Musings

Since the election most of the “what now?” articles I have read seem to be stuck in the old paradigm: Go on policy defense in DC backed by street action, build the party, and win next time with a better message and a better candidate. This is a failure of imagination that greatly underestimates what…

There are a few beings I love so very deeply that even the thought of them being harmed, suffering, or lost is totally unbearable to me. I instantly feel my heart ready to sob without restraint. One of those beings is Earth. My feelings upon first readings of the new administration’s attitudes and objectives regarding…

I. Let’s go to the mat To wrestle and to meditate Peace in the struggle. II. Take consolation In love, music, trees, the sea. The spirit rises. III. As I plant spring bulbs, Tears drench my face and the earth. Beauty might save us.

This man is a loose cannon barreling about the deck in stormy times and predictions can easily be way off the mark. As San Francisco Chronicle architecture critic John King wrote departing from his usual mainly esthetics-based criticism of infrastructure design in our region, we are facing “a future where all bets are off.” With…

I live in a red part of the biggest, bluest state, California. My representative in the US House is on Donald Trump’s transition team. A few kindred spirits gathered at my house on the first Sunday after the election, November 13, to celebrate the full moon, as usual, but this gathering felt like a funeral….

There is a dearth of meaning in American life rooted in the lack of a story, a story that truly liberates the human from limited forms of identity, from seeing ourselves as mere consumers, or even as mere Americans (or any of the sub-identities within our nationalist identity).… Americans tend to equate freedom with individualism…

  We do not know if a Trump administration will be globally catastrophic, or tend to revert to the neoliberal mean, or move in surprising directions. It is business as usual that has already set us on the path toward global ecological catastrophe: billions of poor, wars without end, and an ever expanding national security…

Part I Mama left us girl eggs with instructions: Paddle your way across the sand to the sea. I did that, mama! Swim out as far as you can, as fast as you can. Farther. Faster. Slip away from the ones that try to hurt you. I did that, mama! When you have eggs, come…

The United States Environmental Protection Agency will be decimated on January 20, 2017. There will likely be an agency still in existence with the name, but it will do nothing to stand in the way of the fossil fuel interests that have just taken over the United States federal government. It will for all practical purposes…

Though a journalouse and a wordsmutter myself, I, Padrollian Bassoonius, have read and listed to too many analusters about the Downhill Tromp insistering they know what the man is triumphing to say. Taking himcondon at his warps to be the chump of the working mad, I deciphered to cut to the cheese and call up…

December 2016, Mariana Islands. I was at my neighborhood store getting their 13-year-old who just came from China to speak English, and I’d shared all the pedagogical tricks I knew. She can retain words and speak the language, like naming the goods on display at her store, and pronounce all the words she can read….

Commentators like Timothy Snyder* miss the mark when claiming that a Trump presidency will equate with totalitarianism. We should beware, of course, that there will be assaults on some human rights, the wage gap will continue to expand, and current environmental regulations will be replaced. But the Trump era, like the neoliberal era, will be…

  11/27/2016 Toes pointing into black depths—face and arms arch, I scream inwardly—air bubbles blowing past my ears. Ten thousand things I want to shout, twelve to do.   Dance, laugh, and pray—to ease the shame, To bear the distaste inside my throat.   Cry and lie down by a cool rock—grasping dirt, Stroking moss,…

In an effort to cope with the anger and fear aroused in me by the election, I have turned to Holocaust literature for models of strength in crisis. I’m now reading the memoir And There Was Light by Jacques Lusseyran, a Frenchman who was blinded in a schoolyard accident when he was seven years old,…

On the morning of November 9, 2016, people around Planet Earth awoke to the realization that Donald J. Trump had been elected President of the United States. For some this was the answer to a prayer, for others the foreboding of impending disaster. Some were confused and dismayed, still others were just relieved that a…

Donald Trump as our next president! I think I woke up the day after the election in an alternate universe! I keep on hoping tomorrow it will be different, but no, this is the reality we live in now. My biggest fear is for Earth. Even without Trump, so much is endangered, so much is…

After the cruelty and violence of his campaign, the worst I have experienced in my lifetime, I still feel aghast, unbelieving that my country chose Donald Trump to be its president-elect. I feel that so many barriers to protect civility and decency, diversity and justice have been breached. The result is that no one on…

  I have, I suppose, more emotional feelings about your election legacy than most Aussies. I lived in the US of A twice during impressionable years of my life. Now I am eighty, very healthy in body and mind, and I feel it important to say something! In 1960 I lived in a black ghetto in…