Criminal (in)justice in America:
Another outrage!
January 17, 2019
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Posted by billayers
More on Chesa
January 16, 2019
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Chesa Boudin for DA of San Francisco!!!
January 15, 2019Our brilliant, focussed-on-justice, hard-working son Chesa is up and running, working to shine a light into the darkness. Front page in the SF Chronicle today. Join us!
https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/Chesa-Boudin-son-of-imprisoned-radicals-looks-13533584.php
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Teach Freedom
January 14, 2019An excerpt from my syllabus for a class I’m teaching on “Freedom”:
And men rejoice at being led like cattle again, with the terrible gift of freedom that brought them so much suffering removed from them.~~Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Wait! What? Freedom is a terrible gift that brings so much suffering? I thought freedom was a universal aspiration, something that each of us—and everyone we know or have ever heard about—values and desires, a condition that equals happiness and peace-of-mind.
Well, not so fast. Freedom also means risk and responsibility, precariousness and ambiguity. Jean Paul Sartre tells a story of a graduate student coming to him in occupied France during World War II with a fearsome and formidable dilemma: “My mother is deathly ill,” the student explains, “and I’m responsible for her care, but my father is collaborating with the Nazis, and in order to account for that crime I feel I must join the Resistance; what should I do?” After much consideration and discussion of pros and cons, Sartre says, It seems that you must choose. The student is unsatisfied: “You’re the great philosopher, sir! You should help me choose.” Well, Sartre continues, that is precisely the difficulty of every authentic choice, in fact, the problem of freedom—every yes is a no, every no, a yes, and you yourself—no one else—are responsible. You must choose. “You’ve been no help to me at all!” says the furious student. “I will go instead to a priest!” Sartre responds, Very well…which priest will you choose? We pick our priests, it turns out, to take the terrible gift of freedom off our own heads, to disperse it, or to blame the consequences of our choices on another—but still we choose!
Guarantees of happiness, peace-of-mind, and bread, crackle with tension against notions of freedom which, according to Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, “men in their simplicity and their natural unruliness cannot even understand, which they fear and dread.” This conflict resonates as fundamental—we human beings find ourselves longing for certainty in an uncertain world, something we can hold onto and believe in together, answers to our doubts, perhaps, a single vaccine for the latest virus, the Truth in some final and unquestionable form. We have difficulty tolerating anything as vague and enigmatic as freedom, and this points to the universal allure of dogma and orthodoxy. The insistent message everywhere in society is this: acquiesce, conform, play the game—yes, accede, and perhaps you can call it freedom.
The Inquisitor looks at the rebels, and calls them stupid people, “rioting and driving out their teacher,” who will, soon enough, discover that they cannot keep up their rebellion—they, too, will find freedom burdensome as they retreat into their own shared certainty, their own sacred texts and easy beliefs. The dogma of the rebels, then, may become as insistent and totalizing as any other, and the distractions and comforts that come from membership in a credulous community can signal a break with freedom, even as it offers the advantage of being quasi-invisible—the dogma of common sense inside the group replaces the need for security police, barbed wire, the boot, and the stick.
Of course we can (and must) make a distinction between ideas and power—ideas aren’t tyrannical in themselves, but in the hands of those in power, it’s another story altogether. And so we must ask continually, which rebels and in what time? What are the specifics of their dogma? And who has the actual power to impose their orthodoxy on others as established law and rule?
What is freedom, then?
What are its central and necessary features?
What distinctions can you draw between personal freedom and social or political freedom?
Can a prisoner be free? In what sense?
Can someone on death row be free?
Can an addict be free? How about a person suffering something like severe dementia?
Are you free?
In what ways are you entangled or unfree? Can you name your unfreedom? Can you show the evidence?
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Loud and Clear
January 8, 2019
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Lady Liberty
January 3, 2019How does it end?
By Marge Piercy
From Guatemala, from El Salvador,
Honduras they travel overland
with little, with nothing but hope
out of terror, from rape and murder
with daughters and sons. babies
they hope they’re carrying to safety.
They believe the old promises.
Here you will be safe, here there’s
work no white American wants.
You’ll save to save family members.
This will be a home forever.
Here you will not cower in fear.
They cross and are treated
worse than thieves, shoved
into overcrowded camps, into
cages like dogs no one wants.
Here the children they fled so far
to save are ripped from them
penned like sheep, alone in crowds
crying, confused, terrified again.
Oh, Emma Lazarus, could you see,
would you recognize this country?
France, you must take back that lady
with her now extinguished torch.
Copyright 2018 by Marge Piercy
Marge Piercy has published 19 poetry collections, recently Made in Detroit (Knopf); 17 novels including Sex Wars. PM Press reissued Vida, Dance the Eagle to Sleep; they brought out short stories The Cost of Lunch, Etc and My Body, My Life [essays, poems]. She has read at over 500 venues here and abroad.
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On New Year’s Day
December 31, 2018Bless this my house under the pitch pines
where the cardinal flashes and the kestrels hover
crying, where I live and work with my lover
Woody and my cats, where the birds gather
in winter to be fed and the squirrel dines
from the squirrel-proof feeder. Keep our water
bubbling up clear. Protect us from the fire’s
long teeth and the lashing of the hurricanes
and the government. Please, no foreign wars.
Keep this house from termites and the bane
of quarreling past what can be sweetly healed.
Keep our cats from hunters and savage dogs.
Watch with care over Woody splitting logs
and mostly keep us from our sharpening fear
as we skate over the ice of the new year.
Marge Piercy
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Book Launch!!!
December 28, 2018
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Loud & Clear
December 26, 2018
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To My Christian Sisters and Brothers
December 20, 2018Some of you have urged me to align my values more closely with “Christian Values.”
OK: The Book of Acts says that the first converts to Christianity in Jerusalem were avowed communists, living communally and distributing their wealth equitably—to each according to their needs. They took Jesus’ words literally: “Each of you who does not give up all he possesses is incapable of being my disciple” (Luke 14): “Do not store up treasures for yourself on earth” (Matthew 6); and “Come now, you who are rich, weep, howling out at the miseries that are coming for you” (James 5). There’s more, of course, but a strong through-line in all of it is this: there is but one humanity and one human estate, and it belongs to all; take only what you need to live, share everything, care for one another. Paraphrasing the great Chicago poet Gwendolyn Brooks, the Christian ethic states that: We are each other’s business/We are each other’s harvest/ We are each other’s magnitude and bond.
Those who noisily proclaim their “Christian Values” might want to get right with Jesus now by embracing your communal spirit, upholding our collective mission and fate, and becoming more communist in practice—from each according to ability, to each according to need. Christian Values! Communist Principles! Oh, and to point to communist nations or practices that failed to live up to those principles is not an answer—look clearly at Christian nations and practices and feel the shameful contradiction.
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