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Our Mission |
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WAWA/WeAreWideAwake is my Public Service to America as a muckracker who has journeyed seven times to Israel Palestine since June 2005.
WAWA is dedicated to confronting media and governments that shield the whole
truth.
We who Are Wide
Awake are compelled by the "fierce urgency of Now" [Rev MLK, Jr.] to raise
awareness and promote the human dialogue about many of the crucial issues of our
day: the state of our Union and in protection of democracy, what life is like
under military occupation in Palestine, the Christian EXODUS from the Holy Land,
and spirituality-from a Theologically Liberated Christian Anarchist
POV.
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The Walls of Berlin and Bil'in |
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 Garth Hewitt: From the Broken Heart Of Gaza |
FACTS ABOUT THE WALL from friends in Bethlehem
Read the truth about the Wall and what is happening today in the Holy City of Bethlehem. |
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Eileen Fleming's Biography
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"We're on a mission from God."
The Blues Brothers "Observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all...and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave...a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils."
George Washington's Farewell Address - 1796 "My aim is to agitate & disturb people. I'm not selling bread, I'm selling yeast."
Unamuno
"Imagine All the People Sharing All the World."
John Lennon "If enough Christians followed the gospel, they could bring any state to its knees."
Father Philip Francis Berrigan
"You can stand me up at the gates of hell, but I won't back down."
Tom Petty
"If I can't dance, it's not my revolution."
Emma Goldman
"We have yet to begin to IMAGINE the power and potential of the Internet."
Charlie Rose, 2005
Only in Solidarity do "We have it in our power to begin the world again"
Tom Paine
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"Never doubt that a few, thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world: Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
Margaret Mead |
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"You shall know the truth and the truth will set you free."
John 8:32
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DO SOMETHING! |
Photo of George shown here
and in web site banner
courtesy of Debbie Hill, 2000.
DO SOMETHING!
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Declaration of Independence |
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We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; that, among these, are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; and, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it. -July 4, 1776. The Declaration of Independence |
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Home  Blog August / September 2012 12 years after THAT DAY we call 911
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12 years after THAT DAY we call 911 |
12 years after THAT DAY we call 911
A
few days after THAT DAY, President Bush went on TV and told us to “GO SHOP” if we wanted to HELP and that “They hated us
because we were free.”
I did NOT want to shop, but to understand WHY some people hated US so much that they could target
and murder
innocent people. I was led to join the Olive Trees Foundation
for Peace, an Interfaith non-profit founded by Dr. Khaled Diab,
a 1948 refugee from the Galilee, and then to journey seven times to both sides of the Wall in Israel Palestine.
What follows, is CHAPTER 10: THAT DAY excerpted from KEEP HOPE ALIVE
Khaled,
now seventy-five and a newlywed since July, turned to Fatiha and cried,
“This madness must stop. Retaliation only ups the ante, and the wheel
is still in spin. But I am nearing my end. I have been dreaming of mass
communication for decades and olive trees my entire life; now, I must
act!”
Within hours of viewing the tragic news that stopped the
world on that Tuesday morning, Khaled phoned his many friends: Jews,
Christians, Muslims, and others to gather in downtown Orlando at Lake
Eola.
He told everyone, “Praying for peace without action is
like praying to win the lottery and never buying a ticket. But unless we
work for peace, saying ‘peace, peace, peace,’ means nothing. If we want
peace, we must work for justice.”
Jack had been
restless for three days. Julianne was in New York City at her sister’s
home and wasn’t due back for three more. His knees began throbbing more
the moment she drove out of sight on the morning of September 8, 2001.
After
returning home on Monday night from the BLAC/Brother Lawrence
Addictions Center, Jack mindlessly ate two Lean Cuisines, then spent the
rest of the evening trying to read. He fell asleep just before dawn and
dreamt he was on the blacktop running track at the middle school where
Julianne taught seventh grade English, where they both roller bladed in
the early mornings before the students arrived on campus.
Jack
spent a ten-hour day at the BLAC, as its founder and administrator. The
mornings on the track were when the couple had their best
conversations. He inhaled the aroma of tar as he wondered what was
keeping Julianne from him. He bladed for what felt like hours, when a
silver spandex-clad apparition with a golden helmet flew by, sharply
turned, and with a backward stroke, called out:
“Hi, Jack, don’t look down; don’t look back; look out straight, Jack, look out straight, don’t look back!”
“Yeah, I can; I can do that,” Jack replied, but the apparition had already vaporized into the distance.
And
then Jack rolled onto an exquisite grace, knees freed from bone-on-bone
grinding and not an ache in his fifty-three-year old body that had been
abused by two motor vehicle accidents and hours of overuse syndrome.
Jack glided on the blacktop effortlessly for hours, when suddenly, a
roar of thunder assaulted his senses, and his eyes were magnetized
upward, to view two fireballs thrown down from on high, miles from where
he stood. He saw them hit the ground; one traveled east, the other
west, and then they circled back around, burning a path straight towards
him. Just before they collided, Jack woke up, not believing he had only
been dreaming.
Not until after he had downed a pot of coffee did
the phone ring. “Jack? Are you watching TV?" Maureen, the day
supervisor at the BLAC inquired, as she fingered the framed mission
statement that sat upon every employee’s desk and on the north wall of
every resident’s room:
‘Peace,
peace, peace. God’s peace be upon you. But living today in a time of
war, crying out peace, peace, peace, where there is no peace. Fearing
age and death, pain and darkness, destitution and loneliness, people
need to get back to the simplicity of Brother Lawrence.’ [Dorothy Day]
Brother
L was a monk in the 17th century, who lived in a monastery and was
consigned to the kitchen. He spent his life baking bread, chopping
onions, scrubbing pots and floors. He also ran all the errands, did all
the shopping, and always brought back the finest of wine. He loved his
brothers deeply, but they merely tolerated his many eccentricities, or
he was totally ignored.
Truly,
I tell you, if ever a saint was born to bring hope to the addicted and
those afflicted with obsessive-compulsive tendencies, he is the one. For
Brother L learned that by continually re-remembering the Lord, no
matter what the activity, or where one might be, the Lord was
ever-present and a holy habit was born, just re-remembering that.
Jack thrived on curiosity and spoke as he reached for the remote. “Mo, you know I never watch TV in the daytime; what’s up?”
“Well, isn’t Julianne visiting her sister in the city?”
“Yeah, in fact, today’s plan was to meet her sister’s co-workers on Floor 101 of the North Twin Tower.”
“Jack, turn the TV on.”
“Oh,
Mo, I just did; my God, is it the end of the world?” He spoke as he
hung up the phone and never heard Mo say, “I don’t know.”
Jack knew in his bones that Julianne had been vaporized as he recalled a song he had first heard at a Bob Dylan concert in 1981:
See the massacre of the innocent
City’s on fire
Phones out of order
I see the turning of the page.
Curtain’s rising on a new age.
See the Groom+ still waiting at the altar.
And then, II Chronicles 6:1 welled up within him: “The Lord has said that he would dwell in thick darkness.”
Dr. Jake Hunter heard the news that stopped the world for a day from his third patient of the morning.
Terese didn’t know until Jake called her before his next patient.
Kat
had been dancing in her loft studio in Panacea, Florida, all morning,
ignoring neurological symptoms. She did not turn her cell phone on until
11:45 a.m., and then gasped, “Christ, who died? The entire Hunter clan
has called me. I’ll phone Mom,” she said, just as “Let it Be” chimed from her cell.
“Hi, Kat, I have been trying to reach you.”
“Mom, what’s the deal? What’s going on?”
“Turn the TV on.”
Kat did and gasped, “Oh my God, is it the end of the world?”
“Nobody knows.”
“Mom, I am coming home. I’ll bring Bob; I think I’ll stay awhile.”
“Okay, okay, drive carefully.”
Kat
packed three weeks’ worth of clothes, put Bob, her blue-eyed cat, in
his kennel, and wrote a sign for the front door that read “KATZ STUDIO
CLOSED UNTIL???”
She taped it to the door and never looked back again.
“Bob,
I have been dreading telling dad about my symptoms, because I don’t
want to admit them. But, I have been summoned from the land of denial
and must face the facts on the ground. If I have the dreaded Gehrig’s
disease like my cousin Nick, I will be livid. He was a saint; I am not. I
am not dancing as I once did; I don’t glide anymore, I have gotten
clumsy, and all of these muscle twitches are driving me crazy! I am
pissed! I am too young for this! Oh Christ, I hope it is just a bad
cervical spine, like Dad’s. I can live with the pain, but I must be able
to move about, or I’ll go nuts. Nick was a saint even when he couldn’t
move, but I will be an unholy terror if I can’t dance. Bob, if I have
ALS, will you please just shoot me and put everyone out of my misery?”
Kat
sighed deeply and popped in a favorite mix she had burned of Tom Petty
and U2, and then lost herself in the music until Bono began to wail:
If I could yes I would,
If I could, I would let it go
Into the half light and through the flame
Into the light and to the day,
Let it go and so to find the way,
To let it go, and so to find the way.
I am wide awake, I am wide awake, wide awake
If I could, you know I would:
Let it go:
Desperation,
Dislocation,
Separation,
Condemnation,
Revelation,
In temptation,
Isolation,
Desolation,
Let it go and so to find a way
I am wide awake,
I am wide awake,
I am wide awake, wide awake!
Kat mused, “Strange, how seeing that horror on TV woke me up to some things, too.”
The
Sunday after that day the world stood still, the Hunters’ seven
children and eighteen grandchildren had gathered together. Everyone was
down at the lake except for Jake, Terese, and Kat, who were in the
family room.
Jake contemplated Kat’s chances of having ALS or a bad neck, and brooded.
Terese said, “There’s an interfaith gathering today in Shea Stadium, and I want to view it.”
She
turned the TV on just as the shofar sounded in New York City, and
hundreds of priests, rabbis, sheiks, and clerics of all kinds somberly
filed into the stadium in front of a sorrowful nation. Kat became
luminous. “Wow, look at how beautiful all of that is! All of those holy
ones in their uniqueness and all the shades of people in the stands
reaching out to each other — how blessed we are in America to live among
such diversity, and how beautiful it is to see us coming together out
of such sorrow. This is the way we can let the pain go: by reaching out
to the stranger, we comfort them and heal ourselves. America’s worst day
has brought us and the world together. Why, it’s only a few angry mad
men who did the evil; the international community can confront this
together, by confronting this evil as sister and brother.
"What
an incredible opportunity America has been given to lead the world this
way and not seek revenge. Imagine the dysfunctional family of Father
Abraham building on this momentum, to confront the evil that is
terrorism, by confronting it with good and unity among us. Didn’t St.
Paul say that the only way to resist evil is with good?
"Imagine
how much better the world will be when America chooses not to use
military power, now that we all know our nuclear arsenal cannot protect
us American’s will want to discover why these mad men did this evil and
go after that! The global village is the community to address this
issue; terrorism is everywhere, and now America has woken up to the fact
that we are not immune. We are all in this world together; we will
either learn to share this world as sister and brother, or we will blow
it up.”
Terese responded. “Kat, human nature is to strike
back and seek revenge, but we have the witness of Christ, Gandhi, and
Reverend King how to effectively respond to violence. I hope and pray
this president follows their ways, but I see hawks circling.”
Jake
cleared his throat and intoned, “Another thing is that acting out of
fear makes one do stupid, irrational things. You know I have always said
to never ever react out of fear, for the gospel says fear not! And fear
drives out compassion and hardens the heart.”
Kat was mesmerized by the TV, Terese sighed deeply repeatedly, and Jake brooded.
In
a log cabin nestled within the thickly wooded mountains of upstate New
York, Jack sat in a darkened room with the TV on, but he wasn’t
watching. When the shofar blew and grabbed his attention, he froze until
the ram’s horn went silent, and then popped open his sixth beer of the
day, for Jack had fallen off the wagon.
+The Groom in Christian lingo is Jesus Christ
THAT DAY, This 9/11 and
Bob Dylan
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"HOPE has two children.The first is ANGER at the way things are. The second is COURAGE to DO SOMETHING about it."-St. Augustine
"He who is not angry when there is just cause for anger is immoral. Why? Because anger looks to the good of justice. And if you can live amid injustice without anger, you are immoral as well as unjust." - Aquinas |
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Order My Books |
"Memoirs of a Nice
Irish-AmericanGirl's Life inOccupied Territory"
AND
"Keep Hope Alive" To order either book
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UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS
Everyone has the right to freedom of
opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions
without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and
ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
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The Paradoxical Commandments
by Dr. Kent M. Keith People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered.
Love them anyway. If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.
Do good anyway. If you are successful, you win false friends and true enemies.
Succeed anyway. The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow.
Do good anyway. Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable.
Be honest and frank anyway. The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds.
Think big anyway. People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs.
Fight for a few underdogs anyway. What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight.
Build anyway. People really need help but may attack you if you do help them.
Help people anyway. Give the world the best you have and you'll get kicked in the teeth.
Give the world the best you have anyway. © 1968, 2001 Kent M. Keith " In the final analysis, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway."-Mother Teresa
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“You cannot talk like sane men around a peace table while the atomic bomb itself is ticking beneath it. Do not treat the atomic bomb as a weapon of offense; do not treat it as an instrument of the police. Treat the bomb for what it is: the visible insanity of a civilization that has ceased...to obey the laws of life.”- Lewis Mumford, 1946 |
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The age of warrior kings and of warrior presidents has passed. The nuclear age calls for a different kind of leadership....a leadership of intellect, judgment, tolerance and rationality, a leadership committed to human values, to world peace, and to the improvement of the human condition. The attributes upon which we must draw are the human attributes of compassion and common sense, of intellect and creative imagination, and of empathy and understanding between cultures." - William Fulbright |
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“Any nation that year after year continues to raise the Defense budget while cutting social programs to the neediest is a nation approaching spiritual death.” - Rev. MLK |
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Establishment of Israel |
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"On the day of the termination of the British mandate and on the strength of the United Nations General Assembly declare The State of Israel will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel: it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion it will guarantee freedom of religion [and] conscience and will be faithful to the Charter of the United Nations." - May 14, 1948. The Declaration of the Establishment of Israel
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