Passover, Easter and Ramadan fall quite close together this year, and their spiritual energies are bursting out all over. Yes, all the usual challenges that confront us are on full display. But there’s something else that’s happening as well…a sense of something new in the offing, voices rising on behalf…

I remember the first Earth Day. It began the year I graduated from high school. Earth Day was created by Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson, inspiring Americans to pay more attention to the environment in which we live. At that time, there was not yet an Environmental Protection Agency, or Clean…

I was 15 years old the day Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed. My mother was making dinner in the kitchen and I was watching TV in the den. All of a sudden BREAKING NEWS shot across the television screen, and in those days “Breaking News” meant something. My mother…

Earlier today I came home from some time on the road, first a swing through South Carolina and then speaking at a rally and drag show protesting a draconian law in Tennessee that limits the rights of transgender and drag performers. While American children live daily at the tragic effects…

In 1964 President Lyndon Johnson launched an “unconditional war on poverty,” its goal being the complete elimination of poverty in America by 1976. Due however to the Viet Nam War and then the election of Richard Nixon in 1968, the War on Poverty was put on the back burner and…

Many people are upset about the Willow Project, and for good reason. The $8 billion oil drilling project in Alaska is undoubtedly “recklessly irresponsible,” in the words of Al Gore. Despite President Biden’s campaign promises that there would be no further oil drilling on federal land, the project brings 200…

It’s time for America to recreate itself. An America that has reclaimed its original principles but is willing to reckon with the places where we have not lived up to them. We need to celebrate the places where we have been right and to admit to places when we have…

It says something deeply dysfunctional about our society that there are young people now whose goal is to become a billionaire. Beyond the fact that 99 per cent of those who want that will never get the chance, the very fact that money – and so much money, at that…

56 men signed the Declaration of Independence. It was a document treasonous to the king of England, therefore by doing so they were literally putting their lives at risk. The Declaration called forth a new nation, built around the most enlightened principles that had ever formed the founding of a…

America is like an alcoholic family, in which no one is really saying what’s going on, the children are registering all the unprocessed realities but don’t know what to do with them, and anyone who speaks up and tells the truth is likely to be severely punished. We can’t send…

Years ago I went to work at a place where I sought to institute various changes. I met lots of resistance – I admit I lacked the managerial chops at the time to enroll people in my ideas, as I should have – and kept hearing the same thing over…

Neoliberalism is the political philosophy that dominates both major political parties. It replaces democratic values with market values as the governing principle of our society, making free-market capitalism, deregulation and reduction in government spending a false economic god to which all are expected to bow. We can stand up for…

American history is like a book in which every generation writes a chapter. Some of the chapters have been glorious while others have been tragic; the chapter we’re in is one in which we’re teetering on an edge between the two. It is a time of precipitous decline, and it…

The train derailment and subsequent environmental disaster on February 3rd in East Palestine, Ohio, is the embodiment of a greedy economic perspective and the damage it creates. The railroad industry, like so many others, produces billions of dollars in profit for its stockholders. Yet those profits are often at the…