Greenfield, Mass. (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – International Women’s Day (now March 8) had its origins in great social unrest, turbulence and critical debate among women in Western countries regarding their oppressive working conditions in factories and their lack of voting rights. Marching through New York City in 1908, 15,000 women demanded shorter hours, […]
Above all Now, Workers’ Unions are the Way Forward
Greenfield, Mass. (Special to Informed Comment, Feature) – My father was a family doctor in the mid-twentieth century whose main political issue was socialized medicine, which he preached against to his “large, poor family,” as he liked to describe us. Dad never turned away a patient who couldn’t pay and brought in indigent patients from […]
In a Time of Oligarchy, a New People’s (Women’s) March for a Green New Deal
Greenfield, Mass. (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Pick up any US liberal newspaper today and there are reams of columns speculating on the fate of our country. What will happen and how quickly to our country with Trump as president and a cabinet of billionaires as they destroy an already shredded social safety net? […]
Post-Election Beatitude: Beating the Blues
Greenfield, Mass. (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Whatever postures our country has projected to the world – shining city on a hill; leader of the free world; model of democracy; the indispensable nation; a rules-based order–all have crumbled like a house of cards. Our country’s failures, however, are deeper and older than the recent […]
Your True Self
On a blackboard in a 1930s log cabin at Jacob’s Pillow dance theater in the hills of western Massachusetts, I came upon an intriguing question written in chalk: When do you feel your true self? Visitors had left responses on the blackboard, some thoughtful, some light, such as: “When I am with my friends eating […]
Water, War and Women in Gaza
Greenfield, Mass. (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – In late 2020, a report titled Saving Gaza Begins with its Water stated: The water crisis in Gaza is a problem of daunting proportions, with grave implications for the more than 2 million inhabitants of the Palestinian enclave. The Coastal Aquifer from which Gaza pumps water is diminishing; but […]
We Humans are embedded in a Web of Intelligent Life, not the Pinnacle of a Hierarchy
Greenfield, Mass. (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – From the largest to the smallest and the oldest to the youngest creatures on Earth–Antarctic blue whales and coastal redwood trees, minute bacteria and human beings–we are all enmeshed in layers of relationships. We need each other, though some more than others. Plants evolved hundreds of millions […]
A Proclamation regarding the Anniversary of the First Nuclear War Crimes
August 6 and 9: A Proclamation Greenfield, Mass. (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – As I write, five of nine governments with arsenals of nuclear weapons – capable of destroying life on our planet many times over – are engaged in war: the United States (in multiple wars and stoking one with China), Israel, Russia, […]
Bigger than Dobbs: The War on Women is a War on Democracy
Greenfield, Mass. (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – In 2018, the US National Sexual Violence Resource Center published that 81% of women reported experiencing some form of sexual harassment and/or sexual assault in their lifetime. Further, the majority of violence against women is perpetrated by male intimate partners and acquaintances. There are myriad other misogynist […]
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