I’m very grateful to Steve Welzer and Green Horizon Magazine for editing and publishing this tribute to Mel King in their Fall 2023 issue. The following is the full version, as submitted. ~Eli On March 28th, 2023, there was a dimming of light throughout Boston and across the world as Melvin H. King transitioned to ancestor. …
Continue reading The Arc of the Rainbow Bends Towards Love
Boston lost its Lion King in March with the passing of Melvin H. King at the age of 94. It is impossible to summarize the impact that Mel’s life had on the city, and on the people who endeavor to do justice to his life and vision. State Senator Lydia Edwards put it this way: …
Continue reading Mel King, Rest in Peace / Rest in Power / Rest in Love.
We are reposting this important announcement from the New Economy Coalition, in its entirety. COVID-19 Solidarity Response: We are at a fork in the road. Like many of you, we are reeling. In these uncertain times, our first priority has been to make sure our team is safe and cared for. We are adjusting internal …
Continue reading This is a fork in the road moment.
Today, New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined with Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey to announce non-binding Green New Deal legislation that would strive to “achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions through a fair and just transition for all communities and workers” and “create millions of good, high-wage jobs.” The Green Party of the U.S. issued this response.
Continue reading Green Party Response to Democrats’ Green New DealImportant and timely words from Langston Hughes. It is chilling how Trump’s slogan is almost a complete rip-off. Let America Be America Again Langston Hughes, 1902 – 1967 Let America be America again. Let it be the dream it used to be. Let it be the pioneer on the plain Seeking a home where he …
Continue reading Let America Be America AgainWe are going into our fifth month of demonstrations and actions all over the USA about police violence and sanctioned summary judgment. Hearing, reading, seeing the news, it seems as if brutality, terror, and torture are breaking out worldwide, with beheadings and mass killings happening at, perhaps, a quickening rate. Violence meeting violence to make more violence, intertribal problems stuck on stupid, here and abroad.
Recently, I saw a DVD of “The Interrupters,”
( http://interrupters.kartemquin… ) on an open cart in the library and I took it home. It’s a documentary about a group called Ceasefire which “interrupts” street violence between gangs and violent individuals in Chicago. CeaseFire’s founder, Gary Slutkin, is an epidemiologist who believes that violence spreads like an infectious disease and uses a “medical” treatment: “go after the most infected, and stop the infection at its source,” to stop it. One part of that treatment is the “Violence Interrupters” program, created by Tio Hardiman, a group of street-credible, mostly former offenders who defuse conflict before it becomes violence. They can speak from experience about consequences and how “no matter what the additional violence is not going to be helpful.”
About the same time, a friend wrote me about a radio interview
( http://www.ttbook.org/book/ref… ) with Constance Rice, a civil rights attorney and cousin to the former Secretary of State, who has trained 50 LA police officers over the last five years in “public trust policing” at Nickerson Gardens, an LA public housing project.
I picked up “The Interrupters” because I was wondering why we didn’t hear about this group in relation to what has been happening with the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamar Rice and others. I listened to the interview with Constance Rice for the same reason. Why haven’t I seen Ms Rice, Gary Slutkin, or Tio Hardiman on my TV screen and all over “social media”? They are doing some things which have proven to work in their own communities. How much of what they’ve done in Chicago and LA can apply to NYC and Boston and other places all around the world? Can they teach us all how to interrupt our own violence and to build a system of public trust policing? As Tio Hardiman says in the DVD: “We’ve been taught violence. Violence is learned behavior.” Can these people and the others like them teach us how to unlearn our violent behavior?
We’ll never know unless their voices are part of the conversation.
Continue reading Intertribal Problems Stuck on StupidEveryone should watch this video and sign this petition.
Continue reading President Obama, Pardon Chelsea Manning!The following is a rush transcript by Common Dreams of the statement made by Pfc. Bradley Manning as read by David Coombs at a press conference on Wednesday following the announcement of his 35-year prison sentence by a military court:
The decisions that I made in 2010 were made out of a concern for my country and the world that we live in. Since the tragic events of 9/11, our country has been at war. We’ve been at war with an enemy that chooses not to meet us on any traditional battlefield, and due to this fact we’ve had to alter our methods of combating the risks posed to us and our way of life.
I initially agreed with these methods and chose to volunteer to help defend my country. It was not until I was in Iraq and reading secret military reports on a daily basis that I started to question the morality of what we were doing. It was at this time I realized in our efforts to meet this risk posed to us by the enemy, we have forgotten our humanity. We consciously elected to devalue human life both in Iraq and Afghanistan. When we engaged those that we perceived were the enemy, we sometimes killed innocent civilians. Whenever we killed innocent civilians, instead of accepting responsibility for our conduct, we elected to hide behind the veil of national security and classified information in order to avoid any public accountability.
Continue reading ‘Sometimes You Have to Pay a Heavy Price to Live in a Free Society’Seven of the most prominent leaders of the American peace community today released a letter urging financial and other support for Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein. The letters writers were David Swanson, Medea Benjamin, Leah Bolger, Bruce Gagnon, Chris Hedges, George Martin, and Kevin Zeese. After noting a series of failures of President Barack Obama to curtail military spending and reduce military violence worldwide, their letter states that only Dr. Stein will have the ability to stimulate a serious debate on the nation’s approach to foreign policy.
The peace leaders released their support letter as candidate Stein, a physician from Massachusetts who first became nationally known as an environmental health advocate, enters the final days of a push to qualify for federal matching funds. Stein has won 29 state primaries and has been declared the “presumptive nominee” of the Green Party by virtue of having won more than half the delegates to the Green Party convention. In the next few days she must reach fundraising goals in 9 additional states in order to qualify for federal matching funds.
Read the full text of the letter at jillstein.org.
Continue reading National peace leaders urge support for Stein