SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
violence
Lessons in Equality
A writer reflects on the moments that taught him about the futility of violence and the inherent worth of every human being.
Jun 21, 2026
As I get older—my big eight-oh is virtually two months away—I find myself sloshing through my childhood, my awkward youth, with ever-increasing awe. I’m not talking so much about “memories” (that time I broke my finger playing football, let us say, or that crush I had on Patty in first grade), but something larger, quieter, less clear: moments of unexpected awareness.
These are moments of becoming. And they’re still with me. They’re still creating who I am, which is why I’ve decided to write about them again. I tossed a few of these moments out into the world a couple years ago, but since they’re still relevant to the world of today, I’ve decided to revisit them.
One such moment occurred after I had a punch-out with a friend after school. Then I bicycled home, with bruised knuckles, a torn pant leg. I parked the bike behind our house and as I dismounted, I felt consumed by an awareness I couldn’t shake off. Gosh, that was stupid.
Maybe fighting is part of kid life, but it’s also utterly valueless. I got hold of myself, calmed down... and decided I would never fight again. This wasn’t a flimsy, breakable rule I decided to impose on myself—you know, try to behave better—but something much, much bigger. In that moment, I claimed, well, partial agency over my own hot temper, and eventually beyond that: over the collective anger that had a grip on so much of the world. I decided I didn’t want to be a part of that anymore. This was well before I was in any way “political.” I was 11. I read the sports pages; that was it. But the stupidity of real-life fighting remained a scar on my psyche for the rest of my life.
Everyone is a genius. Everyone matters. We all have a unique perspective on the unknown.
When I was 13, I had another stunning moment of becoming. This one was far stranger, far less obvious. I hardly understood it. It was caused by a movie. The year was 1959. My mother, sister and I went to the local theater one Saturday afternoon and saw—I have no idea why—Imitation of Life. It wasn’t funny or cowboy-and-Indian exciting. It was a social drama about, for God’s sake, race: a black woman who works as a maid, whose daughter is light-skinned enough to pass as white and chooses to do so, separating herself from her mom.
I’m not sure if the movie is any good, but I did watch a small piece of it a few hours ago and was pulled deeply in. Indeed, I was shocked—the ending slashed my heart: At Annie’s, the mom’s, funeral, Sarah Jane, the estranged daughter, pushes through the crowd of mourners and clutches hold of the casket, crying for forgiveness. She had pushed her mom—who loved her dearly—out of her life so she could live as a white person. As she lies atop the casket, she cries, “I killed my mother.” And the movie ends.
As I say, I was 13. The civil rights movement had started up in the South, but I had no connection with it whatsoever. I was a teenage white boy living in an all-white suburb in the Midwest. I knew there were bad people around who did racist things, but what did that have to do with me?
So the movie hit me by surprise. I’m sure I had no emotional protection from its heart-cutting ending, nor did I have the ability to wrap it up mentally under the label “race,” stash it away, and move on. I was simply... well, troubled. And I’m sure we didn’t talk about it. We just headed home.
But then something happened—which had nothing to do with the movie. We had car trouble. Mom pulled into a garage so we could get the matter fixed. It apparently was not a big deal. They started working on it, and we just sat there waiting. I’m sure I was doing my best to put the movie and the emotions it stirred out of my mind, but there’s no doubt something deep had just opened in me. I didn’t know what.
The car was ready. We started driving home. And boing went my mental lightbulb. I had a thought, and the thought is beyond strange. It seems to have had no relationship to the movie per se, though apparently it emerged from the troubled confusion I was feeling. Even now it makes no sense. I silently told myself: I’m a genius.
Huh?
I can only guess what that meant, but I’m sure it had nothing to do with being measurably super-smart. Rather, somehow, I was suddenly aware... of God knows what. Perhaps the value of life. I had just seen over the edge of ordinary, over the edge of what we’re supposed to believe, into a deep unknown. I had seen beyond the answer to the question.
In retrospect, I believe this moment pushed my sense that I was a writer, and that life was mine to discover, not simply “be taught.” I also believe the takeaway from it was: Everyone is a genius. Everyone matters. We all have a unique perspective on the unknown. As I rode home with Mom and Sis, I clutched this like a precious stone, a blue pearl, perhaps, hovering in my psychic void.
And finally, three years later: Here’s me at age 16, about to have another moment of awareness—thanks to an encyclopedia salesman. Actually, I think it was just Volume A, which we got in the mail after joining a book-of-the-month club. Ever the eager learner, I started scrolling through the volume and came across a description of the book The Age of Reason, by Thomas Paine. I was intrigued, and on Saturday I went to the public library and checked out a copy.
I spent the rest of the day in bed and read the whole thing. Oh my God (so to speak). I had grown up in a churchgoing family and had never particularly questioned religion, but Paine’s critique of Christian theology hit me hard, in particular because I had also recently read the book Exodus, by Leon Uris—another book-of-the-month arrival. That book had opened my awareness of the creation of Israel (I’d no doubt get extremely frustrated with it today) and Jewish people in general. I knew nothing more about this than I did about civil rights, but I felt moved by Uris’ story.
And the two books in tandem opened up an awareness I couldn’t tolerate. According to what we’re told to believe, nonbelievers—that includes Jews, all of them—go to hell. In no way, no way, did I give any credence to this, and because I was the person in charge of my own beliefs, I immediately decided to leave the church. The next morning I told my mother, who was shattered. She also loved me dearly, and we struggled for years over this—and eventually our relationship transcended all theology. Our love for one another was bigger than that. And I began calling myself a “trans-believer”: curious about every religion, open to spiritual wisdom wherever it comes from.
And I couldn’t be happier, or more grateful, for these moments of awareness, which, as I wrote, are still creating me. And they support my core belief about life: All humans are created equal.
Keep ReadingShow Less
How Do We Reclaim Our Future From War?
Are we stuck with pending war, and actual war, from now on... until we blow up the planet? I don’t believe that at all.
Jun 07, 2026
Is war simply part of human nature? It’s been absurdly “ordinary” throughout my lifetime, and continually expanding its power and psychological reach.
And unless you’re in the middle of it—unless you’re digging for a dead child beneath a bombed building—war is just an abstract horror. It’s necessary. It’s what keeps us safe. Glory, glory hallelujah.
“You ask: What is our policy? I will say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us: to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer with one word: Victory—victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.”
Hmmm...
We’ve spent multithousand years now turning war into the building block of civilization. You know: Create an empire. Defend, defend, defend.
This is Britain’s new prime minister, Winston Churchill, speaking in 1940, just as World War II has opened its jaws. In that context, yes, his words make sense, but the paradox hiding in those words—the speech titled “Blood, Toil, Tears, and Sweat”—is that with victory there may be no survival either. The Good War gave us, of course, the nuclear bomb. It gave us much of the military hell that’s happened in my lifetime. It also gave us, along with a multitrillion-dollar annual global military budget, a sense of eternal necessity to be ready for the next evil monster who wants to get us.
That’s it? We’re stuck with pending war, and actual war, from now on... until we blow up the planet? I don’t believe that at all, but I started digging back into history to get a fuller sense of what others thought. Who are we?
As Steve Taylor, writing some years ago in Psychology Today, noted:
Our view of human nature determines our view of the human race’s future. If we believe that human beings are innately warlike, then there is no reason for us to believe that our future holds anything else but more of the chaos and conflict that has filled our past. But if we believe that conflict is not innate to us and that our aggression is due to external factors rather than being "hard-wired" into us, then we’re entitled to have a different vision of the future.
There seems to be a consensus among historians that we didn’t start organizing for—and waging—war until about 10,000 years ago, during the Neolithic era, when agriculture began replacing hunter-gathering as humanity’s primary source of survival. A key component of agriculture was, and is, possession and development of land, which began sending waves of change through human consciousness: protect, protect, protect! Land turned into property. And thus, for thousands and thousands of years now, people have been collectively re-envisioning their relationship with each other.
Obviously, this is a quickie look at human history. My point is simply to push the idea that war isn’t inevitable, but rather a response to significant change. I now jump ahead to 1895, when New York Journal owner William Randolph Hearst sent a photographer to Cuba to cover the insurrection going on there against Spanish colonial rule. The photographer cabled Hearst that there was no war to cover, to which Hearst responded: “You furnish the pictures. I'll furnish the war.”
And Yellow Journalism was born! And war has remained media’s friend ever since. It’s headline news. There’s fighting, slaughter, and eventual victory—for someone. And the victor controls the narrative.
Well, actually, it’s the media that controls the larger narrative. That is to say, the media creates the context: War is real. It’s what we do. In essence, it’s the bookend of every historical period, the arbiter of social change and, therefore, human evolution. Any questions?
OK, here’s where I start losing my sanity. War may not be part of humanity’s DNA, but it certainly seems to be accepted as though it were. We’ve spent multithousand years now turning war into the building block of civilization. You know: Create an empire. Defend, defend, defend. And ultimately transcend, as a new empire emerges. And then another. Whatever we do in between our wars—live in peace, more or less—may have value, but it’s not all that interesting. It’s just the lull between glorious battle cries.
And thus war starts to seem like who we are. Obviously, it’s part of who we are, because we’ve made it so, but whatever serious value it has in the moment is minimal. Mostly it’s incredibly destructive. It’s an addiction. It’s the lavishly funded antithesis of human connection: with one another, with Planet Earth.
As Rupert Ross writes in his excellent book about Aboriginal wisdom, Returning to the Teachings: “The principle of wholeness thus requires looking for, and responding to, complex interconnections, not single acts of separate individuals. Anything short of that is seen as a naïve response destined to ultimate failure.”
Oh God. Wholeness. Connection. This is the opposite of war. The meaning and complexity of these concepts requires enormous exploration, but for the moment I end with a story about heart-ripping courage and connection—about the nature of peace – that I initially wrote about nine years ago.
This happened in 2017, on a commuter train in Portland, Oregon. A man started screaming racial slurs at—started waging war with—two teenage girls on the train, one of whom was wearing a hajib. He shouted, “Go back to Saudi Arabia!”
Several passengers intervened, standing between the girls and the screamer, pushing him away. The screamer had a knife; he started slashing. Two people were killed, a third was injured. The killer fled the train. He was later arrested. But, oh my God, another act of public horror had occurred. People did what they could. A woman knelt by one of the dying men—Taliesin Namkai-Meche—holding him, comforting him. He said to her, “Tell them, I want everybody to know, I want everybody on the train to know, I love them.”
Those were his last words.
As I hear them again, I realize that this is who we are, even if we don’t know what they mean. They sear the soul with doubt, with cynicism. How can we reclaim them? Do we have it in us to be so deeply loving? The only larger question is this: How do we reclaim—and start creating—our future?
Keep ReadingShow Less
How Many More Deaths Will It Take for Congress to Hold ICE Accountable?
Violence has followed wherever President Donald Trump has dispatched immigration agents in the name of “public safety.”
Jan 15, 2026
On January 7, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent fatally shot Renee Good in Minneapolis—a city long enriched by immigrants and now under assault from thousands of ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents.
Good, a 37-year-old poet and mother of three, was driving alongside her wife, Becca. They were observing an ICE raid in their community. “We stopped to support our neighbors. We had whistles. They had guns,” said Becca.
Sadly, at least three other people have been killed by ICE officers in the last five months, according to The Marshall Project.
Among them was Silverio Villegas González, a 38-year-old father and cook originally from Mexico, who was fatally shot during a traffic stop in a Chicago suburb. Keith Porter Jr., a 43-year-old father of two—and, like Good, a US citizen—was shot and killed by an off-duty ICE agent on New Year’s Eve in Los Angeles.
Across the country, more communities are responding to our nation’s descent into lawlessness by uniting around our shared humanity and demanding justice.
While the families of all these victims await justice, the violence continues. ICE agents have shot at least nine people in their vehicles since September. The Department of Homeland Security has routinely invoked “self-defense” to justify these shootings, despite video and witnesses repeatedly contradicting their accounts.
From Los Angeles to Washington DC, Chicago, Memphis, New Orleans, Portland, Charlotte, and now Minneapolis, violence has followed wherever President Donald Trump has dispatched immigration agents in the name of “public safety.”
On the same day Good was murdered, ICE conducted a raid at a nearby Minneapolis high school, reportedly tackling a teacher and harassing students. The next day, ICE agents in Robbinsdale, Minnesota forcibly detained a US citizen and Red Lake Nation descendant for no apparent reason. Stories of new outrages emerge almost daily.
And last fall, federal agents descended from Black Hawk helicopters in a midnight raid of an apartment building in Chicago, detaining all its residents, including children. (That’s in addition to killing Villegas González—and shooting another person five times.)
This escalating violence is an outgrowth of ICE’s appalling treatment of immigrants. Across the country, people have been rounded up, thrown in deadly prisons, and ripped from their families—a trend that has sharply escalated under Trump.
Thousands of masked agents in unmarked cars—equipped with military-grade weapons and the latest surveillance technology—treat cities like war zones while executing raids at workplaces, places of worship, and schools.
Citizens and noncitizens alike have been racially profiled and kidnapped at courthouses and off the streets without warrants or probable cause. Trump has also used ICE to attack free speech, abducting and jailing students like Mahmoud Khalil, Mohsen Mahdawi, and Rümeysa Öztürk who spoke out against the Gaza genocide.
In addition to the shootings, 32 people died in ICE custody last year alone—and as of this writing, four more people have died in custody so far this January.
Abysmal conditions in ICE prisons, including medical neglect, have resulted in these tragic and avoidable deaths, leaving families shattered and still searching for answers. Nearly 69,000 people are currently being held in ICE prisons, the vast majority of them without a criminal record. According to ProPublica, ICE also detained over 170 US citizens last year.
ICE has repeatedly denied members of Congress entry to its detention facilities, interfering with Congress’ constitutional oversight authority. Still, Congress enables ICE’s abuses through billions in funding increases. ICE’s $14 billion annual budget for detentions alone, note Lindsay Koshgarian and Sarah Lazare, is more than the total military spending of 124 countries.
Across the country, more communities are responding to our nation’s descent into lawlessness by uniting around our shared humanity and demanding justice. A recent poll shows, for the first time, net positive support—including among self-described moderates—for abolishing ICE.
These Americans understand that no one is safe as long as ICE still exists, operates with impunity, and terrorizes communities. How many more deaths will it take for Congress to hold this agency accountable?
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular