I’m recuperating from arthroscopic knee surgery I had earlier this week. Not sure if it’s the pain or the drugs that are giving me a somewhat distanced perspective on our national shitshow of a presidential campaign, but suddenly the whole thing has the aspect of a miniature landscape viewed from a great height. As nearly …
“Something is happening here but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?” Bob Dylan “The law of unintended consequences is never broken.” I thought I would find many citations when I googled this, but since I found none, I’ll attribute it to myself. Quite a few people I know have been expressing …
If I hear one more person (however grudgingly) admire the Republicans’ “long game” and compliment them on masterminding a fifty-year strategy to overturn a longstanding consensus on rights, bodily autonomy, guns and more, I’ll scream. In fact, I’ve screamed already. It’s not that the U.S. Right doesn’t long for a Big Daddy and eagerly follow …
NOTE: Today is Human Rights Day. I’m republishing this blog from Human Rights Day 2019 because its message bears repeating. Incidents of racialized violence in the US are as numerous as grains of sand, and in one of the specific categories I mentioned, anti-semitic incidents in the US, 2019 saw a record-breaking total of 2,107, …
When Starbucks founder Howard Schultz announced a few days ago that he was exploring a 2020 run for President as a “centrist independent,” progressive social media exploded with reasons to reconsider. Op-eds proliferated, people began leafleting Starbucks and protesting at Schultz’s speaking engagements. A chief objection is the reality that Jill Stein, running as the …
Prosper Kompaore shared a proverb from his home country of Burkina Faso: “How is it that sky-high termite mounds can be made by such tiny insects?” he asked. The answer, counseling determination, endurance, commitment and plenty of sustenance: “It takes earth and earth and earth…” Community, Culture and Globalization It is not given you to …
Back in the day, I had a quote from Wilhelm Reich* over my desk: The nature of the trap has no interest whatsoever beyond this one crucial point: WHERE IS THE EXIT OUT OF THE TRAP? It was the resonant wisdom of this sentence and not the cult of its author that drew me. As …