Aleppo: the Heartbreak

We hear about it day in and day out. If we listen. A people martyred. A cosmopolitan jewel of civilization laid to ruin. I just shut off NPR when I hear a report including a poet still holed out among the trapped and still barely alive. I shut the radio off when I heard him say something like "I'll write against the destruction of my city…"

Meanwhile, the press, the buzz, the discussions seem poised to let oil production (i.e. Capital) dictate every moral compromise imaginable. Russia, U.S., China: How will these three big oafs carve up the world in the next decade?

Meanwhile, the top 1% must be elated: Wall Street is having orgasm after orgasm.

Mom & the Sioux People

The victory, which any right-minded person would hope holds, of the Standing Rock tribe over the corporations building the Dakota Access Pipeline is something to cheer in these bleak days for the U.S. Let's hope that it leads to scrapping the project altogether, since there's no way to realize it without crossing the Missouri River somewhere.

Can't help remembering how our mother, who had plenty else to think about keeping a household with four kids together, abidingly and nearly silently lent support throughout her life to the Sioux Nation. She knew that the people white conquerers, ravenous commerce & Capital had shafted the most were the Native people. Her donations were perhaps not much, but they were tokens of her consciousness of that fact. We miss you, Mom.