Broken windows and this nation's priorities

So….let me get this straight. We can’t deploy federal resources or the national guard to provide masks and protective equipment to doctors and nurses fighting a pandemic….

But can mobilize these forces to deploy around the country within 48 hours of the first window breaking at a protest.

We can’t put together a coordinated response to actually address COVID19 through widespread testing and contact tracing of the immediate contacts of anyone hospitalized from it – or put in place a detailed plan for reopening that was written by Harvard scientists to allow the country to be open SAFELY by early July at a cost of approximately $70 billion….

But we can give away $4 trillion to the same corporations that robbed this country’s economy blind in the 2008 crisis, allowing the NASDAQ to soar to near its pre-pandemic high at the end of May.

We can’t extend unemployment benefits for the over 30 million Americans who recently filed for unemployment, because Mitch McConnell and his pals continue to sit on the bill, which is ready to pass…

But we can demand that people return to work in unsafe conditions where they will likely get sick, in order to pad the pockets of the billionaire business owners they work for.

We can’t convict killer cops…

But we can allow a President who uses coded language (“when the looting starts, the shooting starts”) to signal to his white supremacist base that they can move forward with their plans for a race war.

And then after all this, I’m supposed to be concerned about some broken windows at high-end shops, while police attack and brutalize people exercising their first amendment rights to peaceably assemble all across this country?

Hmm. Somehow broken windows at Louis Vuitton are NOT my top priority right now.

Are they yours???

The Death of Ziad Hassan

I remember the death of Ziad Hassan. He was making coffee for his family. The whole town was under closure. The year was 2002. The Israelis came in, as they did every dawn, creeping with their humvees and their jeeps - this time they didn't bring in the tank. But later that same day they did, tearing up the streets of Qalqilia, taking down all the palm trees that were in the median strip of the main road in town, crunching the pavement into pieces of rubble. Ziad was shot before we were awake. But I was on the ambulance crew - just an observer, just a helpless fucking 'human rights observer', doing the same thing Rachel Corrie was doing when she was crushed to death by a Caterpillar D9 bulldozer made in Peoria, Illinois for standing in front of a doctor's home in Rafah with a megaphone trying to tell them to stop. She was braver than me, maybe. I didn't stand in front of the D9. But I saw it. I saw it in Qalqilia. I took pictures as it came barreling down the stree

Burst the Bubble - Break Down the Wall of Silence Around Palestine!

Habiba: 8-year old daughter of a journalist - friend of a friend - killed in Gaza It's November 3rd, 2023. I am sitting here in Portland Oregon, the 'bubble within a bubble' as my friend from Jerusalem calls it. And I know that this is true - that this city is a bubble within a bubble - because somehow there seem to be two realities that are somehow coexisting, and I cannot reconcile that in my head or in my heart. For the past three weeks, my life has consisted of a constant stream of horror from Gaza - from morning until night, I scroll through images of burned and mutilated bodies, mothers screaming, fathers breaking down and crying as they hold the lifeless bodies of their kids. Another day, another massacre, this time in Jabalia refugee camp - and the videos show the before and after: kids and adults gathered in a circle in an open square. Then someone pointing to the sky and everyone running. Six missiles hit, all in a row, killing 400 people. Screams of horror, gray

Journal from New Orleans Post-Hurricane Katrina (15th anniversary edition)

On the fifteenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, I thought it an appropriate time to share my journal from those days, 15 years ago, when I rushed to New Orleans to do what I could in the wake of the hurricane. I happened to be in Portland, Oregon when Katrina hit New Orleans (followed by the breaking of the levees and the flooding). I was helping my sister with her baby at the time, and not paying too much attention to the news....the first warning I got that things were bad, really bad, in New Orleans, was when i heard a friend's voice on the radio, the Tuesday after the storm. My ears perked up when I heard his voice, then when I heard what he was saying I found myself next to the radio, clutching it with disbelief, “I'm here in Memorial Hospital in New Orleans”, he was saying. “The water is rising...There's no electricity, the people on life support are dying and we're running out of water.” His cell phone then cut off, and the radio station wasn't able

Notes from the Transition

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