What We Can Do

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So what can you do in a case like that?
What can you do except sit on your hat
Or your toothbrush, or your grandmother
Or anything else that’s helpless?

— from “The Whale” by Burl Ives

In 2018 I posted a guide to candidates and organizations worth supporting for the midterm elections. I’ll be doing the same for the 2020 elections once the primaries are over and we know who the Democratic Presidential and Senatorial candidates will be, but for now, I want to recommend the following organizations worth supporting outside of any specific election cycle.… [more]

Beware the Progressive-Wishful Complex!

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It’s Election Day 2018, and I’m seeing it again: social media posts by ultra progressive friends celebrating Democratic victories as evidence of the imminent Revolution and decrying Republican victories as the result of voter suppression or voting machine shenanigans. Underlying these responses is the idea that the vast majority of Americans are really progressive at heart, and the only thing that’s stopping their Voice from being heard is a corrupt Establishment whose overthrow would result in all the people celebrating their newfound freedom.… [more]

What We Can Do, 2018

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I've been seeing  a lot of rage expressed by liberal and progressive friends over not only what Donald Trump has done to this country, but the immunity his followers seem to have to all reason and information. In this post, I'd like to make some suggestions about where we can channel it. There might be nothing we can do to change the person he is, or to change the minds of any of his followers, but what we can do is work to limit his power in November, and eventually put him out of power in 2020.

The Gun’s Thunder

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On this day of the March For Our Lives, I’d like to share an excerpt from my current work in progress, Matoaka, a novel of Pocahontas, John Smith, and John Rolfe.

The entire novel is written in the form of prayers by Pocahontas (who is a daughter of the high chief of the Powhatan nation, and whose true name is Matoaka), diary entries by John Smith (one of the leaders of the Jamestown settlement), third person narratives from Smith’s point of view, and letters by John Rolfe, a tobacco farmer who arrives at Jamestown late in the book.… [more]

Moral majorities

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In the 1970’s, conservative Christians formed an organization called The Moral Majority, the point of the “majority” part of the name being their conviction that they and those like them formed a majority of Americans, whose wishes were being disregarded by the liberal (minority) establishment. The name was also a play on the “Silent Majority,” coined by Richard Nixon to refer to those Americans (again, allegedly in the majority but overlooked by the liberal mainstream media) who were opposed to the countercultural protests of the 60’s.… [more]

The name of the game

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A lot of people see the political struggle between the Left and the Right as a game of capture-the-flag. We battle the other team to set our candidate on that hilltop, and once we do, we win the game. Thinking along these lines, many Bernie Sanders supporters were certain that if they could just get him elected president, everything would change.… [more]

Standing with Occupy

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When the Occupy movement was at its peak, I got an idea about supporting it that I wish I had attempted to promulgate. One of the problems with Occupy was that it was such a small and non-mainstream movement. It consisted primarily of a very small demographic slice of the population, and because of this, it was easier for the police to sweep it away without outraging most ordinary Americans.… [more]

Dear liberal billionaires

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I know that many of you donate a lot of money to progressive causes and candidates, but I recently got an idea for another avenue for societal progress you might pursue. The idea is a general one about a kind of action you can take that combines business, philanthropy, and political activism, but in this post, I’ll describe it in terms of a specific type of business.… [more]