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Stuff to Do: May Day edition

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I t’s the easiest protest and were we to continue with it, it would likely be the most effective. It’s simple. Friday, May the First; NO WORK, NO SCHOOL, NO SHOPPING.  Maybe the “no work” isn’t viable for all, but no school seems a better bet, and what should be the easiest- no shopping- we can all do. Starve the beast! Just for one day. Just for one day, don’t buy a goddamn thing. You need groceries? You’ve got through Thursday? Medicine? Same. What do you do instead? Go for a walk, read a book, talk to your neighbors. Just don’t feed the upward-wealth economy. If we were a more courageous society, a general strike would already be in effect, every day. If most - not even everyone- just quit buying bullshit, that alone would grind a significant part of the market to a halt. Not showing up to work? AI can’t replace everybody yet. If blue and white collar workers just refused to go into work, every day, the disruption would cause an immediate stoppage of profits to the oligarchs....
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Happy Earth Day, Mom!

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Earth, from 6.4 billion kilometers (4 billion miles) away. Photo by Voyager 1, 14 February 1990. Dear Mom, You’ve nurtured life on you for eons. We’re late arrivals and from the way we behave toward you and each other, I rather get the feeling we’re not going to be around forever, maybe not even for much longer.  That’s okay. It’s not just that we’re “unruly children who won’t settle down”, we have been actively engaged in matricide for much of the latter half of the the twentieth century all the way up to right now.  It’s not like we haven’t known. I remember as a kid the warning signs we’d hear about on TV. I also very much remembered waking up to orange skies and burning eyes from the effluents belched into the air by the refineries along the East Texas coast. Hell, the complex near the Houston Ship Channel looked like something out of Blade Runner .  A funny thing happened, though. Much to the chagrin of the petroleum industry, the National Environmental Policy Act wa...
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What we are given to hold

Every day, my inbox, as I’m sure yours, is replete with articles, substack posts, notes about the various hells being unleashed at any given time, more now than ever. It is easy to begin to believe that light is receding at, well, lightspeed. However, a few caveats may be helpful in dispelling, if not the darkness itself, than its seeming power to render us dispirited or despairing. As I mentioned elsewhere, whenever you find yourself confronted with the questions of what good is it? What can one person do?, you can pin a reminder in your mind that it’s never about just one person. There are many doing many good things. Some in concert with one another, some individually here and there. However, it is important not to succumb to doomscrolling out of habit.  I’m not sure that I completely agree with Janus Rose’s thesis in her 2025 article You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism , that more time spent posting about injustice and the latest outrage takes time away from actually doing t...
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