While in South Carolina, my wife Gloria and I visited Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, where the nine people were murdered by a white supremacist. Murdered in cold blood in their sanctuary. Their sanctuary. Oh, another mass killing, people seem to be saying. White people, anyway. This is not Aurora. This is not Columbine. This is different. Those were random white folks going off on their brethren for picking on them. Not to minimize the trauma. But Charleston is different. Charleston represents a significant escalation of the war against black people, perpetrated by a growing white terrorist network that has, among […]

I’ve been on extended vacation – practice retirement really – traveling the East Coast, exploring, visiting family and friends. We stopped in Greenville, SC and found the recently opened Bernie headquarters. My wife Gloria and I spent a couple of hours door knocking in the Black community. It was good. People were friendly. Most hadn’t really thought much about the election, several had watched the debate, out of about 12 contacts I’d say, 2 were leaning Bernie. The key issue for most people was health care. I watched most of the Republican Debate tonight. I was scarily impressed. They were […]

Enough with your internet polls! Yeah I was shocked at the post debate poll numbers, but even if our tech savvy Berniacs didn’t manipulate the results (I don’t blame them. Let’s do what it takes), they don’t mean that much. Thinking that someone won a debate doesn’t mean you’ll vote for them. The very idea of winning such a debate is ridiculous. Hillary did well. She was on her game. So was Bernie. This is one step on a long journey. Ok, I’m glad the soldiers pushed back against CNN, because they can be forced to be more responsive. Let’s move […]

Too many leftists have turned up their noses at the Bernie Sanders campaign because his platform neither opposes – nor barely mentions American Imperialism (let’s name it), let alone wars in the middle east, covert/overt interventions world-wide. Social democracy historically has not consistently opposed imperialist war. It did in Vietnam, by and large. But in the Russian Revolution, the social democrats like Bernie were called Mensheviks. They took power (with the help of the Bolsheviks) in January of 1917 under the program of Peace, Bread, Land. But they didn’t end the Russian involvement in World War I. That’s what gave […]

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 […]