There is no more powerful reminder that something has value than to see another risk everything to embrace it. Brave immigrants have been marching this week through my memories, reminding me that the essence of human freedom is to stand and be counted. My ancestors have been immigrants much longer than I know or can …
I love the idea of protected public space within the culture. National parks are the physical analog for the kind of thing I’m talking about: public libraries, public radio, monuments and murals of the type muralist Judy Baca calls “sites of public memory.” These are spaces of meaning freely available to each and every one …
In my last essay, I quoted a line of Paul Goodman’s from forty years ago: “So we drift into fascism. But people do not recognize it as such, because it is the fascism of the majority.” I have been thinking about it ever since, with growing alarm. In one way, it seems insane to call …
The good news is that the New York Times broke the story about the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretaps of people in the United States, part of the National Security Agency’s “War on Civil Liberties”—er, I mean “War on Terror.” The bad news is they waited more than a year to do it, whether out of …
Very often these days, I am struck by the absurdity of our political situation: people of goodwill find themselves debating questions that in a less anxious and more humane moment would be no-brainers. Take Senator John McCain’s Anti-Torture Amendment to the defense appropriations bill. It would outlaw torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of …
Last week, amidst the news of earthquakes, storms and governmental misdeeds, I sat around the dinner table with half a dozen friends, having “the conversation”–you know the one I mean. These conscientious, thoughtful people contribute a great deal of time and resources to heal the earth and create more just societies. But on this evening, …
We who attended school in the U.S. have a little chip in our collective unconscious that gets activated this time of year. It happened to me as I walked by the water yesterday afternoon. Even though I’m not planning a vacation and don’t have kids in school, something about the angle of the sun and …
This month marks the first anniversary of Arlene’s blog. In one of my first posts, I wrote about a consulting project I was doing with Global Kids’ Newz Crew Project, which involves high school-age kids in online dialogues about global issues. As I am a certifiable fogey, this project also gives me a chance to …
The headlines from Lebanon have propelled my imagination years into the past, to the period in the late eighties and early nineties when my current ideas about social change first took shape. In news photos, we see massive crowds in Beirut, waving flags and asserting their right to self-rule like so many figures out of …
This weekend I revisited the writings of Martin Luther King, looking for something to read in his honor at a gathering of friends. In my mind, he stands for eloquent justice in the face of stubborn privilege, and as far as it goes, that’s true. But taking him literally, he stands so much more for …