TO MY BROTHERS: MEN! CUT THAT SHIT OUT! We need to own our sexism, to take responsibility for it, and to rip it out of our brains. We know this, our rulers plant sexism in our mother’s milk (or Nestle formula) because it keeps us divided. I include myself. Even though I consider myself a feminist, and even as I strive to nurture equality in my home and in our society, there remains a section of my brain devoted to sexism. I don’t think I’m alone in this, but when I walk down the street I evaluate – crudely – […]
From Richard Greener in the Huffpost Blog: ‘The idea of the American Thanksgiving feast is a fairly recent fiction. The idyllic partnership of 17th Century European Pilgrims and New England Indians sharing a celebratory meal appears to be less than 120 years-old. And it was only after the First World War that a version of such a Puritan-Indian partnership took hold in elementary schools across the American landscape. We can thank the invention of textbooks and their mass purchase by public schools for embedding this “Thanksgiving” image in our modern minds. It was, of course, a complete invention, a cleverly created slice […]
In honor of the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, I want to start a conversation about the big picture, the transition from capitalism to socialism. Let’s start at the beginning. An article by John Lanchester appeared in the September 18th New Yorker entitled “The Case Against Civilization” argues that our hunter-gatherer ancestors had better lives than we do: African tribes that still live the hunter-gatherer lifestyle “work” about 17 hours a week to find adequate food – 2300 calories, about what we’re supposed to eat. While Lanchester doesn’t mention Engels and barely mentions the rise of class society, I […]
My favorite cousin and one of my closest friends a few years younger than me was killed last week in a head on crash with a tanker truck filled with apple juice. So I’m grieving, and I have death on my mind. I’m not that far from it myself, even if I live out my full sentence, as it were. I don’t get it, death, that is. We’re here for a hot minute. One thing to consider is the power of the imagination. What we know of “reality” is really just a figment of our imagination, a construct of our […]