My brother-in-law Norms responded to my recent Shebeen article in Hard Crackers with his own story. I want to tell it and a little more. Norms lives with his wife in the Walmer neighborhood of Port Elizabeth, South Africa. He is married to my older sister, Bronwen. They have been a unit for coming on […]
“Everyone Agrees”
When a politician, TV anchor or newspaper opinion writer starts out by saying that “Everyone agrees”, I think it’s time to pay attention. There are not too many instances where everybody agrees—except about something that’s really wonderful or awful. Everybody does agree, I think, that a rainbow in the sky is beautiful. They also all […]
The Forward Pass – An International Recollection on Professional Sport Protest from the Bottom Up
The national insurgency against police brutality and murders has finally infiltrated the elevated ether of professional sports in America, quite spectacularly too. It is both surprising and not so at the same time. I want to cite something I wrote in 2005 about athletes and their attitudes toward the outside world. It was in a […]
COVID, protest, and now fire: Portland at a tipping point
The past four months in Portland have felt like nature doling out warning slaps, demonstrating the fragility of all of our systems. In the midst of years of far right groups mobilizing and marching in the city, months of militant and bold demonstrations against police violence, and after COVID had arrived earlier, our local and national […]
Dispatches from our new Angry Red Planet
First, I’m thinking of all my friends and comrades out here on the West Coast – with all the fires everywhere. I’m hoping folks can stay safe, whether it’s just trying to get by, or being part of the rebellion in the streets. Maybe they’re out in the midst of this hellscape working in healthcare, or firefighting, […]
In the Eye of the Storm: A Report from Kenosha
What’s so simple in the moonlight by the morning never is. -Bright Eyes The night of the shooting, bands of armed white men dotted the landscape before we even arrived in Kenosha. Police roadblocks along I-94 barred easy access to the small Wisconsin city and forced us off the highway early, to hack it through […]