The Wild Reed

Sunday, August 17, 2025

Going Deeper to Change Everything

Author and former progressive Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson has a new video series called “Metaphysical Minute.”

The content of today’s “minute” really speaks to me. Perhaps it will speak deeply to you too.

Everything you need is either right in front of you and you may or may not be seeing it, or it’s on its way and your job is to ready yourself to receive it. Go deeper with where you are, what you’re doing, and who you’re with right now. The vertical work is as important as the horizontal. That’s when the miracle happens.

– Marianne Williamson
Excerpted from “Metaphysical Minute”
August 17, 2025

Saturday, August 16, 2025

The Strongest Force in the Universe

The following is attributed to Joy Harjo.

Love is the strongest force in the universe. We must keep walking in the direction of love, no matter what we hear and see around us. No matter our human failures. No matter what happens, or appears to happen. And if we are thankful for that love, the power magnifies. Forgiveness is a process of love. Love is not bound by religion, belief system, or man-made laws. Our human minds cannot comprehend the immensity of it. We are lit by it, or we would not be here. Some smother the light with fear and acts of fear. Others tend their light and they light the world. Breath feeds the light. Breathe deep today, and continue walking toward that which will enlighten, no matter what burdens you are carrying of shame, grief, or fear. No one can buy their way or push their way ahead of everyone else. We are all in this together.

Friday, August 15, 2025

“It’s Here, and We Are Sleepwalking Through It”

We are no longer teetering on the edge of authoritarianism. We are here. And the most horrifying part is we’re still going to work, booking vacations, making dinner plans, as if nothing has changed.

I keep hearing people say, I just don’t watch the news it’s too depressing. I need to get away from it all. But there is no “away.” There is no escape from what has arrived and is hardening in place.

Washington, D.C., is now under the control of the U.S. military and the Justice Department. ICE is prowling our neighborhoods, snatching people off the streets and deporting them. Universities are cutting deals with the federal government. Law firms are agreeing to stand down in the fight against totalitarianism. And presiding over it all is Führer Trump, stealing billions through crypto while keeping it deregulated so the grift never ends.

A few years ago, if someone described these events happening in another country, you’d call it what it is: a dictatorship, no different in spirit from the Soviet Union. Now it’s here, and we are sleepwalking through it.

So what do we do? We don’t shut up. We don’t go quiet. We talk about it relentlessly. That might make you bad dinner company, but fuck being polite. Now is the time for getting into good trouble. Support the few brave legislators willing to fight like those in Texas. Vote for leaders with the courage to stand up like Zohran Mamdani in NYC [and Omar Fateh in Minneapolis]. And fight voter suppression with everything we’ve got.

The National Guard deployment in D.C., just like the one in L.A., is not about crime. If it were, they’d be fanning out in the states with the highest rates of crime (top 10 per capita are Louisiana Alabama, South Carolina, New Mexico, Tennessee, Georgia, Arkansas Missouri, Maryland, Alaska) but 8 of those 10 voted for Trump. This is about crushing blue states, silencing opposition, and tightening the grip on power.

Their playbook is almost comical it is so well known by everyone with a 5th grade education: militarize the cities, suppress the vote, muzzle the media, attack the universities, eliminate dissent. The only way to stop it is to fight like hell, organize, take to the streets when needed, and flood the polls.

We have no choice. Lose this fight, and we lose the country. And right now, we are getting our asses kicked.

– Jason Duchin
via social media
August 13, 2025

Thursday, August 14, 2025

A Call to Divest from Israel

I share this evening some photographs I took at a rally I attended on Sunday, August 3 outside of the official residence of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. (As you can see at right, I wore my “Omar Fateh for Minneapolis Mayor” t-shirt.)

This event was organized by the Minneapolis-based Anti-War Committee which since last May has been trying to persuade the Saint Paul Board of Water Commissioners to end its cyber security contract with the Israeli company, Waterfall Security Solutions. They have refused to do so, saying that the twin issues of Israeli apartheid and genocide are matters of “personal opinion.”

We gathered on August 3 to urge Gov. Walz to use his position and influence to end the Board of Water Commissioners’ contract with Israel, to do everything he can to divest Minnesota from the apartheid Israeli regime which continues to conduct a genocide in Gaza, a genocide that our tax dollars – both federal and state – are funding.

We also sought to convey the message that economic isolation works. Such a non-violent strategy succeeded, for instance, in ending apartheid in South Africa in the late 1980s. We believe it’s a strategy that can and should now be used to stop Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza.

Related Off-site Links:
Saint Paul Board of Water Commissioners’ Meeting Shut Down by Palestine Solidarity – Mike Madden (Fight Back News, August 12, 2025).
Much Ado About Nothing: Tim Walz’s Empty Words on Gaza – David R. Weiss (Full Frontal Faith, September 16, 2024).

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• “It’s a Systematic Slaughter That We’re Funding”
• Protesting Weapons Manufacturer and Genocide Enabler General Dynamics
• “This Is a Genocidal Project”
• “A Year of War Against Children”
• Protesting Israel’s “Starvation Campaign” in Gaza
• Israel’s Actions in Gaza: “A Clear and Present Moral Collapse”

Wednesday, August 13, 2025

“He Is Enacting an Authoritarian Agenda”: Khalil Gibran Muhammad on Donald Trump’s Militarization of Law Enforcement

Khalil Gibran Muhammad is a professor of African American studies and Public Affairs at Princeton University. He is also the author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America.

Earlier today, Muhammad was a guest on Democracy Now! where he offered the following perspective on President Trump’s recent federal takeover of law enforcement in Washington, D.C. This takeover is being justified by Trump’s contention that the capital is awash in violent crime, including crimes being perpetrated by “roving mobs of wild youth.”

__________________

We are seeing a consistent pattern from Donald Trump. We can start with [his] calls for the return of the death penalty in 1989 in reference to the rape of a white woman in Central Park, which ultimately led to the conviction of five innocent young Black boys. Donald Trump has never apologized for that moment. . . . [T]his is a man who has consistently scapegoated Black and Brown people to either gain celebrity or political capital. And now as president the second time, he is enacting an authoritarian agenda, in which case the militarization of law enforcement and the deployment of law enforcement assets to either coerce or control scapegoated populations, as we saw in Los Angeles recently, is consistent.

And this is, in particular, an escalation, because while he tested the waters in deploying the Marines and 4,000 National Guard troops in Los Angeles, now we see the takeover of a local police department. And while he has the right to do so, at least for a limited period, it’s not clear that he’s going to stop. He’s calling for the same in New York. He’s calling for the same in Chicago.

And I just want to remind everyone that the Trump administration elected in 2016 came in riding on a lie about “American carnage” in American cities. This was also a period of dramatically declined crime rates and violent crime rates, in particular, across U.S. cities. So, there is nothing here that is factual in terms of the pretext for the calls [for the federal takeover of local law enforcement]. What is consistent is Donald Trump’s use of racist rhetoric, racist ideas, and the use of policing to enact a domestic policy agenda.

. . . Donald Trump doesn’t care about any rule of law. What he cares about is flexing the power of the executive branch of government against so-called enemies. And as long as he can get away with it, without congressional oversight, and with a claim of a popular mandate, which, of course, is not entirely true from the election, [he will] get away with it. And it is a slide towards a fascism. All of this is [a] textbook [case of fascism from] around the world. And we ought to be deeply concerned about the future of all of us with respect to the capacity of this particular president to use and threaten a coercive state violence against his so-called enemies.

. . . [A] global perspective is very helpful here. We’ve seen this same president threaten to turn Gaza into the Riviera of the Middle East. That is a massive population experiencing ethnic cleansing and genocide. . . . [Here] in the United States, [Trump is] criminaliz[ing] people who are victims of an unequal society, [people] who have not found the resources to support the healthcare and housing needs; the criminalization of poverty by local officials. [Trump is] essentially threatening to turn those populations into criminal populations — that is, to treat them as if their poverty is a crime. Again, this is consistent with the policies of this administration when it comes to people, both in the U.S. and in Gaza and other parts of the world.

– Khalil Gibran Muhammad
Excerpted from “‘Slide Towards Fascism’:
Khalil Gibran Muhammad on the
Racist Roots of Trump D.C. Takeover”
Democracy Now!
August 13, 2025

Tuesday, August 12, 2025

Quote of the Day

Christians who oppose marriage equality (or LGBTQ rights of any kind) are ignoring Jesus’ command to love their neighbors as themselves.

They are choosing to revoke the freedoms from others that they already enjoy: the right to marry the person they love, the right to adopt children, the right to body autonomy, the right to define their identity, the right to spousal benefits.

Their incessant persecution of people whose relationships, families, and healthcare decisions do not affect them in the slightest isn’t just a lousy thing to do on a human level; it’s also a willful act of rebellion against Jesus.

– John Pavlovitz
Excerpted from “The Sin of Denying Someone’s Joy”
The Beautiful Mess
August 12, 2025

Related Off-site Links:
Who is Kim Davis? Ex-Kentucky Clerk Wants Supreme Court to Overturn Gay Marriage Ruling – Marina Johnson and Maureen Groppe (Louisville Courier Journal, August 12, 2025).
Kim Davis Supreme Court Showdown: Could This Be the End of Gay Marriage in America? – Marie Joy Toledo (International Business Times, August 12, 2025).
U.S. Supreme Court Formally Asked to Overturn Landmark Same-sex Marriage Ruling – Devin Dwyer (ABC News, August 11, 2025).

See also the following Wild Reed posts:
• Progressive Catholic Perspectives on the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2015 Marriage Equality Ruling
• Mariam Williams: Quote of the Day – July 13, 2015
• Tim Wise: Quote of the Day – June 26, 2015
• Ian Reifowitz: Quote of the Day – February 2, 2015
• On the First Anniversary of Marriage Equality in Minnesota, a Celebratory Look Back at the Important Role Played by Catholics (2014)

Anas al-Sharif, 1996-2025

Global condemnation is mounting over the assassination [by Israel] of one of the most prominent journalists in Gaza, Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif, along with four of his colleagues at the network and a sixth journalist, freelance reporter Mohammed al-Khalidi.

The killing of al-Sharif and his colleagues is “really murder,” says Irene Khan, U.N. special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression. “It is not killing in the context of war. It is a deliberate strategy to stop independent voices reporting.”

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres is calling for an independent investigation of the journalists who were killed in the targeted Israeli strike.

On Monday, crowds of mourners gathered for a funeral procession for al-Sharif and his colleagues, marching from Al-Shifa Hospital to Sheikh Radwan Cemetery in central Gaza, carrying the journalists’ bodies wrapped in white sheets. A dark blue flak press jacket and a Palestinian flag were placed on al-Sharif’s remains. People embraced as they decried Israel’s relentless targeting of journalists in Gaza.

Meanwhile, at rallies and vigils worldwide, people are demanding accountability for the attack on journalists, including in Tunisia, Belfast, Dublin, Berlin, London, Oslo, Stockholm and Washington, D.C.

– Amy Goodman
Excerpted from “Israel Has ‘Deliberate Strategy’
of Killing Palestinian Journalists Like Anas al-Sharif”
Democracy Now!
August 12, 2025

The Committee to Protect Journalists is appalled by Israel’s killing in Gaza on Sunday of four Al Jazeera staff – correspondents Anas al-Sharif and Mohammed Qreiqeh and camera operators Ibrahim Zaher and Mohammed Noufal – as well as freelance journalists Moamen Aliwa and Mohammad al-Khaldi.

The six journalists were killed by a targeted strike on a tent used by media near Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.

In a statement announcing the killing of al-Sharif, Israel’s military accused the journalist of heading a Hamas cell and of “advancing rocket attacks against Israeli civilians and [Israeli] troops.”

Israel has a longstanding, documented pattern of accusing journalists of being terrorists without providing any credible proof.

“Israel is murdering the messengers,” said CPJ Regional Director Sara Qudah. “Israel wiped out an entire news crew. It has made no claims that any of the other journalists were terrorists. That’s murder. Plain and simple.”

“It is no coincidence that the smears against al-Sharif – who has reported night and day for Al Jazeera since the start of the war – surfaced every time he reported on a major development in the war, most recently the starvation brought about by Israel’s refusal to allow sufficient aid into the territory,” Qudah said, adding that the famine has been independently corroborated by aid workers and medics, despite Israel’s refusal to let foreign reporters into Gaza.

Al-Sharif had been one of Al Jazeera’s best-known reporters in Gaza since October 2023, and one of several journalists whom Israel had previously alleged were members of Hamas, without providing evidence.

. . . The August 10 attack raises the number of Al Jazeera staff journalists killed by Israel in Gaza during the war to 10, in addition to eight journalists who freelanced with the media organization, according to CPJ data.

“If Israel can kill the most prominent Gazan journalist, then it can kill anyone. The world needs to see these deadly attacks on journalists inside Gaza, as well as its censorship of journalists in Israel and the West Bank, for what they are: a deliberate and systematic attempt to cover up Israel’s actions,” said Qudah. “Israel has killed more journalists in the 22 months since the start of the war than were killed worldwide in the preceding three years. Deliberately targeting journalists is a war crime under international law. This massacre must end.”

– Committee to Protect Journalists
Excerpted from “Israel kills Al Jazeera Journalists
in Targeted Gaza City Airstrike”
August 10, 2025

So many of us feel angry, outraged, powerless and ashamed. We are confronted by a stream of accusations from the IDF that seek to dehumanize our Palestinian colleagues, that seek to justify their killings, and the nature of the carefully calibrated language that we are using in our stories, I understand to many, just feels so detached and so not proportional to the agony and outrage of the moment.

And behind the scenes, many of us continue to push and press and sign letters and write petitions and do meetings, and none of it seems to make a damn bit of difference.

So just a reminder that journalism is not a crime and that the targeting of journalists is a war crime.

– Clarissa Ward
via social media
August 11, 2025

Yesterday Israel assassinated six reporters, among them “the voice of Gaza,” Al Jazeera reporter Anas Al-Sharif. The Israeli government admitted to targeting the journalists. 237 journalists have been killed by Israel in Gaza since the Israeli genocide campaign began that has taken the lives of nearly 62,000 people and is now using the cruelest tactic of all – starving children.

As a journalist, I am appalled and saddened and struggling to understand how society blithely accepts this atrocity. As a woman and mother, I marvel at the strength of Palestinian women to carry on caring in an uncaring and murderous world. As a Mexican citizen, I call on our government to do more – join arms and energy embargoes against Israel and provide proof of the cancellation of contracts, including Pegasus spyware used against journalists. As a U.S. citizen, I call on citizens there to demand an end to taxpayer dollars murdering families, because there’s no point on calling on the government to do anything, as Trump looks on with glee, imagining the hotels he would build on the graves of the children he helped kill.

– Laura Carlsen
via social media
August 11, 2025

I have spent 35 years as a journalist covering conflict – a so-called war reporter – with a focus on war crimes and human rights violations.

Today, I lead The Reckoning Project, a war crimes unit that brings together investigative journalists, lawyers, and digital scientists to hold perpetrators accountable.

Over the course of reporting 18 wars, I have been shot at, sniped, kidnapped, threatened, nearly raped, and had guns – including RPGs wielded by child soldiers – pointed at me. I have lost many beloved colleagues, from Sarajevo to Sierra Leone, Iraq to Syria. I have witnessed more suffering than I thought possible.

And yet, without exaggeration, I can say that I have never seen anything like what is happening in Gaza – nor the near-universal complicity in allowing it to continue.

Since October 8th, 2023, the international community has sat back and allowed Israel to act with absolute impunity.

They kill children.

They kill doctors.

They kill nurses.

They kill teachers.

They kill academics.

And they kill my colleagues – journalists.

Yesterday’s attack on an entire Al Jazeera team was not a mistake. It was targeted. Journalists are civilians, protected under international law – but that protection has been ignored.

It feels almost banal to repeat it: this is not about antisemitism, nor is it blood libel. This is about Israel’s clear intent to eradicate Palestinians – and the world watching it happen.

This must stop. Now.

– Janine Di Giovanni
via social media
August 11, 2025

Sunday, August 10, 2025

Brent Molnar on the “Cold War in Our Own House”

Let’s dispense with the euphemisms. This is not dysfunction. This is not polarization. This is not a rough patch between parties who still fundamentally believe in a shared project. No. We are at war – quietly, bureaucratically, legally. Not with bullets, not yet. But with lines on maps, with edicts signed in backrooms, with judges installed for the express purpose of gutting democracy under the illusion of process. It’s a cold war in our own house. A legal civil war. And the fuse is already lit.

On August 4th, Governor Greg Abbott escalated. He crossed a line we’ve seen coming for years but prayed would hold. With smug glee, he announced that any Democratic legislator who fails to appear for a surprise session would have their seat declared vacant. Not censured. Not penalized. Vacated. This wasn’t governance. This was a purge – designed to manufacture a quorum for an emergency redistricting effort that would slice at least five new Republican congressional seats out of thin air. Not earned. Not voted on. Just . . . drawn.

The motive is not hidden. The GOP is preparing for a catastrophe in 2026. Their coalition is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions, and rather than build a broader base, they’re rigging the battlefield. Five extra seats – procured with a pen, not a vote – could mean the difference between minority status and absolute control of the House. And from there? The plan is plain: manufacture deadlock in 2028, throw the election to the House, and coronate a president by fiat. Maybe even Trump himself. It’s not conspiracy theory. It’s strategy, and they’re announcing it out loud.

And they’re not alone. In response, blue states are sharpening their own blades. Governors in California, Illinois, Washington, and New York have declared their intention to redraw their maps as a counterstrike. They’re no longer pretending this is a shared country. They’re drawing their own lines – not just on paper, but in the ground. We’ve now entered the phase where both sides are actively seizing power through procedural warfare. This isn’t brinksmanship. It’s the opening volley of a new kind of civil conflict.

There will be no Fort Sumter this time. No clear battlefield. Instead, there will be standoffs between federal agents and state troopers. Budget refusals. Competing court rulings. Commanders who ignore orders from “illegitimate” presidents. And as Trump purges the military of anyone not sufficiently loyal, the idea of a unified national defense force becomes laughable. He’s not staffing a government. He’s assembling warlords. And we are supposed to wait and hope this somehow returns to normal?

Let’s stop pretending we’re in a democracy. The GOP has already said, flat out, that they’ll reject the next Democratic win. No ambiguity. No pretense. They’ve broadcast their plan: win the House with rigged maps, create a disputed presidential election, and install their choice by congressional vote. That’s not the loss of democracy. That is democracy’s replacement. And if the courts uphold it – if the Supreme Court smiles and nods and signs the death certificate – then the Constitution becomes nothing more than a prop in a crime scene photo.

So what happens then? What happens when California refuses to recognize a president who was “elected” by an illegitimate House majority? What happens when New York withholds federal taxes? When blue states band together and declare the compact broken? Don’t scoff. The only thing keeping this country stitched together is the will to be united. That will is gone. And once it’s acknowledged – once the mask slips – we don’t go back. We can’t.

The split won’t be clean. It won’t be two nations. It will be dozens of factions: states, cities, counties, military units, militias, digital enclaves. A hundred flags. A thousand claims to legitimacy. And in that chaos, someone will rise – a younger, sharper strongman who offers peace through obedience. He’ll wear Trump’s ideology with a new face, and we’ll be so desperate to stop the bleeding, we’ll crown him king. That’s how republics fall. Not from war – but from the desire to end it.

And here’s the final, brutal truth: they’ve misjudged the left. They think we’re weak because we believe in empathy. Because we respect law. Because we want a world where nobody has to live in fear. But that doesn’t mean we won’t fight. We’ve stood against fascism before – and if the day comes, we’ll stand again. We may lose. We may fracture. But history will not forget who struck first. Or who gave everything trying to hold the line.

– Brent Molnar
via Brent Molnar: Voice of Reason
August 7, 2025

Related Off-site Links:
Is America’s Democracy on the Brink of Collapse? – Alasdair Black (The AIM Network, August 9, 2025).
Tyrant Trump’s Worst Crimes, Dangers, and Destructions Are Yet to Come – Ralph Nader (Common Dreams, August 9, 2025).
Donald J. Trump Is the Leading Threat to U.S. Election Integrity – Michael Waldman (Common Dreams, August 8, 2025).
Is the United States Falling Apart? – Helen Reynolds (The AIM Network, August 8, 2025).
The Trump Administration Wants to Turn U.S. Cities Into Occupied Territory – Jesse MacKinnon (Common Dreams, August 7, 2025).
It’s Up to We the People to Save a Flailing America From Spiritual Death – William J. Astore (Common Dreams, August 5, 2025).
The Rule of Law Is Dead in the U.S. – Elie Mystal (The Nation, July 30, 2025).
What Won't Democrats Fight? – Jonathan V. Last (The Bulwark, July 30, 2025).
American Politics Are in Trouble – James Zogby (Common Dreams, July 28, 2025).
Trump’s Supreme Court Enablers Will Face History’s Verdict – Philip Allen Lacovara (The Bulwark, July 28, 2025).
“The Orban Playbook”: Trump Assault on Media Matters Seen as Dire Warning to Other Critics – Brad Reed (Common Dreams, July 25, 2025).
Trump’s Gravestones, Carved by Reality Denial – Steven Day (Common Dreams, July 24, 2025).
The Fascists Are Trying to Break You, Good People. Don’t Let Them – John Pavlovitz (The Beautiful Mess, July 17, 2025).
“We Are in the Midst of the Creation of a Police State”: Rep. Ilhan Omar on Trump’s Authoritarianism – Democracy Now! (June 13, 2025).
The War on Terror Comes Home: Learning the Dark Lessons of Trump’s First 50 Days – Karen J. Greenberg (Salon, March 30, 2025).

UPDATE: Time for Democrats to Get Off Their Asses – Robert Reich (Common Dreams, August 15, 2025).

See also the following chronologically-ordered Wild Reed posts:
• Marisa Kabas: “We’re Witnessing a Coup By an Unelected Billionaire Propped Up By a Felonious President”
• Timothy Snyder on Resisting the Oligarchs’ “Logic of Destruction”
• “This Is Essentially Viktor Orbán’s Playbook”
• “An Extremely Clever Ruse” by and for the Rich: Owen Jones on Elon Musk’s Coup
• “To Be a Rib in This Body of Our Country”
• Quote of the Day – February 21, 2025
• Ralph Nader: “We’re Heading Into the Most Serious Crisis in American History. There’s No Comparison”
• Why the Democratic Party Is Not Going to Save Us From Fascism
• “This Is How Democracy Unravels”
• Jason Stanley on How Fascism Works
• James Greenberg on Trumpism: “The Tactics Are Unmistakable”
• Tony Pentimalli on Trump’s “Death Warrant for Democracy”
• “This Is What Fascism Looks Like”
• Peter Bloom: Quote of the Day – June 10, 2025
• “Protesting Is What Patriotism Looks Like in Public”: The “No Kings” Protests of June 14, 2025
• “No Kings”? Absolutely. But Also “No Oligarchy”
• Marianne Williamson: Quote of the Day – June 20, 2025
• Rep. Ro Khanna: Quote of the Day – June 24, 2025
• “This Is Fascism”
• The Declaration of Resistance
• The Choice Before Us
• Marianne Williamson: Quote of the Day – July 26, 2025
• How Democrats Can Start Winning Again
• Brent Molnar on the MAGA Cult and Its Intentions
• James Greenberg: “The Choices We Make Matter”

Saturday, August 09, 2025

Photo of the Day

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Summer Vignettes
• O Breath of Summer
• Summer Blooms (2021)
• Summer Garden
• A Summer Sunset Psalm
• Eternal Summer

Image: Michael J. Bayly.

Tuesday, August 05, 2025

Quote of the Day

U.S. labor unions in America have been very complicit, if not participated, in this genocide. For the last 21 months, U.S. labor unions have been shipping arms to Israel every 15 hours. I’ve publicly called them out. The longshoremen have blood on their hands, and the AFL-CIO has blood on their hands, as well. They have passed zero resolutions since October 7, and half a million Palestinians are dead because of this. And as a U.S. labor leader and a U.S. taxpaying citizen [I am aware that] the Palestinian movement of liberation and resistance has always included trade unions, since the first Nakba.

From my journeys around the world and meeting with different trade unions, especially in the Middle East, I’ve met plenty of Palestinian trade union presidents, and I understand that [speaking out against Israel’s genocide in Gaza] is not outside the scope of labor. This is a working-class issue. And as a labor leader [I say that] it is our responsibility to be the shield of the working class. An injury to one is an injury to all, and that doesn’t exclude Palestinians.

– Chris Smalls
Excerpted from “Labor Leader Chris Smalls
Describes Israeli Arrest and Assault
After Military Raids Gaza Flotilla”
Democracy Now!
August 5, 2025

Related Off-site Links:
Chris Smalls Is Coming Home; Will This Shake the U.S. Labor Movement Into Action on Gaza? – Mike Elk (Common Dreams, July 31, 2025).
Detainment of Chris Smalls: White Supremacy at the Core of Zionism – The Black Alliance for Peace (Popular Resistance, July 31, 2025).
Chris Smalls Beaten in IDF Custody; Teamsters President Silent – Due Dissidence (July 30, 2025).
U.S. Gaza Freedom Flotilla Members Say No Consular Support Given After Abduction by Israeli Forces – Brett Wilkins (Common Dreams, July 30, 2025).
Where’s the Outrage Over Labor Leader Chris Smalls’ Violent Arrest by the IDF? – Mike Elk (Common Dreams, July 29, 2025).

UPDATES: “I Rubbed Them the Wrong Way”: An Interview with Chris Smalls – Sabrina Salvati (Sabby Sabs, August 8, 2025).
Chris Smalls Exposes Bernie Sanders and AOC’s Shocking Gaza Hypocrisy – Kit Cabello (Hard Lens Media, August 16, 2025).
Chris Smalls on Bridging the Gaps Between Union Labor and Palestinian Activism – The Joy Reid Show (August 17, 2025).

See also the following Wild Reed post:
• U.S. Labor Leader Chris Smalls Joins the Crew of the Handala
• Jonah Walters: Quote of the Day – September 5, 2016
• At the Minnesota Capitol, a Show of Solidarity for Workers’ Rights in Wisconsin and Beyond (2011)
• Across America, “the Giant is Awake”
• General Strike for Peace (2007)

Saturday, August 02, 2025

James Greenberg: “The Choices We Make Matter”

James B. Greenberg is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Arizona, the Founding Editor of the Journal of Political Ecology, and the past president of the Political Ecology Society.

Last week Greenberg published the following commentary on his substack. It’s a timely and insightful piece, and one that I find in many ways hopeful. Perhaps you will too.

___________________

We are living through a moment in which authoritarianism is no longer merely a threat. It is an organizing principle, a mode of governance that normalizes cruelty, criminalizes dissent, and hollows out the very institutions built to protect the public. The executive orders and legislative measures being pushed today are not bureaucratic accidents. They are acts of political redesign.

What replaces democratic law doesn’t need new institutions. It rewires the ones we already have to serve a different purpose. Law is not discarded; it is weaponized – not to defend the public, but to protect power.

To resist this is not only a political act. It is a historical one. We are shaping the memory of what was accepted, what was contested, and what was possible. Each refusal to comply, each protest, legal challenge, policy safeguard, or act of moral courage becomes part of the long record that future generations will study when they ask what we did in the face of creeping tyranny.

Authoritarianism doesn’t only rely on repression. It thrives on resignation. It tells us nothing can be done, that resistance is futile, that hope is naïve. But history does not support this. The fall of every repressive system – from the plantation economy to apartheid to the Berlin Wall – was not the result of inevitability but of struggle. Accumulated over time. Advanced at great cost. But sustained.

Standing up now may not mean defeating a regime in a single act. It may mean refusing collaboration, protecting a threatened colleague, exposing corruption, or showing up for a neighbor. These acts may seem small. They are not. They are part of the infrastructure of resistance: the human infrastructure on which every democratic revival has depended.

The same perspective holds when we confront climate collapse. The atmosphere, like history, records everything. Carbon released in 1850 is still warming the Earth. The emissions we generate today will linger for centuries. And the ecological systems we’ve disrupted – ice sheets, ocean currents, forests – are shifting in response on timescales far longer than those of our institutions.

We are told it’s too late. That the damage is done. That nothing we do matters. But that defeatism only makes collapse more likely. The truth is: every tenth of a degree we prevent, every ecosystem we protect, every just policy we implement shapes the conditions of life for generations. These are not gestures. They are boundaries: of habitability, of hope, of survival.

This isn’t just an environmental issue. It’s a civilizational one. Climate change magnifies inequality, accelerates displacement, and exposes every crack in the systems meant to mediate power. Its effects fall heaviest on those least responsible. It is not a problem of carbon alone, but of political economy – of systems that reward extraction, commodify nature, and externalize harm.

But not all futures are lost. The choices we make now matter, not only for their immediate effects but for the pathways they open or foreclose. Resistance and renewal are not separate acts. They are part of the same long arc of care. That arc is held up by relationships: between people and place, between generations, between those who came before and those who are not yet born.

We are the inheritors of choices others made. And we are now the ones who must choose what to defend, what to dismantle, what to remember, and what to become.

This all matters because the dominant systems we live under are designed to make us forget. Authoritarianism relies not only on force but on erasure: of memory, of alternative ways of being, of solidarity, of history itself. Political repression and climate denial function in similar ways. Both depend on distraction and disconnection. They thrive on making the unacceptable seem inevitable.

But memory is a form of resistance. And attention is a form of care. Choosing what to remember, what to notice, teach, preserve, and defend is one way we stay human under systems that seek to render us fungible.

None of this guarantees an outcome. But it guarantees that nothing we do is meaningless. Every action, every refusal, every effort to repair is a form of presence that extends beyond the self. We are not spectators. We are participants in a long and tangled chain of causality. That brings with it responsibility, but also the extraordinary potential for transformation.

With what’s going on, we often feel powerless, as if history is something done to us rather than something we participate in. But that sense of smallness obscures a deeper truth: each of us shapes history, not only in our own time but for generations to come. Every action has consequences. Some are immediate, visible, and measurable. Most ripple outward in ways we rarely see, accumulating like sediment in a riverbed, altering the course of things long after we’re gone.

Our very existence is the product of such accumulations. The atoms in our bodies were forged in stars that exploded billions of years ago. We are composed of particles born in the Big Bang, shaped by cosmic events we’ll never witness. Our biological inheritance stretches back through eons, through the first self-replicating molecules in a primeval sea, through ancestors who endured, adapted, resisted.

What we call the present is only a cross-section of that deeper continuity: of energy, matter, and meaning moving forward. And we too are part of that movement. Our choices today, even the smallest ones, carry forward into futures we cannot predict. The same is true for information and practice. Knowledge accumulates, adapts, and corrects itself – but it doesn’t vanish. What we record, teach, preserve, or refuse becomes part of an ongoing inheritance. It enters the world as something real, with the potential to grow, resist, or transform.

A deep time ethic demands more than imagination. It requires commitment – to act not only for today’s outcomes, but for consequences that unfold over decades, centuries, or longer. Most of our systems, political, economic, even academic, are built around short-term returns. But the crises we face now – ecological collapse, democratic erosion, systemic dispossession – unfold on long and uneven timelines. Meeting them requires a horizon of responsibility that stretches far beyond our own comfort or lifespan.

From an anthropological view, agency is not only personal; it is always social. It emerges through relationship, memory, and the accumulation of shared action. Movements arise not from singular events but from networks of care, refusal, and solidarity. They rarely move in straight lines. They advance by persistence, retreat, reconfiguration. And over time, they reshape what is possible.

No authoritarian regime, no extractive order, no imperial system has lasted forever. All have eventually been undone by the patient force of collective will. But that will must be cultivated and remembered.

Indigenous traditions remind us of this differently. In many of these worldviews, we do not stand apart from time – we are woven into it. We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our grandchildren. Responsibility is not heroic. It is relational. It lives in ritual, stewardship, kinship, and story. Time is not a line but a cycle. Consequence is not isolated to individuals; it moves through communities, watersheds, ecosystems, and generations. These are not abstractions. They are living systems of accountability that challenge the extractive worldview and offer an alternative rooted in endurance rather than domination.

Remember this: we are all powerful, not in theory but in action. Our voices and relationships matter. When we remember this, we reclaim the future from the logic of inevitability and become ancestors worth remembering.

– James Greenberg
“Why Connection – Not Control –
Is Our Greatest Source of Power”
James’s Substack
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James Greenberg: “The Choices We Make Matter”

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