By Octaviano Merecias (June 26, 2019) The responsibility of the writer Is to measure the rising poison into our soul by reminding us of our numbness of distraction into the apathy of oblivion as the dissolving heart of our neighbor lingers in our pupils Is to face evil with a piece of pen and ink as mighty weapons And biting…
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By Joseph Orosco (June 25, 2019) Many people have responded in the last week to Arun Gupta’s call for a movement to end the mass detention of immigrants at the US/Mexico Border. He has created a Facebook social media presence to coordinate efforts: https://www.facebook.com/NoConcCamps/ He adds the following: “Hey Folks, I know many of you are eager to get involved…
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By Teka Lark (June 24, 2019) Direct action is a tool that should only be used when it needs to be used. Protesting with a permit is not direct action. Anytime you appeal to authority in a way that puts them in the position of reasonable, you’re not doing direct action. What is direct action? When you resist with your…
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By Arun Gupta (June 23, 2019) Take a good look at these faces. What do you see? They are all indigenous peoples. 527 years after the conquest of the Americas began, we are still penning, brutalizing, kidnapping, and killing indigenous people. Asylum-seekers are 100% legal, protected by U.S. law as the signatory to international agreements such as the Fourth Geneva…
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By Mark Naison (June 22, 2019) Do not assume that Donald Trump’s planned deportation raids will produce the results he intends- unless his goal is the bring the nation to the edge of Civil War. In places where public sentiment is strongly against such policies, I.C.E. Agents may face such massive civil disobedience that they will need US military escorts…
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By Christian Matheis (June 21, 2019) “What do I tell my kids?” a student asked me last spring in an intro class on community problem solving. She, African-American and one of the few (4, she tells me) on the municipal police force of around 450 officers, caught my words. “What do I tell my kids???” she repeated as…
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By Christian Matheis (June 20, 2019) One of the things that happens to people from underrepresented backgrounds when they begin to advocate for themselves, including when they challenge patterns of institutional / systematic discrimination: attempts by people in positions of authority to get you to doubt your reality. We need to call this what it is: an attempt to get…
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By Arun Gupta (June 19, 2019) We need a massive march on the border, tens of thousands who will peacefully, nonviolently disrupt the machinery of ethnic cleansing, to give aid to migrants, to witness and record the concentration camps, the killings, the torture, the ethnic cleansing. The Left is good at mobilizing in large-scale protest: the anti-globalization movement, the anti-Iraq…
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By Rocio Mercedes Alvarez (May 29, 2019) Over a week has passed. The series is wrapped up and millions of Game of Thrones fans worldwide have either had their hearts broken or their decades-long theories confirmed. To say the final season was controversial is an understatement, especially if you followed the countless super-fans on a variety of social media…
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By Teka Lark (May 28, 2019) People say that in Dayton, Ohio that only 9 members of the Ku Klux Klan showed up and that it was a win for US, the community. But that was no win. According to the Time Magazine article, “9 People Showed Up for a KKK Rally in Dayton, Ohio. They Were Drowned Out by…
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By Arun Gupta (May 21, 2019) I am hearing a lot of despair lately, so I would like to share this story with you. In the early 1990s, when I was international news editor at The Guardian Newsweekly, we hired a bookkeeper named Frances. Being a political newspaper run by the staff, our interviews were a mix of questions about…
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