Shiloh Sophia: In Times of Great Sorrow

Thank you to my dear friend Olivia for first sharing this beautiful and wise poem in our women's circle...

There are many wonderful and hopeful things happening in the world today and in many of our lives. At the same time, there are also many experiences that we are aware of and feeling individually and collectively that are incredibly sad, frightening, painful, and tragic. There is indeed a lot of trauma to hold in these times.

Over the years, I have learned the great value in being able to increasingly embody both joy and sorrow, gratitude and grief, uncertainty and abiding loving consciousness. May this one small gift and blessing from Shiloh Sophia be part of what helps empower us to remember to keep our hearts open and receptive, tender and strong, compassionate and wise and loving. May it be so. 🙏💗 Molly

Photo by Molly

In Times of Great Sorrow

In times of great sorrow,

may you learn to be with the knowing

and not lose your joy.

In times of great collective undoing,

may you maintain a strong connection

to your inner self.

In the journey of intense grief

may you feel everything

and not lose your way home.

In times when it seems the truth is lost

may you hold fast to what is dear.

When you are healed enough

may you reach out to offer blessings to others.

May the revolution we are in need of

begin to rise in the heart of community circles.

And please, rest when you are tired.

We need you whole and ready to lead.

May this blessing go out to where it is needed.

Amen

— Shiloh Sophia

From Shelter of the Sacred

https://shilohsophiashop.com/products/shelter-of-the-sacred

Reflections On the Difference a Passion for Truth Makes

With Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!

With Jeremy Scahill, journalist, author, and activist

"The media is absolutely essential to the functioning of a democracy. It's not our job to cozy up to power. Journalism is the only profession explicitly protected by the U.S. Constitution, because journalists are supposed to be the check and balance on government. We're supposed to be holding those in power accountable. We're not supposed to be their megaphone. That's what the corporate media have become." — Amy Goodman

"I have chosen to cast my lot with independent media outlets because I believe that only through independent reporting where you are not beholding to the interests of corporations or government are you able to really aggressively pursue the truth." — Jeremy Scahill

“The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.” — Hannah Arendt

* * *

It was September 11th, 2001 that was the turning point for me which ultimately once again changed my life. Gratefully I did not listen to George Bush and just go shopping. And nor did I believe our then President's words when he said that we "were attacked for our freedoms." In my deepest being, I knew that was a lie. It is also true that I had no idea why 9-11 happened. And I had to find out. The profound trauma I felt compelled me to know and understand what I did not know. It compelled me to explore what needed awareness, healing, and transformation within myself and beyond.

Thus began a journey which continues to this day. My passionate quest for truth led me to discover independent journalists, authors, activists, and media resources which were not connected to any political party and did not receive any corporate funding. The books piled up on my bookshelves as I devoured more and more information. I sought to know who was coming to our area and found myself driving into Portland on cold rainy winter nights to hear so many different people speak. My research led me to gradually begin to discern who I could trust as resources of information and who I could not.

This has not been an easy journey. Along the way I was coming face to face with layer upon layer of my own indoctrination, ignorance, and illusions that I had absorbed in our culture. It was humbling and painful. And this process was also incredibly empowering and inspiring and hopeful. Gratefully, I discovered that disillusionment is an antidote to illusion and a necessary part of the journey into greater and greater truths, integrity, courage, wisdom, and an ever expanding circle of caring.

There are many prayers that I hold in my heart and in my deepest being. Among them is that the passion for truth, no matter where it leads, will expand and grow within more and more of us. Otherwise, as Emma Goldman illuminated long ago, ignorance will remain "the most violent element in society." And as Noam Chomsky has wisely and chillingly said, Americans will also remain "a profoundly propagandized people."

Several weeks ago I once again listened to Noam Chomsky on David Barsamian's "Alternative Radio" on KBOO (9am on Tuesdays), a local independent radio program in Portland that receives no corporate funding. I've been listening to the weekly broadcast that David Barsamian hosts with a large and diverse variety of guests for decades now. Most of the voices he features are rarely and or never heard on corporate funded mainstream media. (https://www.alternativeradio.org/barsamian/about-barsamian/)

Another more recent talk that I heard replayed was an excellent one given by Naomi Klein. This is the description of the program: 

Holocaust, derived from the Greek, is a large-scale calamity involving fire. Today, the term is specifically used to describe the German genocide of the Jews. But it has a long history. The European mass murder of Indigenous peoples in North and South America killed 55 million or 90% of the population, between 1492 and 1600, in a little more than one hundred years. More bloodbaths were to follow. In Africa, many millions were killed in the Congo by Belgium. Germany wiped out the Herero and Nama peoples in Southwest Africa. In the Middle East, that was quickly followed by the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians. Then came Auschwitz. Since the end of World War Two, barbarisms and genocides have continued: in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Myanmar and Gaza. Naomi Klein says, “The Nazi Holocaust is finally being placed in history connected to the terrors that came before and after.” (https://www.alternativeradio.org/products/klen009/)

This is what I seek again and again and again — the larger perspective that empowers me and us to see, know, absorb, and act upon the truths which are impacting us all. Because we are all connected, all related, all family. Without awareness of the issues and lived experiences of our planetary sisters and brothers — and very much including what we ourselves have absorbed and carry in our own hearts, minds, and bodies — our circle of caring remains limited. And our capacity for compassion and heartbreak, for healing and transformation, and for conscious and wise beliefs and actions on behalf of a higher good is also impaired.

* * * * *

Over the past 20+ years, there are many who have helped me to awaken and heal from my long slumber and empowered me to strengthen my connection with truth and with my heart and the hearts of all others. This is a glimpse into some of those who have in some way supported and empowered me in opening to embody and live an increasingly honest and authentic, conscious and Self-led, compassionate and loving life:

Joanna Macy, Jane Goodall, Riane Eisler,  Naomi Klein, Amy Goodman, Arundhati Roy, Isabel Wilkerson, Maria Ressa, Vandana Shiva, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, Angela Davis, bell hooks, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Toni Morrison, Roxane Dunbar-Ortiz, Angeles Arrien, the 13 Indigenous Grandmothers, Pema Chödrön, Joanne Cacciatore, Joan Borysenko, Rachel Carson, Dorothy Day, Hannah Arendt, Rosa Parks, Harriet Tubman, Emma Goldman, Eleanor Roosevelt, Michelle Alexander, Jane Mayer, Rebecca Solnit, Marian Wright Edelman, Frances Moore Lappé, Terry Tempest Williams, Margaret Mead, Mirabai Starr, Melissa Harris-Perry, Christiana Figueres, Malala Yousafzai, Greta Thunberg, Sir David Attenborough, Howard Zinn, Martin Luther King, Jr., James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Langston Hughes, Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, Cornel West, Bernie Sanders, Rabbi Michael Lerner, Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges, Gabor Maté, Richard Schwartz, Lissa Rankin, Bessel van der Kolk, Dan Siegel, Henry Giroux, Jeff Sharlet, Jeffrey Sachs, Norman Solomon, Jeremy Scahill, David Sirota, Seymour Hersh, Daniel Ellsberg, Father Daniel Berrigan, Michael Parenti, Paulo Freire, Chalmers Johnson, Timothy Snyder, Jason Stanley, Bill Moyers, Albert Einstein, Carl Sagan, James Hansen, Bill McKibben, Chris Jordan, Michael E. Mann, Dahr Jamail, David Korten, Bryan Stevenson, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ibram X. Kendi, Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Jelani Cobb, Resmaa Menakem, Michael Meade, Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, Frank Ostaseski, Francis Weller, Fred Rogers, John Welwood, Thích Nhất Hạnh, the Dalai Lama, Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Judith Duerk, Rachel Naomi Remen, Jean Shinoda Bolen, Sharon Salzberg, Brené Brown, Tara Brach, Kristin Neff, Charlotte Kasl, Mary Oliver, John O'Donohue, Rumi, Hafiz, William Stafford, Wendell Berry, Peter Levine, Kahlil Gibran, Joy Harjo, Naomi Shihab Nye, Amanda Gorman, Chelan Harkin, Jack Kornfield, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Matthew Fox, Robert Beatty, Doug Pullin, and the list goes on and on... 

* * * * *

It is not easy to be human. And it is my belief that isolation, rugged individualism, and the "imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy" (a quote from bell hooks) that we humans have long lived under has impacted us all, no exceptions. Therefore, connecting with those who embody a passion for truth and everything that entails — integrity and courage, resilience and persistence, consciousness and wisdom, an understanding of trauma and healing and transformation, and an ever evolving and expanding capacity for compassion and love — truly matters. It is my experience that those who inspire and support us in going deeper and deeper into the truths within our own beings also empower us to heal, to awaken and transform, and to experience our interrelatedness with all beings. 

And then who can we harm? And who might we instead inspire to more deeply pursue our inner and outer truths, and to heal and to love? The outer reflects the inner.

May more and more of us grow and expand how it is that we experience and live out of a commitment to truth, to doing no harm, to alleviating the suffering within ourselves and our earthly sisters and brothers. May we increasingly hold all beings with compassion and caring, and beginning with ourselves and expanding out to include all others. May we be inspired to embody a passion for truth — the larger truths which very much include the experience of the Divine as our essential nature and that which is woven through all of life on Earth. 

There is a great need, I believe, for us as both collectively and as individual human beings to awaken to the essence of our true nature. This is the most essential and empowering truth that we can embody — the recognition and experience of the Divine within us all. 

This is no small journey, but one in which we can embark on throughout our lifetimes with greater and greater depth and commitment to ourselves and to one another. We all matter. And under it all, we are all Sacred. This is the greatest truth that I have discovered.

With compassion, love, and blessings... 

💗🙏 Molly

Photo by Molly

Hannah Arendt: The Philosopher Who Warned Us About Loneliness and Totalitarianism

 An excellent article. — Molly

Hannah Arendt.

 Fred Stein Archive/Archive Photos/Getty Images

Revisiting Hannah Arendt’s ideas about social 

isolation and mass resentment.

By Sean Illing

If you asked me to name the most important political theorist of the 20th century, my answer would be Hannah Arendt.

You could make arguments for other philosophers — John Rawls comes to mind — but I always come back to Arendt. She’s probably best known for her reporting on the 1961 trial of Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann, and for coining the phrase “the banality of evil,” a controversial claim about how ordinary people cancommit extraordinarily evil acts.

Like all the great thinkers from the past, Arendt understood her world better than most, and she remains an invaluable voice today. Arendt was born into a German-Jewish family in 1906, and she lived in East Prussia until she was forced to flee the Nazis in 1933. She then lived in Paris for the next eight years until the Nazis invaded France, at which point she fled a second time to the United States, where she lived the rest of her life as a professor and a public intellectual.

Arendt’s life and thought were shaped by her refugee experiences and by the horrors of the Holocaust. In massively ambitious books like The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition, she tried to make sense of the political pathologies of the 20th century. Reading her today can be a little disorienting. On the one hand, the way she writes, the regimes she describes, the technologies she’s worried about — it all feels very distant, from a totally different world, and she does have blind spots, namely on identity and race, that are glaring today.

And yet, at the same time, the threats she identifies and her insights about our inner lives seem as relevant today as they were 70 years ago. After Donald Trump was elected in 2016, her 1951 book on totalitarianism was selling at 16 times its normal rate.

So I reached out to Lyndsey Stonebridge, a humanities professor at the University of Birmingham, for a recent episode of Vox Conversations. Stonebridge has written two books about Arendt’s legacy and just finished a third about her life and ideas, coming out early next year. We talk about the relationship between loneliness and totalitarianism, what it means to really think, and what happens when the space for genuine political participation disappears.

Below is an excerpt, edited for length and clarity. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow Vox Conversations on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Sean Illing: Arendt was a political theorist who spent a lot of time thinking about loneliness, which seems like a subject for psychology, not political theory. Why did Arendt consider loneliness to be a political problem?

Lyndsey Stonebridge: It’s important not to separate loneliness from the material conditions that produce it. She’s talking about things like the disillusionment of people with the elites who are running Europe, unemployment, the end of the bourgeois dream, inflation — all these things. And like other thinkers, she understood loneliness as this peculiarly modern problem. It’s a problem that comes with individualism. It’s a problem that comes with capitalism. It’s a problem that comes with modernity.

Karl Marx will talk about alienation. Max Weber will talk about disenchantment. Simone Weil, another brilliant woman thinker who doesn’t get nearly enough attention, will also talk about uprootedness in the same way as Hannah Arendt. But [Arendt] talks about loneliness as a distinct modern problem.

When she finally gets to loneliness, she’s already been in America for 10 years and she’s looking in two directions. She looks both to Nazi totalitarianism, which just ended, but also to Soviet totalitarianism, which is still going mightily strong at the time. And she also looks toward her new home in America.

What she sees everywhere she looks is that loneliness is the result of a lack of a common ground of experience. This is what she’s getting at when she writes, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, in other words, the reality of experience, and the distinction between true and false ... people for whom those distinctions no longer exist.”

Sean Illing: In her book on totalitarianism, Arendt talks about the emergence of “the masses,” which is distinct from what we might think of as classes or interest groups, because those are groups that are by definition fighting for some common interest. She’s talking about the rise of an “unorganized mass” of “mostly furious individuals” with nothing in common except for their contempt for the present order. She calls this “negative solidarity” and it’s the raw material of totalitarianism, because it’s a world without connection and friendship, where the only basis of collective action is some kind of awful combination of anger and desperation.

How did the world get so lonely in the first place for her? Was it just the rise of capitalism and individualism?

Lyndsey Stonebridge: Yeah, it’s that, but also much more. When I was re-reading Origins of Totalitarianism a couple of months ago, I was astonished by how often the word “hate” came into her conversation about the creation of the mass. She noticed that it’s really easy to work with people’s anger and whip up a mob, and she has this great statement in the book about the alliance between the mob and the elite and how the elite are quite good at spotting and using the hate that’s already there.

I mean, she’s a historian, so she’s going to say it is things like unemployment. It is things like not being able to keep your home. And when you look at the early 20th century and look at those rates of inflation and unemployment, and then you have the World War and the civil wars across Europe, and then you have miss migration and so on, we’re not just talking about some kind of ennui here. This is raw, real stuff. It’s easy to raise a mob in these conditions. You’re starting with real anger.

This is the creation of the mass and it isn’t just fascism. This isn’t just populism. This is totalitarianism proper in Arendt’s mind. She says at one point, and this is a quote that’s resonated with me for a few years now, that “the masses’ escape from reality is a verdict against the world in which they’re forced to live.” Often the question is, well, how can people be so stupid? How can anyone fall for this? That’s the wrong way to think about it. Totalitarian politics is a verdict against the world in which people are forced to live. It’s a slap in the face. It’s a finger up against the real conditions of existence.

People will often refer to the masses as if they’re gullible and stupid, which on the one hand is just terrible politics. But on the other hand, it’s actually stupid. I mean, people aren’t stupid. A term that’s just as important as loneliness is cynicism. Totalitarianism works through cynicism. It’s crucial because it allows people to say, “They’re all the same, it’s all bullshit, isn’t it? It’s just politics, isn’t it?” What cynicism allows you to do is be gullible and disbelieving at the same time.

Sean Illing: Arendt thought that before a totalitarian ideology could overwhelm reality, it had to first ruin people’s relationship with themselves and others by making them so skeptical and so cynical that they could no longer rely upon their own judgment. So there’s that part of it.

And then she imagines thinking as much more than an activity. She imagines it as a way of being. It is obviously something we do with ourselves, but the real gift of thinking isn’t all the great ideas and grand theories that intellectuals come up with. The gift of thinking is that as long as you’re doing it, you have the capacity to judge. Why is that so critical?

Lyndsey Stonebridge: So let’s just start with thinking, because getting from thinking to judgment is tricky in Arendt. Thinking, for her, is radically democratic. Everyone, she says, has that dialogue with themselves — not all the time, because obviously if you stop to think about what you’re doing all the time, you’d never get out of bed. But a lot of the time, we all have the capacity to think.

We walk around the street. We lose ourselves in our thoughts, and being lost in thought is a gift for Arendt. She says this isn’t time-wasting. This isn’t frivolous. This is what thinking is and we need to take it seriously. She has this beautiful quote where she says, “What makes loneliness so unbearable is the loss of one’s own self, which can be realized in solitude, but confirmed in its identity only by the trusting and trustworthy company of my equals.”

Solitude is very different from loneliness. Solitude is where I go to hear myself think, where I re-gather my thoughts, which makes me fit to return to the world, because I’m not clicking on a bloody “like” or “dislike” or I’m not following another pattern. I am thinking for myself, which, when things are really bad, is all we have.

But going back to judging, she argues that without the ability to think, there can not be any judgment. When she really saw that is when she looked at the Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961 in the courtroom: a self-important man chattering away, talking self-importantly, not even realizing who he was facing — the relatives and survivors of people he had murdered — and he just spoke in cliches. The longer she listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was totally connected with his inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of someone else.

Sean Illing: Arendt fled Nazism twice and eventually landed in New York in 1941. What did she make of America when she got here? Did she think we were lonely? Did she think Americans were thinking in ways that might help them avoid the totalitarian horrors she left behind in Europe?

Lyndsey Stonebridge: She had two visions of America. I often refer to Hannah Arendt having pigeon eyes because she tended to look at both sides of life. On the one hand, she was concerned about American culture, because she saw in the rise of consumer culture a tendency toward social conformity that had already been there.

When she arrived in America, she wrote to Karl Jaspers, her old teacher, and said, “It’s amazing. I can’t understand why a culture that has such a brilliant political foundation can be so socially conservative.” The more time she spent in America, the more worried she was about public relations and consumer capitalism and how that was taking America further and further away from what she understood to be its revolutionary tradition.

Sean Illing: She lays all this out in a speech shortly after the Vietnam War ended, right?

Lyndsey Stonebridge: Yeah, the last paper that she published was based on a talk that she gave in 1975. She was asked to speak a few weeks after the fall of Saigon, and she says, “this is what America has to face: It’s gone further and further away from itself into a culture in which politics is marketing, in which politics is PR.” For her, the fall of Saigon revealed that America had just suffered a humiliating and outright defeat.

Then she listed the things that led up to that. She talked about the Pentagon Papers and how they revealed that there was no purpose to that war other than maintaining the fiction that America was an all-powerful free nation — a fiction, by the way, that was good enough for other people’s children to die for. Watergate showed that this whole thing was being cooked up by a bunch of second-rate crooks. This was politics. This was American politics.

She insisted that we had to recognize that reality. And the reality was that America was not great and free and wonderful, it was not that powerful. We had just suffered a catastrophic loss, and we had jeopardized our politics at the same time. That’s what she called the “big lie,” a phrase that was picked up again when Trump pushed his own big lie about the election. She said that this is how totalitarianism works. You just invent an outrageous big lie and you stick to it.

Sean Illing: Would she say the algorithms are doing the thinking for us today?

Lyndsey Stonebridge: Yeah, she would. You know, Arendt was often appalling on American race relations. She didn’t get Black America at all. But what she would’ve liked about Black Lives Matter, what she liked about the student movement at the time, was that it demonstrated the power of free people acting in concert, and she thought that would always be the saving grace because it was about the possibility of new beginnings.

What she would’ve thought was tragic was everything being algorithmized into social media because then you don’t get the very messy business of politics, which is about sitting in rooms with people who are really pissy and annoying and trying to get something done. It’s not about clicking on theories. You actually have to deal with the messy reality of politics and action. What really would’ve appalled her today is the hemorrhaging of so much political energy.

Please go here for the original article: https://www.vox.com/vox-conversations-podcast/23048597/vox-conversations-hannah-arendt-totalitarianism-the-philosophers

Violence Is Never the Answer — May It Be Wisdom, Compassion, and Love That We Grow and Nourish in Our Individual and Collective Hearts

One of many of our statues of Quan Yin, who is the embodiment of compassion. Photo by Molly

Some Thoughts On Compassion

and Wisdom and Love

In the wake of the assassination attempt on former President Trump's life, I've been experiencing deep sadness and grief. I am conscious of how unhealed pain and trauma permeates so much of our world — and how it is that we are all impacted. There are so many layers. And there is more...

Being humbly honest and human, I also own that — among my very first reactions after hearing about the shooting — there was this part of me that wished this tragic and deeply wounded 20 year old had been successful. This thought, this part of me, was young and frightened and wanting there to be a quick and easy solution to the perils we all find ourselves in today. I am also aware that this younger part of myself is not the core of who I am. 

And, of course, there is no quick fix to decades and hundreds of years and more that have brought us to the precipice where we now stand. There is evidence of collapse all around us. And it took me only a moment to remember this and to be conscious of how it is that the former president is but a symptom of something so much larger than this one deeply wounded man. 

In the midst of so much that is swirling around that is disturbing and painful and incredibly hard to see and hold, I also affirm that there is a ground swelling of courage, of love, of activism and consciousness and truth, and of compassion and wisdom and awakening. Both are happening simultaneously — this collapse of the old and this newer growing body of human beings doing the deeper work individually and collectively to awaken from our long slumber.

It is a lot, this taking on of colonial white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. These systems have long permeated our culture, our politics and mainstream media, our educational and criminal justice systems, our religious institutions, our communities and families, our own bodies and hearts and minds. And there is something incredibly freeing in seeing this, in coming out of denial and disassociation and projections onto others of its all the fault of those Others. Because dehumanizing other humans never serves a higher good for anyone. Instead, we simply become mirrors for that which so frightens and disturbs and horrifies us. 

The inner reflects the outer. It is challenging to not become a mirror reflecting back harm. But we can catch ourselves and intervene when these old parts emerge and choose more wisely how to respond internally and outwardly in the world.

* * * * *

Lately I have been devouring the teachings of so many who embody unmistakable wisdom, compassion, and love. And who, despite great odds, do not cease in striving for deeper understanding, healing, awareness, truth, and compassion. As I absorb more and more, I experience the connections and how it is that all these seemingly different aspects of healing and consciousness are actually all intertwined and interrelated. The voices and forces of truth, of humility and courage, of growth and evolution, of beauty and love are truly all around us. And within us.

Whether I am looking at those with great integrity who are speaking about political matters, the climate crisis, war and dehumanization, the mindbody connection, how we get sick and how we can heal, and so much more — it is all connected. All connected to truth, to empowering and strengthening ourselves, to wisdom and compassion and love.

Again and again there is this return to Self and the embodiment of Love. This Self within us has always been there and cannot be wounded or damaged. We can, however, lose touch with ourSelves or live with an impaired connection with the truth of who we are. I know that one well having lived for many years with disassociation and addictions and many other faces of unaddressed trauma. And, all of this can be embraced, healed, and radically transformed.

Which is what I believe these times ask of us — to bring forth more and more of our Self. And here I am speaking to our individual Self and our collective Self — the Sacred Essence which exists within all of life. Because it is only to the extent that we are healing and awakening that we grow tender and strong enough to hold and act upon in helpful ways what is happening all around us and within us.

The good news is that more and more of us are doing exactly that. And from this place of deep and ever growing wisdom, compassion, and love we can grow and evolve in what it is that we bring to our human and nonhuman Earthly family. We are all needed. May we heal. May our hearts remain open. May we know the beauty of our own true nature. 

Bless us all,

💗

Molly

* * * 

Several recent resources, in no particular order, which I am finding helpful and some of which might also speak to you:

When the Body Says No: Exploring the Stress-Disease Connection by Gabor Maté — https://www.amazon.com/When-Body-Says-Understanding-Stress-Disease/dp/0470923350

No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness With The Internal Family Systems Model by Richard Schwartz — https://www.amazon.com/No-Bad-Parts-Restoring-Wholeness/dp/1683646681

Sacred Medicine: A Doctor's Quest to Unravel the Mysteries of Healing by Lissa Rankin — https://www.amazon.com/Sacred-Medicine-Doctors-Unravel-Mysteries/dp/1683647424

Cured: Strengthen Your Immune System and Heal Your Life by Jeffrey Rediger — https://www.amazon.com/Cured-Strengthen-Your-Immune-System/dp/1250193192

How the Fragmented Self Becomes Whole Through IFS (video) — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmRfP-gAZBk

Becoming Our Compassionate Self (video) — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PMPjVOTknE

Rethinking Addiction (video - which disputes addiction as disease and more) — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5meU_-EnVk

I would also recommend any video online by any of these doctors, authors, therapists — there are many! As we heal ourselves, we heal our world. 🙏

Norman Solomon and Jeff Cohen: The Imperative To Reduce The Chances Of A Trump Victory

This is such an excellent, well articulated and well researched, and vitally important article by Norman Solomon and Jeff Cohen that I hope will be read and shared widely. Also included with this piece in the original link I include below is action that we can each take NOW. This truly is an imperative. And no one can say that we haven't been warned again and again and again what will happen if Biden does not step down. We are warned. May we listen and act! — Molly

Biden’s presence at the top 

of the ticket promises to not only 

deliver the White House to Trump 

but also the House and Senate 

to Republicans.

By Norman Solomon and Jeff Cohen

Let’s face it: Donald Trump is in a stronger position than ever to win a second term in November, with his active supporters even more motivated in the wake of the shooting Saturday. Preventing a Trump victory is now unlikely. But we must try.

Top Trump strategists are very eager for their candidate to run against Joe Biden. They’re now worried that the Democratic Party might end up with a different standard bearer.

Days ago, The Atlantic published journalist Tim Alberta’s in-depth examination of the Trump campaign’s strategic approach. “Everything they have been doing, the targeting that they have been doing of voters, the advertisements that they’re cutting, the fund-raising ploys that they’re making, the viral Internet videos that they have been churning out, they’re all designed around Joe Biden,” Alberta told the PBS NewsHour.

“So if suddenly he were replaced at the top of the ticket,” he added, “I think in many ways it’s back to square one for the Trump campaign. They recognize this. And I think they’re deeply unnerved by the possibility of a switcheroo at the top of the Democratic ticket.”

Last weekend, the Washington Post put it this way: “As Democrats debate the future of Biden’s reelection bid, Republicans would prefer he stay in a race they believe they are already winning.”

On Sunday, Face the Nation reported “top Democratic sources believe that Democrats who had thoughts about challenging President Biden are now standing down ‘because of this fragile political moment.’” Yet a guest on the same CBS program, Democratic Rep. Jason Crow, warned of a “high risk” that his party will lose the election “unless there is a major change.” He said that messaging from Biden’s campaign “is not effectively breaking through.”

While Biden boosters like to talk about national polling that sometimes puts Biden within a couple of points of Trump, such surveys mean little. Due to the Electoral College, the swing states will determine the winner. Biden is behind — and falling further behind in most of them. Arizona, Georgia and Nevada have moved from “toss up” states to “lean Republican” according to the Cook Political Report.

And with an approval rating that now hovers around an abysmal 37 percent, Biden is increasingly playing defense in states he won easily four years ago.

“Democrats’ concerns about Biden’s ability to win are expanding beyond this cycle’s predetermined battlegrounds into states that long ago turned blue in presidential elections,” Politico reported last week, in an article raising doubts about Biden’s prospects in New Hampshire, Maine, New Mexico and Minnesota. The headline: “Dems Are Freaking Out About Biden Even in Once Safely Blue States.”

Around the country, Democratic candidates are running well ahead of Biden. Last week, the Economist/YouGov poll found that “96 percent of registered Democrats say they will vote for a Democratic House candidate in the fall, compared with 85 percent who plan to vote for Biden.”

Biden’s presence at the top of the ticket promises to not only deliver the White House to Trump but also the House and Senate to Republicans.

In the light of such realities less than four months before Election Day, it’s alarming to hear many elected Democrats — including some progressives in Congress — publicly claim that Biden is just fine as the party’s nominee.

The happy-talk denialism from those congressional progressives shows a disconnect from the progressive grassroots. Many activists who devoted months of their lives on behalf of Biden in 2020 to vote Trump out are disaffected from Biden in 2024. Many are furious over Biden’s nonstop support of Israel during its continuous slaughter of civilians in Gaza. That includes Arab-American and Muslim activists and groups who mobilized for Biden four years ago against his Islamophobic opponent. Many climate activists who fought for Biden in 2020 against the “drill, baby, drill” Trump are disgusted with his reversals on climate policy.

So, the depressing poll numbers may understate the problem for Biden as the Democratic nominee, because they don’t count the gap in campaign volunteer energy — especially in contrast with the highly energized MAGA base. Early this year, an anonymous letter from 17 Biden 2024 campaign staffers urged Biden to reverse himself on Gaza and seek an immediate ceasefire: “Biden for President staff have seen volunteers quit in droves, and people who have voted blue for decades feel uncertain about doing so for the first time ever.”

In 2017, the Trump presidency was properly mocked for its brazen assertions of “alternative facts.” It’s now disconcerting that Biden and his advocates so often lapse into puffery as to his true political situation.

That situation was laid out with chilling candor in a detailed New York Times piece by longtime Democratic strategist Doug Sosnik, who was a senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and has advised dozens of governors and senators. The article makes for grim reading: “President Biden has spent much of 2024 with a more challenging path to winning a second presidential term in November than Donald Trump. But for reasons that have become glaringly obvious, that path has all but vanished.”

Biden “not only faces losing battleground states he won in 2020,” Sosnik wrote, “he is also at risk of losing traditional Democratic states like Minnesota and New Hampshire, which Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama carried. If current trends continue, Mr. Trump could rack up one of the most decisive presidential victories since 2008.”

But so many Democrats in Congress are refusing to call for Biden to step aside. And a lot of them are even cheering him on, encouraging his intransigence, as though nothing is amiss.

Until the Democratic Party officially nominates its presidential candidate, the push for Biden to withdraw from the ticket should continue.

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Norman Solomon is national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of many books including War Made Easy. His latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, was published in summer 2023 by The New Press.

Jeff Cohen is co-founder of RootsAction.org, a retired journalism professor at Ithaca College, and author of Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media. In 1986, he founded the media watch group FAIR.

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