Writers and Artists at Eastern:

Don't forget that the CitiZine takes submissions from students at Eastern!

We would like to share your artwork and/or ideas, so feel free to send us your work! If you want to contribute to the conversation at Eastern, you can email us at:

citizinepaper@gmail.com

On a separate note, we just want to encourage you to still have Haiti in your prayers. It has been almost three weeks since the earthquake hit, and sometimes it is easy to lose interest after the initial shock wears off. There are still people suffering, who will continue to suffer in many ways for a long time to come, and they need prayers and physical support.

Phil Ochs!

Here's a great song by Phil Ochs, a protest singer in the 1960s, called "I ain't marching anymore":

Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day!

In April of 1960, Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote an essay called "Pilgrimage to Nonviolence". Here is a link to the full essay (it is worth reading the whole article), and some select quotations. Let us not forget King's convictions about pacifism and how they drove the movement, and let us consider how he would respond to war mongering among Christians today.

"During recent months I have come to see more and more the need for the method of nonviolence in international relations. While I was convinced during my student days of the power of nonviolence in group conflicts within nations, I was not yet convinced of its efficacy in conflicts between nations. I felt that while war could never be a positive or absolute good, it could serve as a negative good in the sense of preventing the spread and growth of an evil force. War, I felt, horrible as it is, might be preferable to surrender to a totalitarian system. But more and more I have come to the conclusion that the potential destructiveness of modem weapons of war totally rules out the possibility of war ever serving again as a negative good. If we assume that mankind has a right to survive, then we must find an alternative to war and destruction. In a day when sputniks dash through outer space and guided ballistic missiles are carving highways of death through the stratosphere, nobody can win a war. The choice today is no longer between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence."

Following Evo Morales

Evo Morales, the first indigenous president of Bolivia, was reelected in early December and is continuing to bring change to the nation. It is interesting to see him become more active and outspoken in the international community, like his recent role in the Copenhagen talks on climate change and his work instituting land reform.

During an address to other world leaders, Morales stated that any increase in global temperature over 1 degree Celsius would cause a holocaust in Africa. Here is a video interview from Democracy Now! with Evo Morales, where he makes the connection between capitalism and destruction of our climate:



Yesterday, NPR published a story on Evo Morales and his agrarian reform. He promised during his campaign to distribute land among Bolivia's poor, and has already begun working towards that goal. Listen to the story here.