Can the bees start us singing again?
There is something the Information Age cannot say. The crisis of the Earth is reported to us as numbers. A hurricane has a category number, a minimum and maximum wind speed, and a cost in number of dead and number of billions. This is classic for the dot com era, where public talk is abbreviated, snarky, and a wet cat doing chin-ups can go viral like the 9th Symphony used to.
Honeybees and Fracking Wells
In each singing ritual on the tour of Scotland and Ireland, bees have descended on our shoulders, wild bees and honey bees. Today we travel to the last habitat of the Colette's Bee, an species endangered by golf courses and second home condos in Ireland's north.
All Packed
We're all packed for Scotland. Lena is crying as Savi brushes her hair. Going out a week early to meet Edinburgh activists and try to find where Monsanto's CEO Hugh Grant lived when he was a boy.
Cops and Bankers
COPS & BANKERS LOVE THEIR CHILDREN & WE GOTTA LOVE 'EM TOO. The Earth Movement won't move if cops & bankers don't move on their bosses & defend the lives of their loved ones. So ("COPS & BANKERS...) is the opening line from our new song! Talking with activists in Edinburgh last night.
Not Another Meme//Writing Matters Again
In the 70's, Joan Didion had a realization that overwhelmed her. She was motoring in Los Angeles at the time, working on a movie, and it dawned on her that "narrative doesn't matter anymore" in American culture. She had to pull off the road. I'm an American in Scotland, on my first morning after the flight from New York, and I'm having a double-take in the opposite direction.
Save Our Library From...A Nuclear Winter?
Dragonfly, Sarah and Monica - in a moment of terror, a moment that activists know well.
Arrest and detention is imminent because the information about where the protest is taking place is wrong. We thought we were singing outside of a warehouse in New Jersey, on the outskirts of Princeton University, where the trustees of the New York Public Library (investment bankers, slumlords and socialites) had secretly shipped over 2,000,000 books from the 42nd Street Library. And the books ARE there, but something monstrous is there with them...
Iraq War Supporters Now Excuse the Palestinian Slaughter
It was harrowing to hear David Brooks of the NY Times ho-hum the bombing of schools and refugee camps on American national radio (NPR) last Friday. Ten years ago, he gave the thumbs up to an Iraqi War that would inevitably take a heavy civilian toll, with the human cost so obvious from the first moments of "Shock and Awe." Brooks and war-fever buddy Tom Friedman are opinion-makers who brought many traditional liberals to accept their gruesome idea of necessary violence.
How Do You Do Citizenship Anymore?
Last winter our New York Public Library trustees, 1%ers all, investment bankers and realtors, trucked at least 2,000,000 books from the 42nd Street Library to a storage facility in New Jersey under cover of darkness. The famous "stacks" below the Rose Reading Room were suddenly emptied of physical books.
Do We Have a New App for the Injured and Dying Children of Gaza?
Our last remaining bit of shame is being dot-commed, with a young girl's pixilated eyes looking back at us from her murder.
I'm watching this atrocity with up to date technology, as I sit here typing. I remember a time when some techno-utopians thought that the global village would tilt us toward peace, as the violence became so vividly fore-grounded, the bleeding too painfully bright red, the searching for loved ones too real, and the eyes. Her eyes are more piercing than ever.