Last week I commented on one Tim Wise’s powerful postsabout gentrification. I said, “Ironically it’s us ‘progressive’ whites that are just antiracist enough to move into poor black and/or Latin communities and gentrify them…” The comment got 121 likes in a couple of days, a lot for me, an FB neophyte. I’m thinking this comment touched a nerve because gentrification of cities is really the front line of the war against Black and Latin people. It’s a much bigger deal than we think, and it directly impacts Bernie’s campaign. What the comment points to is that racism is systemic. We […]

As I was saying last week, the shift we are trying to make in our consciousness is from “Me” to “We.” From the individual to the collective, which is a loaded word, let’s call it the individual to the community. We want to foster the flourishing of our community, as defined by the concentric circles of family neighborhood, workplace, municipality, the regional ecosystem, the country, the human family. We are all connected. When my youngest son was 5 he dictated a poem to me, “Now we are one.” That has a nice sound to it. So a corollary of the […]

I think we may have stumbled onto something, though maybe I just stepped in it. There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear. But people are connecting in ways that demonstrate to ourselves and the world how powerful we are. One way to look at it is that we are moving from me-ness to us-ness. Individualism has been the bedrock value of capitalism from the git, but we are now evolving beyond that. In the coming phase of our human history, collective consciousness will assert its primacy. “I” will not be first anymore. “We” will be first. The […]

Bernie Sanders makes me happy. That isn’t quite accurate. The movement that Sanders has inspired makes me happy. What makes me happy is struggling against oppression. This is not the first time I have discovered this. I don’t know if I can generalize, but I will anyway. Human happiness depends on the struggle against oppression. If one of us is oppressed, we are all oppressed. And we are all oppressed. The billionaire class that we love to vilify, do you think they’re happy? Those Republican candidates, do you think any of them are happy? But even they are oppressed by […]

We need to take a deep breath and look at what we are witnessing. I’m beginning to think the Bernie Sanders movement is unstoppable. In a sense he is the one we’ve been waiting for, because he sees — and unleashes — our genius as a people. The “structure” of his campaign relies totally on the spontaneity of volunteers hungry to experience our genius. Check the artistry of the myriad memes that have been created in his behalf. The only thing that matters is uniting the working class. Like the man said, all history is the history of class struggle. We are […]

Let’s get real, fellow white people. We are afraid of Black people. Even for those of us who have worked diligently on our racism, who have tons of Black friends, some black people scare us, the young men, maybe, with low slung pants, who listen to that music that most of us older folks don’t really like. We need to get over this fear. If we are going to get Bernie Sanders elected, if we are going to build a movement for a society that puts people before profit, we need to get beyond this fear. The best way to get […]

Having played a role in instigating the proposed Bernie Sanders Enough is Enough rally in the Bay Area for some time this fall, I’m having second thoughts. It sure was fun watching our numbers climb to 10,000 and beyond on facebook. Even though we are nowhere near what they call viral, we had a taste of it. But we need to plant this virus deeper. It’s pretty easy to click on a meme to say you’re coming to a rally. It’s a little harder to get your butt TO the rally. (An organizer’s rule of thumb: Yes means maybe, Maybe means […]

Now that it looks like Bernie Sanders might actually win (with the new Iowa poll putting him at 35% to Hillary’s 43%), we need to look to the future – really, whether he wins or loses. I don’t know about you, but one effect of the Bernie campaign is to make me a Facebook addict. I used to hate Facebook. But the horserace gets to me. Isn’t it exciting? I lap up every little dribble of Bernie/Hillary and yeah even Trump news. As I was caught up in the drama, a meme I guess you call it popped out at me […]

Many of us have been predicting the collapse of capitalism for 150 years. One day, we’ll be right. Another way to look at our situation is that, actually, capitalism collapsed in 1929. At the time, there was a powerful socialist movement, headquartered in the Soviet Union, fully poised to take over where capitalism left off (not to say it wasn’t highly flawed). The panic among the capitalist class was palpable. They were able to resuscitate capitalism only by unleashing on the world from Germany, Italy, and Japan a fascist movement of unprecedented viciousness and launching a world war which destroyed […]

As much as we hate putting their names in the same sentence, there is a parallel between the campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump: both candidates are whipping up the enthusiasm of their followers. In Bernie’s case, of course, we see this as wonderful, a genuine progressive movement that could lead the country a long way toward a focus on people rather than profit. Trump, on the other hand, is whipping up the enthusiasm of the gun-loving white supremacists. At first he was funny, so outrageously out there it was a joke. But then we discover that no, actually, […]