It’s easy to look out at the world and despair, to ask what point there is in donating to nonprofits, voting, protesting, calling your elected officials, writing Op-Eds. There is no shortage of anecdotes and pithy quotes to rebut that […]
Unfortunately, many of us, especially activists and other change agents, understand far too little about what works and doesn’t, why some protests fizzle out and others lead to transformational change.
While what happens on Twitter–the memes, the controversies–may not resonate with or represent the experiences of the general electorate, many of the trends are illustrative of, and often exacerbate, fundamental challenges to our democracy. Consider so-called Hot Takes, which are […]
I choose to make a stand on the beaches even as the waters rise and the sun bears down hotter than ever. And I choose to do so with a spirit of love, joy, righteous anger, and deep sadness.
It is a fallacy to claim that because only one political party opposes this rising threat, fighting for the preservation of American democracy is a partisan issue. If a train is on the verge of crashing into a group of pedestrians, the political affiliation of the conductor is immaterial to the task at hand: saving lives.
“The earth is not dying, it is being killed, and those who are killing it have names and addresses.” – Utah Phillips Of all that the so-called Facebook Papers revealed, most interesting, I think, is the fact that on social […]
The Big Lie that fueled an attempted coup now forms the basis of an entire political party’s strategy for holding on to power: make it hard for people who are likely to vote the “wrong way” to cast a ballot, label any election they lose as fraudulent, and slowly give themselves the power to overturn elections they disagree with.
Justice can only be achieved by the judicious application of power. Yet all around me I see emergencies–climate change, a Republican party rapidly descending into full-on authoritarianism, a shockingly unequal global distribution of COVID-19 vaccines–and good people failing to use […]
Even after he came close to ending the American experiment, the vast majority of Republicans, including those backed by Koch, continue to stand with the former president. America’s political illness has led to great suffering, death, and inequity.
Sometimes, taking a break from the news and work,
I’ll spot the collected works of this or that poet
and, for a moment, have context for despair.