Of all the powers in which I have placed my faith, my deepest and most lasting allegiance is to the power of speech. I eat, breathe, and sleep words. When I am lucky enough to happen on it, the delicious taste of le mot juste fills my mouth like melting chocolate. If words had volume, …
One thing I know for certain is that our struggles in the little world of our own hearts, minds, and relationships are inscribed on the big world that comprises the institutions, communities, and movements that human beings make. Turn the conventional assertion on its head: As below, so above. I was talking with a visiting …
Sometimes life delivers moments of irrefutable insight, shattering fragile illusions like so many soap-bubbles. Remember that post-Katrina telethon where Kanye West said, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people”? There was a great commotion, the President’s compassionate conservatism was vigorously asserted, West was condemned for incivility. Now, five years later, take a look at New …
Could everybody please stop for a minute and take a breath? A milestone has been reached, one we might best commemorate by a collective inhalation, sending a little oxygen to the national forebrain, which seems to be suffering the symptoms of acute deprivation. The scapegoating of Shirley Sherrod, the Agriculture Department official who was forced …
The gulf between practice and preaching is vast enough to swallow almost anything, but I am beginning to think we have something caught in our collective throat. Despite all our claims for the higher virtues of compassion, truth, and altruism, our common culture has persisted in attaching a positive presumption to material success. Those who …
As the U.S. pauses from work to celebrate freedom, what national liberation do you desire? At the risk of seeming ridiculous, I’d love the public interest to awaken from its self-imposed trance, putting the people’s business before self-serving politics. When a pig flies, you say? Look north, up in the sky, what’s that pink blob …
At times like this spring, when I’ve been on the move and meeting deadlines pretty much non-stop, my policy of blogging only when the spirit sparks me tends to bog down. Life takes on a hamster-wheel quality, and the poor pooped hamster has few insights worth sharing. My favorite philosopher, Isaiah Berlin, is famous for …
I’m heading home tomorrow, after being on the road for a couple of weeks, during which Arizona’s new and frightening anti-immigrant legislation was being passed, triggering vast and vastly appalled protest. I am glad to see from news photos that the scope of May Day protests exceeded expectations, but the photos also seem to say …
Last month, Representative George Miller introduced the “Local Jobs for America Act,” H. R. 4812, much-needed legislation “To provide funds to States, units of general local government, and community-based organizations to save and create local jobs through the retention, restoration, or expansion of services needed by local communities, and for other purposes.” The bill contains …
Passover starts Monday evening, the great celebration of liberation from bondage, both literal and figurative. For the first seder—the ritual meal of symbolic foods that accompanies the retelling of the Exodus from Egypt—I will be with friends whose lives are dedicated to progressive politics. I expect that in the telling, there will be many parallels …