government supports with arms and money.Shonen manga are notorious for spunky teenage protagonists with superpowers. “These are people whose family members were victims.” Such are the human costs of the war on drugs that the U.S. “The main purpose of the caravan is to show a human face,” explained Laura Carlsen, director of the Center for International Policy’s Americas Program in Mexico, who joined the caravan on its last leg through the East Coast. Five other young women were traveling with her. Guadalupe Coral Pérez Triana vanished on July 24, 2011, somewhere on the road between Reynosa, Tamaulipas, and Monterrey, Nuevo León. There are thousands of people in Mexico like me who don’t know what happened to their loved ones.”Ī middle-aged woman from the violent state of Nuevo León in northern Mexico, Pérez had come to the United States with the Caravan for Peace with Justice and Dignity to tell her North American neighbors what had happened to her daughter-and to an estimated 80,000 other Mexicans who have been killed or disappeared during the country’s six-year-old war on drugs. “This is my daughter, Coral,” Pérez said in Spanish, her voice breaking. ON A BLAZING August day last summer, Rosa Pérez Triana faced a crowd of several hundred people in downtown Tucson and held up a color photo of a pretty young woman. I live and move and have my being in pursuit of this goal.” Sharma quotes Gandhi directly on the importance of highlighting the dimension of spirituality in any attempt to understand him: “What I want to achieve-what I have been striving and pining to achieve these 30 years-is self-realization, to see God face to face, to attain moksha. Pointing out that most of the biographies of Gandhi really tell the story of Mohandas Karamchand (the name he was given by his family), not Mahatma (a title that means “great soul” and is given to saints in India), Sharma’s book Gandhi: A Spiritual Biography sets out to give an account of the Mahatma. And while the heart of Gandhi’s faith was Hindu, as King’s was Baptist, the influences were remarkably diverse. As King said in 1958 of the civil rights movement, “Christ furnished the spirit and motivation while Gandhi furnished the method.”īut what of Gandhi’s influences? How did a skinny, middle-class, mid-caste Indian, so scared of public speaking as a student that a classmate had to read his speeches aloud for him, come to lead one of the great liberation struggles of the past century? A new book by Arvind Sharma, professor of comparative religions at McGill University, makes the case that the source of Gandhi’s strength was his spirituality. A remarkable number of King’s fundamental beliefs-the use of active nonviolence as a tool of social reform, the commitment to loving one’s enemies-can be traced back to the influence of Gandhi, which means that one of the defining figures of 20th century American Christianity was profoundly shaped by the example of an Indian Hindu. once said that the greatest Christian of the 20th century was not a member of the church. All of these represent legitimate threats, but perhaps the most likely scenario is that rampant voter suppression tactics impede enough voters in key battleground states to alter the presidential election outcome and which party controls Congress. His efforts deflect attention away from the ways that voter suppression efforts already underway pose a real danger, both to people seeking to exercise their hard-won right to vote and to the integrity of the electoral system itself.Īs many have pointed out, there are numerous ways internal or external forces could call the results of the election into question: declaring a state of emergency that disrupts voting, delaying Election Day, interference by hostile foreign powers, tampering with voting machines or databases, and more. The president has attempted to co-opt real concerns about the upcoming election, claiming without evidence that it might be “stolen” as a result of fraud tied to vote-by-mail. Now we’re seeing repeated attempts, through propaganda and other means, to further undermine the system and discredit in advance the results of the 2020 election. In recent years, attacks on the integrity of the electoral system-the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, disinformation campaigns, foreign interference, and more-have weakened its overall infrastructure and cast doubt upon its results. THE RIGHT TO VOTE, a foundation of our democracy and a fundamental attribute of citizenship, is under serious threat.
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