When protectors of the climate raise our voices all as one, There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun; Only days remain to act but there’s a planet to be won, And the climate makes us strong. [Chorus:] Climate solidarity forever, Climate solidarity forever, Climate solidarity forever, For the climate makes us strong….
I’m feeling contradictory emotions around the Green New Deal. Hope, because momentum seems to be building for *something.* Apprehension, because it seems to ultimately rely on liberal nationalism. Pride, because I know people who know people involved. Apprehension, because I sense in Sunrise the same limitations I sense in IfNotNow. Excitement, because this could be…
Justice is what love looks like in public. Solidarity is what justice looks like in practice. Love is what solidarity looks like in private. The first line is Cornel West, the second two are my riffs. I often, after something like Pittsburgh, find it safer to think about justice than love. Justice can just mean…
I know my liberation is bound up in others’. But I need to feel it. I need to link it to my identities and my spiritual vulnerabilities, including my vulnerability as a member of oppressor groups. This linking is nobody’s task but mine and my groups’. But it *is* our task. If we just think…
I want a Revolutionary Climate Front. Derived from radical-leaning environmental, identity-based, and political groups that already exist. With global, decolonial, anti-capitalist, and anti-racist goals. Led by people most immediately impacted by climate destruction. Whose members back up demands not only by threatening to hold rallies and vote out politicians, but also by threatening to withhold…
Very often, I think that revolution is impossible. If it were possible, it would have happened already. If the new world were coming, it would already be here. What helps me get out of this funk isn’t some political philosophy or another. It’s therapy. Individually, I really *have* worked through some issues– and I bet…
Last night was full of emotion. Then a woman on the sidewalk recommended a book on Moldovan pogroms to take my mind off things. Then I saw Orthodox men singing in the street with a police escort, dancing with the Torah. Why? Because Simchat Torah celebrates the return to Genesis, to “in the beginning,” to…
We shouldn’t be running after the enemy- the enemy should be running after us. I read something to that effect in an interview with Subcommandante Marcos of the Zapatistas. It perfectly captured what I often feel about activism. So often we define ourselves and others purely by what we’re *against*– capitalism, neoliberalism, Trump, etc. That’s…
I used to think in terms of revolution. If a concept or a campaign or a coalition or whatever didn’t totally change the right structures, I thought it didn’t count. But nothing ever seemed revolutionary enough. Thinking like that got lonely. Now I try to think in terms of life cycles. I try to think…