Bill Ayers

https://mailchi.mp/thetricontinental.org/in-light-of-the-global-pandemic-focus-attention-on-the-people?e=b87d70674f

“In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing.
About the dark times.”

― Bertolt Brecht

https://www.democracynow.org/2020/3/19/naomi_klein_coronavirus_capitalism?utm_source=Democracy+Now%21&utm_campaign=1776703ecd-Daily_Digest_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_fa2346a853-1776703ecd-191184861

Robert Koehler writes about creative empathy in a pandemic:

As Robert Reich pointed out regarding the American public health system: “. . .we have a private for-profit system for individuals lucky enough to afford it and a rickety social insurance system for people fortunate enough to have a full-time job.

“At their best, both systems respond to the needs of individuals rather than the needs of the public as a whole. In America, the word ‘public’ — as in public health, public education or public welfare — means a sum total of individual needs, not the common good.”

But health equals wholeness. Without collective health, we have humanity shattered by greed and paranoia, that is to say, social hemorrhage, or what Randall Amster called business as usual: “The simmering cauldron of political vitriol, reifications of otherness, escalating inequality, endless war, even more endless waste, and a rapidly warming world hasn’t exactly set us in good stead to weather the storm.”

If you like to read poetry, I’ve got three new books to recommend to you.
And if you’re not a regular reader of poetry, I urge you to give it a try. As I tell my students each term, quoting William Carlos Williams, “It is difficult/to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day/for lack/of what is found there.”

I then read aloud to them Billy Collins’ brilliant “Introduction to Poetry:”

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

OK, ready?

First, Felon by Reginald Dwayne Betts. A heart-stopping collection that reveals the darkness at the heart of our national experience, and the luminous possibilities human beings strive for—in spite of the ubiquitous presence of the cages that cruelty creates.

Next, Two Menus by Rachel DeWoskin. A beautiful book of surprises that swings effortlessly from childhood to old age, from the love heart massage parlor in a Beijing alley to an icy surgical suite above a lake—and all the places where love can find its bearings and prove itself at last.

Finally, Social Poetics by Mark Nowak. A dazzling and thought-provoking book that foregrounds the efforts of Nowak’s Worker Writers School and writing workshops “from below” where worker-poets, to paraphrase the Trinidadian revolutionary C.L.R. James, seek to chronicle their own struggles “to regain control over their own conditions of life.”

https://www.paypal.com/pools/c/8npOgwIczH

Social distancing—it’s an awkward, ugly term as well as an unfamiliar but necessary practice we’re all learning to implement. As we move through these dire and unpredictable times, let’s change that language and call it what it is: social solidarity. We’re all in this together, after all, and among the zillion things we can do to help one another as part of a shared community is to break the chain of contagion and allow some sensible space between us—it’s an act of cooperation, not distance or isolation, and an expression of human harmony.

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/23953323

Pandemic

What if you thought of it
as the Jews consider the Sabbath—
the most sacred of times?
Cease from travel.
Cease from buying and selling.
Give up, just for now,
on trying to make the world
different than it is.
Sing. Pray. Touch only those
to whom you commit your life.
Center down.
And when your body has become still,
reach out with your heart.
Know that we are connected
in ways that are terrifying and beautiful.
(You could hardly deny it now.)
Know that our lives
are in one another’s hands.
(Surely, that has come clear.)
Do not reach out your hands.
Reach out your heart.
Reach out your words.
Reach out all the tendrils
of compassion that move, invisibly,
where we cannot touch.
Promise this world your love–
for better or for worse,
in sickness and in health,
so long as we all shall live.

–Lynn Ungar 3/11/20

Pandemic

What if you thought of it
as the Jews consider the Sabbath—
the most sacred of times?
Cease from travel.
Cease from buying and selling.
Give up, just for now,
on trying to make the world
different than it is.
Sing. Pray. Touch only those
to whom you commit your life.
Center down.
And when your body has become still,
reach out with your heart.
Know that we are connected
in ways that are terrifying and beautiful.
(You could hardly deny it now.)
Know that our lives
are in one another’s hands.
(Surely, that has come clear.)
Do not reach out your hands.
Reach out your heart.
Reach out your words.
Reach out all the tendrils
of compassion that move, invisibly,
where we cannot touch.
Promise this world your love–
for better or for worse,
in sickness and in health,
so long as we all shall live.

–Lynn Ungar 3/11/20