Sarah van Gelder
Sarah van Gelder is co-founder and editor-at-large of YES! Magazine, and author of The Revolution Where You Live: Stories from a 12,000 Mile Journey Through a New America. Follow her blog and connect with Sarah on Twitter: @sarahvangelder
Articles by this author
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Views Thursday, March 29, 2018 No, Growing Inequality Won’t Solve Itself Republicans in Congress and President Trump got their big political victory: a tax overhaul that vastly benefits the superrich and corporations at the expense of nearly everyone else. On one hand, it’s not surprising—GOP leadership had clearly signaled their intent to reward their wealthy donors... Read more |
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Views Wednesday, March 28, 2018 What to Do About Bolton and Other Pro-War Appointees “Yes, John Bolton Really Is That Dangerous” read a headline from the New York Times. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said he “can’t imagine a more reckless, more dangerous pick” in an interview for MSNBC. “U.S. War with North Korea and Iran More Likely With John Bolton Running National Security” read a... Read more |
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Views Friday, February 23, 2018 I Was Wrong About the Rural–Urban Divide I thought I knew something about Wisconsin politics. I assumed the state was neatly divided between blue cities, like Madison and Milwaukee, and solidly red rural areas that twice elected Governor Scott Walker, one of the nation’s most right-wing governors, and went for Donald Trump in 2016. Turns... Read more |
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Views Friday, January 26, 2018 We Need Radical Imagination There are many consequences to the near daily barrage of lies, violence, bigotry, and vulgarity produced by the Trump administration. One impact: This atmosphere crowds out space for imagining and creating new possibilities. So it was refreshing to hear that for Poka Laenui, radical imagination is... Read more |
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Views Monday, January 08, 2018 We Must March. But We Must Also Organize Locally Last year at this time, a giant women’s march was in the planning stages. It turned out to be among the largest in U.S. history, according to the Washington Post . Between 4 million and 5 million people turned out in over 650 marches across the U.S. on Jan. 21, 2017, ranging from 200 in Abilene,... Read more |
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Views Monday, January 01, 2018 Feeling Burned Out? When We Gather, We Get Energized If it feels like you and the people you know have no say over what happens in Washington, D.C., that’s not an illusion. Research shows that ordinary people have close to zero influence on policymaking at the federal level while wealthy individuals and business-controlled interest groups hold... Read more |
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Views Thursday, December 28, 2017 We Can Reimagine and Reinvent Our Society in 2018 I’ve been writing a year-end column for YES! for years. Previously, my aim was to find the strands of hope from the past year that can be woven into new possibilities in the next year. But as I sat down to write this column, on one of the darkest days of the year, I realized that this year will be... Read more |
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Views Sunday, November 12, 2017 Americans Are Stressed About the Future. Here’s Why That’s Promising Americans are really stressed out, according to a new poll by the American Psychological Association. That’s not news, but what’s surprising is that we are slightly more stressed out by the future of our country (63 percent) than by the usual stressors—money (62 percent) and work (61 percent). In... Read more |
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Views Thursday, September 14, 2017 90 Companies Helped Cause the Climate Crisis—They Should Pay For It Pacific Northwest forests are on fire. Several blazes are out of control, threatening rural towns, jumping rivers and highways, and covering Portland, Oregon, Seattle, and other cities in smoke and falling ash. Temperatures this summer are an average of 3.6 degrees higher than the last half of the... Read more |
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Views Thursday, July 20, 2017 To the Millions Who Have Stood Up to the Trump Administration: Thank You The Republican health care bill is dead. Good riddance. The bill was so harsh that even Donald Trump called the House version “mean.” And yet, this legislation was stopped at a time when Republicans control both houses of Congress and the presidency. How? The answer is ordinary people, acting... Read more |