Articles
by Carolyn Baker and Friends from Around the Net
Medusa’s Curse: The Necessity of Art In The Climate Struggle, By Kathleen Dean Moore
What is this reflective shield that can show us the danger without turning us to stone? What can open our hearts, without breaking them? What can replace paralyzing fear with a new vision of what is beautiful and possible? What can break the bonds of lies and denial? What can allow us “to see, to sing, to welcome with courage and grace and imagination, whatever asks entrance into our lives”? The words are from the poet, Jane Hirschfield.
It’s Time For America To Face Its Racist Shadow: Making Intolerance And The Intolerant Intolerable, By Dr. Gary Stamper
It’s easy to blame the racist rants of leaders who loudly denigrate the “others, but if leaders weren’t supported by a large number of people, they wouldn’t be able to get away with it. A leader and a large number of people and their shadow/hatred/fear of the “other”- spurred on by the silence of those may not agree but are afraid to speak up – encourage their hatred to feed upon one another.
Rebecca Solnit: The Coup Has Already Happened
After the coup, everything seems crazy, the news is overwhelming, and some try to cope by withdrawing or pretending that things are normal. Others are overwhelmed and distraught. I’m afflicted by a kind of hypervigilance of the news, a daily obsession to watch what’s going on that is partly a quest for sense in what seems so senseless. At least I’ve been able to find the patterns and understand who the key players are, but to see the logic behind the chaos brings you face to face with how deep the trouble is.
We still have an enormous capacity to resist the administration, not least by mass civil disobedience and other forms of noncooperation. Sweeping the November elections wouldn’t hurt either, if that results in candidates we hold accountable afterward. Or both. I don’t know if there’s a point at which it will be too late, though every week more regulations, administrators, and norms crash and burn—but we are long past the point at which it is too soon.
Dr. Gabor Mate On Donald Trump, Traumaphobia, And Compassion
Dr. Gabor Maté: Before the election, leading psychiatrists wrote a letter to President Obama advising him that Trump should undergo a psychological evaluation to see if he would be a danger to the country and the world if he were elected. What’s not talked about is what is behind Trump’s obvious pathology. This pathology includes grandiosity, which he’s clearly got; ADHD, which he’s clearly got; and narcissistic personality disorder, which cannot be diagnosed without a first-hand evaluation, but he does seem to have as well. However, what I have not seen discussed publicly is that underlying these categories of psychiatric diagnosis is actually trauma. Trump is an example of a traumatized child who refuses help.
Lessons From The Holocaust For Our Times, Part 4: A Tale Of Two Mustard Seeds, By Dianne Monroe
A continued exploration of my family history and how the past can guide us through turbulent and dangerous times.
Lessons From The Holocaust For Our Times, Part 3, By Dianne Monroe
Shortly after Trump’s election, Yale History Professor Timothy Snyder (whose focus of study is Central and Eastern Europe and the Holocaust) published a book titled On Tyranny, Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. The first lesson is Do Not Obey in Advance. Sometimes footprints from the past can point the way forward through a perilous and uncertain future.
“A Complete Disaster”: Noam Chomsky On Trump And The Future Of US Politics
What all of this portends, worldwide, is far from clear. Though there are also significant signs of hope, some commentators have — with good reason — been quoting Gramsci’s observation from his prison cell: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
Chaco Canyon, Chaco Earth, By Chris Hedges
There is one crucial difference between the Anasazi and our complex society. The collapse of past civilizations like the Anasazi’s was localized. There were always new lands to conquer, new natural resources to plunder and new peoples to subjugate. Our age is different. There is no new world left.
Carolyn Baker and Andrew Harvey Receive Nautilus Award For “Savage Grace”
You have written &/or published a book that carries a potent message – whether in text or photos – and we are grateful for the chance to help promote and celebrate your book by making it visible as a Nautilus Award Winner. We hold the intention with you that your book will find much recognition and success with this significant award
Trauma In The Body, An Interview With Bessel Van der Kolk
Reposted from Daily Good Bessel van der Kolk, M.D. is the founder and medical director of the Trauma Center in Brookline, Massachusetts, a professor in the department of psychiatry at Boston University Medical School, and the director of the National Child Traumatic...
“Albatross” Film Trailer
https://vimeo.com/218502282
Understanding Ecological Grief, By Neville Ellis
Reposted from Alternet We are living in a time of extraordinary ecological loss. Not only are human actions destabilising the very conditions that sustain life, but it is also increasingly clear that we are pushing the Earth into an entirely new geological era, often...
Beyond Hope: The Evolution Of Knowing, By Deb Ozarko
These are deeply spiritual times. I’ve done everything I can to serve a better world with the desperate hope that I would live to see the “more beautiful world my heart once knew was possible.” It was a lovely dream. There is no new world. It’s over.
The Woman Who Silenced America For Six Minutes And Twenty Seconds, By Carolyn Baker
In reality, what Emma and her friends are experiencing is a profane, contemporary iteration of what youth in ancient, tribal times experienced in a sacred, contained, ritual setting. In those times, the community understood that rites of passage in youth were as necessary as learning to walk, cutting teeth, or entering puberty. Thus the community prepared its children for adolescent rites of passage because they understood that children come to this life with an inherent need for them. In fact, they understood that not providing rites of passage or what is sometimes called initiation, guarantees that the child will never grow up and in fact, will become toxic to the community
Introduction Of “Beyond Hope: Letting Go Of A World In Collapse,” By Deb Ozarko
My purpose with this book is not to convince you of the apocalyptic times we are now living in, or of the biosphere collapse currently underway, or of what you already know inside yourself. The fact that this book is in your hands is indicative of a truth that already lives within. My purpose for this book is to highlight the inauthenticity of who and what we’ve allowed ourselves to become so that in these final times, we can awaken to, and embrace all of who and what we’ve always been meant to be. At the very least, let’s make our final ride enlightening, compassionate, and caring. Let’s at least become as a result of what now is.
I Felt Despair About Climate Change–Until A Brush With Death Changed My Mind, By Alison Spodek Keimowitz
This planet is dying. Not just in the way that life on Earth is always, inevitably beginning and ending, that species are rising and falling, that extinction and evolution occur, and that temperature and sea levels cycle dramatically and irregularly. In the 21st century, Earth is hurtling toward a specific death with a shape, a name, and a timeline. It is dying of global warming, climate change, extinction, biological annihilation, and ocean acidification. The exact names and the exact timing is debated, but the overall trajectory of life on Earth is well-understood: We are in the midst of Earth’s sixth mass extinction, and the odds of human civilization reaching the 22nd century are often estimated at no better than 50/50.
Is America On The Verge Of A Constitutional Crisis? By Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes
McCabe’s firing is part of a pattern. It follows the summary removal of the previous FBI director and comes amid Trump’s repeated threats to fire the attorney general, the deputy attorney, and the special counsel who is investigating him and his associates. McCabe’s ouster unfolded against a chaotic political backdrop which includes Trump’s repeated calls for investigations of his political opponents, demands of loyalty from senior law enforcement officials, and declarations that the job of those officials is to protect him from investigation. All of which has led many observers to wonder: Are we in the midst of a constitutional crisis? And if so, would we even know?
Getting Past Trump, Part 2: The Russia Connection, By Richard Heinberg
I probably won’t change many minds about Trump/Russia in what I’ve written above. Some will probably conclude that I’ve sold my soul to the Clintonites (for the record, I did not support Clinton in the election), or that I’ve bought into anti-Russian propaganda emanating from the neoconservative foreign policy establishment. But that’s also part of the story: we are entering a post-truth era in which tribal alignment matters far more than mere facts, which are becoming ever harder to establish to everyone’s agreement. Jennifer Kavanagh calls this “truth decay,” and notes that it makes the job of informing and mobilizing the public much harder—not just with regard to Trump-Russia or politics in general, but also when it comes to climate change and the other collective survival threats