Columns

When the national political scene becomes so rancid that not even news junkies can stand to pay too much attention to it, the disgust factor can infect one’s attention to local issues, too. In fact, local issues suffer from almost any conflict with national news, especially when national news is vile, loathsome AND packaged as […]

Albuquerque, the major city of the poorest state in the nation, does not seem to be actively preparing itself for what now seems likely to be the inevitable advance of desiccating global warming in the Southwest. We seem to be suffering from a kind of future shock, a disease of change that takes the form […]

I wonder what Rachael Carson, biologist, nature writer, truth teller and mother of environmentalism in America, would make of the “post-truth” era of Donald Trump and the Trumpian Republican Party? She’d probably say it’s no different than the corporate propaganda that attacked her so viciously when she first published “Silent Spring” in 1962 and revealed […]

What are the signs of a culture coming unglued? Can American culture deconstruct and reconstitute itself with a different, healthier national personality? Are President Trump, #MeToo and the Woman’s March this year and last, along with our climate catastrophe economy and the American pollution industrial complex, signs of an impending cultural breakdown — at once […]

Time Magazine’s Person of the Year for 2017 is not a single person, but hundreds of persons that Time calls “The Silence Breakers,” women and a few men who’ve refused to keep quiet any longer about the sexual extortion and rape that is a fundamental mode of oppression by America’s degenerate patriarchy, and all patriarchies […]

In an economic system that criminalizes poverty, an America in which one in eight citizens are officially and actually poor with no hope of climbing a ladder to prosperity that has no rungs, a nation in which greed is canonized so the elite have a special elevator to paradise on earth, a country in which […]

After a year like 2017 many of us are hell bent to do better. What went wrong? How can we start to repair the wreckage of our national moral culture wrought by the sectarianism and secessionist policies of the sons and daughters of the Confederacy disguised in the hooded robes of so-called fiscal conservatism? How […]