Community is: you are just as scared as I am, but you know you cannot figure it out alone. You can't solve it so you hold onto the hand of the next person, grip really. Then they do the same, and the person next to them. It's like Matisse's painting "The Dance" some days.

But mostly it is like walking through the sky, not daring to look down.

I long for the day when civil rights are viewed the way that oxygen is: shared, essential and no less necessary to those whose morality is in doubt than they are to those with whom we sympathize. If the air is toxic nobody can breathe.The UN's website maintains the full text of this terrific refresher course in justice.

The Classics

Thinking about the poet John Forbes, for the first time in a while.

Running Out of Choices

Climate change - it's total impact on food prices, human costs from natural disasters, and in the context of a global economic slump- is, arguably, the instigator of a fearful zeitgeist, globally, that I think is being misdirected into all kinds of conservatism. We must direct our fear, instead, into action to offset and slow climate change and defend against climate disaster.

It is an interesting point in history. Just as the threat of nuclear war caused an uneasy truce to the arms race, I think climate disaster will ultimately result in a similar detente. What we are seeing now is the spinning wheels of fear.

Sexism is just one of the showers of sparks from those wheels.


Change is the only constant. This is not new. Some are already adapting to change.

Nick Cave-Into my Arms

Beauty stays longer

Beauty stays longer in some places, some faces, but none of us can lay claim to it forever except through forgetting ourselves and living.

Across the Wire

It is hard for me to understand how anyone could believe that guns make us safer. But when I walk around our neighborhood and see the probably-armed, probably-black teens who are committing most of the thefts around here, I almost, for a second understand the visceral ugly fear that would have one buy a gun and risk more lives rather than stand up and ask why all this is happening, stand up and make things better for that kid and every kid so that both the crime rate and gun violence are reduced. The argument that sickens me the most is that one must have a gun to "protect one's family". Protecting one child at the cost of another is not noble, not brave, not "patriotic". It's a rearrangement of miseries.

Nagging thought: Being an ordinary, nonviolent very young man in the U.S. today may be harder than anyone ever knows. The violent end of this age group spectrum is, to an extent, the canary in the coal mine. 

Here is a different point of view, one that I found refreshing: we need more courses in gender studies in community colleges.