“This time”—my friend stood over a sinkful of dirty dishes, a stricken expression on her face—”I’m voting as if my life depended on it.” Extreme energies of hope and fear are rising and ricocheting over every city and town in the nation. I wish there were a way to harness a forcefield of this magnitude: …
Judging from my friends’ reactions (and the level of unrest in the Blogosphere and Punditstan), Sarah Palin’s nomination has unleashed a tidal wave of fear and despair large enough to sweep defeat from the jaws of victory—unless we can master this reactivity and get on with winning the election.
People keep sending me outraged emails about Barack Obama’s pandering to the reactionary Israel lobby, AIPAC, and on the merits, of course I agree with his critics. He has taken precisely the same hard-right line on Israel and Palestine as Clinton, McCain, and let’s see…. Oh yes, everyone I can recall who has gotten close …
A couple of weeks ago, Adam Liptak of the New York Times reported from the front lines of the U.S. prison-industrial complex: The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners. Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a …
I have been trying to clear my mind of obstacles so I can think without the impediments created by attachment to things as they appear to be. If that sounds a little abstract, imagine a farmer prying stumps or boulders out of a field before plowing and sowing; or a painter smoothing and priming a …
Thousand Kites, the project started by artists to awaken our national conscience to the realities of our prison-industrial complex—the planet’s biggest and most costly, bar none—has launched a great new Web site where you can learn about and make use of theater, video, audio and other tools to involve your community. You can share stories, …
I’ve been a cultural activist all my life, so where I stand on the question of culture is clear: with Augustin Girard when he wrote more than 30 years ago that “Culture concerns everyone and it is the most essential thing of all, as it is culture that gives us reason for living, and sometimes …
My desire to believe there is progress in human history is strong. Clearly, there is change: more people, more stuff, more (or at least different) dangers, more (or at least different) pleasures. But can anything be said with certainty, anything more than “Things change”? Yes, amidst all of the terrible suffering and soaring hopes of …
I spent the last few days with people whose work in the world combines art and social justice, mostly the community-based and collaborative work I’ve written about for decades. As a group, we tend to be simultaneously weary and hardy. The theme that comes to mind is from Pirke Avot (Ethics of the Fathers) 2:21: …
I had another birthday last week, on the whole an experience far superior to not having one. But growing older is such a crazy quilt of joy and angst: as the inner library of experience expands, you know more, see more, feel more, have more choice in almost every matter; and all the while, despite …