More reasons why the power to imprison people should not be given solely to the executive branch. What will it take to wake us up?

If you think that the latest bill signed by the President, Military Commisions Act only applies to non-citizen enemy combatants, do yourself a favor, as an American, and listen to this podcast. This is not, nor should it be, a partisan issue. This latest bill is an insult to all of us, and shame on us for letting it happen.

Austin will be speaking at Mid-City Nazarene Church about slavery and human trafficking this weekend. I’ll be there, and if you’re in San Diego and want to join what should be a fascinating and alarming wake up call, I’d encourage anybody to join.

Austin works with Free the Slaves and they are recently promoting efforts to eliminate U.S. government and American corporate-backed contractors that practice slavery in Iraq and the Middle East. More details on how to get involved can be found at warslavery.org.

Details on the talk as follows:

We Are The World?
How does turning off the light switch when you leave the room help children escape malnutrition in Africa? How can bicycling short distances instead of driving lead towards an end to strife in Darfur? How can the clothes you wear help free slaves around the world?

Introducing GLOCAL
It’s time to explore how the little things make a huge impact around the world. We live in an era full of choices…now is the time to learn how to choose justice through the little decisions we make. Join us on Saturday, October 21, 2006 as we launch a new series of Teach-Ins called, GLOCAL.

At GLOCAL Teach-Ins you will hear from locally-based experts that can help us connect the dots between how what we do in our local communities and the effects to our larger community, the world. Network and brainstorm with like-minded people, on how you and your community can make a difference.

Each GLOCAL Teach-In will discuss a particular problem that exists both globally and locally, current efforts to address the problem and specific things that we, the people in the room, can do to help bring change. The idea being that each of us leaves with practical, realizable and realistic next steps that we can take.

MODERN SLAVERY AND HUMAN TRAFFICKING
At the October GLOCAL, Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick will open a dialogue about what slavery and trafficking is, how it’s connected to our lives and what people in San Diego can do to bring it to an end.

Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick is a human rights advocate and educator working on issues of human trafficking, modern slavery and human rights. He is an Outreach Coordinator for both San Diego Youth and Community Services (San Diego) and Free the Slaves (Washington, DC) and is a lecturer at San Diego State University. His recent projects have included the creation and implementation of a human rights education campaign in at-risk communities and the implementation of www.warslavery.org, a campaign to end tax-payer sponsored slavery in Iraq.

There are 27 million people held in slavery around the world. While some are trafficked and others are born into slavery in their own communities each of them has been held through violence, with little or no pay, for economic gain. In America, tens of thousands of women, men and children are forced to work in the agricultural, domestic and sex sectors of the economy. As human trafficking, especially trafficking for sexual exploitation, has gotten the public’s attention, it is critical that Americans -as consumers and voters- understand what slavery is and how it can be stopped.

This teach-in will provide an overview of the global and domestic perspective and efforts being made to bring slavery to an end. This will be followed by a facilitated discussion about what we, as consumers and voters living in Southern California, can do to bring justice to victims of this human rights abuse.

When: Saturday, October 21, 2006 at 6:00 p.m.

Where
Main Hall at Mid-City Nazarene Church
(corner of 41st and University Ave.)
4101 University Avenue
San Diego, CA 92105
http://midcitynaz.org/

No cost … but your donations at the event are helpful and greatly appreciated

Spread The Word!
We need your help in getting the word out about GLOCAL. Please forward this email on to everyone you know. Go to http://groups.google.com/group/glocalsd and sign-up for our GLOCAL update e-mail, visit our MySpace page at http://www.myspace.com/glocalsd and tell others about it. Send us an e-mail at glocalsd@googlegroups.com to let us know that you are coming on October 21 and to suggest topics for future GLOCAL Teach-Ins.

GLOCAL is a collaborative effort of people from the following organizations:
The Ecclesia Collective (http://ecclesiacollective.org)
Floresta ( http://floresta.org)
Jubilee Economics Ministry ( http://www.jubilee4justice.org)
Free The Slaves (http://www.freetheslaves.net)
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church
Church of the Nazarene in Mid City ( http://midcitynaz.org/)
Healthmuse Holistic Health Counseling (www.healthmuse.com)

After years of wanting to get up there, we finally took a few days and traveled in Washington and Oregon. I’ve created a new Tabblo with some of our pics.

The Common Dreams Newscenter has a short piece on the reaction of the Amish community to the shooting of 10 of their children, killing five. I haven’t written anything about the events, but the reaction of both the older girls before they were shot and their families after the attacks has moved me.

Marian Fisher, according to an article in the Seattle Times, asked to be shot before the other girls, all younger than her, apparently in an effort to get the gunman to let the others go.

The Common Dreams piece takes the story and admittedly goes a little far in extrapolating the lessons from the story into a sermon on the war and the American prison system. I don’t disagree with these extrapolations, per se, but the compassion and courage of the girls that day is worthy of more contemplation and self-reflection than simply to be used as a springboard for a political sermon.

Maybe that’s our problem.

Perhaps we turn every tragedy into a posture to adopt or a policy to enact, and in doing so miss out on the real lessons that those who respond with grace in the face of violence have to teach us. The most compelling acts of courage, it seems to me, are not the ones belonging to soldiers carrying out the rage of a nation but the ones that carry out the words of truth, which have turned the world on its head for 2,000 years: “Love your enemies.”