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???

Israel: USA's "Mini-Me" - Settler/Colonial Reflections

Israeli is a microcosm of the USA. It's like a little miniature version of the settler-colonial state that took over the entirety of turtle island from "sea to shining sea" between the 1600s and the 1800s, and which continues its viral, foul spread through today. We vaporized the coal mines - turned all that dust and soot - the pit where generations of coughing miners lived and died underground, into our atmosphere - creating a massive hole in our ozone layer, a layer of protection made of O3 molecules that keeps the sun warm but not too hot, keeps us all warm and cozy inside. Without it, we have extreme weather patterns, like those we have started to see across the globe - higher oceans, bigger, wilder storms. Droughts last for years and form deserts, dustbowls, in what had a generation ago been fields and fertile land. And still we drive these cars around, in circles and circles and circles, hunted and hunter, again and again and again until we hit a Wall, and realize ...

Day 140: Remember Hind. Remember Deir Yassin

Hind Rajab Khoudary, 6 The fourth month of Israel's ongoing invasion and bombardment of Gaza has begun, and they have started bombing Rafah - with a threat of a full-on ground invasion. Rafah, the town on the southernmost border of Gaza, where 1.5 million Palestinians have fled to, leaving behind everything but the clothes on their backs as they fled in terror from the Israeli bombardment of homes, schools, hospitals, mosques, churches, universities, colleges, buses, cars, barns and even horses. This is a city that usually is home to 200,000 people. The town has been overwhelmed with internally displaced refugees. The threat of a ground invasion of Rafah is not an empty threat - it is a threat that has echoes of the attack on al-Shujaeyya in 2016 -- the images of that night still seared into the mind of anyone above ten years old in Gaza - the relentless Israeli bombardment that went on an on and on until the people of al-Shujaeyya (in eastern Gaza City) fled for their lives. It e...

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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