The news went straight to the Dad Zone of my heart and I thought about my 20-year-old daughter finishing up her junior year in St. Paul, Minn. I thought about book bags and attitude, tentative career plans and those uncomfortable plastic chairs with the flip-up elbow rests — the stuff of a young person’s becoming — and then I went numb with grief.

On the most ordinary of ordinary days this week, on a different campus but in my mind the same campus, the future was shattered with a methodical popping noise.

While the horror is still fresh, before we have satisfied ourselves with superficial understanding and moved on — oh yeah, another loner with a gun — I invoke this prayerful meditation from Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet”:

Not long ago, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman was America's top op ed cheerleader for George W. Bush's attack on Iraq, portraying it as a "war for democracy."

Now, in a landmark Times Magazine article, he claims naming rights to a "green" movement for nuke power and "clean coal," portraying them as part of the answer to global warming.

This is VERY dangerous stuff.

But before we proceed, this Earth Day we can welcome the fact that major media types like Friedman finally do concede that we have a global climate crisis. The din of Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" has corporate big-wigs lining up to be washed green. For that much, we can all be grateful.

There is much that's positive in Friedman's writings about the need for emission-free energy. Most of it derives from countless concerned citizens seeking a Solartopian system based on solar, wind, bio-fuels, efficiency and a truly Earth-based culture.

Friedman never acknowledges them. But tens of thousands of grassroots activists have contributed decades of loving labor, often including jail time (mostly at reactor sites), to give birth to that vision.

I do not hesitate one second to state clearly and unmistakably: I belong to the American resistance movement which fights against American imperialism, just as the resistance movement fought against Hitler.
---Paul Robeson

Virtually every day our mendacious corporate media publicizes the farcical "debate" between officials of the Bush Regime and Congress. While numerous polls have indicated that over 2/3 of US Americans want an end to the war in Iraq, and voters positioned the Democrats to exercise the will of the people, the war rages on.

Between the Gulf War, the subsequent US-driven draconian UN economic sanctions, and the seemingly endless US invasion and occupation of Iraq, well over a million Iraqis are dead. Infrastructure essential to vital human needs, including transportation, health, utilities, water, and sanitation has been decimated. Depleted uranium will continue to visit misery and death upon the Iraqi population long after the imperial invaders have been sent packing, as we were in Vietnam.

They and Edwards Refuse to Oppose a Bush-Cheney Attack on Iran

NEW YORK CITY (April 16, 2007) MONDAY – Congressman and Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich is challenging his fellow candidates' votes to authorize and fund the war in Iraq, and their positions on Iran.

"Clinton, Edwards, and Obama share responsibility for wasting hundreds of billions of dollars in an unnecessary war. And the American tax payers on this day need to remember that," Kucinich charged. Hillary Clinton and John Edwards voted to authorize the war.  Clinton and Barack Obama continue to vote to fund it.

At a New Hampshire town meeting yesterday, someone asked Clinton about her vote to authorize the war, and asked if she had read the intelligence reports prior to her vote.  Senator Clinton is reported to have said that if she had known then what she knows now, she never would have voted to give the President the authority to go to war.

"Solartopia has made me what I previously thought impossible, optimistic." -Kurt Vonnegut

"Isms are wasms." -Abbie Hoffman