Christine E. Black I belong to one of the historic peace churches. Where I worship there is a sign in the hallway that has become dear to me. It is known as the Quaker Peace Testimony, a Declaration to Charles II in 1660. It says: We utterly deny all outward wars and strife and fightings …
Ever since the lockdown began, friends have time and again asked me the same question. How am I managing my life in the lockdown? Well, for a writer like me, mid-afternoon solitude is nothing new. Solitude has become my second nature. Moreover writing and reading are essentially solitary affairs. Even in the past, I used […]
May Day in Hong Kong, and here it happened again!
Several media outlets reported that “hundreds of protesters did gather in small groups at a shopping mall in the town of Sha Tin, chanting slogans and holding protest flags”. A few other groups of rioters were spotted at various other locations in the city.
They were holding banners, and singing and chanting slogans that were described by Western journalists as “pro-democracy” and “anti-Beijing”.
As Hong Kong is still fighting against the COVID-19 pandemic, the police, naturally, sent the rioters packing.
None are so hopelessly enslaved, as those who falsely believe they are free. The truth has been kept from the depth of their minds by masters who rule them with lies. They feed them on falsehoods till wrong looks like right in their eyes.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Bk. II, Ch. 5; source: Die Wahlverwandtschaften, Hamburger Ausgabe, Bd. 6 (Romane und Novellen I), dtv Verlag, München, 1982, p. 397 (II.5).
“We honor what we value,” goes the old saying. In our hedonistic culture we value most those who can put a ball in a hole. We ignore those who save lives through civic action.
The sports champions – golf, basketball, football, and baseball – receive riches and accolades from the masses. They are inducted into “Halls of Fame” and are the subjects of biographies, and documentary and feature films. As for the mass life-savers –few even know their names, much less their dramatic victories against overwhelming odds.
Additional to the global health crisis and the coming worldwide economic collapse, Covid-19 is fuelling a humanitarian crisis. The World Food Program (WFP) warns that, “millions of civilians living in conflict-scarred nations, including many women and children, face being pushed to the brink of starvation, with the spectre of famine a very real and dangerous possibility.” The WFP’s view that the biggest impact of the pandemic will not by caused by the virus directly, but the hunger that flows from it, is in line with other concerned groups.
Back in the 1960s, the British academic establishment was rather excited about the work of Karl Popper, the philosopher who developed the concept of empirical falsification. Popper was keen to define the demarcation between the scientific and that which only mimics empiricism and scientism.
We present the narrative of this report and the recommendations that flow from it to the President of the United States, the United States Congress, and the American people for their consideration. Ten Commissioners—five Republicans and five Democrats chosen by elected leaders from our nation’s capital at a time of great partisan division—have come together to present this report without dissent. We have come together with a unity of purpose because our nation demands it.
In the age of COVID-19, it’s even more obvious than it’s been for at least ten or twenty years that capitalism is entering a long, drawn-out period of unprecedented global crisis. The Great Depression and World War II will likely, in retrospect, seem rather minor—and temporally condensed—compared to the many decades of ecological, economic, social, and political crises humanity is embarking on now.
May Day, or International Workers Day, is celebrated with marches and rallies every May 1 to lift up the working people and their demands for freedom, equality, and justice. That is the Red tradition of May Day. But there is also an older Green tradition in which cultures the world over celebrate as Spring arrives in temperate and arctic climates or the wet season arrives in tropical climates. This Green tradition of May Day celebrates all that is free and life-giving on the green Earth that is our commonwealth and heritage. These Red and Green May Day traditions are complementary.
