Children’s March for Kindness – December 11

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New York City Parents are organizing The Children’s March for Kindness + Kids Speak Out on December 11th at 12:30 pm in Central Park in NYC.
childrens-march-for kindness_Dec 11 2016

The purpose of this event is to empower children who have been upset by the recent election by enabling them to experience the positive change that they can make in their world when they stand up and speak out for their values in community.

The March will be followed by a Kids Speak Out, where children will speak from the bandshell stage on their thoughts and feelings about this election. We will also have a musical performance with Broadway singers, a children’s choir performance, sing-alongs, a reading by children’s author RJ Palacio from her award-winning novel Wonder, and distribution of Be Kind postcards that the children can write on and send to Donald Trump.

We want kids of all ages to be part of this March + Speak Out, with teens taking active roles, including serving as Marshals at the parade.

We need your participation and support! Please help us with our outreach by distributing the attached flyers [ EnglishSpanishArabic ] throughout your communities, schools, parent groups, political clubs, religious institutions, etc. We also need volunteers to help on the day of the March! Please contact us at: kidsmarch2016@gmail.com 

We need help funding the March and Kids Speak Out! We are trying to keep our costs as low as possible – the majority of expenses are due to renting the sound system and obtaining permits and insurance. If you would like to make a donation you can do so here: https://www.gofundme.com/kids-speak-out-march

We hope to see many of you on Sunday December 11th at 12:30 pm in Central Park, marching together with our children, and demonstrating the values of inclusion, kindness, diversity, curiosity, and openness that are the true bedrock of our city and country.

In solidarity,
Rachel Lavine

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Jacob’s Plan for a Trump Presidency

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Love Trumps Hate in Jacob's Plan

Love Trumps Hate in Jacob’s Plan

The United States made history on November 8th, but not the way that we expected. Instead of our first woman President, we elected someone with open contempt for our Constitution and democracy, an anti-Founding Father.

 

And the next morning Robbie and I had to tell our 10-year-old son Jacob that Donald Trump would be our next President.  His immediate reaction of fear, shock, and horror broke our hearts. Jacob told us how scared he was that he wouldn’t be safe. He wanted to know what would come next. He asked what would happen about global warming. And he worried about friends, a gay couple we had recently stayed with while canvassing in Ohio for Hillary Clinton.

“Are they going to be OK?,” he asked.

“Yes,” we told him, “they would be.”

“But they live in Ohio,” and he pointed to the map on the front page of the New York Times.

“See, it’s red. That means it went for Trump.  How will they be OK?”

We looked at him. The truth is that his fears are valid. But our reassurance is also true: You are safe. Our friends will be OK: they have each other, friends, family and community.

This election and Presidency is part of a process. We don’t like it, but sometimes in democracies things happen that we don’t like. And then we read him the comforting words that our Rabbi had sent us on how to live in painful times.  Yet Jacob is also right:  global warming will be infinitely harder to end now, along with a multitude of other vital issues.  And while we and our friends will be fine, so many others will not be.

Jacob processes his thoughts and feelings by drawing them out.  So, once he had overcome his initial shock, he began to draw a plan to deal with the Trump Presidency. His first drawing was an expression of pure aggression – he showed it to us and asked us what we thought.  “Well,” we said, “it looks very … Trumpian.”  He stared at us and back at his drawing, and then said, “that won’t work.”

Tossing his original drawing aside, Jacob came back with a clean sheet of paper. And together, as a family, Jacob and his two Jewish mothers drew up a plan. The very fact that the three of us are already a family, in every legal and emotional sense of that word, is the first refutation of so much of the hate and ignorance that has spewed out this campaign season.

So here’s Jacob’s Plan:

In Ohio, Jacob's Plan

Jacob canvassing in Ohio

  First, we decided, we needed to get stronger.

  Second, we want to spend more time with the people we love.

  Third, we will do more direct service helping others, because service requires us to see hardship and those whom it affects, and is also an active reminder that we do have the power to make change through our individual actions, however small.

  Fourth, The next step is to learn something new and hard, to surprise our minds and stay engaged.

  Fifth, and the last step? I’m sure you can guess. We go out and win back our country.

Jacob’s plan is a plan for, not a plan against. Jacob’s plan goes high, even though the winners went low.

The Trump voters want us to feel their rage and pain.  Well, we do.

There is no doubt that the Trump campaign was fueled by racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny and xenophobia. By the hate and fear of being economically displaced, of experiencing a supposedly natural order of female subordination being upended, of anticipating an American future that is racially, ethnically, and culturally diverse. And now the rest of us are experiencing the bleak inversion of that parade of horribles: a menacing white majority and cratering economy, the further degradation of our environment, the evisceration of Obamacare and the Voting Rights Act, the rollback of reproductive and civil rights.

So I don’t know if the putative reconciliation that is being tentatively invoked by some is a possibility. While we all may share the same spectrum of negative emotions, the basis of our fears is radically opposed, as are our proposed solutions. We all understand that economic instability needs to be addressed, but the root question of why it exists is not so easily agreed upon – much less its redress.

That real divide does not make the problem of inequality and instability any less urgent. Nor does one season of successful political and social bullying determine the course of American history. Dahlia Lithwick has written an incredible piece in Slate asking whether Americans and our democratic institutions will bend to one man’s will and version of the law?

We say: we will not bend.  Though if we are going to fight for our country, its political institutions, and its Constitution, we need a plan.

Our family taped Jacob’s plan up on our fridge to remind us every day of what we must do to win next time. It’s our plan on how we’re going to move forward as a family, and as a country.

What’s your plan?

In solidarity,

Rachel Lavine

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Life After DOMA: It Gets Better (And More Real)

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After DOMA was overturned by the United States Supreme Court in Windsor, a good friend (and extraordinary advocate) Mary Bonauto asked my wife Robbie Kaplan if she felt personally different after the decision.
After DOMA

Robbie Kaplan and Rachel Lavine at the White House

Meaning that, while everyone understands that the overturn of DOMA legally affects every married gay and lesbian individual and couple, granting us a multitude of hitherto withheld economic, social and legal rights, did that legal/social change make Robbie feel differently as a person? Robbie said yes. And I certainly feel yes.

Yes, after DOMA there is the sudden and shocking relief of real rights, real respect.  It’s as if  having been used to living in a cramped, dark, airless space- so familiar it didn’t even feel confining, the door was opened and your sense of dignity and self-worth, which you didn’t even realize had felt imprisoned and distorted, was set free. Because we didn’t know what we didn’t know: we had never received the automatic respect and recognition of our marriages and families that are afforded to all other married U.S. citizens, so we didn’t really understand on a cellular level what it felt like to have that respect withheld from us. We knew what homophobia felt like: what dislike, contempt, disrespect, discrimination, fear, anger, lack of security, anxiety for our children – we all knew what that felt like.

But we couldn’t really understand the inverse: the automatic sense of self, of comfort and safety that is afforded to you and your family when your government and your society recognize you. When it states with its full authority that you and your family are equal, that you are the same as every other American citizen. We just didn’t know what that joy and relief and self-respect would feel like.

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