Tag Archives: Great Peace March

Addressing the housing crunch

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Last week, I cleaned our chicken coop. It was a dirty, dry, dusty deal. An intelligent person would have worn a mask. Me, I chose to land a sinus infection.

Why am I telling you this? I barely had enough voice to manage two segments of this week’s program. Thus, the other two segments are reruns: conversations about walking across the Mojave Desert, and why America needs another coast-to-coast march to address the twin perils of climate change and nuclear war.

I was glad to have architect Mark Clipsham as my guest during the first segment of this week’s program. One reason: It’s easy to get Mark to do most of the talking. That gave my voice a bit of a break.  Continue Reading →

Biden will lose if he fails to stop the genocide in Gaza

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Given the Israeli military’s atrocities against a civilian population and the mounting presence of widespread starvation, why won’t President Biden freeze military aid to Gaza? Great question. Let’s dig into it.

First, just how bad are things? Dr. Fozia Alvi, a Canadian physician who’s treated Palestinian children in southern Gaza, said, “This is not a normal war. The war in Ukraine has killed 500 kids in two years and the war in Gaza has killed over 10,000 in less than five months. We have seen wars before but this is something that is a dark stain on our shared humanity.”

On March 18, an Oxfam official reported that “the catastrophic levels of hunger and starvation in Gaza are the highest ever recorded in terms of number of people and percentage of the population.”

These horrifying truths make the words of Congressman Tim Walberg (R-MI) even more appalling: “We shouldn’t be spending a dime on humanitarian aid. It should be like Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Get it over quick.” Continue Reading →

America needs a new peace movement

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Other than a few persistent, isolated voices for peace, we mostly hear crickets. Thus the question I ask in this week’s program and have asked before: Where is the peace movement?

Forty years ago, the anti-nuclear-weapons movement was broad and vibrant. It embraced every conceivable strategy — from hammering missile silos to volunteering in campaigns of “pro-peace” candidates.

That movement accomplished a lot: The Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, START, The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, US-Soviet citizen-diplomacy, and much more. There are still 13,080 nuclear weapons in the world, but that’s down from over 60,000 in 1986.

Change happened, as it always does, because hundreds of thousands of people marched, spoke out, got arrested, campaigned, and made more noise than the lumbering colossus of the federal government could ignore. Continue Reading →

How an industry took over a political party that took over the US

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Rosenwald talks about how, early on in his career, Limbaugh was a failure, being fired from one radio stint after another. Limbaugh wasn’t very political. He didn’t bother to vote until his 30s. It will probably surprise you that Rosenwald says, “Limbaugh was so entertaining that he would have been equally successful had he been a liberal.”

Ouch. Opportunity squandered … perhaps. Entertainment (and the advertising revenue it brought in) was Limbaugh’s bottom line. He had no political agenda at first, and often used, even abused, parody.

Once, by way of taking a shot at the Great Peace March (my first foray into social change work!), Limbaugh told his audience that if you play Una Paloma Blanca backwards you’ll hear the voice of the devil. Limbaugh knew he was making it up. Much of his audience believed it. Continue Reading →