Greenville, Mass. (Special to Informed Comment – Feature) – The 19th century origins of Mother’s Day differ vastly in spirit and purpose from celebrations of it in the 20th and 21st centuries. Mother’s Day was first inspired by two women with diverse but compatible social and political purposes. Prior to the Civil War, Ann Reeves […]
As Tax Day Approaches: Is the Federal Budget Moral or Immoral?
Greenfield, Mass. (Special to Informed Comment) – April, the month tax filings are due, prompts us to ponder what our income taxes pay for. Are they used to provide all citizens sufficient resources and public goods for human security and well-being – the core of our national security? How much of our taxes pay […]
How local Peace Work changes Culture, Town by Town, Generation by Generation
Greenfield, Mass. (Special to Informed Comment) – Signs abound in Greenfield, Massachusetts’ downtown shop windows, among them PEACE, ART NOT WAR, FOOD FOR ALL NOT WAR, SOLAR NOT WAR, MAKE TEA NOT WAR… Why have so many shop owners and institutions, including the Greenfield Library and Greenfield Community Television, agreed to offer their store windows […]
Imagining a World Without Nuclear Weapons
Greenfield, Mass. (Special to Informed Comment) – January 22 marks the second anniversary of the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, a global lifeboat supported by 70% of the world’s countries. Meanwhile, the US Department of Energy’s 2023 budget request for nuclear weapons’ upgrade is more than $21 billion and close to $8 […]
A Letter to President Joe Biden: About that pledge you Made of “Diplomacy First”
Greenfield, Mass. (Special to Informed Comment) – Dear Joe, Remember the mid-March snowball fight with some boys in our 8th grade class at St Helena’s School in Wilmington, Delaware? The snow was wet and made for hard, icy snowballs, so I hid my young sister Monica behind a parked car. You joined me against the […]
The Other Way of Celebrating Armistice Day: Soldiers and Vets for Peace
Greenfield, Mass. (Special to Informed Comment) – The first Armistice Day November 11, 1919 was a celebration of the moment – the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, 1918 – that the brutality of that first industrial war, World War I, which robbed 40 million soldiers and civilians of life, ended; […]
All the Victims of the Ukraine War
“They will beat their swords into plowshares . . . Nor will they train for war anymore.” Isaiah2:3-4. Greenfield, Mass. (Special to Informed Comment) – What’s wrong, so profoundly wrong with war that compelled Isaiah to implore for peace (without debate over just and unjust war) almost 3,000 years ago? War breeds a plague of […]
Peace Literacy: Every Student Needs It
Greenfield, Mass. (Special to Informed Comment) – Philadelphia is “awash in guns”: More people were shot there in 2022, hundreds fatally, than in larger cities including New York and Los Angeles. In this “country’s poorest big city,” most shootings take place in neighborhoods shattered by multiple forms of racial discrimination and endemic poverty. The market […]
The Unbearable Weight of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Where We Stand on August 6 and 9, 2022
August 6 and 9 mark the 77th year since the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, annihilating instantly an estimated 170,000 women, men and children and sentencing tens of thousands more to eventual death from radiation poisoning and injuries. Article continues after bonus IC video United Nations Institute […]
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