Tag: essays

My neighbors are good people. Always ready with a polite nod or wave. Helpful if your car breaks down. In this rural region, they’re farmers and loggers, truckers and mechanics. They’re quick to volunteer for the local fire department, show up for spaghetti dinner fundraisers, and plow the seniors’ driveway in a pinch.  Two-thirds of […]

Image: Portland, OR, June 2025 by Spicypepper999 – CC0 No one likes to be deceived. Or misled. To the best of our abilities, we try to use make good decisions based on the information we receive.  What if that information is wrong?  President Trump watched Fox News coverage of riotous protests in Portland, Oregon, and […]

Charlie Kirk’s murder. School shootings in Minneapolis and Denver. Genocide in Gaza. Russia’s war in Ukraine. Violence is everywhere. It’s frightening and heartbreaking. No one likes violence. Do they?  In truth, our culture sends out very mixed messages when it comes to violence. We glorify it in movies. We fantasize about it in video games. […]

Image By Ashraf Amra – UNRWA: United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, CC BY-SA 4.0 Gaza is being starved – deliberately, with cruel intention and shocking inhumanity. The photos of skeletal children haunt me. At night when I close my eyes. At dawn when I rise. They should […]

Image: Trump at Alligator Alcatraz in Florida. Photo by The White House, Public Domain After spending months firing federal workers, slashing public services, gutting healthcare, and raising taxes for everyone but the rich, our country just wasted hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on a detention center in Florida. Dubbed Alligator Alcatraz, it’s nothing more […]

Originally published by PeaceVoice in journals nationwide on Feb 15, 2025 It takes time. That’s what people keep saying in response to concerns about the Trump Administration. It’ll take time before he can get the good stuff done. They say the promised benefits to this chaos are coming soon. Don’t hold your breath. The egg […]

Do Not Obey. In Advance or Otherwise.Dandelions are everywhere. If you’ve ever wondered what it would feel like to live in “the time that looms around the corner of today” where The Dandelion Insurrection begins … well, this is the closest parallel I have ever seen. At the start of the book, a fist thumps down upon the […]

by Rivera Sun The spirits are speaking to me. Across time. Through history. Ignore the headlines. Go to the heart.How many millions of humans have stood where you stand now? Afraid. Overwhelmed. Despairing. Raging. The globe spins with their haunting cries from Chile under Pinochet, Liberia under Taylor, Estonia under the Soviets, East Timor under […]

by Rivera Sun for Peace Voice On Election Night in my small town, I sat around a folding table with four election clerks, sworn in by the election warden and doing my civic duty to count every vote. The polls had closed. Darkness pressed heavy against the windows, as it does this time of year […]

Originally published on Waging Nonviolence After the shooting at former President Trump’s campaign rally, many people rushed to say that “political violence has no place in our democracy.”  Let’s go even further and boldly say: political nonviolence is essential for democracy.  The ties between nonviolence and democracy run deep. We know from the groundbreaking research of Erica Chenoweth […]

Every child has that book. The one that breaks your heart wide open. Bridge To Terabithia. The Velveteen Rabbit. Charlotte’s Web. The Hate U Give.  For me, it was Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes. Based on the true story of Sadako Sasaki, it tells the story of a 12-year-old girl who survived the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima as […]

Image by Pexels from Pixabay Local news has its finger on the pulse of our communities. When city council acts (or acts up), when disaster strikes, when corruption or scandal needs to be scrutinized, local news steps up. From our kids’ sporting events to small town heroes, road construction detours to storm preparedness, they cover […]

It’s four in the morning and my heart is in my throat again. The presidential election in November fills me with nothing but dread and despair.  On the one hand, we’re facing a candidate who spews hatred, advocates violence, and peddles sneakers and bibles while facing astronomical legal costs for his fraud, lies, sexual assaults […]

By Rivera Sun Love is in the air . . . or at least occupying the airwaves this week, selling chocolates and roses and candlelit dinners for two. But this romantic love is just a thin slice of the feast of love that exists in the human heart. And when Valentine’s Day rolls around, I […]

We all have our reasons for getting alarmed about the climate crisis. With bare ground at Christmas and no snow on the horizon, my neighbors just got theirs. This Northern Maine valley nestles against the border of Canada – and winter without snow is unfathomable. Snowmobiling is a big deal around here. While most of […]

… by Rivera Sun If you enjoy this Solutionary Climate Fiction Story, you will also enjoy Ghosts & Gleaners. … “That crow lady’s back.” “She’s more buzzard than crow.” “Magpie, I’d say. Always on the lookout for shiny trinkets.” Peering through the grimy window, clutching identical mugs of steaming herbal tea, the three workers watched […]

This post was originally published on Waging Nonviolence. Twin Cities Nonviolent, one of the sites with our Nonviolent Cities Project, held two environmentally-themed musical actions as part of their 12 Days Free From Violence. On Sept. 30, the symphony group Classical Uprising performed “The (Uncertain) Four Seasons,” Vivaldi’s classic with a climate twist. On Sept. 25, another […]

This article was originally published on Campaign Nonviolence’s Community Page on Waging Nonviolence. It is reposted with permission. “Aren’t we supposed to sing beyond the choir?” This question recently came up during a training, the person’s eyebrows drawing down into a perplexed expression. On the screen, a diagram of the Spectrum of Allies – a […]

When I was a teenager, I knew global warming was caused by fossil fuels. So did Exxon.  For decades, Exxon has been hiding the truth about the climate crisis, burying their own scientific reports. From 1970 to 2003, the oil company ran studies that accurately predicted the disastrous consequences of continuing to burn fossil fuels.  They modeled […]

I have a new rule: any day that’s warmer than the historic average is a day to take climate action. In Northern Maine today, the temperature is a nippy 31 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s still cold, but the historic average is a frigid 14.4 degrees.

The last thing any of us need is a war with Russia over the Ukraine. You don’t need to know much about foreign policy to know that. Let the pundits and talking heads argue about the nuances of NATO and war maneuvers at the border of Russia. For most Americans, there are at least four […]

An Essay of the Man From the North by Rivera Sun A nation built on greed is not a nation; it is just a legal framework for rape and pillage, slavery and exploitation, theft, murder, and genocide. A nation whose primary function is to protect the exclusive right of the rich to engage in those […]

An Essay of the Man From the North by Rivera Sun The tools of nonviolent action and the skills of struggle are as vital to these times as reading, writing, and arithmetic. Training to use them is as essential as learning how to use a computer. The ability to boycott and strike is as important […]

An Essay of the Man From the Northby Rivera Sun I want to love this broken-hearted country, this land of shattered dreams and dashed hopes. I want to place my ear to the drumming cadence of our cities and hear the insistent pulse of life. I want to wander the forgotten highways of stories that […]