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The Institute for Global Education opened its doors four decades ago. We have advanced causes of peace, justice, diversity, and non-violence in the West Michigan area. Think Globally Act Locally. We are now an all-volunteer organization and do this work with the financial and volunteer support of many friends like you.

In the past 40 years, we have accomplished much, but with your additional financial support, we can do even more. We have not asked for contributions in recent years but are asking now.

Two of our most dedicated workers died this year: Corrine Carey and Mike Franz. Their families have designated IGE as an organization to which you can make donations in their honor.

IGE appreciates donations at any level. IGE is a 501(C)(3) organization. This year, when you donate to IGE, there is up to a $300 deduction for cash donations (cash, check, credit & debit cards) without itemizing.

• Send a check to IGE
• Pay with a credit card through PayPal on our website
• Stop by with cash

We have peace and justice items including T-shirts, Yard signs and Buttons.  These, along with IGE memberships, make great holiday gifts.

Again, thank you for your ongoing support.

by RON IRVINE

I’ve been thinking a lot about peace, especially throughout September in light of the International Day of Peace. In a context of such polarization we are a long ways from being at peace in this country. So much of the cause of this and it’s expression is in the public realm. In my 62 years, I’ve never seen so much political and religious division from the deliberate use of a politics of violence and a language of war to express and provoke rage, hate, and fear. Social media and self constructed social silos leave us all living in very different realities based on our own pet alternative truths. We are going to have to solve these problems we have created or die, suffocating in our safe and secure bubbles of death. But these problems have become so complex that it will take years to unravel them, let alone solve them. 

But, in the meantime, peace is possible in the same way it has always been. It must begin within me. Outer turmoil always begins with inner turmoil. Peace out there is not possible without peace within. It is like a jar of water with dirt mixed in. When that jar is all shook up, it is no longer clear. But if we are patient with ourselves and just sit with it in stillness, eventually things will become settled and clear again. If we become still and settled, peace will return.

For more, please check out Living with Open Hands at ronirvine.wordpress.com

Ginsburg’s impact on women spanned age groups, backgrounds

By JOCELYN NOVECK September 21, 2020 GMT

“She was my teacher in so many ways,” said Gloria Steinem, the nation’s most visible feminist leader, in an interview. But even if she hadn’t known her personally, Steinem said, it was due to Ginsburg, who died Friday at 87 of complications of cancer, that “for the first time I felt the Constitution was written for me.”

“Now, it wasn’t written for me — it left out most folks, actually, when it was written,” Steinem added. But, she said, by forcing the courts to address issues like workplace discrimination, sexual assault and a host of others, Ginsburg “literally made me feel as if I had access to the law, because Ruth was there.”

But the extent of Ginsburg’s influence was felt not only by older women like Steinem, 86, who understood from experience the obstacles Ginsburg faced, such as not being able to find a job at a New York law firm despite graduating at the top of her class at Columbia Law School.

Younger women and girls also say they were inspired by the justice’s achievements, her intellect and her fierce determination as she pursued her career. Hawa Sall, 20, a first-generation college student in New York, said it was Ginsburg who inspired her to attend Columbia, where she’s now an undergraduate studying human rights and planning on law school.

“Her resilience, her tenacity, her graciousness through it all — she’s always been one of my biggest inspirations in life,” said Sall, who lives in Brooklyn where Ginsburg was born, and whose family comes from Mali and Senegal. “She’s what I’ve always wanted to be, and still want to be.”

Sall says she was fascinated by what she learned about Ginsburg when she attended an event at the Lower Eastside Girl’s Club in Manhattan for the 2015 book, “Notorious RBG,” by Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik (the title played on the name of Brooklyn rapper The Notorious B.I.G.) That book was part of a wave of rock-star like fame that enveloped Ginsburg in her later years on the bench, making her a hero to a younger generation: There was also a famed impression by Kate McKinnon on “Saturday Night Live,” a feature film, starring Felicity Jones as Ginsburg, and the hit documentary “RBG,” both in 2018.

Julie Cohen and Betsy West, who co-directed “RBG,” saw firsthand how women of all ages quickly identified with Ginsburg.

“We’d go to screenings … and afterward older women who had been through the kind of discrimination she faced as a young woman would be sobbing … because they knew what she was up against, and what she did to help them and their daughters and granddaughters,” West said.

But also, Cohen added: “She became a huge symbolic figure for young women and even girls in a way that we hadn’t anticipated. So many children came to the movie, often little girls dressed in little robes. … Girls seemed to find her just mesmerizing.”

West theorizes the fascination might have come from Ginsburg’s small stature. Her legacy, though, was nothing less than enormous, she said: “She changed the world for American women.”

It wasn’t just Democratic-leaning women who praised Ginsburg. Stacey Feeback, a 33-year-old Fayetteville, North Carolina, voter at a weekend rally for President Donald Trump, said the justice was “an inspirational woman.” 

“She meant a lot to the (women’s) movement,” Feeback said. “She’s been an inspiration. She’s brought America and women forward in a generation.”

Ginsburg first gained fame as a litigator for the Women’s Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, which she directed in the ’70s. The project marked “a real turning point for situating women’s rights not just as a gender issue, but as a civil rights issue that affected all of us,” said Ria Tabacco Mar, its current head.

At the time, the Supreme Court had never applied the Constitution’s guarantee of “equal protection of the laws” to strike down a law because of gender discrimination. That changed in 1971 with a case in which Ginsburg helped persuade the high court to invalidate an Idaho law that called for choosing men over women to administer the estates of the dead.

Two years later, she again prevailed — making her first oral argument before the high court she would later join — in the case of a female Air Force officer whose husband was denied spousal benefits that male officers’ wives automatically received.

“For every gender injustice that we see today, Ruth Bader Ginsburg saw it first, and she fought it first,” said Tabacco Mar.

Devi Rao, one of Ginsburg’s law clerks in 2013, said the justice had taught her that “law isn’t just about the law — it’s about the people whose lives are impacted by those laws.” 

Rao, who now works on appellate cases for a civil rights firm, said Ginsburg “distinguished herself in a man’s world and on a man’s court without looking like them or sounding like them, but simply because they couldn’t deny the power of her ideas. She teaches women and girls not to count themselves out even though they don’t look like those in power.” 

It’s that lesson that mothers like Brianne Burger hope their daughters will understand. Earlier this year, Burger posted a photo of her daughter Adi, 5, on Facebook, outfitted as RBG in black robe and glasses for a school dress-up day in Washington, D.C. The girl came home delighted, her mother said, that so many people recognized her costume.

“She still talks about that day,” said Burger. 

Asked what Adi understands about Ginsburg, the mother replied: “She knows that RBG made girls equal to boys.”

Associated Press writers Jennifer Peltz in New York, Jessica Gresko in Washington and Bryan Anderson in Fayetteville, North Carolina, contributed to this report.

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IGE member Janice Pugh died August 30, 2020 (b. February 28, 1948). Janice was confined to a wheelchair for many years due to a car accident. She was brave and interesting.  She is survived by her son Evan. There are no plans for a funeral or memorial at this time.  – Katie Villaire

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