❧❧❧ Whatever you can do or dream, you can BEGIN IT. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Goethe ❧❧❧
❧❧❧ You were born whole, not broken. Sandra Hammel ❧❧❧
When they were Presidential candidates, John McCain and Barack Obama pledged "unstinting resolve" in pursuing an end to the Darfur genocide.
Be a voice for Darfur. Join one million people declaring with one voice: President-elect Obama must make Darfur a Day One priority.
To help reach the goal of one million postcards, sign the online postcard or order yours today for FREE by simply filling out and submitting the order form below. They will ship them to your door!
Collect signed postcards and simply mail them back to the return address on the postcards and they will be added to the number that will be presented to the new president.
On December 3rd, people around the world will ask their friends and families to join them for STANDFast - an event that asks you to fast from one luxury item, like coffee or your morning newspaper, and donate the money that you would have spent on that item to protecting civilians in Darfur and Burma.
The money you donate supports GI-NET's Civilian Protection projects in Darfur and Burma, which provide much-needed protection to people living in fear of violence and attack.
On December 3rd, we're asking you to STANDFast with us against genocide.
Over the past three years, GI-NET members have raised more than $500,000 for civilian protection in Darfur. This year, we plan to raise even more and expand our protection efforts to those in Eastern Burma as well. Please join us this December to STANDFast against genocide and mass atrocities taking place in these areas and around the globe. You can make a difference!
I believe that when we are told we have to sell our souls to save our souls that something is drastically wrong. That is what we were expected to do under the outgoing administration. We need to get a grip. We need to get our noses into our government and change some things. In the movie Amazing Grace, William Wilberforce says to Thomas Clarkson, "you must never speak of revolution in my presence ever again." But Clarkson calls Wilberforce on this very issue of revolution.
Thomas Jefferson said: "Every generation needs a new revolution." And I think we have allowed our government to flail without our oversight for far too long and need a revolution within our nation. But first we must be informed. "Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government." Again, Thomas Jefferson.
Do Something to Use Your Freedom of Speech To Stand Up and Stand Out Against Genocide Don’t Be Complicit Don’t Choose Silence Don’t Choose Apathy Don’t Choose Ignorance Be Proactive Be Alive Be Aware Be Present Do Something To Tell Your Leaders To Lead In This Human Disaster of Genocide If Not You, Then Who?
The Genocide is Five Years, 8 months old The Holocaust Went On For Twelve Years …Before We the People’s Government Did Something Right …Does That Mean We Are Going to Wait 6 More Years Until We Decide Darfuri Families Have Suffered Enough On Our Watch?!
Freedom of Speech means nothing if you don’t use it.
“…unless we all have plenty one of us will become a thief and the thief will make you angry you will hurt him
this will hurt his children they will punish you this will hurt your children they will punish his children and that’s how it begins
to believe in man is to know peace will not work if just one man alive is unjust if one man alive is ignorant or hungry or crazy or ashamed FOR we have seen if only one of us decides to pull the plug, the millions of us can kiss the world good-bye whether we like it or not.”
From Joseph Pintauro’s little book To Believe in Man Illustrated by Sister Corita Kent
"The strong can not expect the weak to placate them and call it healing." Sandra Hammel
Don’t let weeds grow around your dreams. From H. Jackson Brown, Jr.’s Life’s Little Instructon Book. Volume 2
I wrote about slavery where I live - What We Are Is Who We Were - and tonight the special television documentary about a local family with ancestors who bought and sold people to make their livelihood is airing. It will also air tomorrow night. PBS is offering this Point Of View documentary - Traces of the Trade.
We don't like to be around people who point out our flaws, our mistakes and our bad behavior. We don't like to feel uncomfortable. An honest look at our past, acceptance of the truth and courage to be better human beings would do wonders to heal our own emotional wounds. And also would go leap years toward healing humankind's wounds.
P.O.V. Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North
First-time filmmaker Katrina Browne makes a troubling discovery — her New England ancestors were the largest slave-trading family in US history. She and nine fellow descendants set off to retrace the Triangle Trade: from their old hometown in Rhode Island to slave forts in Ghana to sugar plantation ruins in Cuba. Step by step, they uncover the extent of Northern complicity in slavery while stumbling through the minefield of contemporary race relations. In this bicentennial year of the abolition of the US slave trade, Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North offers powerful new perspectives on the black/white divide. An official selection of the 2008 Sundance Film Festival.
Katrina Browne spent two years fine-tuning this documentary as a WGBH filmmaker in residence. Providing a supportive workspace and editorial and production resources through our Filmmakers in Residence program is just one of the missions of the WGBH Lab.
What do you know about slavery in the United States of America? Did you learn anything about slavery history in your classrooms? I didn’t.
When I was in school, the USA spoke of the propaganda that the Soviet Union, Russia, used as their truth, their history. The USA history that I was taught in my education was propaganda. I was not taught anything about the history of the Native American Indians or the Black slavery. I was not taught anything about the internment camps of the Japanese. Where did I learn about these things? On PBS television shows.
When I was in my all white high school in the 1960s, I found a book in my school library, Black Like Me. I read it with much interest.
Slavery By Another Name by Douglas Blackmon is a book that reveals that once slavery was outlawed, slavery was given another name. I have heard the author twice now speak and just Friday, June 20th, Douglas Blackmon was on Bill Moyer’s Journal. In the 1930’s until World War II, slavery existed.
From the transcript of this segment of Bill Moyer’s Journal, June 20th, 2008 with Douglas Blackmon:
BILL MOYERS: How is it, you and I both Southerners, how is it we could grow up right after this era, and be so unaware of what had just happened to our part of the country?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, I think there are a lot of explanations for that. The biggest one is simply that this is a history that we haven't wanted to know as a country. We've engaged in a in a kind of collective amnesia about this, particularly about the severity of it.
And the official history of this time, the conventional history tended to minimize the severity of the things that were done again and again and again, and to focus instead, on the idea, on a lot of false mythologies. Like, this idea that freed slaves after emancipation became lawless and sort of went wild, and thievery, and all sorts of crimes being committed by African-Americans right after the Civil War and during Reconstruction. But when you go back, as I did, and look at the arrest records from that period of time, there's just no foundation for that. And the reality was there was hardly any crime at all. And huge numbers of people were being arrested on these specious charges, so they could be forced back into labor.
I live in Newport County in Rhode Island, USA. Amistad the movie was shot here. My favorite scene in the movie is of the argument before the Supreme Court by John Adams. Personal note: My friend made Adams bedroom canopy and bedding, which is in the scene just before the Supreme Court ruling.
I learned tonight while googling Slavery in Rhode Island that the founder, William Ellery Channing, of the Unitarian Church where I go, if I go to church, had a slave in his household. I had already known that slaves were auctioned off 12 minutes from where my house is from a previous google search. This place is in downtown Newport, Rhode Island. And that households here were typical if they owned slaves.
The following excerpt is taken from www.eyesofglory.com “Black History Here in Newport, Rhode Island we have several physical ‘touch stones’ to remind us of the legacy left by those Africans and later African Americans who graced our city with their presence. From 1696 when the first documented slave ship, the ‘Sea Flower’, touched our shores, to the present, African Americans have worked, raised their families and prospered in the city by the sea.
The American Slave Trade and Newport share similar origins. Newport, the most prosperous of colonial American ports, saw unprecedented growth throughout the 18th century; mostly from the export and trade of rum, spermaceti candles and slaves. By 1784, the fledgling state government abolished slavery.
Many of the slaves that came to Newport’s shore would arrive, like most goods, at the Long Wharf. These slaves would be auctioned off to the highest bidders at the Granary (market), which is today known as the Brick Market at the foot of Washington Square.”
Brick Market is in the central tourist area of Newport, today.
Bristol, Rhode Island is a small quaint town just over the Bristol Bridge from my hometown of Portsmouth. Bristol has a Fourth of July parade, which it boasts is the longest running Fourth of July parade in the country.
The PBS television channel will be airing in June 2008, P.O.V.’s TRACES OF THE TRADE: A STORY OF THE DEEP NORTH told by Katrina Browne, whose family is from Bristol, Rhode Island. This is the bicentennial year of the U.S. abolition of the slave trade. Katrina Browne discovered that her slave-trading ancestors from Bristol, Rhode Island were not an aberration, but rather, they were just the most prominent actors in the North's vast complicity in slavery, buried in myths of Northern innocence.
Katrina Browne — a direct descendant of Mark Anthony DeWolf, the first slaver in the family — took the unusual step of writing to 200 descendants. She invited them to journey with her from Rhode Island to Ghana to Cuba and back, retracing the Triangle Trade that made the DeWolfs the largest slave-trading family in U.S. history. Nine relatives signed up. TRACES OF THE TRADE: A STORY FROM THE DEEP NORTH is Browne's account of the journey.
From the transcript of Bill Moyer’s Journal, June 20th, 2008:
KATRINA BROWNE: My DeWolf ancestors were known as the "Great Folk" in Bristol. There were professors and writers, artists and architects, and many Episcopal ministers. I was proud to be related to them. It never occurred to me to ask how we got so established.
What no one in my family realized was that the DeWolfs were the largest slave-trading family in US history. They brought over 10,000 Africans to the Americas in chains. Half a million of their descendants could be alive today.
The slave trade was illegal for most of the time the DeWolfs were practicing it. To maneuver around the law, they secured a political favor from none other than President Thomas Jefferson, whose campaign they'd supported. Jefferson appointed their brother-in-law as Bristol's customs official. This man always happened to be looking the other way as DeWolf ships went in and out of harbor.
…At the Bristol Historical Society, tucked away in a corner on the second floor, there was a file cabinet, full of DeWolf papers. These eerie records revealed the details of the logical economic model that the DeWolfs developed from 1769 to 1820. Here's how they made it work.
First they got the financing together. They recruited fellow townspeople to buy shares in their voyages and eventually started their own bank. They also started an insurance company to cover the risk. Rum was the prime currency of the slave trade, so James acquired a distillery from his father-in-law. The DeWolfs also purchased ships, mostly from builders in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. The ships took rum to the Guinea Coast to trade for Africans. "July 4th, 1795, bought nine prime slaves, one woman and eight men and paid for them tobacco, rum, hats, bread, mackerel." Many of the enslaved Africans were brought to work on plantations that the DeWolfs established in Cuba. These plantations supplied sugar and molasses needed to make the rum back in Bristol. They also served as holding places for Africans while the DeWolfs waited for slave prices to go up at auction. "Havana, Sept. 11, 1806, John DeWolf of Bristol, Sale of 121 Negroes." Total income: 36,300 dollars, which today equals 553,000 dollars.
The largest number of slaves were sold in Havana and Charleston. But Rhode Island slavers did business in more than 40 markets in the West Indies, North and South America. Rhode Island became the state most complicit in the American slave trade. Rum, Africans, sugar, rum. The efficient wheels of the Triangle Trade were set in motion again and again.
Full transcript with Katrina Browne on Bill Moyer’s Journal:
Watch a portion of the video "Traces of the Trade" which airs on P.O.V. soon, Katrina Browne. Where I live in Rhode Island, it airs (90 minutes): June 24, 2008, 10:00 p.m. Channel 44, Boston June 26, 2008, 3:00 a.m. Channel 44, Boston June 29, 2008, 9:00 p.m. Channel 44, Boston June 30, 2008, 10:00 p.m. Channel 2, Boston July 3, 2008, 9:00 p.m. Channel 36, Providence July 5, 1:30 a.m. Channel 36, Providence Source: www.pbs.org/pov
Check out: Rhode Island’s Slave History -The Unrighteous Traffic 7 part series “The traffic was so lucrative that nearly half the ships that sailed to Africa (from Newport, Rhode Island) did so after 1787 - the year Rhode Island outlawed the trade.” Source: Rhode Island's Slave History
If you suspect an existing case of human trafficking today, call the national human trafficking hotline 1-888-373 -7888
This is a painting that I did using a photograph from the Oprah website of when she went to South Africa
for the Christmas Kindness show. It is a water color and I won Honorable Mention at a juried art show with the Portsmouth Arts Guild in Portsmouth, Rhode Island.
Lines from the movie, Amazing Grace:
“……and you still have passion. That matters more.” Barbara to William Wilberforce
“Great men are spoken about when it’s to do with violence, such as Napoleon and return to pomp. Rarely do they speak of men of peace. William Wilberforce, however, will return to his family with head on pillow, knowing the slave trade is no more – making a better world.….” Thomas Clarkson
I love this movie, AMAZING GRACE, so-o much. The cast, the story, the acting, the music. I majored in music because of what it does to my soul. I have my B.S. and M.M. in music. And it is not the degrees that I have, but the power of music that reaches in and takes a hold of me like nothing else. I remember as a young person sitting in church and sometimes I didn’t listen to the sermon, but the songs were what grabbed a hold of my spirit and moved me. And it’s no different today. I love, love, love music. I am the music and the music is me. I know that I am a passionate person. More than others. People let me know this continually by their reaction to my passionate way of emoting and being. Some may not feel . . . I don’t know, maybe, comfortable around such passion – but others seem to be drawn to it. I can’t be any other way.
I love who I am and my passionate way of living my life is a huge part of that. I am speaking at the Unitarian Universalist Channing Memorial Church March 18 and yesterday I met with the two who are in charge of planning the entire service for two hours after a very interesting all music church service. This is a Unitarian Church so the music included songs such as Embraceable You, Imagine, Standing in the Need of Prayer, Over the Rainbow, Take Five, Catch a Falling Star, Nine Ma Tov and a trumpet solo playing Taps! Anyway, I will be the guest speaker on the 18th of March and the topic is Darfur and the Genocide. My passion was seemingly too much for one of the participants, however I have witnessed her in an altered state of excitement at one time, so I’m not sure what it all meant that she didn’t welcome my spirit of joy. I am so happy in my life and it shows. When I left I heard myself softly say to myself, “Well, I don’t care if she doesn’t like my happiness, I like my happiness.” I am doing what I feel destined to do in speaking out against the genocide and when aligned with the universe, I think the happiness just comes from the well of just-being-all-right-with-LIFE.
I found this wonderful Youtube video tonight. I have been looking since I saw AMAZING GRACE last Friday, February 23, opening day of the movie here in the United States for a special video of this song. See if you like this.
<:<:<:<: "The strong can not expect the weak to placate >:>:>:>: them and call it healing." ........Sandra Hammel, aka ilovemylife Don’t let weeds grow around your dreams. ........From H. Jackson Brown, Jr.’s ........Life’s Little Instructon Book. Volume 2 <:<:<:<: “We are All the Keepers of Justice. <:<:<:<: OR not.” ........Sandra Hammel, aka ilovemylife
peacepeacepeacepeacepeacepeacepeacepeacewillnotworkif justonemanaliveisunjustignoranthungrycrazyashamedJosephPintauro :>:>:>:>:>:>:>:>:>:>:>:>:>:>:>:>:>:>:>:>:>:>:>:>:>: "The Glory of God is Man Fully Alive." St. Irenaeus of Lyons ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: "We think of religious activity as directed toward God - instead of man.
We believe in someone divine rather than in ourselves.
Maybe we have turned religion inside-out." Please Touch Edwin M. McMahon & Peter A. Campbell
I love my life. I love where I live. And I am passionate about my passions. I love to dance. Necessary to live: music, piano, singing, writing, acting, painting.
I have been fighting for and supporting the arts all my adult life. Since 2004, I have been working with other activists to end the Darfur genocide.
I have traveled to Europe many times since my early twenties. Places I have been: many USA states including Hawaii, Montreal, Canada, Barbados, France, Spain, Luxembourg, England, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Greece and Germany - and have wonderful memories.
My last trip was in May - June 2013 to Spain.
I would like to travel to Europe and Kyoto, Japan.
I love the southwest where I have visited Hopi, Navajo, Zia and San Idlefonso potters.
Life is exciting and I intend to live it full-out to the end.
B.S. and M.M., both in music
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Khartoum, Sudan Stop Genocide Time
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RAFA NADAL -BRING BACK LONG PANTS - SLEEVELESS TOPS
Double Click on Videos to Enlarge
Darfur - The Abandoned Genocide - a video by Sandra Hammel
Want to help? Call 1~800~GENOCIDE
"May I Suggest" by Susan Werner
Satchita - Playing for Change
Stand By Me ~ Playing for Change
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Genocide is not only a word,
it is crying of the whole human race.
There is nothing redeeming about being silent
when speaking up is the humane thing to do.
The honor and integrity of the human race is at stake.
