Say Goodbye to America

 https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/nation-world/turkish-student-detained-tufts-university-masked-federal-agents/507-e8a60d3c-2e2f-482e-83ad-880677192b82

No one is safe when everyone is a suspect. The Great Dream is ending. God help us all.   

 

The Journey

One day you finally knew

what you had to do, and began,

though the voices around you

kept shouting

their bad advice—

though the whole house

began to tremble

and you felt the old tug

at your ankles.

"Mend my life!"

each voice cried.

But you didn't stop.

You knew what you had to do,

though the wind pried

with its stiff fingers

at the very foundations,

though their melancholy

was terrible.

It was already late

enough, and a wild night,

and the road full of fallen

branches and stones.

But little by little,

as you left their voices behind,

the stars began to burn

through the sheets of clouds,

and there was a new voice

which you slowly

recognized as your own,

that kept you company

as you strode deeper and deeper

into the world,

determined to do

the only thing you could do—

determined to save

the only life you could save.

Poem by Mary Oliver

The Scream 2025

 Which Picture Do You Like More?

leave a comment.

This Generative AI design is meant to represent an army of silent billionaires. I tried to get as close to Charlie Chaplin’s “Little Tramp” as possible. Well, I’m still tweaking it. All of Chaplin’s films were silent and heavily body-centered, absurdist, and patho-visual. I wanted the tux-wearing army to represent the ruling class. The billionaires running/ruining the world, the planet, the working classes, the voices of minorities and diverse groups of marginalized people. The child, deliberately androgynous and ethnically ambiguous, is screaming to be heard, to stop the privatisation of healthcare, education, incarceration, big-pharma, big-agra, big oil, big billionaires buying elections and completely undermining privacy and originality via (the irony is not lost) the very tools I used to create this image: AI. Replacing artists, writers, actors, and journalists who strive to report real information that is fact-based, first person, and primary-sourced. 

The child is screaming because Earth is being provoked to the point that the pollution of big oil energy will destroy humanity and cause incalculable suffering, displacement, and death to all forms of life. The billionaire’s have their compounds, their bunkers, safe rooms, mega-yachts, and each other. They are brazenly and openly disdainful of democratic values. And they don’t give a flying fuck about the common man. They’re snickering at the people who voted Trump in. Trump is their puppet and apparently almost a 3rd of the electorate voted for Trump, so they are puppets to these billionaires as well. It’s a super-feeder benefitting the top 1%. 

This child stands for all of us, whether we know it or not. Elon Musk wasn’t always a gregarious monster with a mohawk. Jeff Bezos wasn’t always a corrupt Washington Post owner not thinking twice about manipulating politics, and bleeding ethical & moral journalists. He wasn’t always ego-driven, and a brazen destroyer of the proletariat. Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t always a Zionist, suppressing or oppressing the viewpoints of Palestinians working for him at META, and Palestinian/pro-Palestinian users. He is among a group supporting the “conflation of  anti-Zionism with antisemitism,” https://novaramedia.com/2024/07/09/meta-extends-ban-on-the-term-zionist/  .

These men weren’t always elitist, aloof billionaires undoing all the safeguards for truth, transparency, and justice on the biggest, most famous social platforms and presses in the world. You know the saying…power corrupts. Well, it’s about to get a lot more wild out there, as an Earthling trying to survive climate change, pollution, and man-made environmental disasters; as a citizen of the country - and the world, we should all be screaming. 

We are such a young, formerly promising, Democratic experiment of what could be in a just world where equality was valued, and the quality of life for all being’s was primary. I am sad. I am screaming sad.    

PS: and for all the hate-filled trolls trying to friend me on Facebook— my maternal grandfather was a Russian Jew whose family fled during the Revolution; my daughter’s paternal great grandmother was 100% Jewish, and my husband has Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry. No Hate. Peace.

Contentions

 

Multitude by Lia Chechelashvili

A Sparrow Girdled within 

a winter garden I stop. 

An enmeshment of baby bats. 

As flight struggles in the scene where 

A calico eye’s found bounty. 

I didn’t realize how many 

times I need to wash my hands. 

In life, I am failing at hygiene. 

A plastic toothpick does more 

harm than good, 

second person, 

glaring up at me. Why you 

glaring up at me? 

I’m a ripe egg, feathered,

vulnerable as a blind mouse. So shoot, 

burn, throw your throwing knives. I am 

stronger than, at least, calving glaciers,

I am rising from a deep 

rich brown ground. A darkness falls away.