Unfulfilled Dreams

If I had to explain what life was like for my paternal grandfather, who traveled in the caboose of freight trains working for the Northern Pacific Railway, I would be remiss to leave out the impact of the Great Depression. Two photos I would like to show people inclined to support repeal of Social Security, Food Stamps and Medicare--all of which came out of the New Deal programs under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt--are the one of a crowd outside the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street, and the photo of an Oklahoma family living in a shanty. While Jesse and Edith Taber had union jobs to get them and their three kids through the Depression years, they daily witnessed hungry families and transients passing through on their way to unfulfilled dreams.

All We Have

Their evil is mighty
but it can't stand up to our stories.
So they try to destroy the stories
let the stories be confused or forgotten.
They would like that
They would be happy.
Because we would be defenseless then.
--from Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko

Homecoming

Some of the American Indian soldiers returning from fighting for the U.S. Army in World War II had grandfathers who had fought against the U.S. Army during the Indian wars on the Great Plains.

Conflated Expressions

Recurring expressions of despair over our collective insanity, followed by ineffective acts of symbolic resistance, are often conflated with organized social movements that achieved tangible results through strategic persistence. This conflation is reinforced by the ruling elite through their charitable grants to the non-profit industrial complex and alternative media.

Naqab Nakba

Mapping My Return: A Palestinian Memoir, reviewed by Sarah Irving for Electronic Intifada, is the story of exile by a refugee from the fertile plains of the Naqab, where his family's fields were plowed by camel. As the son of a paramount chief of the Tarabin Bedouin, Salman Abu Sitta attended university in Cairo, but recalls the attack on his father's home and the Israeli massacres in Gaza.