Everywhere we turn today, we are bombarded with images and reports of warfare and violence. Parents face the challenge of helping our children process these “current events” without leading them to become cynical or hopeless or excessively fearful. Moms are particularly sensitive to this dilemma, given our special role as nurturers and keepers of the peace at home and in our society.

For moms, nothing is more important than making the world safe for our children. In fact, Mother’s Day was originally founded in America as a holiday to unite women against war. In proposing a “Mother’s Day for Peace” more than a century ago, the American abolitionist and women’s rights advocate Julia Ward Howe hoped that this powerful, maternal desire for security could even shape world events.

Howe, whose other claim to fame was penning the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” had witnessed firsthand the horrors of the Civil War and the scourge of violence and disease that claimed the lives of soldiers on and off the battlefield. She also worked with widows and orphans of both Union and Confederate soldiers and later traveled to Europe where she encountered similar devastation from the Franco-Prussian War. In response, she called on mothers to work for peace and for the establishment of a special day in their honor.

More than a century later, our nation is again at war. Today, more than ever, it’s time we put the peace back in Mother’s Day.

But what is the best way to do this? Suffice it to say, most of us can’t take it upon ourselves to pack our bags for Sri Lanka or Sudan or any other number of conflict-torn regions badly in need of peace building. Nor can we step in and help broker peace negotiations among warring nations. But there are many, meaningful things any family can do on Mother’s Day, or any other day for that matter, to promote the ethics of peace that Howe envisioned:

Make room for peacemakers. Even though the news overwhelmingly focuses on conflict, it’s only part of the story. If we are to kindle any sense of hope in our children and grandchildren, we must take it upon ourselves to teach them about the people who are working to make the world safer and more secure for everyone. Why not use Mother’s Day to talk about what inspiring and courageous moms are doing around the globe? Moms such as Wangari Matthai, the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner whose Green Belt Movement motivated thousands of ordinary citizens in Kenya to, in her own words, “overcome fear and a sense of helplessness and to defend democratic rights.” Or Lisa Schirch, director of the nonprofit 3D Security Initiative, who uses development projects such as building schools and water wells to disarm conflicts from Lebanon to Ghana. You can find more stories about moms working for peace at www.rediscovermothersday.org.

Break down barriers. Most wars and violent conflict can be traced to clashing ideologies that have all but drowned out our common humanity. Introduce your children to different cultures; encourage them to question their assumptions; and break down perceptual barriers that could contribute to hate and misunderstanding.

Be a role model. There are many ways to model your values. Practice healthy ways to resolve everyday conflicts, like asking questions rather than rushing to judgment, and mending fences whenever possible. Make family donations to groups that work for peace. Explain to your child on election day why you’re voting and what you’re voting for.

Consume ethically. Talk to your children about shopping decisions you make to support products from countries with good human rights and workers’ rights records. And work with your family to use energy more wisely, because reducing our dependence on oil makes us all more secure.

War enters our homes on a daily basis through the TV, over the Internet and in conversation at the dinner table. As parents and grandparents, we owe it to our kids to make sure peace gets an equal hearing. Mother’s Day is the perfect chance to begin that conversation, to hold a space in our homes and in our society for something better.

How do we talk to our children about war? The answer is simple: Talk to them about peace.

Susie Tompkins Buell is a San Francisco businesswoman, activist, mother and grandmother, and a sponsor of www.rediscovermothersday.org. Naila Bolus is executive director of Ploughshares Fund and the mother of three young daughters.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/2007/05/13/EDGONP1IL71.DTL

This article appeared on page E – 5 of the San Francisco Chronicle

In this scenario, warming would begin to feed upon itself and outgrow the human power to slow it, leading to shifts in temperature, sea level, ocean currents, rainfall patterns, and ecology with the potential to disrupt coastal cities, agriculture, and ecosystems.Minimizing this risk calls for massive improvements in energy efficiency, decreases in consumption, and a rapid shift to clean energy. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that all of this is possible if we were to get serious about public investment and incentives for a life-serving energy system, but ten years is a short window for going about such large scale change, especially in a nation that has not yet gathered itself to rise to the challenge.

A few hours and a little research will provide all of the information you need to come to your own conclusion about the above assessment. But then what? If you find yourself agreeing that we have ten years to address a problem of human survival and that addressing it will require very deep changes in much that we take for granted, how do you find the response that is right for you, whoever you are? What’s a fifth grade teacher to do? Or a grandmother? An artist? A carpenter? A student?

The answer to this question doesn’t strike most people instantly or with total clarity. Grave threat though it is, climate change isn’t at all like a burning building or a raging flood. It’s not the sort of crisis that automatically pulls our best selves forward. All our highest capacities are there to draw upon – our creativity, our intellect, our perseverance, our selflessness and courage – but most of us seem to need to hold the reality of global warming in our awareness for some time before ours hearts and souls cipher out a response.

But here is a dangerous irony. While we may need to sit with the reality of climate change for a while before we can see what it is that we are able to offer in response, most minds don’t react to our global crisis with calm and deliberate introspection.

Some minds know for certain that calls for immediate and dramatic action are flat out wrong and typical alarmist environmentalism.

Some minds leap with fear for beloved people and places and can’t see or think very well beyond that fear.

Some minds quickly find distraction, in daily obligations or solvable problems.

And some minds decide that’s its too late anyway because people will never change and one person can’t make a difference.

Climate change presents us with all sorts of challenges, but the very first one, the one that must be met before any of the others can even be engaged, is the challenge of opening ourselves to the reality of climate change’s existence, scale, and immediacy.

There’s no one right way to open oneself to something this big, of course. We each have to find our own way, on our own terms. But we can experiment, and we can share our discoveries with one another.

In that spirit I offer a few ideas:

Talking with others helps. Climate change is everyone’s problem so there’s no point in trying to face it alone.

Believing in your own sense of reality helps too. As you begin to learn about climate change, the fact that the newspaper headline says 150 New Coal Plants on The Drawing Board, rather than Congress Declares State of Emergency, makes it easy to doubt yourself and your perspective. Don’t do this. Instead seek out others who have examined the data, talk it over with them, and consider the possibility that you’re the sane one and it is the society that is lost in illusion.

Envisioning what you really want pulls your mind forward, and helps you see the other side of climate change, the push towards what you long for anyway. There is a lot to look forward to in a post-fossil fuel world. I’m more than ready for a super-efficient train system and a flowering of my local economy. I’m ready for less junk-mail and no more planned obsolescence of everything from toasters to telephones. I’m ready for more quality and less quantity and more time with my family. I’m ready for the last day of the last war over oil.

Whatever you see when you envision your world once it’s moved beyond fossil fuels, treasure that vision, allow it to reveal itself to you more and more clearly. One reward for realizing how much you dislike the current drift towards disaster is discovering just how much you want something else. Whatever this something else is, you can learn to describe it with passion and vividness, and in doing so, you can chip away at the unconscious belief in our culture that we are already living in the best possible way, and that any accommodation to climate change would therefore be sacrifice.

This is not a matter of imagination only, of course. Once you really take in the reality of a ten-year window to address climate change, without question, you will begin to try new things. Who knows what: biking to work, running for Congress, organizing your community, planting your first vegetable garden.

Whatever it is, in choosing it, you will be opening yourself to the messages of an astonishingly beautiful planet and trying to figure out how to live according to its elegant and non-negotiable terms.

And the human spirit can bear a lot of fear and worry and grief when it is held up by a purpose as large and life-affirming as that one.

Elizabeth R. Sawin is the Director of Sustainability Institute’s Our Climate Ourselves program and is a writer, teacher, and systems analyst who lives with her family as part of an intentional community and organic farm in Hartland, Vermont. For more of her writing visit www.ourclimateourselves.org

In a 210-page report released Monday, Human Rights Watch said Wal-Mart uses an arsenal of sophisticated tactics — some of which it says are illegal — aimed at thwarting union organization and creating a climate of fear for its 1.3 million U.S. workers.

The Human Rights Watch study was based on interviews with 41 current and former Wal-Mart workers and managers, as well as labor lawyers and union organizers, between 2004 and early 2007. The organization also said it analyzed cases against Wal-Mart charging the company with violating U.S. labor and employment laws.

While Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is not alone in engaging in illegal anti-union tactics, the retailer “stands out for the extreme sophistication and aggressiveness of its anti-union strategies,” said Carol Pier, senior researcher on labor rights and trade for Human Rights Watch and author of the report.

Pier noted that while Human Rights Watch had been following reports on Wal-Mart’s anti-union efforts, what was missing from the debate was a “human rights analysis” and a roadmap to its systematic approach. With Wal-Mart being the largest private employer in the States, Pier noted that “the company’s treatment of its workers has significant impact in the U.S. and beyond.” She emphasized that the report was not funded by labor unions and the group is not an anti-Wal-Mart organization.

But Wal-Mart was quick to dismiss the study’s allegations as untrue and unsubstantiated.

“Wal-Mart provides an environment of open communications and gives our associates every opportunity to express their ideas, comments and concerns,” said David Tovar, a spokesman at Wal-Mart, in a statement. “It is because of our efforts to foster such an environment that our associates have repeatedly rejected unionization attempts.”

He continued, “…Wal-Mart respects our associates’ right to a free and fair unionization vote through a private, government-supervised process and we remain committed to compliance with U.S. laws regarding workers’ rights to unionize.”

Tovar added that less than 5 percent of all retail workers in the States are part of a union, so the current trend is not unique to Wal-Mart.

In a statement, Justin Hakes, legal information director at the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, a nonprofit group, called the study “the latest tactic in the aggressive efforts by union officials to force union affiliation on Wal-Mart’s workforce.”

Human Rights Watch is using the report to call on Congress to pass the Employee Free Choice Act. The EFCA — which passed the U.S. House of Representatives in March and is now under consideration in the Senate — increases penalties for labor law violations. The legislation also would restore what the group calls a “democratic” union selection process by requiring employers to recognize a union if a majority of workers sign cards showing their support. Currently, employers can force union elections and then intimidate workers with their aggressive anti-union message during the campaign period, Human Rights Watch said.

Unions have been trying to organize Wal-Mart for years, but after failing in several attempts to represent workers at individual Wal-Mart stores, union-backed groups like WakeUpWal-Mart.com have emerged to embrace a broader strategy that goes beyond its employees and aims to get the retailer to improve its wages, health care benefits, environmental record and to be a better neighbor.

According to Human Rights Watch, Wal-Mart uses training sessions, videos and other means to indoctrinate its employees on the negatives of joining a union, tactics that the group says starts on the day employees start their job. The company also gives explicit instructions to managers on how to prevent union formation, according to the report. The report said that Wal-Mart generally responds within a few days to workers organizing by dispatching from headquarters members of its Labor Relations Team.

According to Pier, Wal-Mart engages in illegal tactics such as restricting the dissemination of pro-union views and firing workers for their union activity, in extreme cases. According to former workers and managers at one store, Wal-Mart ordered the repositioning of surveillance cameras to monitor union supporters, the report said.

This Wednesday the invasion had grown to some 3,000 families, a total of 12,000 people, camping in shelters made of bamboo and black plastic sheeting.

The MTST and other organisations demanding housing, like the National Union for Popular Housing (UNMP) and the Downtown (Sao Paulo) Homeless People’s Movement, stepped up their mass protests this month, holding street marches and rallies in front of government buildings and occupying abandoned old buildings.

The MTST’s activities have expanded the traditional “Red April”, when social movements take action to commemorate International Day of Peasant Struggle on Apr. 17 and the national Indigenous People’s Day on Apr. 19.

This year these actions extended over several weeks, and in the case of the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) are still continuing.

“Red April” gets its name from the red flags that are the hallmark of MST demonstrators and carried prominently in their marches.

“The biggest social movement in Brazil today is the Landless Movement (MST)” which is campaigning to accelerate the agrarian reform. It joins forces with other movements with common aims, such as protesting social injustice, Breno Bringel, a political scientist and visiting researcher at Campinas University, told IPS.

Apart from the landless MST and the homeless MTST, who are “revitalising urban protest,” organisations of indigenous peoples, garbage pickers, and people affected by dams are also active, he noted. There are also organisations fighting for education or health; youth culture groups, such as hip hop; and the Afro-Brazilian movement, Bringel said.

Social movements emerged as political actors in Brazil during the 1970s, when they “organised opposition to the military regime,” developing new forms of grassroots organisation. In the 1980s they acquired new dimensions, going on to claim social rights like the rights of women, the environment, and sexual and ethnic minorities, he said.

But in the 1990s, with the advance of free-market policies, “the influence of organised social movements declined. They lost ground to non-governmental organisations, as public criticism of the system ebbed away,” Bringel said.

“The demonstrations this April are seeking to break the state-market-service sector tripod, while rejecting policies based on welfare or charity,” and they signal a return to the fundamental demand for social transformation, said Bringel, who holds a doctorate in the theory of social movements.

The growing strength of social movements, which played an important role in the Brazilian elections “by cementing the forces of the left,” contrasts with the crisis in trade unionism which has been exacerbated by the rise in unemployment, the growth of the informal labour market, and the “flexibilisation and increased precariousness of labour relations,” he said.

The fundamental contradiction between capital and labour has been displaced outside the factory, with “workers being excluded or rejected by the formal employment structures,” said the academic.

“If they do not adapt, trade unions with a vertical structure will only plunge deeper into crisis, because of their disconnection from the new realities,” he predicted.

The high level of social unrest this April is also a response to political circumstances in Brazil, as President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who began his second four-year term on Jan. 1, has belatedly only just completed the appointment of his ministerial cabinet, historian Dulce Pandolfi, head of the Brazilian Institute of Social and Economic Analysis (IBASE), told IPS.

The trend is for social movements to take more of a leadership role, in Brazil as well as in other countries, because of their “broader and more horizontal action,” which makes them capable of responding to more tenuous demands, such as those of the informal economy and of segments of the population lacking many effective rights, like people living in “favelas” (shantytowns), Pandolfi said.

Whereas trade unions are very much tied to negotiating salary issues for those who have jobs, the social movements have “novel” ways of organising in networks that are horizontal and flexible, equipping them for confronting “more complex relations between social classes,” she said.

That is the sort of outcome achieved by, for example, an initiative from Rio de Janeiro for the “right to the city,” which mobilises homeless people, favela dwellers and other sectors, such as people concerned about public security, or about recreational and cultural areas, to participate, she said.

The MST, which has multiplied the number of its occupations of land considered unproductive, and has even invaded land belonging to the army, has recently abandoned its previous willingness to negotiate with the Lula administration. For years, it considered Lula an ally, but impatience with the slow pace of agrarian reform has led to an apparently confrontational attitude now.

“The dozens of demonstrations this April do not indicate a growth of the grassroots movements, but rather greater indignation among activists” in response to the slow implementation of the ongoing agrarian reform, Joao Pedro Stédile, one of the national coordinators of the MST, told IPS.

“The MST’s struggles provide a kind of education for the masses, by showing disorganised and apolitical sectors that struggle is the only way to improve people’s lives,” Stédile said.

Indeed, the acronym of the MTST and its way of operating, by occupying buildings but then pulling out if the courts order them to do so, are very similar to those of its rural counterpart. (FIN/2007)