News Briefs 3.19.03

He comes in peace

A
world on the brink of war. Terrorism. Murder. Brutal dictatorships. Who’s to
blame? For most people, it’s “them.” We believe we’d have a more just and
peaceful world if only “they” would change and be more like “us.” But how do we
change others or an unjust society? Sulak Sivaraksa, a Buddhist peace activist
who will speak in Rochester, believes he knows what it takes to affect change.
“Radical transformation of society,” he says, “requires personal and spiritual
change first or at least simultaneously.” In other words, a better, more
compassionate world begins with working on yourself; you can’t change them
until you change yourself.

            Sivaraksa, who’s from Thailand, is a
proponent of “socially engaged spirituality.” For him, a spiritual person
doesn’t hide from the world. “To be truly religious,” he writes, “is not to
reject society but to work for social justice and change.” This is a different
view of Buddhism especially for people who think Buddhists stay in monasteries,
rejecting the world. That, says Sivaraksa, can happen but shouldn’t. He
believes that people sometimes have to withdraw from the world for a time but
they must stay engaged with the world and its problems. If not, he says, “that
withdrawal becomes an escape.”

            Although a Buddhist, Sivaraksa’s
message and talk isn’t solely for Buddhists. Sivaraksa and his organization,
the Sanithirakoses-Nagapateepa Foundation (SNF) have worked with a number of
different religious groups, including Quakers and Sufis in this country and
Muslims in Southeast Asia. “It will offer a Buddhist perspective,” says Donna
Kowal, one of the people helping to bring him to Rochester, “but the talk will
more broadly address engaged spirituality.” There are, obviously, many
religions and, says Sivaraksa, “…many descriptions of the religious experience.
But all come back to becoming less and less selfish.”

            Sulak Sivaraksa’s talk will be held
Thursday, March 20, at the Visual Studies Workshop, 31 Prince Street, at 7pm.
Info: donna@rzc.org.

—
Joseph Sorrentino

Uninsured
get their week

As
national “Cover the Uninsured Week” drew to a close, the Jewish Community Federation hosted a kind of summation: a
March 14 Interfaith Breakfast with religious leaders and health-care professionals.
The event and campaign grew out of work by the New Jersey-based Robert Wood
Johnson Foundation and other groups.

            Temple Beth El’s Rabbi Raphael Adler
opened with an aphorism. “Sometimes God is very big or very small,” he said.
“And sometimes God is very small indeed, [like] an uninsured child.” Later,
Roman Catholic Bishop Matthew Clark noted his denomination “advocates for a
more just distribution of the goods of our society.” Then keynoter Bonnie
DeVinney, director of the Finger Lakes Health Systems Agency, put some numbers
on the problem.

            Locally in 2000, said DeVinney, 90
percent of adults and 98 percent of children had health insurance. That still
leaves a large number uninsured, of course, but further problems complicate the
picture. For example, said DeVinney, a significant number of local people are
“discontinuously insured” — they occasionally fall through the cracks through
job loss or change of family status.

            Then there are the intertwined
issues of race, ethnicity, and class: According to DeVinney, 21 percent of
local Hispanics are uninsured, as are 31 percent of local residents who live
below the poverty line.

            Which way are we headed? Budget
cuts, and the politics behind them, have brought in new procedures that hold
things up. For example, said DeVinney, some Medicaid applicants are
experiencing delays in processing, and in the private sector, some employers are
shifting more of the burden of health premiums onto their workers.

            As part of her presentation,
DeVinney showed a slide with a kind of bottom line: “Lack of health insurance
is now the sixth leading cause of death for people under 65.”

            “What more can we do?” asked
DeVinney. We must understand, she said, who’s at risk for being uninsured —
and realize that the ranks of the uninsured now hold lots of suburbanites as
well as city residents. And, she said, we should know how to hook people up
with assistance like “Medigap” (additional coverage for seniors on Medicare)
and low-cost or free health services.

            During a discussion of employers and
health insurance, we pointed out that some Canadian localities advertise
government-provided health benefits as a plus. Indeed, businesses that
re-locate north of the border don’t have to bother at all with health
insurance. Have Rochester-area businesspeople taken note? “We have not had that
discussion about health care,” said DeVinney.

            Not that there isn’t government
intervention here. As the Catholic Family Center’s Marvin Mich told the
interfaith group, New York State is now moving large numbers of people from
Medicaid to the state’s Child Health Plus and Family Health Plus programs. That
saves money but may provide less coverage.

ArtWalk’s
gay add-on

Rochester’s
ArtWalk could soon have a significant work of public art commemorating the gay rights movement and honoring the
local gay community.

            A new group called the
Atlantic-Beacon Sculpture Committee has begun to work with ArtWalk activists,
who’ve already installed various sculptures along recently upgraded walkways at
the University-Atlantic intersection. The Sculpture Committee’s plans call for
a “visual representation of Stonewall” — that is, the 1969 uprising in New
York City’s Greenwich Village that catalyzed the contemporary gay and lesbian
struggle.

            A competitive design submission
process is job one, says a committee news release. Moreover, the committee
plans “to create a non-profit gay community foundation/organization to promote
the ideals of Stonewall.”

            For information, contact the
committee by e-mail: ABSC14607@aol.com.

Correcting
ourselves

A
production error caused two images in last week’s Calendar to be reversed. The
image with the City’s Choice on Vinnie Massaro (by Judy Levy) was supposed to
run with the City’s Choice on Gallery 15’s Memory
and Identity show. And vice versa. Our apologies to the artists and
galleries.

This article appears in Mar 19-25, 2003.