“A writer’s notebook is not a diary. Writers react. Writers need a place to record these reactions. That’s what a writer’s notebook is for. It gives you a place to write down what makes you angry or sad or amazed, to write down what you noticed and don’t want to forget. A writer’s notebook gives you a place to live like a writer.” - Ralph Fletcher
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
Many long-term consequences of spending cuts if Congress fails to repeal the sequester are less media-friendly than pictures of crowded airports—but that does not make them less important or less real. Families will be unable to obtain affordable housing, children will be denied places in a Head Start classroom, seniors will not be served by Meals on Wheels.
Barbara A. Mikulski, a U.S. senator from Maryland, chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, and the longest-serving woman in Congress.
(Source: Washington Post)
We cannot know for sure what time the party will end, but the party’s over.
Does that seem histrionic? Excessively alarmist? Look at any crucial measure of the health of the ecosphere in which we live—groundwater depletion, topsoil loss, chemical contamination, increased toxicity in our own bodies, the number and size of “dead zones” in the oceans, accelerating extinction of species, and reduction of biodiversity—and ask a simple question: Where are we heading?
Remember also that we live in an oil-based world that is rapidly depleting the cheap and easily accessible oil, which means we face a major reconfiguration of the infrastructure that undergirds daily life. Meanwhile, the desperation to avoid that reconfiguration has brought us to the era of “extreme energy,” using ever more dangerous and destructive technologies (hydrofracturing, deep-water drilling, mountaintop coal removal, tar sands extraction).
Oh, did I forget to mention the undeniable trajectory of global warming/climate change/climate disruption?
Robert Jensen
(Source: popularresistance.org)
You can’t be a complete human being if you don’t understand those non-rational forces that make us human, all those things that can’t be measured empirically: love, grief, the struggle with our own mortality, the search for meaning. I mean, Freud said I can write about sex but I can’t write about love—it’s a mystery. And that’s what great religious writers, great philosophers, great artists, great novelists, great poets—that’s what they seek to retain, these forces that finally make us human, that make it possible for us to see in the other not the stranger or the enemy but the reflection of ourselves.
Chris Hedges
(Source: charlesbivona.com)
I’m learning the contours and textures of my heart. I’m learning that I don’t have to wait for the pale light of dawn leaching through the clouds. I can drink coffee and dance at 3 am. I am in that delicious space between moments of my own history. As Bach once said, I am taking fate by the throat.
Becky Tsaros Dickson
(Source: thinkingtoohard13.wordpress.com)
We need to become not just the majority opinion, but the undeniable reality. As we achieve this critical mass and majority opinion is shaped through years (and generations) of daily active struggle, either the Democrats or some other opportunistic political force will realize that catering to this critical mass is a surefire win come election day (no matter the financial advantage an opponent might have).
This critical mass, this mass majority convinced through years of struggle that a fairer, more humane, more sustainable world is possible, can serve us as more than a political platform: engaging our economics and culture as well. Out of this critical mass we can draw strength for both local resistance and wider institutional changes. It’s not an election or a law specifically that we’re looking to change. It is the hearts and minds of our fellow democracy stake-holders. Without a critical mass, Democratic candidates offered up to the left will continue to be corporate henchmen who happen to lean more socially liberal than the other corporate candidate.
Manny Jalonschi
(Source: politicususa.com)
TIME’s Tim Padgett has a great take on how the modern Catholic Church has doubled down on fighting the forces of progressive women in a last-ditch effort to preserve its waning power, and argues that these efforts will ultimately end up expediting the Vatican’s global irrelevance.
Erin Gloria Ryan
(Source: jezebel.com)
…a counter-insurgency (or counter-terrorist) effort that is not democratically regulated with the sober influence of popular oversight will soon degenerate into human rights abuses and institutional tyranny. For example, also noted in the New York Times piece is the remarkably low “civilian death toll” from our hundreds of drone strikes. Here a lack of democratic oversight led to a convenient, almost Orwellian, change of language that allowed the American public to imagine their drone program wasn’t massacring its way through civilians in central Asia.
Manny Jalonschi
(Source: politicususa.com)
Since 2004, between 2,464 and 3,145 people are reported to have been killed by US drone attacks in Pakistan, of whom up to 828 were civilians and 175 children. Some Pakistani estimates put the civilian death toll much higher.
Seumas Milne
(Source: todayonline.com)
Predators and Reapers are President Barack Obama’s weapons of choice and coercion, deployed only on the territory of troublesome US allies, such as Pakistan and Yemen—and the drone war is Mr Obama’s war.
Seumas Milne
(Source: todayonline.com)
The streets of Montreal are clogged nightly with as many as 100,000 protesters banging pots and pans and demanding that the old systems of power be replaced. The mass student strike in Quebec, the longest and largest student protest in Canadian history, began over the announcement of tuition hikes and has metamorphosed into what must swiftly build in the United States—a broad popular uprising. The debt obligation of Canadian university students, even with Quebec’s proposed 82 percent tuition hike over several years, is dwarfed by the huge university fees and the $1 trillion of debt faced by U.S. college students.
Chris Hedges
(Source: truth-out.org)
