Rest well, friends, but get ready, too
I understand there are times on a battlefield when everyone is exhausted and demoralized. Maybe the fighting has been very intense for a long time. Maybe there has been a break in the fighting and it feels nearly inconceivable to have to get up and fight again. … And yet, the enemy is on the march. Here they come. The stakes are just as high as before. You have made significant advances, but the battle has not been won.
In a little over a year, we face mid-term elections here in the U.S…
There are many comments here in agreement with this article, and many of us are still totally alarmed and watching all of this unfold with bated breath. Many here are asking: But what can we DO? I believe it is worth our further efforts to protect our democracy--as influential as it is globally--and the lives of women, POC, transgendered, Jews, Muslims and others. I suggest donating to Democratic campaigns and phonebanking again as we did in 2020. Getting out the POC vote. Getting out the blue vote. Also, donate and volunter with People's Action and Swing Left. I suppose, get ready to hit the streets too. We are all exhausted, but these next two and four years are our tipping point. We will succeed or fail at the "American Experiment." The time is now.
Thank you for this essay. I have recently been invited to co-host a radio show at the Monterey Bay and Santa Cruz radio station, KSQD (!) and my first show, this Friday (May 21) will be about this. I came up with the same title as you for this essay. The show will be at 3 pm Pacific Time, if you want to join in. www.KSQD.org ...
“Seriousness, like life, is a thought … and this thought creates a feeling. And if you create the feeling of seriousness, then you are in a very serious state …
“You are very liable to have stress, strain, sickness and unhappiness and jealousy and everything else … Now, seriousness doesn’t help you do anything in life, but destroy yourself.” — Sydney Banks
In hindsight, I don’t think I quite knew what was coming.
For many years, I cared about climate change. Probably since before Al Gore’s first movie put to rest much of the misinformation that had been flying around…
And Why We Need To Impeach Now
- During the national election in 2016, the Trump campaign and the Russians (colluding or not) engaged in massive efforts to suppress the Black vote, the young, “progressive vote” (Bernie Bros, etc.) and others in key states, including Michigan.
- (Author’s note: I have personal experience with this because my girlfriends called the Trump campaign on a lark, and were told to go to polls and intimidate likely Dem voters from voting. Also, my half-black cousin was called a “N****r” and verbally attacked by a Trump supporter at her polling place in Michigan). …
Calls for “unity,” forgiveness and “let’s all get along” may seem compassionate and wise, but are they? … with reflections on MLK’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”
This summer, my new young girlfriend was nearly killed by a Trump supporter in a white pickup truck. He careened around police barricades, his license plates duct taped so they could not be read. And he headed straight for her. A black activist, at a legal and peaceful protest — seventeen years old, still in high school, her hair usually bound up in pigtails at the top of her head. …
I live in a seaside town, not too far from San Francisco. As many conservatives will immediately assume, we are known as a “liberal” enclave. We sport a lot of health food stores, organic farms, a Black mayor (our first), a highly active Democratic Socialist chapter, a lot of Bernie supporters, an Extinction Rebellion chapter … and we’ve got a lot of hippies living in our woods, running on solar, marijuana and hu-manure. Our city police department helps organize the annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Day march, along with the NAACP.
Given all this, I used to think we were…
I’ve been deeply researching the climate and eco-crises for some time now, as well as experiencing the physical changes, extreme weather events and frightening mass extinction events happening in my own personal world. Alarmed, I even helped found an Extinction Rebellion chapter in my hometown on the California coast.
Sometimes, I have hope. Sometimes, I don’t. A lot of the time, I feel like this …
Well, folks: Here we are on the Titanic! …
The accelerating cascade of news about the frightening, exponential rate of global heating due to human-caused green house gase emissions (GHG’s) — and “feedback loop” systems of GHG’s released from the arctic tundra, seas and elsewhere due to rapid planetary melting of snow and ice has many of us considering our carbon footprints with a bit more gravity than before.
Greta Thunberg, our role model purist and a personal Shero, chose to take a carbon-free sail boat from Europe to New York to speak before the United Nations and generally, does not fly. …
There is no doubt we live in dark, exterior times. For many of us, we never thought things would come to this. Whether we call this “late stage capitalism,” the rotten fruits of “corporatism” or the inevitable products of regressed human consciousness (insecurity, greed, imagined separation), it all looks rather s**t at the moment.
My friends in the UK, post-election, are currently in a bit of shock and despair. “Welcome to the club,” I’ve said.
I have in the last few years despaired at our tacit, universal acceptance of nearly complete electronic surveillance; the crumbling of democracy and truth under…
Ami Chen Mills-Naim
Author, coach, teacher & former investigative journalist: San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner, Inc. Magazine, Metro SJ, Recipient of 3 CNPA First Place awards.
