Note: This blog entry was authored by AWTT Education Director Connie Carter, reflecting on her recent virtual visit with students in Roslindale, Massachusetts. On Friday I spent an hour talking with fourth grade students at Phineas Bates Elementary School. They had hosted four Americans Who Tell the Truth portraits in their classroom for a month […]
Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine is 73 years old. She has held her seat for 29 years. Graham Platner, her Democratic challenger this year is 41. She’s old enough to be his mother. Not likely, though, given their ideological, political, and moral differences. And, as far as anyone knows, she has no children. Nevertheless, […]
I painted Jonathan Kozol, educator, writer and champion of inner-city schools, in 2004. At that time I had resolved to paint 50 people with whom I could surround myself, people whose struggles toinsist that we live up to our proclaimed ideals of justice and equality had made a difference, people who modeled the courageous citizenship […]
People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction. – James Baldwin Years ago, in the 1970s, when I was first living in Maine, industrial logging, clear cutting, and aerial insecticide spraying by paper companies were contentious issues. The nascent environmental movement raised the alarm about the health ramifications of these practices […]
Just a few weeks ago we removed the portrait of Noam Chomsky from the AWTT gallery because of his association with the sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein. As far as we know Chomsky himself was not involved in sexual abuse of girls, but he assisted Epstein in protecting his reputation from negative exposure. Even though Chomsky […]
All my pretty ones?Did you say all? O hell-kite! All?What, all my pretty chickens and their damAt one fell swoop? – Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act IV, Scene 3 One of the hardest truths to understand about Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza is the deliberate targeting of children. Children and babies have been bombed, burned, mutilated—killed […]
When I was a college student in the late 1960s in Boston, I went to a teach-in at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge to hear Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky talk about the context of the Vietnam War—the history of the United States backing French colonialism in Vietnam, and, after the defeat of the French […]
Connie Carter, AWTT Director of Education offers these thoughts. Believe your eyes, believe your eyes, and not the eyes of those who would deceive you – believe your eyes! Hold out your hands, hold out your hands, across the land to neighbors who are frightened – hold out your hands! Come move your feet, come […]
Recently I can’t shake the image of a cat heaving up a hairball. It’s a head-to-tail, coast-to-coast undertaking, the cat’s whole body rhythmically contracting with the effort to separate itself from its indigestible residue—very much like the stinky stuff that plugs the trap under the bathroom sink. The cat’s straining, undulating, Massachusetts-to-California heaving, mouth gaping like San […]
When I was just a baby, my mama told me, “SonAlways be a good boy, don′t ever play with guns”But I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.When I hear that whistle blowin’, I hang my head and cry (oh yeah!) – Johnny Cash, Folsom Prison Blues One of the curious aspects […]