“We are people who believe in the worth of every human being,” Elizabeth Warren said the other day, and I wondered for a moment what life would be like if that were true.

The more crucial question, however, is: How can we make it true?

Warren had just returned from McAllen, Texas, where she visited an “immigration processing center” — a place where desperate human beings are stirred into the border bureaucracy and separated into categories — immigrants, refugees, criminals — and where children, including babies, are torn from their parents’ arms, possibly forever.

Naomi Wallace’s genre (and gender) blending Slaughter City is a cross between a Clifford Odets type of play about the working class and a Rod Serling TV episode set in “a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man… as vast as space and as timeless as infinity… the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge… the dimension of imagination.”

Today an anti-worker majority of justices on the United States Supreme Court struck down 40 years of precedent permitting public sector unions to collect a fair share fee from workers who receive the benefits of collective bargaining and representation in the workplace. The ruling in Janus v. AFSCME, like similar legislation in Congress and so-called right to work initiatives in Ohio, is the result of a multi-year campaign by corporate interests and wealthy individuals who oppose the very idea that workers should have freedom of association, economic power and a voice in our system of government.

Under the high court’s decision, unions must still negotiate for and represent all workers in a bargaining unit, including those who refuse to pay a fee for the benefits and services they receive from the union. The Court’s decision also forces loyal union members who voluntarily pay dues to subsidize anti-union co-workers who refuse to pay while receiving the same wages, benefits and working conditions as union members. But the Janus decision is about more than the “free-rider” problem.

1. The 2014 Mount Polley Environmental Disaster (British Columbia, Canada)

Aerial view of the outlet of tiny Hazeltine Creek (normally 6 feet wide) as it empties into Quesnel Lake (a once world-famous salmon fishery) at the head of the 600 mile-long Fraser River estuayr that is now contaminated with 2.5 billion gallons of toxic sulfide mine waste (including sulfuric acid) that was discharged in 2014. The brown color represents the trunks of the huge trees that were up-rooted during the deluge. The diameter of some of the trees measured half the width of the original creek.