As I’ve scanned the headlines over the last few weeks, it’s felt like many of us have been holding a canopy just above our heads for a while now. A steady rain of trauma drips and trickles off the edge of the canopy. And there’s a wind blowing just enough rain under the edge to […]
Remote war and responsibility
Contains spoilers for Eye in the Sky. The United States recently expanded its military activity in the Horn of Africa. Among the regional groups it now openly targets in the name of post-9/11 counter-terrorism is Al-Shabab (The Youth), a decentralized network based in Somalia and operating around the Somali-Kenyan border. The US has in fact […]
One of us
“One of us.” One of us. One of ours. Our own. We claim them. We look out for them. We protect them. When the axe came into the forest, the trees said, ‘The handle is one of us.’” The apostle Paul writes, “They are not all Israel, which are of Israel.” Zora Neale Hurston’s version is […]
Comfort food
I ate a quarter of a large Ledo’s olive pizza this morning. For breakfast. It was a meal with all the right pieces: carbohydrate, protein, vegetables. I don’t always eat pizza for breakfast, but when I do, I wolf down a quarter of it, and then I tell myself it’s a meal with all the right pieces. […]
Being right and doing wrong
Davontae Sanford gets to go home now. After nine years trapped in the Michigan prison system after a false conviction, the 23-year-old gets to go home now. ‘It’s about time. It’s too bad nobody listened years ago… so this kid wouldn’t have to spend so much time in prison for a crime he didn’t do.’ […]
Organizers threaten everything.
Organizers threaten everything. Organizers should threaten everything. This is what we need our organizers to do: challenge organizational habits, disrupt our inertia, and remind us of the communities we’re accountable to. Unless organizers function cleanly and constructively, and organizations allow their critiques to make change, no one can do their best. Organizing is a way to creatively destabilize the […]
