Category Archives: Doing Good

A Mourning Meditation On Miserable Melancholic Multi-Millionaire Mitt

 

This map tracks the rise and fall of empires and once-great nations; it hangs on Mitt Romney’s Senate office wall.

As a Mormon, Mitt Romney presumably does not believe in Karma. But maybe, more informally, he could nod glumly at  the non-theological adage that what goes around comes around.

Or, more biblically, does he acknowledge that the scripture says we reap what we sow?

I have a feeling he does, now.

Or he should, at least when his money manager passes on the invoices for the $150K+ monthly he’s paying for 24/7 security for his four houses and his family. 

And what about when he ponders the fact that all his five sons have already quit the GOP.

(The figures come from published excerpts from the forthcoming book, Romney: A Reckoning,, by reporter McKay Coppins.)

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A History of NOW and its Women who Made History

The Women of NOW review: superb history of feminist growth and groundswell

Katherine Turk has produced a must-read on the group which did so much for American women in the 1960s and 70s

Clara Bingham

Pauli Murray – an under-appreciated feminist-civil-rights-labor activist and thinker, also a founder of NOW. From a wall mural on a Durham NC street

What do a bestselling author, a segregationist congressman and a Black legal scholar have in common? Through a series of serendipitous events, Betty Friedan, Howard Smith and Pauli Murray lit fires that ignited the largest social revolution of the 20th century.

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Sun Ray Kelley: Elfin Eco-Architect

The forested lower slopes of the Cascade Mountains in Washington State are dense and not much inhabited. But, venturing there in recent decades, walkers might well believe they had discovered an Old Man of the Woods.

He wore a brown peaked cap, like an elf’s, on white dreadlocked hair that fell to his shoulders. His beard was long, his scruffy clothes were matted with mud and straw, and he went barefoot, even in snow.

At times, as he scavenged for berries, dragged branches or enjoyed a swing from perilous trees, his fleeting, shuffling form seemed more animal than human. But his wave, with a hand that held either a chainsaw or a fat hand-rolled “herbal palliative”, would be welcoming and warm.

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An Ode to Jimmy

Jimmy Carter in church, at Plains Georgia.

 

I didn’t vote for Jimmy Carter in 1976. In fact, I didn’t vote at all that year.

I’m not proud of that, but there it is. It happened mostly because I was away from home on election day, and because I wasn’t scared.

That autumn I was trying to write a novel about Quakers on Nantucket island off Massachusetts, who were caught in the riptides of the American Revolution.

The novel was a good idea. Still is, if I had an extra ten years or so to put into it.

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Bernie On The Moon! From His New Book

From The Guardian

Bernie on Mike Who???

Bernie Sanders on going viral: ‘There I was with my mittens on the moon, at the Last Supper, on the Titanic’

In an extract from his new book It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism, the US senator talks about the Capitol attack, Biden’s inauguration, and his sensible attire becoming a global sensation Continue reading Bernie On The Moon! From His New Book