[Sosfbay-discuss] Green Focus Debate: Do Greens Need a 'People ofColor' Caucus?

[Tian Harter]

I tried to submit this comment, but it kept giving me a "you failed the 
capatcha challenge" error. I've given up, but just for fun, here it is:

I agree totally with Alex on this. In my activism on the oil issue, I 
always look for strategies that work from an "it begins with me" 
perspective. When someone else agrees with me that a solution to oil 
addiction is "stop voting for oil companies at the gas pump", I feel 
like I've made an inch of progress. I like it when another person agrees 
with me that it's a good thing to have harmless, Oxygen exhaling, bushes 
in our world. Should I care if that person has the name Patel, Smith, 
Nguyen, Park, Harter, or Nowak? I say respect their human rights until 
they break the law. I have met many people that don't look like what you 
would expect from reading their names. From my point of view, everybody 
I meet is another John Q. Public until they do something I can remember 
them for.

I visited my sister for Thanksgiving last week. When I was leaving she 
gave me a pomegranate to eat on the way home. Waiting in the terminal in 
Houston I ate the thing. The older woman behind me in line asked where I 
got it. She smiled when I said "my sister gave it to me." My day was 
brightened by the shared experience. It works so much better when we get 
along. I had a similar experience with someone from another ethnic group 
a bit later. Neither of them looked much like me.

Last summer I had some "World Famous Ribs" at Murphy's Law, the biker 
bar in downtown Sunnyvale. I figured there was some hyperbole in the 
hand lettered sign, but just to be sure I asked my email buddy in New 
Zealand if she had heard of them. She didn't even know what a Biker Bar 
was, never mind the rest of it. Since finding that out, I've been 
calling my sister's granola world famous. If you're not reading this in 
Marion County, Georgia or Mountain View, California that's even truer 
now then it was before.

I've been talking about food for the past two paragraphs because we all 
have to eat. You and I are not in a situation where the food on the 
table is a shared experience. If you hear an old Grateful Dead song with 
lyrics like "ripples in still water" know that it was written by people 
like me trying to find common ground in art that was more basic than 
food. My advice to you is let there be songs to fill the air. I know not 
your path, but I hope it is okay. From where I'm sitting it's okay to 
use less energy than Tian Harter, but you have to work to do it. I don't 
use that much.

Tian

alexcathy at aol.com wrote:
>  
> /EDITOR'S NOTE: My op-ed below is the first of a series to be published 
> in Green Focus on applying Green values for people of color. Breaking 
> the Democrat-Republicans monopoly on American politics requires the 
> destruction of big city Democratic Party Machines to which many of us 
> have emotional attachments. It's important for Greens to free our minds 
> from the tyranny of Democrat-Republican old politics about race and 
> ethnicity. Thus, we need to consider if we need a "People of Color 
> Caucus" at all.
> /
> 
> / /
> /I am posting this essay on www.greencommons.com 
> <http://www.greencommons.org/node/870>. Many will disagree vigorously. 
> Good. Accept this challenge: Post a comment with your thoughts; write an 
> 800-word op-eds for Green Focus and send it to don.boring at gmail.com 
> <mailto:don.boring at gmail.com> . /
> /
> /
> /Alex Walker //
> /Los Angeles Greens//
> *
> <http://www.greencommons.org/node/870>*
> *A Debate: Do Greens Need a 'People of Color' Caucus? 
> <http://www.greencommons.org/node/870>
> *No - Let's Be The Change We Want to See*
> *by Alex Walker **
> /
> /
> /"Be the change that you want to see in the world." -- Mohandas Gandhi/
> 
> Read More at:  http://www.greencommons.org/node/870
>  
>  
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-- 
Tian
http://tian.greens.org
"I may be a post-Nietzschean anarcho-Taoist beer mystic, but I ain't no
stinking communist." - Gary Singh in the Nov 28th Silicon Valley Metro.