Apart and Together: Reengaging with the Full Range of Our Emotions
“There is a great deal of pain in life and perhaps the only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid pain.” – R. D. Laing
The appearance of the current Coronavirus, and the major disruptions that both the pandemic and the responses to …
Responding to Breakdown of Trust in Police
“The belief that if you don’t do “anything wrong” you would never be bothered by the police is deeply entrenched in many places, especially in those countries where the dominant population believes that country to be democratic, which many do. It’s extremely difficult to show: anyone who is not in …
Apart and Together: Blurring the Distinction between Public and Private Spheres
“The personal is political” was one of the rallying cries of second-wave feminism in the US. As much as this slogan has been contested and put to different uses, it came to my mind as I sat down to write this piece (the 7th in my “Apart and Together” series …
Apart and Together: Accepting our Vulnerability to Consume Less
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This is the 6th piece in a series I named “Apart and Together” to capture the paradoxical reality of the pandemic we are part of: we are being asked to be apart from each other, physically, in the most elemental ways that we are, even as our …
Apart and Together: Restoring Dignity and Meaning to Work and Separating it from Sustainability
As a child, I was always struck, when reading 19th century novels, by figures about annual amounts of money given to people. I couldn’t figure out, even taking into account insane inflation rates, how it would have been possible for anyone to subsist on those amounts. …
Apart and Together: Finding Systemic Solutions to Systemic Problems
One of the ways I see the Coronavirus as having brought to us some new possibilities in the midst of a growing crisis is that it calls into question one of the deepest and most pervasive narratives of modern life under liberal democracy-style capitalism: that every problem originates in an …
King’s Two Messages: Soul Force in Times of Social Unrest
“I contend that the cry of Black Power is, at bottom, a reaction to the reluctance of white power to make the kind of changes necessary to make justice a reality for the Negro. I think we have to see that a riot is the language of the unheard.” – …
The Future of Social Justice Education: A Liberation Perspective
My approach to personal growth, healing, group learning, and activism is grounded in a general systems theory perspective. One of my guides for this approach is r. buckminster fuller. From reading his essays and major works, and sitting in his lectures, I came …
Apart and Together: Grounding in Interconnection and Solidarity
Spiritual traditions the world over, covering the entire range from Indigenous perspectives to monotheistic religions, teach us about oneness, about how we are all part of one interconnected web of life. There’s nothing like the Coronavirus, and the pandemic that we are now living in, to make this lesson much …
Is Nonviolent Use of Force an Oxymoron?
The following is the beginning of an article I posted on Medium. It’s way too long for this site, and so I provide a link below it to continue reading if you are interested.
This article has been in the works consciously for at least three years, and, implicitly, since …
