In slightly more than three pages, the article at this link provides wisdom, compassion, insights, and encouragement to fix our society’s problems. I believe you will find that reading this is a good use of your time. Here is the link: Profound Nonviolence for a Truly Just Society
You don’t need to be a Hillary Clinton supporter (and I certainly am not) to recognize the strong evidence that elements from Russia flooded American social media with racially polarizing social media during the 2016 election campaign. Why did it occur? How about considering the following context? Traditionally socialism has envisioned a joining together of the entire working class, across nations and across races. When the USSR existed and the Communist Party USA was active, especially from the 1930s and subsequent decades, the CPUSA really worked vigorously for racial integration and equality as part of this larger struggle. Instead of […]
For several decades the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (NCADP, www.ncadp.org ) has been doing very good work, including working with state-level organizations working to abolish the death penalty. They recently moved to new office space shared with other organizations at “WeWorks,” so they have a new mailing address and a new address for receiving donation checks. Mail correspondence to: NCADP c/o WeWorks 80 M Street S.E. Washington, DC 20003. Mail donation checks to a different new address: NCADP P.O. Box 829846 Philadelphia, PA 19182-9846. Other great organizations include the ACLU (at nationwide and state levels), the Death […]
The article at this link — https://www.alternet.org/activism/progressive-infighting — offers many very fresh insights that can help us move forward. I urge people to read the entire article. I’m summarizing a few key points below (and identifying which additional comments are my own). The entire article fleshes these out and adds more insights. I highly recommend reading the article at the link in this paragraph. The article’s title – “Here’s Why Some Progressives Are Tearing Each Other Apart” – is bold, accurate, and highly relevant to the organizing crises many of us have been experiencing in the past few years. The […]
I’ve been reading a lot about Trump’s blatant attempt to violate the Constitution by politicizing and racializing the 2020 census. This article from MoveOn does a good job of summarizing the crisis succinctly, and it provides an URGENT PETITION that you can sign: Donald Trump and his Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross, want to add a question about citizenship to the census. The Constitution states that “all people” must be counted for the census, not just citizens. If this question goes ahead, all urban areas — and big states like California, Florida, New York, and Texas — will lose federal funding […]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/fatal-police-shootings-in-2015-approaching-400-nationwide/2015/05/30/d322256a-058e-11e5-a428-c984eb077d4e_story.html?wpisrc=al_alert-national We keep seeing statistics about the huge number of police shootings. This article came from several years ago. The slaughter will continue until the public insists on changing public policy in several ways.
The U.S. has a very harsh (and ineffective) criminal justice system, compared to other modern nations. Here is some information about Norway and Sweden that I saved from a few years ago: Norway’s prisons are much better than the U.S.’s. Instead of dehumanizing their inmates, they help prisoners retain their human dignity, so they will become better able to reenter society. http://www.alternet.org/drugs/michael-moore-norway-prison-tony-papa-sentence?akid=13995.2186.s12ezx&rd=1&src=newsletter1051042&t=10 In 2013 Sweden acted sensibly to reduce prison populations. They accomplished this for several reasons including reducing sentence length and emphasizing rehabilitation. http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/11/12-0 I would like to see ordinary Americans (including taxpayers and conservatives) confront elected officials and […]
Many people assume that Trumpism’s cruelty is more widely accepted by Americans than it actually is. In truth, the vast majority of Americans hold better values. In order to organize the public to oppose Trumpism, let’s tap into the better values that the vast majority of Americans hold. In order to push against the right-wing extremist agenda of Trumpism, we need to help ordinary Americans recognize that Trumpism seriously violates our nation’s best values. Ordinary Americans support truth, justice (fairness), human rights, the rule of law, science, preventing governmental corruption, etc. Trumpism violates these cherished American values. Exposing Trumpism’s violations […]
One of President Nixon’s top aides, John Ehrlichman, later reported this: “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did […]
Many people have observed that a good way to judge a society is by how it treats the people on the bottom. People in prison are among those at the bottom of our society. Many people want to grind them farther into the dirt and diminish their humanity. But what happens when they get out of prison? Society will reap what it has sown. Society’s contempt for them will flow back upon society at large. The moral and sensible solution is to break the cycle – to restore every person’s full humanity. If we want to live in a decent […]
Although the whole world is interconnected in many ways, most Americans do not know enough about Arab culture, and most Americans don’t have enough friends from countries in the Arab world. If we did, we would be more likely to make peace instead of war. The Olympia Fellowship of Reconciliation’s September 2012 TV program is an enjoyable conversation with people whose roots are in different countries within the Arab world. We’ll learn something of Arab culture. And we’ll sow the seeds of peace. Locally, the Olympia-based Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice does a lot of good work, so […]
The U.S. is suffering its most serious existential crisis ever! The .pdf document at the link below helps us understand Trumpism and take positive actions to stop it. How We Got into Our Current Crisis – And How to Get Out — THOROUGH article
Everybody knows that the criminal justice system in the United States is full of problems. Some of the problems are well known, but our society and our political system seem unable or unwilling to solve them. Yet workable solutions really do exist. The Olympia Fellowship of Reconciliation’s February 2014 TV program examines some of our criminal justice system’s problems — with a special emphasis on the racial disparities — and we also look at solutions. Three knowledgeable guests help us explore the topic: • Larry Jefferson has 17 years of experience as a defense attorney in King County and in […]
To watch this 1-hour program, click HERE. To read a thorough summary — including sources of more information — click HERE for .pdf format or HERE for Word format. The Olympia Fellowship of Reconciliation’s May 2014 TV program about the death penalty provides fresh information, fresh insights, and fresh support for moving ahead toward abolishing it.Washington State is one of 32 states that can sentence people to death. Therefore, over the years, the Olympia Fellowship of Reconciliation’s TV series has produced a number of programs about the death penalty. The first third of the program summarizes the problems in two […]
Within any very large group of people – such as an entire nation – power is not distributed evenly. Some kinds of people have more political, economic and social power than other kinds of people. In the United States, a big factor affecting the unequal distribution of power is a person’s race. The historical roots go back 400 years to the early 1600s when white European people came here and stole the land from Na-tive Americans and – also in the early 1600s – started bringing African people here to work as slaves. Injustices still continue 400 years later. Also, […]
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