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Superstores Brand Us To Ensure
We Belong To Them
By George Monbiot
Published on Tuesday, July 31, 2001
in the Guardian of London
All successful conquests go through three stages. First the
defeated are dispossessed. Then they adopt the habits and the
outlook of the conquerors. Finally, they thank their new masters
for their dispossession. Corporate power has entered the third
stage of conquest. And everywhere we are told how grateful we
should be.
Last week Prince Charles, accompanied by the chief executive of
Sainsbury's, Sir Peter Davis, launched a "Rural Action Campaign"
to save small businesses in the countryside. He called upon the
members of Sir Peter's Business in the Community scheme to help
the farmers trying to learn new skills, such as making cheese or
running bed and breakfasts. He asked them to support his
campaign to save sub-post offices and village stores and to make
the village pub the focus of community life.
Mysterious Connections
That Link Us Together
By Azar Nafisi
Originally aired on NPR on July 18, 2005
 I believe in
empathy. I believe in the kind of empathy that is created
through imagination and through intimate, personal
relationships. I am a writer and a teacher, so much of my time
is spent interpreting stories and connecting to other
individuals. It is the urge to know more about ourselves and
others that creates empathy. Through imagination and our desire
for rapport, we transcend our limitations, freshen our eyes, and
are able to look at ourselves and the world through a new and
alternative lens.
Whenever I think of the word empathy, I think of a small boy
named Huckleberry Finn contemplating his friend and runaway
slave, Jim. Huck asks himself whether he should give Jim up or
not. Huck was told in Sunday school that people who let slaves
go free go to "everlasting fire." But then, Huck says he
imagines he and Jim in "the day and nighttime, sometimes
moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking
and singing and laughing." Huck remembers Jim and their
friendship and warmth. He imagines Jim not as a slave but as a
human being and he decides that, "alright, then, I'll go to
hell."
What Huck rejects is not religion but an
attitude of self-righteousness and inflexibility. I remember this particular
scene out of Huck Finn so vividly today, because I associate it with a
difficult time in my own life. In the early 1980s when I taught at the
University of Tehran, I, like many others, was expelled. I was very
surprised to discover that my staunchest allies were two students who were
very active at the University's powerful Muslim Students' Association. These
young men and I had engaged in very passionate and heated arguments. I had
fiercely opposed their ideological stances. But that didn't stop them from
defending me. When I ran into one of them after my expulsion, I thanked him
for his support. "We are not as rigid as you imagine us to be Professor
Nafisi," he responded. "Remember your own lectures on Huck Finn? Let's just
say, he is not the only one who can risk going to hell!"
This experience in my life reinforces my belief in the mysterious
connections that link individuals to each other despite their vast
differences. No amount of political correctness can make us empathize with a
child left orphaned in Darfur or a woman taken to a football stadium in
Kabul and shot to death because she is improperly dressed. Only curiosity
about the fate of others, the ability to put ourselves in their shoes, and
the will to enter their world through the magic of imagination, creates this
shock of recognition. Without this empathy there can be no genuine dialogue,
and we as individuals and nations will remain isolated and alien, segregated
and fragmented.
I believe that it is only through empathy, that the pain experienced by an
Algerian woman, a North Korean dissident, a Rwandan child or an Iraqi
prisoner, becomes real to me and not just passing news. And it is at times
like this when I ask myself, am I prepared -- like Huck Finn -- to give up
Sunday school heaven for the kind of hell that Huck chose?
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'Because we all share this planet
earth, we have to learn to live in harmony and peace with each
other and with nature. That is not just a dream, but a
necessity. We are dependent on
each other in so many ways that we
can no longer live in isolated communities and ignore what is
happening outside those communities.'
Meditative Calm of Yoga
Celebrate
Peace 
Every waking
moment of our lives, we swim in an ocean of advertising, all of
it telling us the same thing: consume, consume. And then consume
some more. The epidemic of over-consumption begins with the
things we put in our mouths. The United States is the fattest
nation on earth. Sixty-five per cent of American adults are
overweight; 30 per cent are obese. In the decade between 1991
and 2001, obesity figures almost doubled.
Many people
over the last year have said variations of "you only oppose
the war because your husband had to go" to me. This
statement implies that being made to suffer (my husband
ordered to Iraq, me home alone) caused me to believe that
the battle is not just. But the opposite is true. I hope
that this essay helps some people realize how much harder it
is to oppose the war and policies that started it when
personally involved.