Bill Ayers

https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/2024/01/31/defunding-unrwa-is-genocide/

You may already know that 15 US governors rejected federal funds available for families who qualify for free school lunches that would provide $120 per child per month through the summer. If you forgot, I get it—your cruelty/stupidity quotient may have reached capacity, and your brain simply couldn’t accommodate one more item.

But let me ask: if you were governor, could you reject food money for kids, explaining that you opposed “feeding a welfare system with food at home?” Well then you won’t be the governor of Nebraska.

Or, could you turn down the food-for-kids money because “An EBT card does nothing to promote nutrition at a time when childhood obesity has become an epidemic?” OK. You can’t be governor of Iowa either.

During the pandemic a federal program that offered a monthly payment to low income families in addition to the child tax credit lifted 3.7 million children out of poverty; reduced child poverty by 30 percent; and helped food insufficiency rates among households with children drop by 26 percent.

That’s over, and hunger in this prosperous country is on the rise—by choice not chance. Pandemic aid programs have ended or are winding down, food costs are rising, and in 2022 food insecurity rates increased, with 17.3 percent of households with children lacking enough food, up from 12.5 percent in 2021 according to the USDA.

If you have a roof over your head and food to eat, good. But recognize that you’re living day-by-day in the USA: Unnecessary Savagery and Abuse.

82-years-old today—still marching for peace and justice. Still risingxoxo

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/saving-israel-by-ending-gaza-war

https://pilsencommunitybooks.com/events/32434

Gaza is not Starving. Gaza is Being Starved

It’s astonishing that the New Yorker could publish a long and putatively comprehensive article on the imminent famine in Gaza (“Gaza is Starving” January 3, 2024) and fail to mention Israel. The looming mass starvation we are all witnessing is not a natural disaster nor an act of God, but is, rather, the result of a deliberate policy announced in early October by officials of the Israeli government: the Palestinians in Gaza would be denied food and water, medicines and fuel, and Gaza would become a place where no human being could exist. That’s a war crime, and it was immediately embraced by our government, which now stands alone in the world providing a green light for mass annihilation.

William Ayers, Chicago

Goodbye, 2023. Part of me hates to see you go, while another part of me is giddy to leave you behind.

Hello 2024! 

Whether we embrace it or not, the clock keeps ticking— goodbye, hello, goodbye.

Welcome to the the worst of times—a new and escalating cold war with China, a hot and destructive proxy war in Europe, and now a preannounced genocide by Israel being executed against the Palestinian people in Gaza. On top of this, racialized police violence rages unchecked, environmental collapse is on full display, fragile and often anemic democratic institutions are on life support, religious authoritarianism is on the rise, women’s bodily integrity is under sustained assault. The overlapping crises threaten to overwhelm us—it’s the end of the world as we know it.

Welcome, as well, to the best of times—26 million people took to the streets in 2020 in response to the police murder of George Floyd, the largest public outpouring for racial justice in  history; women across a wide political spectrum have refused to accept a medieval definition of their rights; labor has won historic, game-changing victories from the Writers Guild of America to Amazon and Starbucks workers to the United Auto Workers; and broad forces are on the march world-wide to resist plunder and extraction, and to preserve life on earth. 

I wake up each day and glance at the poet Mary Oliver’s hopeful words taped to the wall, capturing something of this prevailing paradox: “Just to be alive on this fresh morning in the broken world.” YES! It’s the end of the world as we know it, (and I feel fine).

Charles Dickens would recognize our predicament at once: the winter of despair and the spring of hope; an age of foolishness and an age of wisdom; Darkness in mortal combat with Light. But life is never one thing in isolation from every other thing—yes, there’s exploitation, but there is also resistance; progress, yes, and also backlash. If we freeze our focus, we will sink into despair and miss the dynamic, noisy, frenetic magnificence of life as it’s actually happening—the world that we encounter every day. Where does one thing end and another thing begin? Where are we looking, and what are we looking for?

Contradiction, says Viet Thanh Nguyen, is the “perpetual body odor of humanity!”

You may not be interested in politics right now but, as Rousseau noted, politics is interested in you. Contradiction. Think reproductive freedom—politics—climate sanity, war and peace, health care and education and housing as human rights—politics, politics, politics. Resolve this year to be political in this sense: pay attention, get involved, participate, act on what the known demands.

Keep rising!!