Tag: Rivera Sun

An Essay of the Man From the Northby Rivera Sun Corporate demons possess our nation’s soul. They crept in stealthily, full of trickery and deception, but now they’re lodged in place, as surely as if they had stormed our homes and halls of power with guns and tanks. Perhaps we’d recognize their coup if they […]

  (This is an excerpt from Rivera Sun’s novel, The Dandelion Insurrection, which you can find here.)   Charlie and Zadie drove down the main street of the rural Pennsylvanian town. The locals stood in the doorways, frowns carving their faces as they stared at the teeming soldiers. The waitresses at the diner peered through […]

An Essay of the Man From the North Don’t wait until the perils of extraction are on your doorstep, in your backyard, or poisoning your water. Look around! Pay attention to the stories coming from the north, south, east, west. See the noose of hard truth tightening. Oil and gas extraction is invading the United […]

A Message from Rivera Sun This morning, I rose and stood in my black wool wrap as a gentle desert rain fell on the dry earth. The scent of sagebrush drifted with the low clouds. I reached down and placed my palm on the damp ground. Gratitude is the sensation of rain falling in the […]

Announcing a new novel from Rivera Sun! The Way Between blends fun, action, adventure, and fantasy while delivering an uplifting message of waging peace and active nonviolence for a new generation of readers. This exciting story will be available soon. Between flight and fight lies a mysterious third path called the Way Between, and young shepherdess […]

An Essay of The Man From the North A smoothly functioning society is created and maintained by the people. Children go to school, workers show up at their jobs, shipments are made, groceries and purchases are bought, bills are paid, goods and services are delivered; and so on. In times of justice, when the workings […]

I am an old millennial, one who just barely squeezes into the age category.  I graduated high school in 2000. My first presidential election was Bush vs. Gore – a rigged election with widespread allegations of electoral voting machine manipulation and a dubiously-legal intervention of the Supreme Court to stop the pivotal Florida vote count, […]

Caring for the health and safety of our children and families is common ground where Americans on the left and the right meet. Yet, during this election cycle, few candidates seem willing to talk about the health and safety risks caused by toxic industries. Instead, the false split between environment and jobs is used to […]

Recently, I traveled by train across the US in a swaying, creeping journey that took me through the backyards and forgotten corners of our country. Here, you see the America that doesn’t make it into the slogans of presidential campaigns. These back alleys are not evoked by the statistics and demographical jargon politicians use to […]

by Rivera Sun, author of The Dandelion Insurrection The word you’re looking for is swarming. The people are rising, resisting, changing, growing, evolving . . . and as they do, they’re swarming like bees or birds in the hundreds, thousands, millions. They’re coming together to stop pipelines, then dispersing and reassembling in a different configuration […]

[ Photo Credit: By Warren K. Leffler, U.S. News & World Report Magazine; Restored by Adam Cuerden – Public Domain[/caption] Civil Rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer was born on October 6th, 1917, in Mississippi, and lived under the harsh reality of the Jim Crow South. Through years of courage and challenge, she became a legendary […]

Automation isn’t coming. It’s here. At the airport, the public library, the grocery store, and dozens of other places, touch screens are rapidly replacing human bodies, especially in basic service industry positions. In a time when service industry jobs represent 80 percent of all employment in the United States, and when a presidential report on […]

At a certain point, you realize you must live in utter rebellion to the totalitarian oligarchic-corporate state that controls our government, legal system, police and military, the media, education, entertainment, arts and culture. You start to make daily acts of resistance to their domination of so many aspects of our world. You don’t watch their […]

This story appeared as part of Pace e Bene/Campaign Nonviolence‘s inspirational email service: This Nonviolent Life. Sign up here. On August 10th, 1976, Anne Maguire took her children out to go shopping in Northern Ireland. Anne was pushing a pram with her six-week-old newborn. Her son walked ahead; her daughter rode her bicycle beside her, […]

“You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake,” said Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to Congress. Decades of invasions, airstrikes, occupations, and conflict have left Americans staring at a disastrous rubble of our own making. War is an earthquake – a violent, destructive force unleashed. The aftershocks bring our […]

If our cars fatally malfunctioned as often as police officers shoot citizens, there would be a massive recall, pulling vehicles off the road, overhauling the engineering design, firing culpable employees, and paying out settlements to consumers for injuries and deaths of family members. The problem of a complete lack of accountability within the police system […]

On August 23rd, 1989, two million people joined hands to form a human chain crossing the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, in protest against the Soviet Union, and in support of each nation’s independence. The Baltic Way, as the human chain was called, spanned 420 miles, engaging people of all ages in […]

On August 1st, 1976, the first nonviolent mass demonstration of the Clamshell Alliance took place at the proposed site of the Seabrook Nuclear Energy Facility in New Hampshire. The Clamshell Alliance was a group of anti-nuclear activists who worked to stop nuclear power plant construction at a time when President Nixon’s “Project Independence” had proposed […]

This week in nonviolent history commemorates a turning point in the long struggle to demand justice for the residents of Love Canal, a residential community in upstate New York that was situated on top of a leaking toxic waste dump. On August 2nd, 1978, State Health Commissioner Robert Whalen issued a state of emergency ordering […]

On August 20, 2013, Antoinette Tuff (right) nonviolently disarmed a school shooter, saving the lives of hundreds of school children. Antoinette was a bookkeeper. She wasn’t supposed to be at the school that day. She was just filling in as a front desk receptionist as a favor to a friend. That morning, during her prayer […]

During election years, pent-up frustrations, simmering animosities, and the toxic legacy of countless hours of hate talk radio erupt from the seething volcano of the American public. Injustice left festering explodes into anger and hatred. Defensive arrogance and condescension drips down the pyramid of privilege. What should – and perhaps someday could – be a […]

“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” ~ Dr. King From the left and the right, policy proposals are flying fast and furious. It is an election year, after all.  But one topic is completely off the agenda […]

“A voice of one is better than the voice of none.”  This sentence sums up much of my approach to speaking truth, demonstrating, and showing up. I’m not waiting for the crowd, for the great leader, or for the glorious revolution. I want to speak up, show up, stand up. I don’t care if I’m the […]

The forest sways in ripples of green. Wind sends the dappled sunlight sparkling through the branches. These are the things we forget in the heat of the political season. There are few politicians who will speak on behalf of all people . . . and even fewer who will speak for the beings that comprise […]