Janet Quinn: I Am a Women Bathing in the Bliss of the Company of Other Women

Just emerging from a women's ceremony, I am moved to 

once again post this beautiful affirmation. Deep, deep 

bow of gratitude. May we all be so blessed.

❤ Molly

 

I Am a Women Bathing in the Bliss of the

Company of Other Women

Sitting in a circle of women, women beside me, women across from me; women around me; women listening to me; women embracing me; women understanding me; women appreciating me; women admiring me; women comforting me; women laughing with me; women keening with me; women celebrating with me; women outraged with me; women creating with me; women allowing me to create my own way. Women healing each other; women healing the world; women longing for peace; women uniting for justice; women choosing love and forgiveness; women visioning; women in the world; women in the home; women mothering children; women tending men; women nursing parents; women running institutions; women struggling; women overcoming; women growing; women dying. Women, huge and tiny, bold and shy,

wide and full, long and athletic; wise, strong, tender, compassionate, vital, brilliant, magnificent, multicolored, multitalented, multifaceted, sparkling, glimmering, holy, light-giving gems of Creation, women! I am a woman bathing in the bliss of the company of other women.

From I Am a Woman Finding My Voice: Celebrating the

Extraordinary Blessings of Being a Woman

By Janet F. Quinn, Ph.D., R.N.

If Our Planet Has a Future, It’s Thanks to Greta Thunberg

Climate activist Greta Thunberg sits between Francois Villeroy de Galhau, left, who is the governor of the Bank of France, and John J. Haley, CEO of Willis Towers Watson, during a session of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January.

By Natasha Hakimi Zapata

“When I first heard about something called climate change … I remember thinking that it was really strange that humans, who are an animal species among others, could be capable of changing the earth’s climate,” says 16-year-old activist Greta Thunberg in a TedX speech that has been viewed over a million times. “Because if it were, and if it was really happening, we wouldn’t be talking about anything else.”

Thunberg certainly doesn’t want us to talk about anything but climate change—she’s even scolded European leaders for obsessing over Brexit, the United Kingdom’s separation from the European Union, instead of taking urgently needed action to address the climate emergency at hand. The TedX talk, which the Swedish activist gave in Stockholm in late 2018, came after months of protesting her government’s climate inaction by skipping school and sitting in front of the steps of the Swedish Parliament. Little did Swedish leaders or perhaps even Thunberg herself know that her seemingly simple act of civil disobedience would spark a worldwide youth activist movement.

Not only did students around the globe follow in Thunberg’s footsteps by staging their own school strikes, but entire movements such as Extinction Rebellion, which essentially brought the city of London to a standstill in April, have been inspired by the young activist’s “plain-spoken, no-holds-barred chastising of world leaders over their inaction on climate change [with] signature calm,” as Truthdig’s Sonali Kolhatkar writes.

The young activist’s message isn’t necessarily new or groundbreaking. In fact, as she explains in her talk, she’s not here to offer hope in the form of solutions for one crucial reason: They already exist. And she’s right. The public has known for many years that we were doing possibly irreversible damage to our planet. More importantly, political leaders have also known this, yet have done little to enforce goals like those of the Paris Agreement, which came late in the game anyway. What’s more, heads of companies such as Shell, Exxon and others in the fossil fuel industry have known the facts for decades, and have willfully deceived consumers. Climate scientists have been warning us and also coming up with an abundance of green solutions.

“I want you to panic,” Thunberg says. For the young woman with her whole life ahead of her, the rest of us are acting far too calmly about a full-on crisis that will determine her future and that of her children and grandchildren, as she reminds us.

Perhaps one of the most inspiring things about Thunberg is that she practices what she preaches. The Swedish youth is a vegan, based on the numerous studies that have shown how meat consumption is responsible for a large portion of harmful methane emissions, and she has given up air travel completely.

Her transportation choices haven’t stopped her from traveling widely and more sustainably to the likes of Davos, the COP24 conference, the European Commission, European Parliament and, most recently, the U.K. parliament. In all these houses of power, the teenager looked at the people surrounding her, all many years further into their lives and careers than she and did nothing to hide her disappointment in her elders.

At the World Economic Forum held in Davos in January, Thunberg told those present, “Our house is on fire, I am here to say our house is on fire. According to the IPCC we are less than 12 years away from not being able to undo our mistakes.”

In the Houses of Parliament in London, she began, “I speak on behalf of future generations. I know many of you don’t want to listen to us — you say we are just children. But we’re only repeating the message of the united climate science. … Many of you appear concerned that we are wasting valuable lesson time, but I assure you we will go back to school the moment you start listening to science and give us a future. Is that really too much to ask?”

These are just some highlights of her incredibly eloquent, powerful speeches, which you will soon be able to read in a book aptly titled, “No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference.” Thunberg, who has been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, views it as a “gift” that has allowed her to see things in “black and white.” As writer Ian Birrell argues in the Guardian, “Greta Thunberg teaches us about autism as much as climate change.” Recently, the now-household name was also nominated for a Nobel Prize.

But perhaps the most remarkable thing about Thunberg’s activism is that it’s having a measurable impact. U.K. opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn and Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon have led the U.K. Parliament to declare a climate emergency, due to pressure from Thunberg and the Extinction Rebellion movement. Thunberg’s message continues to spread and inspire activism and action across this ailing planet, and not a second too soon, given, as she reminds us, that we are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction and are just a few years away from the point of no return when it comes to our planet’s survival.

For all she has already accomplished in her short years on earth to help save it, Greta Thunberg is our Truthdigger of the Month.

Please go here for the original article: https://www.truthdig.com/articles/if-our-planet-has-a-future-its-thanks-to-greta-thunberg/           

No Joe!

It is essential that we assume responsibility for informing ourselves, for placing principles before personalities, for pursuing facts over opinions, and for embodying a passionate commitment to truth. — Molly

Joe Biden's disastrous legislative legacy

By Andrew Cockburn

In the heart of the US Capitol there’s a small men’s room with an uplifting Franklin Delano Roo­sevelt quotation above the door. Making use of the facilities there after lunch in the nearby House dining room about a year ago, I found myself standing next to Trent Lott. Once a mighty power in the building as Senate Republican leader, he had been forced to resign his post following some imprudently affectionate references to his fellow Republican senator, arch-segregationist Strom Thurmond. Now he was visiting the Capitol as a lucratively employed lobbyist.

The bathroom in which we stood, Lott remarked affably, once served a higher purpose. History had been made there. “When I first came to Washington as a junior staffer in 1968,” he explained, “this was the private hideaway office of Bill Colmer, chairman of the House Rules Committee.” Colmer, a long-serving Mississippi Democrat and Lott’s boss, was an influential figure. The committee he ruled controlled whether bills lived or died, the latter being the customary fate of proposed civil-rights legislation that reached his desk. “On Thursday nights,” Lott continued, “he and members of the leadership from both sides of the House would meet here to smoke cigars, drink cheap bourbon, play gin rummy, and discuss business. There was a chemistry, they understood each other. It was a magical thing.” He sighed wistfully at the memory of a more harmonious age, in which our elders and betters could arrange the nation’s affairs behind closed doors.

I don’t know that Joe Biden, currently leading the polls for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, ever frequented that particular restroom, in either its bygone or contemporary manifestation, but it could serve as a fitting shrine to all that he stands for. Biden has long served as high priest of the doctrine that our legislative problems derive merely from superficial disagreements, rather than fundamental differences over matters of principle. “I believe that we have to end the divisive partisan politics that is ripping this country apart,” he declared in the Rose Garden in 2015, renouncing a much-anticipated White House run. “It’s mean-spirited. It’s petty. And it’s gone on for much too long. I don’t believe, like some do, that it’s naïve to talk to Republicans. I don’t think we should look on Republicans as our enemies.”

Given his success in early polling, it would seem that this message resonates with many voters, at least when they are talking to pollsters. After all, according to orthodox wisdom, there is no more commendable virtue in American political custom and practice than bipartisanship. Politicians on the stump fervently assure voters that they will strive with every sinew to “work across the aisle” to deliver “commonsense solutions,” and those who express the sentiment eloquently can expect widespread approval. Barack Obama famously launched himself toward the White House with his 2004 speech at the Democratic National Convention proclaiming that there is “not a liberal America and a conservative America,” only a “United States of America.”

By tapping into these popular tropes—“The system is broken,” “Why can’t Congress just get along?”—the practitioners of bipartisanship conveniently gloss over the more evident reality: that the system is under sustained assault by an ideology bent on destroying the remnants of the New Deal to the benefit of a greed-driven oligarchy. It was bipartisan accord, after all, that brought us the permanent war economy, the war on drugs, the mass incarceration of black people, 1990s welfare “reform,” Wall Street deregulation and the consequent $16 trillion in bank bailouts, the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, and other atrocities too numerous to mention. If the system is indeed broken, it is because interested parties are doing their best to break it.

Rather than admit this, Biden has long found it more profitable to assert that political divisions can be settled by men endowed with statesmanlike vision and goodwill—in other words, men such as himself. His frequent eulogies for public figures have tended to play heavily on this theme. Thus his memorial speech for Republican standard-bearer John McCain dwelled predictably on the cross-party nature of their relationship, beginning with his opening: “My name is Joe Biden. I’m a Democrat, and I loved John McCain.” Continuing in that vein, he related how he and McCain had once been chided by their respective party leaderships for spending so much time in each other’s company on the Senate floor, and referred fondly to the days when senators Teddy Kennedy and James Eastland, the latter a die-hard racist and ruthless suppressor of civil-rights bills, would “fight like hell on civil rights and then go have lunch together, down in the Senate dining room.”

Please continue this article here: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/03/joe-biden-record/

Amy Goodman and Dennis Moynihan: Greta Thunberg, Frances Crowe and a Passing of the Torch

What a beautiful piece about Greta Thunberg and Frances Crowe by Amy Goodman and her husband Dennis Moynihan. I am also moved to highlight that Greta, Frances, and Amy are incredibly courageous women who are shining examples of how one person can make a difference that spreads, evolves, deepens, and makes all the difference. May we all be inspired! The ripples each of us creates matters, and matters deeply. — Molly

Greta Thunberg speaks at the U.N. Climate Change COP24 Conference in Katowice, Poland, in 2018.

By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan

Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old Swedish climate activist, sailed into New York Harbor Wednesday after an occasionally harrowing, two-week trans-Atlantic voyage. Greta walks the walk, living her life with as small a carbon footprint as she can. She decided to forgo flying as part of that commitment, so, in order to make it from Europe to North America, she sailed on a zero-emissions racing yacht. The day before Greta’s arrival, on Tuesday, another activist ended a remarkable voyage. Frances Crowe, a lifelong peace activist, died at home in Western Massachusetts, surrounded by her family, at the age of 100. Frances was a firebrand, a nonviolent warrior for justice, arrested countless times protesting war, nuclear weapons, nuclear power plants and more. The departure of one elder activist on the eve of the arrival of one so young symbolizes, bittersweetly, the passing of a torch.

Frances was born just months after World War I ended. “My mother told me she took me to my first march when the soldiers came home,” she wrote in “Finding My Radical Soul,” her memoir. “I was only a baby, but I have always had the feeling that war has defined my life.” Her husband, Tom, was a medical doctor. Speaking on the “Democracy Now!” news hour in 2005, she described a pivotal moment in her life, Aug. 6, 1945, the day the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima: 

“I was a bride. My husband was in the Medical Corps in the Army. He had told me a few weeks before that he had heard rumors that we were developing this incredible weapon. He was at sea when we dropped the bomb, but I was alone in our apartment in New Orleans. When I heard it on the radio, I unplugged the iron, left the place mat that I was ironing and went out looking for a peace center in the streets of New Orleans.”

From that day, at the age of 26, until she died, Frances Crowe never relented in her pursuit of peace and justice. She was a war tax resister, refusing to pay taxes to support the sprawling Pentagon budget. She opposed South African apartheid and U.S. intervention in Central America in the 1980s and in Iraq and Afghanistan in the 2000s. She climbed fences into the Seneca Army Depot, and was arrested for pouring her own blood on a newly built Trident nuclear submarine just before it was launched in Connecticut.

Wednesday, at Manhattan’s North Cove Marina, a vessel of a different kind arrived. Hundreds of young climate activists cheered as Greta disembarked, standing on terra firma for the first time in two weeks. “The ground is still shaking for me,” she said as she opened her press conference.

“The climate is an ecological crisis, a global crisis, the biggest crisis humanity has ever faced,” she said. “If we don’t manage to cooperate, to work together despite our differences, then we will fail. … Let’s not wait any longer. Let’s do it now.”

We first met Greta at the U.N. climate change summit in Katowice, Poland, last December. She explained then on “Democracy Now!” that, because of her Asperger’s, “I work a bit different. I see things in black and white. I guess I saw the world from a different perspective.” She focused intently on the worsening climate crisis, even suffering debilitating depression around the age of 11. “I got out of that depression by promising myself that I’m going to do everything I can to change things,” she said Wednesday.

That determination led her to launch a school strike for the climate, skipping school every Friday to stand in front of the Swedish parliament, demanding action to prevent catastrophic climate change. Her protest spread, quickly going global. Hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren around the globe have participated in their own, local school strikes for the climate. This Friday, Greta will join kids in New York at their monthly strike outside the United Nations. A global strike for the climate, expected to be one of the largest global protests in history, will take place on Sept. 20. After that, Greta will make her way, using “a lot of trains, buses and probably even sailing,” she explained, to the next U.N. climate change summit in Santiago, Chile, in December.

Greta’s work as an activist is just beginning. She is a living example of what Frances Crowe said not long ago: “There is something else also to life, the joy of struggle, that not enough people have tasted. The joy of community, and the joy of cooperation, instead of competition; these are the values that I want to perpetuate and talk about to young people.”       

Please go here for the original article: https://www.truthdig.com/articles/greta-thunberg-frances-crowe-and-a-passing-of-the-torch/?amp&fbclid=IwAR12aCQBIZXgUCAhFVhJ2OiXnJtFXuuGg32N3wyCL9pBrhCQ9I1A65Gle6g