New Clear Vision

Security for All as a Requisite for Survival

by Brian Terrell

In the final weeks of a six month prison sentence for protesting remote control murder by drones, specifically from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, I can only reflect on my time of captivity in light of the crimes that brought me here.  In these ominous times, it is America’s officials and judges and not the anarchists who exhibit the most flagrant contempt for the rule of law and it is due to the malfeasance of these that I owe the distinction of this sabbatical.

As I share in the perspectives gained from residing in the federal prison camp in Yankton, South Dakota, it is important to disclose that as a political prisoner sent up on trumped misdemeanor charges for a few months, my situation is not the same as my fellow inmates!  Of  all nonviolent “offenders,” most by far are prisoners of the war on drugs and most are serving sentences of many years.  I also try to avoid the temptation to exaggerate the hardships and privations I’ve suffered here.  Certainly, doing time in a minimum security camp is easier time than in most other kinds of jails.  If basic necessities are barely met, they are met.  I am in good company and time is passing with little drama and without fear.  For me, these months have been more a test of patience than of courage. (more…)

All the Foolish Things in This World…

by Windy Cooler

My neighbors across the street lost their house to fire a few days ago and one, an elderly woman, lost her life. Two other neighbors have been displaced because we share walls in our neighborhood, and they share walls with the house that burnt. It took about 20 minutes for most of this to happen. Flames came from the roof. I was home with my six year old. It was horrible.

The following day news reporters came to interview the occupants of our court. What do we have to say? It was horrible? I refused to be interviewed because it felt like participating in tragedy porn to say anything. Other people came and took photos of the shell of a house, where our neighbor had died, on their cell phones. I have no idea why.

And then there is the part where most of the rest of us, people who are really quite close and live together well, did not truly know the people in the home that burnt. They were very quiet. We do not know how to help and the house is a daily reminder of this. There is helplessness in this and some grasping of a lesson and just pain, which varies from person to person. (more…)

All the Good One Woman Could Do…

by Pat LaMarche

Waterville, Maine is a small town on the Kennebec River. About 16,000 people live there and by Maine standards they are young. You see, Maine’s got the oldest population in the country and Waterville’s per capita elderly population is lower than the state average. These young people have young people, and about 20% of those kids are living under the poverty level. One thing about poor kids — especially the children of the working poor — is that they are usually pretty hungry by the end of the day.

Poverty is directly related to food insecurity, and food insecurity among children — according to Feeding America – is responsible for “health problems, education problems, and workforce and job readiness problems.” (Their report on hunger’s negative effects on society can be read at their website.) (more…)

Can We Reclaim Our Reverence for the Planet that Sustains Us? 

by Robert C. Koehler 

“Oh God, thy sea is so great and my boat is so small.”

The Arctic ice is melting at a record pace this summer — just one more measurable phenomenon indicating that extraordinary change in the global ecosystem is in progress. As the ice melts, and the vast polar reflecting surface diminishes, the planet absorbs more and more of the sun’s energy and . . . grows warmer. More ice melts.

So what? Sitting at my desk in Chicago, I was tempted to opt out of caring about this — trend Republican, you might say. Put it on the back, ahem, burner. It takes a leap of consciousness to align my own well-being with the fate of the Arctic ice, the ocean, the Inuits, the polar bears. (more…)

The Revolution Will Not Be Anti-Social

by Windy Cooler

I have been ruminating lately on how much I am looking forward to school starting up again for Ob, my six year old son, because of how deeply I enjoy my time with other parents picking up their kids after school; how meaningful, powerful, and frankly, political, much of that time is.

Most of us are women. One is a grandfather and one is a stay at home father, married to the only woman he ever dated. We are very different people, religiously, in age, in personality, in class background and country of origin, to some extent, racially. We talk about everything and we have a huge impact on each other’s lives.

We jokingly call ourselves, after the suggestion of one of us, a poet and homeschooling mother, the “Playground Coven.” I usually write for activists, and I am doing it here, despite myself. I think of us sometimes, in that light, as a kind of Bughouse Square. (more…)

A Woman’s Life Offered Unto Itself

by Mary Sojourner

I wrote. When all was said and done, when I had known it was over, when I had barred the door behind my love, when I had burned his last letter, the one in which he diagnosed me as permanently broken and lost; when dust radio broadcast no more, and the word “much” meant only a great deal, then on a silver-gray day I wrote.

I wrote because to do otherwise was to negate the slab of juniper tucked in a niche below the porch roof of my little cabin. The wood was golden. A red prayer ribbon from a Tibetan nun looped through a crack in the juniper. A few weeks before my love (Code name: Monkey) had come to visit the first time, I wrote She Writes on the juniper in black marker. I wondered why I felt compelled to declare the ordinary. There had not been a day for two decades in which I hadn’t written.

A year later Monkey arrived to live in a cabin near me. A few weeks later, he began to die in front of my gaze. His ghost was hungry to move in — not to occupy Monkey’s cabin, but to seep into Monkey’s flesh, to live behind his eyes, to stare out, un-seeing and unseeable. (more…)

What Do We Lose When Experiences Go Extinct? 

by Chris Desser 

Over many years as an activist, attorney and artist working on environmental campaigns, Chris Desser began to wonder about the sensual pleasures that will disappear from our lives as more and more species go extinct. That was the genesis of her “Catalog of Extinct Experiences” — a multimedia installation at San Francisco’s Fort Mason Center planned for the Fall of 2013.

“At its most basic, as we lose these experiences we lose ways of coming to consciousness,” Desser explains. “These things are all part of the commons — these experiences belong to all of us.

Some of the exhibits that she is planning for the exhibition include: images of endangered landscapes preserved in jars, like extinct species preserved in formaldehyde; recordings of soundscapes from rainforests, deserts and other threatened places; vials of perfumes made from endangered plants; honey flavored by various flowers, with empty jars for extinct species; commissioned and curated work from other artists.

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