First off, I agree that ONE goes farther than Bono. ONE also goes farther than strategists. ONE goes down to the hearts of every person involved, including people like you and I. This means that there will be a lot of variance in types of activities, within certain guidelines. And I know, personally speaking, when my Senator does something I disapprove of, I like to call and calmly let him/her know. This was the reason I asked. I am sorry if they were googled, and became offended by this, but I can hardly imagine that if they were willing to take the actions they did that they objected too heavily to people working as we are to eliminate global disease mind if we know who they are. Certainly, they would realize that we mean them no harm, but want to figure out a way to garner their support. I don’t know, but I do know this: I don’t understand the ONE campaign to be an organization that wants to take our lumps on the chin from an anonymous source and go surging forward, fighting blind, prepared to take more lumps, ignorant of who’s opposing our efforts. If these Senators feel they’ve acted in the right, then I’m sure they’re willing to dialogue with their constituents about it. If not, at least now their constituents know that they need to be dialoging more with their senators.

I’ve called one of my Senators several times before to tell him how much I’d like his support in the future. He respects this. Some of his staffers know my name and we speak cordially when I call. I would’ve hated to call in to inquire about his actions and risked that rapport if I could find out on here who was responsible.

The thing is, ONE isn’t some father-notion passing down mandates to everyone else. You and I are a part of ONE, a part of the decision-making processes. No, it’s not a democracy, but it IS a grassroots coalition, which means that you have to help handle Seattle how you think best, I have to help handle my area how I tihnk best, Debbie has to handle…Austin, I gather…how she sees best. This is within how the national team thinks things best handled, which is, ultimately, stemmed from Bono’s vision. We’re all no the same team, and that’s important to remember. The regional guys are great, but they aren’t bosses or anytihng like that, they’re just teammates doing another part of netowrking the grassroots movement. That’s part of the genius of ONE, is that somenoe who helps lead a campus with three involved students has as much power to enact new ideas, be creative, and seek friendly, peaceable solutions, as a regional director in charge of three, four, five states. That said, we all need to be (as you so poetically phrased it) “talked off a ledge” sometimes. You have, as far as I can tell, tried to do that here, and it’s appreciated.

As one of those guys that’s beeen to Africa, that’s held the hand of a dying three-year-old and had a sick mother ask me to take her baby so that he may live, I don’t mind saying that this is very personal to me. So, I hope you don’t take it personally when I say that I don’t see any setback as “not batting a thousand” or “part of the game.” I don’t see a game. I see thirty thousand children JUST like the ones I met dying every day, and therefore every time I see something fail I see a small genocide. As such, it’s easy for me to want to run to the Hill, kick in these Senators’ doors and show them some pictures and find out what they’re thinking. But, as you said, that’s not my job anymore. It’s now the jobs of the people in their states to express disdain…if they find that’s what’s effective.

Sadly, I doubt the world will ever be at a point of being completely past civil disobedience, and I am personally quite unafraid to use it in the event that all other solutions have been exhausted and failed. Because as I said…I don’t see games and wins and losses. I see Thabo who has an advanced form of the AIDS virus. I see Kenny, who will likely starve to death before puberty. I am far less concerned with staying warm-hearted than with helping them. Usually, staying warm-hearted is the best way to help them, but in the event that this changes, I hope you understand that I am committed first to doing whatever helps them, then to propriety.

I don’t know the history between Debbie and Sammi, nor do I care to, but as I’ve read this, I don’t see anytihng that appears overtly vicious or laden-down with animosity. Perhaps it’s a personal matter. Either way, I appreciate both activists’ inputs and considerations, and I certainly hope that forgiveness, mercy, and love abound in our actions as well as our rhetoric ( I suspect they do, from the things I’ve heard from you both).

At any rate, Debbie has been asked to be excluded from discussion. I, however, find discussions like this one, even when they take their more…shall we say…terse moments, to be stimulating as well as beneficial to everyone. How everyone learns and grows and refines their ideas and philosophies and theories. As I said, it’s grassroots, so it’s important we stay in communication. If you want to continue discussion with me, I’d love to keep talking with you…pasisng back and forth ideas and discussing how to handle similar events. Shoot me an email if you want…sendmeillgo [at] yahoo.com . I like email a little better, I think, than just voicing things on the blog, since it prevents us from being able to say stupid things for the whole world to read…just fire one at me…NO SPAMMING please.

Peace. Out.

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I have not attacked anyone in this thread for their ideas and/or opinions and had asked for the same in return.

Evidently, that courtesy is not being extended to me by the above poster who is in violation
of the posting guidelines that Virginia Simmons herself has requested of all of us.

You would think that someone who is such a “strong” supporter of ONE would follow ONE’s own guidelines for posting in this blog!

I will not comment on anything that the poster has said because I think her comments actually are shedding some bad vibes and I want no part of that.

But I do think that a suggestion that people can not offer idea and alternatives in this blog violates again what Virginia says and sets up a very dangerous precedent.

sammi, we have both known of each other for years and never did co-exist well with each other,unfortunately.

Instead of this public display of a very long-held personal animosity, is there a way for us to discuss our difference in private to stop this very embarassing display here in the ONE blog?

I am not intimidated by this discussion but I think the personal viciousness with which you are addressing me violates the posting requirements in the blog and actually makes you look bad.

If you are not interested in discussion with me offline to resolve our differences, then please just desist from all this negativity.

I hope that you will being willing to take the olive branch from me.

AS ONE, debbie:)

if you debbie or any other ONE volunteer has a problem with how ONE is running their organization, or the future of it, we volunteers have regional drectors or a national director that we can deal with, rather than airing it out here in a public blog. or there are great leaders in Austin ONE, i’ve met a few. conversations about new ideas is one thing, telling ONE how they should do their job or conduct their future is another.

ONE is not a democracy. ask them.

my ONE regional rep, as my “supervisor,” talks me off a ledge when my passion and frustration is high and keeps me recalibrated to the big picture, and it stays out of the public blog and reflects a unified front to the public. if you don’t like the way things are done, why air it out here? it will accomplish nothing. or very little.

and i believe this contribution will be very healthy for us, including ONE.

staying close,

sammi

The brilliance of ONE is the diversity of organizations, backgrounds, experiences, outlooks, etc which makes up this COALITION called ONE.

The ONE idea which brings us together is the sha(red) goal of ending AIDS and extreme poverty in the world, especially Africa.

But that does not mean that we will always agree with each other - nor should we. It is our diversity which makes us strong not weak.

Everybody(including me) in this discussion is for working through Congress to accomplish our goals (how many more times need I say this?) but we must be big enough to plan for the future if we do not accomplish what we want to for Africa.

While I have always supported our national ONE office (and send them nearly 1,000 new ONE member sign ups every year), I am my own person and can think my own thoughts.

Voicing an opinion of concern in this organization shouldn’t be considered treason or disloyalty. Conversation and new ideas is HEALTHY for the future survival of any organization, including this one.

So we have all had a chance to speak our minds - GREAT!

Can we all desist from this thread because continuing this discussion I think will not be healthy for any of us, including ONE.

CoeXisTing & ALWAYS FOREVER, ONE - debbie
www.mpwn-uganda.org

ONE is a helluva lot more than Bono, and i really believe he is not he final word in this organization. ONE consists of dozens of brilliant political and legal strategists, many who have had decades of experience in this work themselves. most have been in the rurals of africa to see the flesh and blood of the dying people and know perfectly well what they are doing. they have not suffered a mission-drift, and i choose to let them make the decisions on how best to pursue the future of ONE.

i’d like to think we’d evolved beyond civil disobedience or placcarding in our country, especially in our work. ONE has used discretion in not listing the names of the senators holding out, now when their names are googled, it will come here. not the sort of relationship ONE, as i understand, wants to have with even these senators. i remember when Bono sat down with Strom Thurmond and appealed to him regarding the AIDS virus. shaming and exposing them won’t do anything but distance them further in the 111th congress, 112th congress, down the road. but yes, by being responsible to our own leaders, i did mean communicating with them, developing working relationships with them, and when necessary forgiving them and moving on to the next issue when they don’t vote as we ask. even Babe Ruth didn’t bat 1000.

last year at the RESULTS conference in dc, a young college girl spoke of the moment she found her spark in what we do. she and other students were in south africa at an orphanage,working with the children and staff, seeing the needs. at the final goodbye, she was crying her eyes out at the sadness of leaving. one of the matrons there cupped her face in her hands in love and said something like “you are a citizen of the richest and most powerful democracy in the world. go back and tell them about us, about what we need. if we women go to our leaders here like you can there, we will be cast out, or beaten, or our husbands will pay for it. but you can tell your leaders about us, and can with others make big changes happen, like we’ve seen already.”

i have no plans of going to Africa, there are people with more qualified skill sets than i have who do. but i can go to congress. we all can, and should. not necessarily to DC but my congressman has a staff and office hours here in his district and we meet with him when we can and show our support at town hall meetings. that is what ONE is all about . . . . . citizen advocacy for the people of Africa, congress is where the checks (promises) are cashed (fulfilled.) this organization consists of many of the brightest and most unpretentious people in any ngo who know exactly what they are doing. my congressman Rick Larsen is my responsibility, to speak to him or his assistant about the asks that ONE, RESULTS, Jubilee, Bread for the World, others like-minded and what they ask of me, for the extreme poor and hungry. as well as senators Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell. I’ve been to their offices here in my city this year a few times and have the honor of a lobby day in dc in two weeks during the RESULTS conference in dc to see them again, and ask for legislation important to us, more than often its to thank them for signing on and asking for their continued support. i love this stuff we do, it really does make a difference.

thanx for your work eric, and your perspectives are appreciated here. our disappointment in the timing of this legislation is evident, but it is not dead legislation, or voted down yet. the rest of Ken Patterson’s message included action items:

“1. Please refer to the updated action alert http://capwiz.com/results/callalert/index.tt?alertid=11539736and call your senators; ask them to vote “no” to any amendment to cut funding below $50 billion.
2. It’s important to keep making calls until you are certain your senators will support the bill and oppose any amendments that will reduce funding or weaken the bill, including amendments to earmark particular AIDS transmission prevention methods - like abstinence - over others. If your senators are Republicans, see if you can get them to speak to Mitch McConnell in favor of passage, and to *the opposing senators* to encourage them to allow the bill to move forward. ”

staying close,

sammi in seattle

Believe me, this is not my first course of action and if people have been reading my words correctly, then you will see that I still want us to work within the system but ultimately, if this process does not work with Congrees and the heart of our program for Africa is gutted - then what?

We’re back at ground zero and African people lose their lives?

I’m not comfortable with that option and I don’t think most other ONE supporters are either.

Our purpose in this organization is to make sure that as few people in Africa die from AIDS & other preventable causes as possible and to end extreme poverty.

If we can accomplish our purposes solely with working with Congress - great. Let’s do it.

But we’re seeing from enough Senators in Congress and from more & more countries in the G8 that the momentum to our movement may be waning in the governments of the world.

Right now, Bono goes into the G8 negotiations with only the U.K. & Germany firmly keeping their commitments to the world’s poorest people.

With this holdup in the Congress, the U.S. commitment to Africa looks shaky and thus, I doubt if he will be able to use the USA as one of those firmly committed to Africa’s Future.

We’ll all see what comes out of the G8 summit next week but I am very concerned about it.

As for Bono meeting with politicians & al, that is a STRATEGY that he has used because he has believed that it would work in our favor for Africa. Up to now, that strategy has worked well but that may HAVE TO change in the future.

I don’t know if you saw the interview that Bono did with the French media after the release of the DATA Report but Bono didn’t sound very happy to me with the way things are with our governments’ commitments to Africa in that interview.

“But what do you say to the G8?

I would say that there is a lot at stake. The whole political process… Are these just talking shops? Is this a joke? That you can stand in a photograph, with your arms around other statesmen, and say, “Yes, we make a promise to the world’s poor that we will increase aid to Africa over the next five years by 25 billion,” and then walk away and it’s not there? Jacques Chirac signed his own name. Tony Blair signed his own name. Those pledges became contracts at that moment. It’s not just some communiqué. There’s a lot at stake in this stuff. And it’s not just the moral stuff.”

So, all we can do is wait and see what happens next weekend in Japan. But if we are not able to get these governments to KEEP their promises to Africa through our current lobbying efforts, then where do we go? What do we do?

Keep doing the same old stuff that isn’t producing POSITIVE RESULTS for Africa?

I said that I don’t have all the answers - I’m just posing ideas and alternatives for future consideration.

But ONE thing that I know for sure - if our movement is not successful in saving PEPFAR and the other programs for Africa that we have worked so hard to achieve through the ways that we are currently trying to use, then this movement will have to answer to those Africans who will lose their lives because our strategies did not produce the results that we had hoped for.

It is that simple.

I wish you well, Eric. You seem like a very concerned young man. I’m just speaking from the voice of experience of living social justice movements for the last several decades.

I hope that we can continue to achieve success for Africa through our current methods.

We just have to be prepa(red) for alternatives if our current method fails.

I would like to try to bow out of any continued discussion because I actually do have a life. (smile)
So feel free to continue a discussion of the ideas raised in this thread but let’s keep it civil and not resort to any personal attacks to make our points.

ALWAYS FOREVER, ONE- debbie

If we were to speak up now…protest, whatever, they can’t go back and change what they’ve done in time for G8, and it will come to a vote anyway. All we would do is show them how angry we are. This means nothing to them because they assumed we wouldn’t like it, anyway…

At worst, they become afraid to cross us…but any animal (and humans are animals as well) that is acting out of fear is dangerous at best, and since they can neither undo what they’ve already done nor stop the train (so to speak) forever, protesting seems to lose its point.

I assure you, I know the history of the ONE camapign and the poverty-ending movement in general, very well. I simply do not feel that protesting gains anyone anything at the current time. Sure, stand up. Sure, make your voice heard. Sure, if you live in one of those Senators’ states, call and express your displeasure. But save the protesting for now. We can still make progress as far as PEPFAR is concerned, and we can still lose ground. We have to, have to, have to continue doing what works.

And I assure you, I use the word “save” in the strongest sense, because that’s what it is. Someone who’s always protesting becmoes a protester, and nobody responds to a protester. Not even other protesters. I know this…my room mate is one of those chronic protesters, and for him to get upset and fired up holds absolutely no conviction for me. His ire is irrelevant because all he does is protest. I have another friend, however, and when he gets fired up enough to protest an issue, I look it up myself and usually wind up getting involved…because he is laid back and it’s rare for him to get that irate over things. The goal is to use our voice often enough that it’s recognized, but still infrequently enough that it’s listened to.

You can only disobey so often before you become a degenerate, and I won’t do that, because that’s not laying MY life across the tracks for Africa…that’s laying my life across the tracks so I can say I did. The trick is to be disobedient when it becomes necessary, when it becomes prudent, and when it becomes relevant. Right now, we’d just be making noise.

I guess I would not differ with the logic of nonviolent protest, but rather with the claim that it’s the “genesis” of our movement. And I wouldn’t really object fully to that. The thing is, it’s a part of our movement. There are also pictures of Bono, for instance, havnig lunch with kings and dignitaries and The Pope, not attempting to protest, but simply to speak logic. MLK, Gandhi, Mandela…all of these men wrote extensively about when and if to use protesting. To be a student of these men and to attempt to implement their strategies is to realize that the solution doesn’t always lie in protesting and that, angry though we may be right now (I say ‘we’ because I, too, am infuriated by the hard-hearted callous of these men), we must look objectively and decide IF our best course of action is a protest. And, for my part, with what I know now, I don’t believe it is.

Again, I appreciate your passion in regards to this. If we can get all the competent, intelligent, and pasisonate voices talking about real ideas, solutions, and courses of action, then we’re moving into a position to make it happen and end the suffering of all these people.

This organization was the brain child and the creation of a man that everyONE here holds in very high esteem - Bono.

Bono’s current activism for Africa started almost ten years ago with the “Drop the Debt” movement out of which grew DATA, ONE, EDUN and (RED) - props to Tamsin for the post that she did in (BLOG) RED where I also post.

That movement (Drop the Debt) had at one of its helms a young man, Jaime Drummond, who would befriend Bono and become his close associate. They would later go on and start DATA, along with Lucy Mathew in 2002.

Out of DATA’s advocacy for Africa would come ONE - a vision that Bono had to build a GRASSROOTS movement across the American heartland for Africa.

That is our movement’s history.

What is missing in all these responses was that the SPARK which lit the fire to start these organizations was Bono’s experiences with the “Drop the Debt” movement - a massive civil society uprising in Europe with massive demonstrations and rallies at G8 summits and other meetings.

There are pictures of Bono and his friends at these rallies, linking arms with other protesters, demanding that the G8 RESPOND TO THE WISHES OF MILLIONS OF PEOPLE AROUND THE WORLD!

And they did.

OUR MOVEMENT HAD ITS ROOTS IN NON-VIOLENT PROTEST !

If it was good enough for us then, why is it not good for us now if these politicians won’t listen to our petitions and our phone calls?

Dr. King, Mohandas Gandhi, Cesar Chavez, the anti-apartheid movement out of which I came as a student organizer, Aung San Suu Kyi and the People of Burma, the DaLai Lama and the People of Tibet - all these historic movements have used/are using non-violent demonstrations as a part of their strategy to gain social justice.

NONVIOLENT SOCIAL PROTEST IS THE GENESIS OF OUR MOVEMENT - it’s amazing that this knowledge is missing from the responses here.

If this strategy was good enough for us to use ten years ago when the G8 was deaf to our voices for the world’s poor, what makes it an anathema now for us to CONSIDER to use a s A strategy for Africa’s Future?

As Bono challenged us - ARE YOU WILLING TO LAY YOUR LIFE ACROSS THE TRACKS TO SAVE MILLIONS OF AFRICAN LIVES?

I certainly am. What about you?

AS ONE, debbie

First, I want to make clear that I most definitely wasn’t suggesting/implying/endorsing any kind of any disobedience. I agree that this setback is heartless and absurd, but at day’s end, it really is just one setback. No more heartless or absurd than any of the other setbacks seen daily. I hate it with my entire being that it wasn’t passed now, in light of the potential effect it could have at the G8 Summit, as well, but I can’t say we are at a place where anybody needs to do anything rash.

However, I also do not agree that all we can do as voters or ONE members is hold our own senators accountable (I assume that’s what was meant by “being responsible to”). I agree that it is our responsibility to make sure PEPFAR gets reauthorized in July, but let’s not forget that, with this decision, President Bush has no example to take to the G8 summit, and that this is merely another delay in getting the people the help they need.

I mainly asked who was responsible for the hold, not to enact “excuses,” but because I am in the habit of calling my Senators (McCaskill, D-MO and Bond, R-MO) when they don’t vote with us and letting them know I’m disappointed (always kindly and peaceably). The Senate seats 100 members, as you know, and only knowing one name leaves three other dissenting senators. That leaves 912,576 remaining combinations of Senators, even NOT counting Sen. Kennedy. I wanted to make sure Sen.s Bond nor McCaskill were among them.

I think the best way to put it was what someone involved in a Bread for the World meeting once told me: “activism for the poor is like driving a car. Keep looking forward, but don’t forget what’s behind you, either.” I intend to put my efforts into getting PEPFAR passed in July, but I will not forget Senators Sessions, Vitters, or DeMint opposed passing this now, in time for the G8 summit and so that everyone could spend the next weeks moving on to something else.

Thanks to Sammi for the level-headedness and strategy…way to stay on-task and sensible.
And thanks again, Debbie, for both the information and the intensity.
You’re both assets.

Peace. Out.
Eric M.