decide for themselves” whose sanctions against Iran would be “more crippling,” his or Mr. Romney’s.  This was an obscene and unacceptable choice.

Sanctions are portrayed as a diplomatic alternative to war but in their application can be as lethal, warfare by another name.  Sanctions that extend beyond trade in armaments to include embargoes on food, medicine, educational materials, and other necessities of life can constitute weapons of mass destruction in themselves.

It is often said that such comprehensive and indiscriminate sanctions make prisons of the countries targeted with them.  While the regime of sanctions against inmates here at Yankton is less severe than the brutal conditions I witnessed in Iraq in 1998 or that the United States imposes on the people of Iran or Gaza (by proxy), the comparison is apt.  Sanctions and prisons are both about imposing economic and social isolation and both can raise levels of tension and fear when applied without conscience.

Meaningful employment, decent housing, support of loved ones, education and self-respect would be helpful responses to the scourge of addiction and the crimes that ensue from it.  Providing these for people at risk would be a priority for a responsible society but all these are robbed from inmates in federal prisons.  Threats of war and terrorism are provoked by sanctions and invasions and can be countered only by addressing root causes.

“What father,” Jesus asked, “would give a stone to a child who asks for bread?”  We know the answer and it is to our shame.

“The choice is no longer between violence and non-violence,” said Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  As resources dwindle, the climate warms and nuclear arms proliferate, even more clearly now than in King’s time, “the choice is between non-violence and non-existence.”

The quality of life and the very existence of all of us depends on the security and well being of each person, especially of those we label criminal or enemy.  The admonition from the Hebrew book of Proverbs to give food to our enemies when they are hungry and drink to them when they are thirsty, echoed in the Sermon on the Mount and the universal Golden Rule to treat others as we would be treated is no romantic, unobtainable dream.  “Love is the only solution” to the human predicament, said Dorothy Day.  Love in our time has become a hard, pragmatic, gritty requisite for survival.

Brian Terrell, a Catholic Worker and Co-Coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence will be released from prison on May 24, 2013.  After that he can be reached at brian@vcnv.org.

Rwanda hands over one warlord to ICC and props up others as it continues plunder of Congo’s resources.

QUOTES:

JAY: Bosco says [...] he gave himself up, but he also says he’s not guilty. He says, I’m just a soldier. So isn’t Rwanda a little worried that when Bosco gets in front of the ICC he’s going to point the finger at Rwanda?

CARNEY: [...] there is no dearth of evidence in terms of Rwanda’s complicity in war crimes, crimes against humanity, the destabilizing, the pillaging of the Congo. [...] What is the issue is that in spite of Rwanda’s crimes in the Congo, it continues to get cover from the United States, from the United Nations, from the United Kingdom. And this is where the problem lies. There’s a lack of political will on the part of the world powers that are protecting Rwanda to act against Rwanda. When I say act, I mean sanctioning Rwanda at the UN. Rwanda’s violated UN embargoes. Putting high-level officials, Rwandan officials, on the sanctions list–they’ve been identified and named for their role in destabilizing the Congo.

What seeds are you sowing in the world? (original image by Van Gogh)

This is the text of a sermon delivered at St. Michael’s Episcopal Church in Little Rock, Arkansas on June 17th, 2012.

Ezekiel 17:22-24

Mark 4:26-34

Not long ago I heard a story on the public radio program Living on Earth about clear cutting in Oregon. After each round of deforestation, logging companies like Weyerhaeuser fly planes and helicopters over the cuts and drop tons of herbicides on the cleared land to keep it open for the next generation of seedlings. Residents who live near the clear cuts are understandably worried about chemical drift and poisons settling into their water supply.

On the program, Terry Witt a representative for a logging industry trade group with the Orwellian name Oregonians for Food and Shelter, argued of course that the chemicals were no threat and that the aerial sprays were necessary because, “There’s a tremendous seed bank in the ground that when you disturb the soil the seeds start sprouting.”

In this last regard, what Witt said is true. Everywhere, from the bottom of lakes to the soils under the ice the arctic, there are seeds waiting in the ground for just the right conditions to sprout. To give an example, the common weed Lambs Quarters can remain viable in dormancy up to 1600 years. The seeds lay just below the surface waiting for just the right combination of light, favorable soil chemistry, and moisture to flourish. And with each seed that sprouts and matures, hundreds of new seeds are deposited for the next thousand years. You can see that attempts by logging companies to control these seed banks is futile. They must resort to what is essentially violence against the land, and thus people. At best, for all of their effort and destruction, the logging companies will be effective only for the span of months while these seeds work on the level of millennia.

I was reminded of these subterranean seed banks when I was discerning what it was Jesus was trying to express to his disciples in today’s Gospel.

But before we get directly into what Jesus says, we need to understand the questions Jesus was answering and who exactly was asking them.

Jesus’ audience was a crowd of peasants—fisherman, farmers, carpenters and masons. These people were tenants mostly—they had wealthy and powerful people they answered to, people who set the agenda, both religious and economic, that these peasants had to live under.

These peasants were not unlike modern farmers in Mozambique, where thousands of acres of land are being leased to multinational agricultural conglomerates out from under local small farmers. In one village, a company came in and took over forty square miles for cheap prices, and no doubt some bribes to the government, with promises to build a well and school. This area comprised the best agricultural land available—land that had once been the primary source of local livelihood. Now the locals are without the best land, the well has still not been drilled a year after the promise was made, and there is little hope that the situation will improve. These agricultural conglomerates are largely funded by Wall Street bankers, making sound investments no doubt, for our 401(k)s and IRAs.

We can feel the sense of injustice here, the futility of small farmers against the economic systems they are wrapped up in. Whether its farmers in Mozambique having their land leased to multinational corporations or indigenous Amazonians losing their native hunting grounds to oil companies or US farmers sued by Monsanto for the drift of genetically modified pollen into their fields—there are Powers and Principalities, evil forces, what Thomas Merton called the Unspeakable in the world that are perpetuating a counterfeit prosperity and abundance at the price of people and land and goodness.

To such an audience we have Jesus coming to announce that he is here to inaugurate a new kingdom—a kingdom where people will be able to build lives of goodness and flourishing without oppression and exploitation; where their work will be rewarded with abundance. Jesus has been going around the countryside, building up a band of followers among these peasants, who are ready to follow his lead and inaugurate a reign that will bring to earth the ideal Jewish Kingdom as described in Ezekiel 17. God we are told will make “high the low tree,” and “low the high tree”—meaning, like in the Magnificat, that God will “casts the mighty from their thrones and raise the lowly.”

These peasants have been listening to Jesus, they have been hearing about this kingdom, they are ready to become disciples and follow Jesus on this way toward a new reordering of society, but we can imagine the burning question that’s on the tip of all of their tongues—

When?

When will the oppression end?

When will the mighty be brought from their thrones and the lowly exalted?

How is such a kingdom even possible?

Jesus’ answer comes in the parable’s we read today and it is essentially this. Who knows? We can’t predict when the conditions will be right for the seed to sprout. It could be fifty years. It could be a thousand. But what disciples are called to now—the sowing of seeds— is going to pay off one day. There will be a harvest and God will be there to gather the harvest when it comes. It doesn’t matter how small the seed we sow is, it can be as small as a mustard seed, and yet with a seed this small God can accomplish the coming of God’s shalom—God’s overwhelming peace and well being, represented here as in our Ezekiel reading by birds coming to nest. Why does God seem to care so much about birds nesting in these two passages? Birds have represented well being, God’s shalom, since Noah first sent out the doves from the Ark as a way to see if the world that had been reordered by God had returned to peace.

The seeds we are called to sow include justice, righteousness, an economy of abundance where everyone has what they need. Practically they are actions like a refusal to lie, an effort to divest our economic life from the forces of injustice, a dedication to curbing our desires for more and living a simple life of enough. Our greatest seed is the taking up of our crosses where we put to death those false selves Christ is calling us away from.

The world can try to dump all the herbicides it wants to keep these seeds from growing, but one day, little by little, the kingdom of God will sprout and flourish, creating a lush habitat where peace and justice can reign, where good work will be rewarded, and birds can nest and raise their young. Our work now is to grab a handful of seeds, and scatter them.

Read more of Ragan Sutterfield’s work online at sustainabletraditions.com