Archive for Social justice & diversity

Gung hei fat choi! Happy New Year!

From the David Suzuki Foundation website:

Join two of Canada’s leading thinkers, Dr. David Suzuki and Stephen Lewis, in an intimate conversation on the links between the environment, health and Canadian values…

Feeling the Pulse of the Planet:
A conversation with David Suzuki and Stephen Lewis
Monday, 2007 February 12, 7:30 pm
Winter Garden Theatre, 189 Yonge Street

Tickets are $20, $15 for students, from ticketmaster.ca (416-872-5555) or at the theatre box office (Mon – Sat, 11 am – 5 pm).  Sold out.

Merlin Andrew, who may be our most senior supporter at 92 years of age, invites others to join her at the following event:

Protest trade in dog and cat fur
Tuesday, 2007 February 13, noon – 1 pm
Chinese Consulate, 240 St George St
(north of St George subway between Lowther & Bernard)

From the flyer:

Greece, Italy, France, Switzerland, Belgium, Australia, and the United States have slammed the door on the gruesome trade. In November 2006, the European Commission proposed a ban on the import, export and sale of dog and cat fur in the European Union.
…
Unless Canada wants to become an appalling dumping ground for dog- and cat-fur products, Canadians must join the effort to halt the cruel trade here.

Last Saturday, I participated in a rally to Close Guantanamo.  It was a rally I helped to organize with the USA Team of Amnesty International, but I never even blogged about it because I was so busy with other things.

Guantanamo is where the United States continues to hold hundreds of prisoners captured in Afghanistan.  By labeling these prisoners “enemy combatants”, the United States has claimed that they have no legal rights whatsoever.  The rally marked five years that the prison has been in operation.  Many of the prisoners that remain at Guantanamo have not had any contact with family in all these years.  Dozens of them are juveniles.  There have been suicides, hunger strikes, force-feedings and deaths.  Allegations of torture are numerous.  In fact, the United States does not deny engaging in sleep deprivation, playing loud and/or offensive music at all times of the night and day and using other techniques they do not deem torture when they are the torturers.  During the rally, we were asked for 5 minutes of silence to mark this grim anniversary.  As I thought about what these prisoners have endured, and what their families have endured, I started to cry, as I always do at Amnesty rallies.     Read more »

There is a sickening kind of irony that while nobody worried too much over the fate of millions of Chinese and Bangladeshis, the cute and fuzzy polar bear may be what finally brings the United States to action on global warming.