What does it take to make you happy?

Each of us may have a different answer to that question; and your answer says a lot about you and who you are. And when WAS the last time you were happy? Today we take a closer look at “The Happiness Factor” and how that works or doesn’t work…

It’s all a matter of how you look at it. The Thich Nhat Hanh article in today’s Support Page adds an additional twist on “The Happiness Factor.” We also have a video clip from the Chris McDermott sanctuary concert in 2019 and as this is Black History Month we have several articles regarding the civil rights movement and its continuing challenges with conversations around “cancel culture” and the inclusion of all Americans in the solution. (It’s interesting to note that both articles feature white activists allying with their Black brothers and sisters.)

Have a great week-end everyone and we hope you can join us for the UUHoulton weekly service.

The recorded service will be available to view at 10AM on Sunday morning and archived so it can be watched later at your convenience. I will send out the service link to YouTube later today and the link will be live on Sunday morning at 9:45AM (in case you want to come to the service early). If you subscribe to our YouTube channel you can locate it automatically on your YouTube home page under subscriptions. The 10AM service will be followed by a Zoom coffee hour and check-in at 11AM for those who are interested in discussing the service or just want to check in. I’ll send the Zoom links out today. Practice patience and kindness.

In Ministry,DaveVirtual Offering Plate

If you would like to send in your pledge or donation (we still have to pay the bills) simply drop an envelope in the mail. The address is listed below.

Thank you for your support!

UU Church of Houlton

61 Military Street

Houlton, ME 04730

article written by Robert D. McFadden,

June 3, 2013

Rev. Will Campbell

The Rev. Will D. Campbell, a renegade preacher and author who joined the civil rights struggle in the 1950s, quit organized religion and fought injustice with nonviolent protests and a storyteller’s arsenal of autobiographical tales and fictional histories, died on Monday night in Nashville. (2013) He was 88.Mr. Campbell, one of the few white clerics with an extensive field record as a civil rights activist, wrote a score of books that explored the human costs of racism and the contradictions of Christian life in the segregated South, notably in a memoir, “Brother to a Dragonfly” (1977), a National Book Award finalist.

A knot of contradictions himself, he was a civil rights advocate who drank whiskey with Klansmen, a writer who layered fact and fiction, and a preacher without a church who presided at weddings, baptisms and funerals in homes, hospitals and graveyards for a flock of like-minded rebels that included Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Dick Gregory, Jules Feiffer and Studs Terkel.

Most of his scattered “congregation,” however, were poor whites and blacks, plain people alienated from mainstream Christianity and wary of institutions, churches and governments that stood for progress but that in their view achieved little. He once conducted a funeral for a ghost town, Golden Pond, Ky., where the residents had been removed in the late 1960s to make way for a Tennessee Valley Authority project.

After a fashion, he was also an eccentric voice of wisdom in the funny papers — the model for the Rev. Will B. Dunn, the bombastic preacher with the broad-brimmed clerical hat in “Kudzu,” Doug Marlette’s syndicated comic strip about rural Southerners.

Followers and friends called Mr. Campbell hilarious, profound, inspiring and apocalyptic, a guitar-picking, down-home country boy who made moonshine and stomped around his Tennessee cabin in cowboy boots and denim uttering streams of sacred and profane commentary that found their way into books, articles, lectures and sermons.

“Brother Will, as he was called by so many of us who knew him, made his own indelible mark as a minister and social activist in service to marginalized people of every race, creed and calling,” former President Jimmy Carter said.

The son of Mississippi cotton farmers, Mr. Campbell grew up in a backwater of segregated schools, churches and cracker-barrel country stores where men chewed tobacco and spat bigotry. He was ordained a Baptist minister at 17 and attended three colleges and Yale Divinity School before embarking on an unsatisfying life as a small-town pastor and then chaplain at the University of Mississippi. He left Ole Miss amid death threats over his integrationist views.

As a race-relations troubleshooter for the National Council of Churches from 1956 to 1963, he joined the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, James Farmer, Bayard Rustin, John Lewis and other civil rights luminaries in historic confrontations across the South.

Mr. Campbell was the only white person invited by Dr. King to the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta in 1957. Months later, Mr. Campbell helped escort black students through angry crowds in an attempt to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Ark. (The students were turned away by the National Guard, but succeeded three weeks later with an escort of federal troops.)

In 1961, he counseled and accompanied Freedom Riders of the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee who integrated interstate bus travel at the cost of beatings by white mobs in Anniston, Birmingham and Montgomery, Ala.

And in 1963, he joined Dr. King’s campaign of boycotts, sit-ins and marches in Birmingham, one of America’s most segregated cities. In scenes that stunned the nation, protesters were met with snarling police dogs and high-pressure water hoses.

“If it hits you right, the pressure from a fire hose can break your back,” Mr. Campbell said years later. “I remember seeing adults and children hit and rolling along the sidewalk like pebbles at high tide.”

Later in the 1960s, after appeals to Christian churches in the South to end segregation in their own ranks and actively fight discrimination, Mr. Campbell abandoned organized religion, though not his faith. He accused Southern Protestant churches in particular of standing silent in the face of bigotry.

Widening his horizons in the 1960s, he protested American involvement in the Vietnam War, helped draft resisters find sanctuaries in Canada, spoke against capital punishment and turned against politics, government and institutions in general for failing to provide solutions to the nation’s social problems.

His belief that Christ died for bigots as well as devout people prompted his contacts with the Ku Klux Klan, and he visited James Earl Ray in prison after the 1968 assassination of Mr. Campbell’s friend Dr. King. He was widely criticized for both actions.

In later years, Mr. Campbell campaigned for equal rights for women, gays and lesbians, and turned increasingly to writing. “Brother to a Dragonfly” was both an elegy to his brother, Joe, who died after years of alcoholism and drug addiction, and a memoir of the civil rights era and its bombings, murders and terrifying calls in the night.

“Will D. Campbell is a brave man who doesn’t like to talk about it,” John Leonard wrote in a review of the book for The New York Times, “one of a handful of white Southerners — like P. D. East, Ralph McGill, James Silver, Charles Morgan and Claude Sitton, all of whom appear in these pages — who Mr. Campbell says stood with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Fanny Lou Hamer and John Lewis in the worst of times.”

Will Davis Campbell was born on July 18, 1924, in Amite County, Miss., to Lee and Hancie Campbell. At 5, he survived a near-fatal case of pneumonia. He and his sister and two brothers attended local schools, and he went to Louisiana College before joining the Army in 1942. He was a combat medic in the South Pacific in World War II.

In 1946, he married Brenda Fisher. They had a son, Webb, and two daughters, Penny and Bonnie. They survive him, as do four grandchildren.

After earning a degree in English from Wake Forest College in 1950 and a year at Tulane University, Mr. Campbell graduated from Yale Divinity School in 1952. His two years at a small Baptist church in Taylor, La., dissuaded him from a pastoral career; two more as a chaplain at Ole Miss coincided with his growing opposition to segregation.

After his years in the civil rights movement, he directed the Committee of Southern Churchmen and for decades published Katallagete, its quarterly journal of politics and social change, whose title referred to a biblical passage on reconciliation. He wrote books at his farm near Mount Juliet and traveled widely, lecturing and ministering to followers who shared his distrust of institutions.

His books included critiques of modern Christianity, “Race and the Renewal of the Church” (1962) and “Up to Our Steeples in Politics” (1970); spiritual-historical novels, “The Glad River” (1982) and “Cecelia’s Sin” (1983); memoirs, “Forty Acres and a Goat” (1986) and “Crashing the Idols: The Vocation of Will D. Campbell” (2010, with Richard C. Goode); and various biographies, histories and children’s books.

In 2000, Mr. Campbell received the National Endowment for the Humanities medal from President Bill Clinton and was profiled in a PBS documentary, “God’s Will,” narrated by Ossie Davis.

Chris Hedges: Cancel Culture, Where Liberalism Goes to Die

By Chris Hedges

February 15, 2021

Elites and their courtiers who trumpet their moral superiority by damning and silencing those who do not linguistically conform to politically correct speech are the new Jacobins.

The Rev. Will Campbell was forced out of his position as director of religious life at the University of Mississippi in 1956 because of his calls for integration. He escorted Black children through a hostile mob in 1957 to integrate Little Rock’s Central High School. He was the only white person that was invited to be part of the group that founded Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He helped integrate Nashville’s lunch counters and organize the Freedom Rides.

But Campbell was also, despite a slew of death threats he received from white segregationists, an unofficial chaplain to the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. He denounced and publicly fought the Klan’s racism, acts of terror and violence and marched with Black civil rights protestors in his native Mississippi, but he steadfastly refused to “cancel” white racists out of his life. He refused to demonize them as less than human. He insisted that this form of racism, while evil, was not as insidious as a capitalist system that perpetuated the economic misery and instability that pushed whites into the ranks of violent, racist organizations.

“During the civil rights movement, when we were developing strategies, someone usually said, ‘Call Will Campbell. Check with Will,’” Rep. John Lewis wrote in the introduction to the new edition of Campbell’s memoir “Brother to a Dragonfly,” one of the most important books I read as a seminarian. “Will knew that the tragedy of Southern history had fallen on our opponents as well as our allies … on George Wallace and Bull Connor as well as Rosa Parks and Fred Shuttlesworth. He saw that it had created the Ku Klux Klan as well as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

That insight led Will to see racial healing and equity, pursued through courage, love, and faith as the path to spiritual liberation for all.

”Jimmy Carter wrote of Campbell that he “tore down the walls that separated white and black Southerners.” And because the Black Panther organizer Fred Hampton was doing the same thing in Chicago, the FBI — which, along with the CIA, is the de facto ally of the liberal elites in their war against Trump and his supporters — assassinated him.

When the town Campbell lived in decided the Klan should not be permitted to have a float in the Fourth of July parade Campbell did not object, as long as the gas and electric company was also barred. It was not only white racists that inflicted suffering on the innocent and the vulnerable, but institutions that place the sanctity of profit before human life.

“People can’t pay their gas and electric bills, the heat gets turned off and they freeze and sometimes die, especially if they are elderly,” he said. “This, too, is an act of terrorism.”

“Theirs you could see and deal with, and if they broke the law, you could punish them,” he said of the Klan. “But the larger culture that was, and still is, racist to the core is much more difficult to deal with and has a more sinister influence.”

Campbell would have reminded us that the demonization of the Trump supporters who stormed the capital is a terrible mistake. He would have reminded us that racial injustice will only be solved with economic justice. He would have called on us to reach out to those who do not think like us, do not speak like us, are ridiculed by polite society, but who suffer the same economic marginalization. He knew that the disparities of wealth, loss of status and hope for the future, coupled with prolonged social dislocation, generated the poisoned solidarity that give rise to groups such as the Klan or the Proud Boys.

We cannot heal wounds we refuse to acknowledge.

The Washington Post, which analyzed the public records of 125 defendants charged with taking part in the storming of the Capital on January 6, found that “nearly 60 percent of the people facing charges related to the Capitol riot showed signs of prior money troubles, including bankruptcies, notices of eviction or foreclosure, bad debts, or unpaid taxes over the past two decades.”

“The group’s bankruptcy rate — 18 percent — was nearly twice as high as that of the American public,” the Post found. “A quarter of them had been sued for money owed to a creditor. And 1 in 5 of them faced losing their home at one point, according to court filings.”

“A California man filed for bankruptcy one week before allegedly joining the attack, according to public records,” the paper reported. “A Texas man was charged with entering the Capitol one month after his company was slapped with a nearly $2,000 state tax lien. Several young people charged in the attack came from families with histories of financial duress.

”We must acknowledge the tragedy of these lives, while at the same time condemning racism, hate and the lust for violence. We must grasp that our most perfidious enemy is not someone who is politically incorrect, even racist, but the corporations and a failed political and judicial system that callously sacrifices people, as well as the planet, on the altar of profit.

Like Campbell, much of my own family comes from the rural working class, many espousing prejudices my father, a Presbyterian minister, regularly condemned from the pulpit. Through a combination of luck and scholarships to elite schools, I got out. They never did. My grandfather, intellectually gifted, was forced to drop out of high school his senior year when his sister’s husband died. He had to work the farm to feed her children. If you are poor in America, you rarely get more than one chance. And many do not get one. He lost his.

The towns in Maine where my relatives come from have been devastated by the closures of mills and factories. There is little meaningful work. There is a smoldering anger caused by legitimate feelings of betrayal and entrapment. They live, like most working class Americans, lives of quiet desperation. This anger is often expressed in negative and destructive ways. But I have no right to dismiss them as irredeemable.

To understand is not to condone. But if the ruling elites, and their courtiers masquerading as journalists, continue to gleefully erase these people from the media landscape, to attack them as less than human, or as Hillary Clinton called them “deplorables,” while at the same time refusing to address the grotesque social inequality that has left them vulnerable and afraid, it will fuel ever greater levels of extremism and ever greater levels of state repression and censorship.

The cancel culture, a witch hunt by self-appointed moral arbiters of speech, has become the boutique activism of a liberal class that lacks the courage and the organizational skills to challenge the actual centers of power — the military-industrial complex, lethal militarized police, the prison system, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, the intelligence agencies that make us the most spied upon, watched, photographed and monitored population in human history, the fossil fuel industry, and a political and economic system captured by oligarchic power.It is much easier to turn from these overwhelming battles to take down hapless figures who make verbal gaffes, those who fail to speak in the approved language or embrace the approved attitudes of the liberal elites. These purity tests have reached absurd and self-defeating levels, including the inquisitional bloodlust by 150 staff members of The New York Times demanding that management, which had already investigated and dealt with what at most was poor judgment made by the veteran reporter Don McNeil when he repeated a racist slur in a discussion about race, force him out of the paper, which management reluctantly did.

The cancel culture was pioneered by the red baiting of the capitalist elites and their shock troops in agencies such as the FBI to break, often through violence, radical movements and labor unions. Tens of thousands of people, in the name of anti- communism, were cancelled out of the culture.

The well-financed Israel lobby is a master of the cancel culture, shutting down critics of the Israeli apartheid state and those of us who support the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement as anti- Semites.

The cancel culture fueled the persecution of Julian Assange, the censorship of WikiLeaks and the Silicon Valley algorithms that steer readers away from content, including my content, critical of imperial and corporate power.

In the end, this bullying will be used by social media platforms, which are integrated into the state security and surveillance organs, not to promote, as its supporters argue, civility, but ruthlessly silence dissidents, intellectuals, artists and independent journalism. Once you control what people say you control what they think.

This cancel culture is embraced by corporate media platforms where, as Glenn Greenwald writes, “teams of journalists at three of the most influential corporate media outlets — CNN’s ‘media reporters’ (Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy), NBC’s ‘disinformation space unit’ (Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny), and the tech reporters of The New York Times (Mike Isaac, Kevin Roose, Sheera Frenkel) — devote the bulk of their ‘journalism’ to searching for online spaces where they believe speech and conduct rules are being violated, flagging them, and then pleading that punitive action be taken (banning, censorship, content regulation, after-school detention).”

Corporations know these moral purity tests are, for us, self-defeating. They know that by making the cancel culture legitimate — and for this reason I opposed locking Donald Trump out of his Twitter and other social media accounts — they can employ it to silence those who attack and expose the structures of corporate power and imperial crimes. The campaigns of moral absolutism widen the divides between liberals and the white working class, divisions that are crucial to maintaining the power of the corporate elites. The cancel culture is the fodder for the riveting and entertaining culture wars. It turns anti-politics into politics. Most importantly, the cancel culture deflects attention from the far more egregious institutionalized abuses of power. It is this smug, self- righteousness crusade that makes the liberal class so odious.

Doug Marlette, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist who created the comic strip “Kudzu,” which featured a Campbell-inspired character called Rev. Will B. Dunn, brought Campbell to speak at Harvard when I was there. Campbell’s message was met with a mixture of bewilderment and open hostility, which was fine with me as it meant the room swiftly emptied and the rest of the night Marlette, Campbell and I sat up late drinking whiskey and eating bologna sandwiches. Marlette was as iconoclastic and acerbically funny as Campbell. His cartoons, including one that showed Jesus on Good Friday carrying an electric chair instead of a cross and another that portrayed Jerry Falwell as the serpent in the Garden of Eden, provoked howls of protest from irate readers.

Campbell’s memoir, “Brother to a Dragonfly,” is not only beautifully written — Campbell was a close friend of Walker Percy, whose novels I also consumed — but filled with a humility and wisdom that liberals, who should spend less time in the self-referential rabbit hole of social media, have lost. He describes America, which routinely employs murder, torture, threats, blackmail and intimidation to crush all those who oppose it at home and abroad, as “a nation of Klansmen.” He refused to draw a moral line between the American empire, which many liberals defend, and the disenfranchised and angry whites that flock to racist groups such as the Klan or, years later, would support Trump. The architects of empire and the ruling capitalists who exploited workers, stymied democracy, orchestrated state repression, hoarded obscene levels of wealth and waged endless war were, he knew, the real enemy.

Campbell remembers watching a documentary by CBS called “The Ku Klux Klan: An Invisible Empire,” after which he was invited to address the audience. The film showed the murder of the three civil rights workers in Mississippi, the castration of Judge Aaron in Alabama, and the deaths of the four young girls in the Birmingham Sunday school bombing. When the film showed a Klan recruit pivoting right when the drill master shouted, “Left face,” the audience erupted in “cheers, jeers, catcalls and guffaws.” Campbell writes that he “felt a sickening in my stomach.

”Those viewing the film were a group convened by the National Student Association and included New Left radicals of the sixties, representing Students for a Democratic Society, the Port Huron group, young white men and women who had led protests at campuses across the country, burned down buildings, coined the term “pigs” to refer to police. Many were from affluent families.

“They were students in or recent graduates of rich and leading colleges and universities,” he writes of the audience. “They were mean and tough but somehow, I sensed that there wasn’t a radical in the bunch. For if they were radical how could they laugh at a poor ignorant farmer who didn’t know his left hand from his right? If they had been radical they would have been weeping, asking what had produced him. And if they had been radical they would not have been sitting, soaking up a film produced for their edification and enjoyment by the Establishment of the establishment — CBS.”

Campbell, who was asked to address the group following the film, said: “My name is Will Campbell. I’m a Baptist preacher. I’m a native of Mississippi. And I’m pro-Klansman because I’m pro-human being.”

Pandemonium erupted in the hall. He was shouted down as a “fascist pig” and a “Mississippi redneck.” Most walked out.

“Just four words uttered — ‘pro-Klansman Mississippi Baptist preacher,’ coupled with one visual image, white, had turned them into everything they thought the Ku Klux Klan to be — hostile, frustrated, angry, violent and irrational,” he writes. “And I was never able to explain to them that pro-Klansman is not the same as pro-Klan. That the former has to do with a person, the other with an ideology.”

“The same social forces which produced the Klan’s violence also produced the violence in Watts, Rochester and Harlem, Cleveland, Chicago, Houston, Nashville, Atlanta and Dayton, because they are all pieces of the same garment — social isolation, deprivation, economic conditions, rejections, working mothers, poor schools, bad diets, and all the rest,” Campbell writes.

And these social forces produced the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests after the police murder of George Floyd and the storming of the Capitol by an enraged mob. Campbell never asked any of the members of the Klan he knew to leave the organization for the same reason he never asked liberals to leave “the respectable and fashionable organizations or institutions of which they were a part and party, all of which, I was learning, were more truly racist than their Klan.”

This radical love was the core of Dr. Martin Luther King’s message. This love informed King’s steadfast nonviolence. It led him to denounce the Vietnam War and condemn the US government as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” And it saw him assassinated in Memphis when he was supporting a strike by sanitation workers for economic justice.

Campbell lived by his oft-quoted creed, “If you’re gonna love one, you’ve got to love ‘em all.” Like King, he believed in the redemptive and transformative power of forgiveness. The ruling elites and the courtiers who trumpet their moral superiority by damning and silencing those who do not linguistically conform to politically correct speech are the new Jacobins. They wallow in a sanctimonious arrogance, one made possible by their privilege, which masks their subservience to corporate power and their amorality. They do not battle social and economic injustice. They silence, with the enthusiastic assistance of the digital platforms in Silicon Valley, those who are crushed and deformed by systems of oppression and those who lack their finely developed politesse and deference to linguistic fashion. They are the useful idiots of corporate power and the emerging police state. Cancel culture is not the road to reform. It is the road to tyranny.

page7image65189904Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of the Emmy Award-nominated RT America show On Contact.

To Practice Mindfulness Is to Return to Life

BY THICH NHAT HANH| FEBRUARY 1, 2021

To practice mindfulness is to become alive. Life is so precious, yet in our daily lives we are carried away by our forgetfulness, anger and worries. We are often lost in the past, unable to touch life in the present moment. When we are truly alive, everything we touch or do is a miracle. To practice mindfulness is to return to life in the present moment.

Practicing mindfulness, we see the suffering that is caused by the destruction of life everywhere, and we vow to cultivate compassion and use it as a source of energy to protect the lives of people, animals, plants and minerals. When we see suffering, compassion is born in us. It reflects the Buddha’s first sermon, that we have to be in touch with suffering.

It can be said that there are two kinds of suffering. Perhaps ninety-five percent of the suffering we endure every day is not at all necessary. Because of our lack of insight, we cause suffering to ourselves and others, including our beloved ones. But the remaining five percent is born out of contact with the real suffering around us and inside of us. To be aware of this kind of suffering brings about compassion, the energy necessary to transform ourselves and help relieve the suffering of the world.

Compassion is not blind energy. With it, we practice in order to learn ways to protect the lives of people, animals, plants, and minerals.

Do not lose awareness of the suffering that is going on in the world. Nourish that kind of awareness by whatever means possible: images, direct contact, visits, and so on. We have to do that in order to keep both the awareness of the suffering and compassion alive in us. But experiencing too much suffering is not good. Any medicine must be taken in the proper dosage. We need to stay in touch with suffering only to the extent that we will not forget. Then compassion will flow within us and be a source of energy that we can transform into action.

People often use their anger at social injustice as a basis for action, but that is unwise. When you are angry you are not lucid, and you can do many harmful things. According to Buddhism, the only source of energy that can be useful is compassion, because it is safe. When you have compassion, your energy is born from insight. It is not blind energy. With compassion, we practice in order to learn ways to protect the lives of people, animals, plants, and minerals. Just feeling compassion is not enough. If we do not know how to help, we can do damage. That is why love must go together with understanding.

Thich Nhat Hanh

ABOUT THICH NHAT HANH

Thich Nhat Hanh is a renowned Zen Master and poet, the founder of the Engaged Buddhist movement, and the founder of nine monastic communities, including Plum Village Monastery in France. He’s also the author of At Home in the World, The Other Shore, and more than a hundred other books that have sold millions of copies worldwide. Thich Nhat Hanh currently lives in Vietnam.

Joys & Concerns

When one of us is blessed we are all blessed.

When one of us experiences sorrow we all feel the pain.

Bantu Steve Biko

To mark Black History Month, music legend Peter Gabriel has teamed up with the non-profit Playing For Change and artists around the world to re-record his soaring 1980 anthem “Biko,” inspired by the savage murder of anti-apartheid icon Steve Biko by South African police while in custody. A gifted medical student and charismatic organizer, Bantu Steve Biko was arguably the most famous martyr of the struggle against South African apartheid. Filling the void left by the ban on the African National Congress and imprisonment of Nelson Mandela and other leaders, Biko launched the South African Students Organization in 1969, and a few years later the Black People’s Convention. His “black consciousness movement” sought “the cultural and political revival of an oppressed people” and stressed the need for self-reliance under the rubric, “Black man, you are on your own.” His goal: “The realization by the Black man of the need to rally together with his brothers around the cause of their oppression – the blackness of their skin – and (to) rid themselves of the shackles that bind them.

”Banned from politics in 1973 by the Afrikaner government, he was arrested and detained multiple times before his arrest in August 1977 for subversion. Held in Port Elizabeth, he was brutally beaten and tortured, naked and shackled, for weeks; he was finally thrown into the back of a van for a 700-mile trip to a police hospital in Pretoria, where he died the next day. With the help of complicit medical officials, police claimed he died from a hunger strike; he was later found to have extensive traumatic brain injuries, and to have died of a brain hemorrhage. His funeral service, led by Bishop Desmond Tutu, drew over 20,000 people who joined together to chant “Amandla! Ngawethu!” (Power is ours!). News of his murder led to international protests and a U.N-imposed arms embargo. No police were ever charged. Two decades later, five officers confessed to killing him; they sought amnesty from South Africa’s post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but were denied.

Just 30 when he died, Biko remains an emblematic figure to many South Africans. “The fight to end apartheid had claimed many thousands of lives before his, and many thousands more would be killed after Biko’s murder,” wrote a white Time editor who grew up in the still-apartheid country. “But no death shook my world, and the country all around me, more than Steve Biko’s. He lives on in the best achievements of the South Africa he helped birth, and in the best instincts of those who continue to challenge its flaws.” Now, 40 years after its original release, and as thriving racism, police brutality and white nationalism prove it “still holds true,” the Playing For Change team have released a remake of Gabriel’s Biko as its newest Song Around the World. Established in 2007 to “create positive change through music,” PFC presents songs in collaboration with international artists, from well-known to street performers.

Biko brings together 25 musicians from seven countries; they include the Cape Town Ensemble, the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe, Beninese singer and activist Angйlique Kidjo, Silkroad’s Yo-Yo Ma, Congo’s Jason Tamba, bassist Meshell Ndegeocello and the Taiko Project. The new Biko premiered in December as part of Peace Through Music: A Global Event for Social Justice, a virtual fundraising event in partnership with the United Nations

Population Fund featuring over 200 performers. The video began streaming Friday on RollingStone.com, and was released Saturday on the Playing For Change website. The $25,000 it hopes to raise will go to social justice groups including the Population Fund, Remember Slavery Program, Bob Marley Foundation, Sankofa, Silkroad and PFC. Although Biko’s apartheid government is gone, Gabriel says, “The racism around the world (it) represented has not.” Myanmar, India, Turkey, Israel, China, the BLM movement – they’ve all “made it very clear how far we still have to go.”

The man is dead

The man is dead

You can blow out a candle

But you can’t blow out a fire

Once the flames begin to catch

The wind will blow it higher

We’ll be playing the Playing For Change video of “Biko” during zoom coffee hour tomorrow.

Join us for the viewing..

Musings from MaryAlice;February 13, 2021

The good thing with this cold, is that often with the cold comes the sun. We had lots and lots of grey days, so even when I was enjoying the mild days, I missed the sun. Well the sun has come and with it the cold. This morning on my way out of town I took this shot.

It doesn’t do justice to the absolute clarity in the air and the brilliance of the reflection of the sun on the snow and on the mountain range.

The sun is streaming in my windows and I am enjoying the light, the ever lengthening light. I once again have a dining room table that needs to be cleared off all the papers from a week of zoom meetings and correspondence that needed attention. Laundry is in the washer and in the dryer. I am making more ice and flower disks. This cold weather is great for that. I have new candles to be put out today for the ice globes. I am reading several books, and have two audio books started! I have managed to once again regain some balance and comfort with the way my Covid guidance life. I am happy and grateful to be warm and cozy. I am glad for the light.

The UUChurch of Houlton is looking for a new treasurer in the new year. If you are interested in finding out more about the position please contact our good moderator, Leigh Griffith at griffith@mfx.net We’d like to express our thanks and appreciation to our outgoing co-treasurers Mary Blocher and Barbara Erickson for their excellent years of service to the organization.

THANK YOU!

Please continue to send in joys and concerns during the week to revdav@mfx.net and I will post them on the Support Page.

The Four Limitless Ones Prayer

May all sentient beings enjoy happiness and the root of happiness.

May we be free from suffering and the root of suffering.

May we not be separated from the great happiness devoid of suffering.

May we dwell in the great equanimity free from anger, aggression and exclusion

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