Yesterday afternoon, from 4:30 to 5:30 p.m., 17 men and women dressed all in black, stood in a line on the street in the little village of Blue Hill, Maine. Each of us held an empty pot, open end toward the road, and a wooden spoon. We were bearing witness to the starvation in Gaza enforced by […]
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all crueltyto know what occurs but not recognize the fact. – William Stafford, from A Ritual to Read to Each Other I don’t want to be writing this. Probably there are better things for me to be doing. Especially because the massacre in Gaza has been […]
A friend asked me to write a little essay about being astonished. Astonished? . . . My first thought was a glass of cool water. Drinking it. The mysterious and momentary sublimity of that. Its sensuous, animal satisfaction, its poetic wonder. And then, water itself. A miracle. What is the direct line from the Big Bang to […]
“It was a dreadful thing to see. Human beings can be awful cruel to one another.” — Huck Finn
Right below the surface, like the rotting body of a drowned Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon, is the stinking, smug racism of Donald Trump as he attempts to remove institutionalized efforts toward Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) from governmental, educational, and corporate practice. He wants white people to feel victimized by DEI – as though five-hundred […]
“Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. . . . Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a law-breaker, it breeds contempt for the law: it invites every man to become a law unto himself, it invites anarchy.” – Louis Brandeis Friends, I just watched the second inauguration of Donald Trump. I suspect many […]
Friends, Donald Trump has promised that his first official act as president will be as a dictator. My first act – waking up on November 6th to the news of his election – was to apologize to all living plants and creatures on this planet. Trump will not be their executioner, that process has been […]
Here we are, nearly 80 years after the seeming end of WWII, the war Americans like to call the Good War, the war that left much of Europe in ruins, a war that killed over 50 million people – most of them civilians, a war that featured a horror show of atrocities – the Holocaust, the dropping […]
Chaos Comes Calling: The Battle Against the Far-Right takeover of Small Town Americaby Sasha Abramsky, Bold Type Books 2024 I was talking recently with a leading educator from Washington County, the poorest county in Maine and home of some of its most conservative politics. He told me two disturbing things. One is that difficult emotional […]
Yesterday, July 27, 2024, on a beautiful, hot summer day, I was arrested along with eight other peace activists while blocking the entrance to the parking lot at Bath Iron Works (BIW) in Bath, Maine. The shipyard at BIW builds an ever growing flotilla of enormous and enormously expensive warships which patrol all the world’s […]
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