“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 […]
Stop the Wars. Save the Planet
Greenfield, Mass. (Special to Informed Comment) – This report “is an atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership.” Such was the response of UN secretary general Antonio Guterres to the February 28, 2022 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) documenting the present and future impact of the […]
Can sanctions ever be just — let alone effective?
( Fellowship of Conciliation/ Waging Nonviolence ) – As a result of its brutal invasion of Ukraine, Russia is now the most sanctioned country in the world, leading one former Obama administration Treasury official to describe the situation as “financial nuclear war.” Western European countries, however, depend on Russian oil and gas, so they have […]
Have We Forgotten . . . the people of Afghanistan?
Greenfield, Mass. (Special to Informed Comment) – The US 20-year war and occupation in Afghanistan, waged to avenge the September 11 terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people, has taken the lives of more than 71,000 Afghani and Pakistani civilians. A massive increase in civilian deaths ensued there in 2017 when the US military loosened […]
Women have had the Right to Choose in America for a Large Part of its History
Greenfield, Mass. (Special to Informed Comment) – Did you know? …Abortion has been legal for a large part of US history and was significant in the history of women’s reproductive health care: Not a single state banned abortion in our country’s first century. Women used abortion-inducing herbs and medications described in early pharmacological literature and […]
How Government Policy created the New Urban Black-White Segregation and Failing Inner Cities
Greenfield, Mass. (Special to Informed Comment) – For many years, I worked in Boston public housing with teams of residents, community organizations, public housing staff and other professors on reducing and removing the many asthma triggers that caused the highest rates of asthma and asthma attacks in the city. Living and working in the heart […]
November 11 Armistice Day: Honor Peace Day
Greenfield, Mass. (Special to Informed Comment) – The first Armistice Day 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, which robbed 40 million soldiers and civilians of life, ended; and peace began. On Veterans Day […]
© 2022 All Rights Reserved