New Year's resolution - Protect Mother Earth

Here's a New Year's resolution you can achieve right away - protecting our earth: New York State has proposed a new draft of rules that, if approved, could allow drilling under our land and waterways using slick water hydrofracking.

Research about hydrofracking has raised serious concerns about environmental and human health damage from the process. With the deadline for public response on January 11th, time is of the essence.

 Luckily, there are some who have made responding easy and even fun. See "Tis the season to write comments" at http://nyagainstfracking.org/commentsseason/ for info and even comment-writing party ideas. More info at nyagainstfracking.org/take-action/urgent-comment/.


Please respect the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.


There will be a presentation on fracking on Sunday, January 13, 2013 at 10:00 PM at the Brockport Unitarian Universalist Fellowship at the Historic Garland Church

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What's the problem here?

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Global warming - Are you ready?

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Reading Hedges - Farm labor working in the shadows

In the book Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco tell the stories about the effects of capitalism out of control and the consequences of what they call "sacrifice zones", that is, those parts of the United States which have been devastated by corporate practices. The first sacrifice zone described was the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota and the consequence of genocide on Native Americans. The second sacrifice zone described was Camden, NJ, the poorest city in the United States. The third sacrifice zone was the mountain top removal and the devastation of the Appalachian mountains in West Virginia, and the fourth sacrifice zone is the farm workers in Imokallee, Florida.

Hedges writes, "The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that the agriculture industry has a death rate seven times higher than the average rate for most industries." The farm workers perform grueling work for 10, 12 hours a day in the fields often covered in pesticides in sometimes extreme weather conditions. These workers are paid very low wages which allow only the most subsistent living, if that, often sleeping on the woods or incarcerated by crew leaders in confined accommodations so they cannot flee.

Here, in Brockport, we eat our cheap tomatoes in February because of the oppressive conditions which the farm laborers in Florida endure. We also see these folks when they come north in the summer to work in our fields here in the Brockport area. Tom Rivers does an excellent job documenting their work here in his book, Farm Hands, which is available at the Lift Bridge Book Shop.

While our nation has been very inhospitable to undocumented farm laborers, the fact is their labor is needed if we are going to continue to eat cheap produce. Americans are huge hypocrites when they stigmatize and mistreat the very people who do the hard, dirty work, they are not willing or are unable, because of their poor physical conditioning, to do themselves.

Farm workers deserve better working conditions, benefits, and most importantly, to be treated with dignity. Here in Brockport they live in fear, and last year the Bienvenido celebration was canceled for the first time in many years, because of fear of border patrol harassment were the farm workers to gather in public.

Congress has yet to pass a humane and viable law to manage the millions of undocumented but badly needed and hard working immigrants among us. We should promote and affirm justice, equity, and compassion in our human relations and when it comes to farm laborers, we have failed because of economic pressures which, for the most part, are invisible to most Brockporters.

Let us become aware of the plight of farm workers and celebrate their hard work and gifts which make our quality of life possible eating fresh vegetables all year around.

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Music for Brockport, NY - Never ending happening - Bill Fay

Editor note: Music For Brockport, NY is a regular feature of the Brockporter Online News Magazine and appears most Wednesdays. This is song #99 in this series.

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A New Year's Resolution

" All sentient beings in this world have perfect wisdom and complete virtue, they simply do not know it."

Buddha

"The course does not aim at teaching the meaning of love, for that is beyond what can be taught. It does aim, however, at removing the blocks to the awareness of love's presence, which is your natural inheritance."

A Course In Miracles

Let us resolve to remove the blocks to the awareness of love's presence in our lives in Brockport, NY during this year of 2013.

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Happy New Year Brockport!

"There is a beginning, and there is no beginning of that beginning."

Chuang-Tzu

Dad what was the beginning of the world?

It was a twinkling in the eye of God, sweetheart.

What does that mean?

It means that God is love and love has no beginning or end. It just exists. We don't know why. It is simply our inheritance. Today is a gift. That's why we call it the present. Beginnings and endings were created by humans. They do not exist in the mind of God. Sometimes you will know this when you experience the Holy Instant, when time stands still, when you get caught in the flow and when you come back to time's awareness you say, "My golly where has the time gone!?" The answer is that it didn't go anywhere, we simply have returned to our self consciousness and will start arbitrarily marking time again.

Wow!

Yeah Wow! How are things in Brockport?

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