Imagining World Peace At the Skokie Festival of Cultures

America pulling out of the Paris Accord [on climate change]. America ending its participation with the Iran treaty on nuclear weapons. A threatened end to America’s social safety net. The news is so horrific these days that I feel exhausted from it and needed a break. Fortunately, I got it at the 28^th Annual Skokie Festival of Cultures this past weekend.

Flags representing all the participating countries

Skokie, a Chicago suburb of about 70,000 people, is home to people from around the world. About 55% of its residents speak a native language other than English; over 70 languages are spoken here. Every year Skokie’s diversity is not just tolerated. Rather it’s embraced. This year 40 communities participated.

The Skokie Festival of Cultures takes place on the third weekend of May each year. We chose the better of the two days – at least it wasn’t raining – to attend. We visited the booths meeting people this year from Ireland, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Bangladesh, Iraq, Uzbekistan, Sweden, Guatemala, and Korea. People displayed their folk arts and artifacts and talked about their countries to whoever stopped by their booths. We had been blessed to travel to a few of those countries and told the people at each booth about our trips. They were interested in hearing our impressions and we had some nice conversations.

At the Bulgarian Booth

At the Uzbekistan Booth

At the Iraqi Booth

Then it was on to the pavilion to see the dancing and singing. This year we saw dancers from West Africa and Korea. Beautiful performances. Then it was on to an Indian Holi celebration. This festival of colors is observed each spring in India to celebrate a good harvest as well as the victory of good over evil. People throw colorful paints at each other in a festival of all different hues. I had seen this on television but never in person. As usual in Skokie, people from all different backgrounds wanted to participate. A line was formed to get one’s tee shirt to wear to protect one’s clothes. While not quite as colorful as it is in India, it was certainly joyous.

Korean Dancers

Holi Festival

And so now people have shared their songs and dances, their celebrations, and their foods. We are no longer strangers to one another and we can spend another year learning from each other about our respective cultures. If only the rest of the world would learn from Skokie’s experience, the world would be a lot more peaceful. In the meantime, we look forward to next year's Festival of Cultures and the around the world trip in one day that is always so much fun. 

Not Too Late to Advocate for the ERA

“Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex.” For reasons beyond my understanding, the state of Illinois has never been able to ratify these 24 simple words. If Illinois does ratify the ERA, it will be 35 years late.

This Monday, saying “Better late than Never” and hoping that Illinois would finally get it right, I got on the El Monday, May 7^th to attend the Hearing of the human rights committee of the Illinois House on SJRCA4.

The Illinois Senate had passed SJRCA4, the bill that would have Illinois ratify the federal ERA. An ERA for the state of Illinois has been part of the state constitution since 1970. The bill is now before the House. I needed to witness the state of Illinois making history at long last. After all, Abigail Adams had beseeched her husband John Adams to “remember the ladies” in a letter to him on March 31, 1776. They didn’t listen to her and women have been omitted from the Constitution ever since. It was about time.

What I witnessed, however, was probably not Illinois making history but rather reliving it. The room of viewers was packed predominantly with proponents of the ERA. Four panels of witnesses – twenty altogether – had the opportunity to tell the members of the House human rights committee what their opinions were regarding the ERA and about their life experiences that pointed to its necessity. Sixteen people testified in favor and four testified against it.

The arguments were the same as they had been in the 1970’s. Rep. Lou Lang, chief sponsor of the bill, started off presenting cogent arguments. The state and federal government needed to ratify the ERA to protect women’s rights. At present, the only right for women delineated in the Constitution is the right to vote. Laws passed which give equal rights to both sexes can be repealed at any time. The opposition gave the same old arguments: that the ERA would lead to more abortions, unisex bathrooms, and a groundswell of boys demanding to play on girls’ high school LaCrosse teams. The ERA states nothing about any of those issues.

After each panel, the House members were able to ask the panelists questions. One house member Mary Flowers asked the same questions to each panel member after a tirade about how the ERA would not specifically protect women of color. Each panel member explained how it would protect all American women but wouldn’t explicitly protect women of color from racist discrimination. The bill is about sex, not race. The vociferousness with which Ms. Flowers presented her arguments suggested to me that some behind the scenes horse trading to which the public was not privy was most likely going on. The failure of the Illinois House to make some bargain was what doomed the ERA to failure in Illinois in the 1970’s.

 I hope that I wasn’t seeing Illinois history repeat itself. At this writing, a hearing in Springfield in the Illinois House is in process. There’s still time to call your representatives and tell them to vote YES. All of us American women – white, black, Asian, Latina, native American, pink, green, or whatever – deserve better. It’s about time.  

Standing Against Racism in Trump's America

Every spring since 2007, the YWCA has organized a national stand against racism. During the stand - usually from 2:00 to 2:25PM, people in towns throughout the United States stand in unison declaring their opposition to racism. www.standagainstracism.org

This year in our increasingly polarized society, I felt that I had to stand with the YWCA and all groups that were saying that bigotry is wrong. I was proud to stand at my synagogue Beth Emet in Evanston to do this.

While it should be self-evident that racism is wrong, apparently it isn’t. Expressions of racism, anti-Semitism, anti-Muslimism, and attacks on the LGBT community have risen sharply since the presidential election in 2016, spurred in large part by T’s racist rhetoric. In the days immediately following the election, 867 incidents of harassment and intimidation of African-Americans, Jews, Muslims, and people in the LGBT community were reported. The Southern Poverty Law Center (www.splcenter.org) reports an increase in hate groups. They have identified 954 hate groups operating in the United States. The FBI reports anti-Semitic incidents up 55% in 2017, anti-Muslim incidents up 25%, and increased incidents against the LGBT community.

After the disturbances in Charlottesville, I watched in horror as the President of the United States gave a press conference attesting vehemently that many of the people joining the march of neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan were “fine people.” Since then he has reiterated many racist statements thus emboldening racists to act on their feelings. After Charlottesville, for example, the Holocaust Memorial in Boston was vandalized for the second time that summer. Although the perpetrator was arrested and charged with a hate crime, the fact is that it was done.

I am not accusing our current president of creating racism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and homophobia. Evidently people always had those feeling but they lay under the surface. In the past, however, people knew that acting on those feelings was unacceptable in the United States. Since 2016, they have been given permission to express those feelings. For myself, any feelings I had of being secure and safe in America have been erased.

It is because of this that it is more important than ever that we stand against racism. We have to stand and say that racism is not acceptable. After the stand, we standers from Beth Emet joined a discussion at the Unitarian Church with members of their congregation as well as people from St. Marks Episcopalian Church. We reaffirmed our opposition to racism and discussed efforts being made in our community to combat it.

Some say that there will always be people with racist feelings and I agree that there will be. I can’t control what is going on in the hearts and minds of other people. I can, however, work with other people to create a situation in which people are not allowed to act on those feelings. That’s the direction the United States had been headed toward during the past few decades since the Civil Rights Movement. We have to work together to get our country to return to that direction. I hope that it’s not too late.