Drug War: A Costly Failure
 
        With the “War on Poverty,” the word “war” was a metaphor. But with over 38,000 people killed just under the current Mexican administration alone, the War on Drugs is an actual war.
        On June 2 a report was issued by the Global Commission on Drug Policy, with past presidents of Mexico, Columbia and Brazil, past U.N. Secretary General Kofi Anan and past U.S. Secretary of State George Schultz, among others, saying: "The global drug war has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world.” They recommend instead a nonviolent health-care approach.
 

        Connections: Women who’ve had abortions may be more likely to engage in substance abuse. Conversely, intoxicated women are more likely to get pregnant in circumstances where abortion is considered. The massive incarceration of drug offenders destabilizes families and helps mire people in poverty, leading to more abortions. Finally, abortion defenders often propose drug-addicted pregnant women as one reason for abortion availability -- but wouldn’t making needed treatment available be a gentler solution, rather than adding unborn children to the punitive Drug War’s death toll?   
       

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Rest in Peace, Jack Kevorkian
 
        Jack Kevorkian died a natural death in a hospital on June 3, 2011, age 83. An activist for euthanasia, he participated in deaths for around 130 people with his own invented machine, pictured here. Most were not terminally ill. He explicitly understood this death-oriented “autonomy” as connected to that which was asserted to have been given to women in Roe v. Wade. In his book called Medicide: The Goodness of Planned Death, he dwells at length on how his involvement with executions led him into his euthanasia practice.
        His advocacy interfered with efforts to stop bigotry. Not Dead Yet president Diane Coleman commented: “As a disabled woman, I was disgusted and alarmed with how easily society accepted and even applauded Kevorkian’s ‘help’ in the suicides of disabled women.  Like many women, I’ve gone through periods of isolation and desperation – and was lucky to have friends see that I needed support. It seems that when a disabled woman says she wants to kill herself that no one . . . looks for reasons beyond the wheelchair the woman sits in as a valid reason for wanting to die.”
  

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Resource: Curriculum for Grade-schoolers
 
        Peg Burns and Greg Kerbawy merged their knowledge of nonviolence with their training in the Montessori Method. The curriculum, called Nonviolent Followers of Jesus: The Golden Thread is for children Pre-K through 6th grade. It primarily covers the first three centuries of Christian nonviolent activism in the context of the violence of the Roman Empire. Peg also consults for using the material with junior high and high school students, and Greg has more material applying “the Golden Thread” throughout history with various different religions. Contact: Pegburns00@gmail.com, phone 816.786.5619.
 

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A Worldwide War against Baby Girls
 
        Subscriber Elizabeth Palmberg alerts us that a program by that name and sub-titled “Sex-Selective Abortion Goes Global” will happen in Washington D.C. from 2-3 PM Eastern Time on June 14, 2011, and is supposed to be on the web in streaming video and as a video to be viewed afterward.
   
Quotation of the Week
A.J. Muste, (1885-1967),
Executive Secretary of Fellowship of Reconciliation (1940-1953)
(in All Saints, ed. Robert Ellsberg, Crossroad Publishing, 1997, p. 72)
 

     "The way of peace is a seamless garment that must cover the whole of life and must be applied in all its relationships."