The United Nations lowered the U.S. ranking to #41 among nations in 2022 due to the extreme gap between the rich and the rest and women’s loss of reproductive freedom. Elsewhere the U.S. ranks as a “flawed democracy” because of its severely fractured society.  These ongoing societal failures feed a continuous decline in health, such that we now ranks 48^th among 200 countries in life expectancy, while having the largest number by far of billionaires and millionaires compared to other wealthy countries.  Corporate lobbies for the weapons industry, fossil fuels, pharmaceuticals, processed foods, etc. dictate our federal government’s priorities while 78% of US people live paycheck to paycheck.

Blessed is the Poor People’s Campaign: This national campaign in more than 45 states is organized around the needs and demands of the 140 million poor and low income Americans.  Its vision to restructure our society from the bottom up, recognizes “we must…deal with the interlocking injustices of systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation and the denial of health care, militarism and the distorted moral narrative of religious nationalism that blames the poor instead of the systems that cause poverty.”  Add sexism to that list of injustices.

Blessed is Fair Share Massachusetts, a coalition of labor unions and dozens of community and faith-based organizations that won passage of the Fair Share Amendment in 2022. The constitutional amendment has instituted a 4% surcharge on annual income over $1 million.  In 2024 the $1.8 billion accrued from the tax on millionaires provides free school meals; free community college; and funds to invest in roads, bridges, and public transit. 

In 1948, the United States signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which recognizes adequate housing as one cornerstone of the right to an adequate standard of living. All 27 European Union (EU) member states as well as Australia and South Africa institutionalized housing as a human right for their citizens while the United States has not.  In every state except Oregon and Wyoming, it can be illegal to be homeless, essentially casting blame on 650,000 adults and over 2 million children for their poverty-stricken homelessness

Blessed is Rosie’s Place, a model to our country of woman-centered humanism.  Much more than a shelter, it is a mecca and “a second chance for 12,000 poor and homeless women each year” in Boston.  Rosie’s Place was founded on Easter Sunday 1974 in an abandoned supermarket, as the first shelter for women in the country.  From providing meals and sanctuary from the streets, it grew into a multi-service community center that offers women emergency shelter and meals plus support and tools to rebuild their lives.  Rosie’s offers a food pantry, ESOL classes, legal assistance, wellness care, one-on-one support, housing and job search services, and community outreach.  Ninety percent of homeless women have suffered severe physical or sexual abuse at some time in their lives.

Blessed are the nearly 3000 domestic violence shelters and groups organized throughout the U.S. to provide temporary shelter and help women re-build their lives, offering legal assistance, counselling, educational opportunities and multi-services for their children.

“Beating the Blues,” Digital, Midjourney / Clip2Comic, 2024

A recent Gallup Survey found that the U.S. ranks last among comparable nations in trust of their government and major institutions, including business leaders, journalists and reporters, the medical system, banks, public education and organized religion – a plunge from top of the list nearly 20 years ago.

Blessed is Hands Across the Hills, a blue-state red-state seven-year effort formed after Donald Trump’s 2016 election to bring together progressive residents in western Massachusetts and more conservative residents of rural eastern Kentucky, for conversations and sometimes intense dialogues about their political and cultural differences.  They disputed the idea, “that we are hopelessly divided, as a myth sold to us by politicians and mass media, to hide our nation’s all-too-real inequalities.”

Blessed are the peacemakers across dozens of federal agencies, including the military and in communities throughout the country who challenge, resist, resign and refuse orders in our flawed hyper-militaristic government. Since the US-enabled genocide in Gaza, more than 250 veterans and active-duty soldiers have become members, respectively, of About Face: Veterans Against the War,  Feds for Peace, Service in Dissent, and A New Policy PAC.  All have arisen from current and former federal employees aligned with the majority of Americans who want the Israeli-US war on Gaza (now expanded to Lebanon and the West Bank) to end through diplomacy.

Blessed are those of the people, for the people and by the people – beacons in a country sundered by militarism, rich privilege, origins in slavery and genocide of Native Americans, and persistent inequality of women.

I then decided to explore the question with friends, including a retired teacher; a writer, a truckdriver, a community activist, a certified nursing assistant (CNA), and a poet.  And here is what they had to say.

“Walking in nature, I feel at peace.  I can hear that still small voice inside me, which we all have, that is often obscured in the hustle and bustle of daily life.”                                                                                                …….

Another said, “Because I have been living with Stage 4 cancer for over 6 years, I am focusing each day on becoming more deeply my true self.  I spent my first 17 years dodging the daily penalties of being myself. I learned by the age of 4 that in order to survive (at least psychically), I needed to follow my mother’s rules to the “t.”  Those rules made me small.

So, in these remaining days, I am consciously asking myself how I want to interact with the world around me.  I feel my true self when I communicate honestly – my values, passions, fears, joys, and decisions — not in a way to be contentious, but simply to let others know who I am — the deep, wide person I have always been.”

         ……

“When I am behind the wheel of the truck [an 18-wheeler]. I’m happy with what I do and it gives me purpose, moreso since my wife died.  It helped me get through.”

         ……                                                                                              ——

         “When I am walking in nature, stopping every few moments to gaze at a life form that astonishes me with its beauty—then I feel my truest self. I am one of those life forms (not the chief one) and an admirer and comrade of all the others.

When I set aside my own concerns of the moment and listen with full attention and compassion to another and with my listening provide the condition for her to find a portion of her truth and bring that truth out into the world, I feel my truest self. The world acts as if speaking is the big deal. It is a big deal but give listening its due: Deep listening enables speech. And as for compassion: There is a kind of knowledge that cannot form inside someone, cannot exist, without the presence of compassion.” 

         ——

“’Thich Nhat Hanh wrote, “‘You are not an isolated being. You are made of ancestors… There is no separate self.  We are a current.  We are a stream. We are a continuation.’” I was born in the babble of Stonecoal Creek, lapping the banks of Besoco, West Virginia. I am a wave in the mountain streams of my ancestors. We are one tributary, each generation flowing into the next.

My true self appears as a turtle, bravely and quietly revealing its sunbaked head in tender moments, in which the interconnectedness of life, and the spirits of my ancestors, and the shared trust of a vulnerable heart are all felt, or in the peaceful ambiance of a solitary occasion, before retreating to its hard shell.”

……

“When I am hiking in nature where I feel the true beauty of life.”

Pondering the question When am I my true self also led me back to some of the most authentic human statements/actions I have encountered over the years of writing on war and peace: those of veterans who spoke searingly against the immorality of the wars in which they fought.  Tens of thousands of US recruits and soldiers have declared themselves conscientious objectors to war, have gone AWOL or refused to re-deploy, risked prison, rejected their war medals in a public act of conscience. Their voices, like that of poet Namaya, have a deeply moral tenor:

“I burn with the shame
Of our wars!

Our shame should burn as bright
as the phosphorous bombs
that we dropped in Vietnam…”

This past August three 18-year-old Israeli conscientious objectors “declared their refusal to enlist” in required military service. Their reasons rise from the depths of their true, ethical selves.

Yuval Moav: “If you ask me why I refuse today, the answer is, ultimately, because of refusing to participate in genocide. I’ve been met with violence [for my decision]; but I will keep going.  The war has only strengthened my decision.”

Oryan Mueller: “Refusal is like holding up a mirror to Israeli society, first of all to show that it is possible to resist the militaristic death machine and the cycle of bloodshed. We don’t have to take part in it.”

Itamar Greenberg: “After growing up in an ultra-Orthodox home…I left religion and…this directed me to justice…I think the decision to refuse is a direct result of that.”

May they inspire their generation everywhere.

The water crisis in Gaza is a problem of daunting proportions, with grave implications for the more than 2 million inhabitants of the Palestinian enclave.  The Coastal Aquifer from which Gaza pumps water is diminishing; but more dangerously, it is experiencing significant deterioration from seawater and highly saline groundwater intrusion, as well as sewage pollution.  

Fast forward to 2024: Gaza’s water scarcity pollution is severely worsened by its forced closure of water and wastewater treatment plants due to Israel’s blockade of fuel to Gaza to run the plants in its 2023-2024 war.

The authors of the Saving Gaza Begins with Its Water end in a cautiously positive note.  The crisis of water in Gaza also holds promise, they wrote because Gaza’s water problem will require cooperation between antagonists, to their mutual benefit. There is no solution that can be achieved by Gaza or Israel in isolation because one of Israel’s water sources is the same Coastal Aquifer.

But this affirmative conclusion presumes that the people of Gaza have not been annihilated by Israeli bombing, inflicting a daily death rate greater than any major war of the 21^st century, combined with the induced famine across all of Gaza by Israel’s blockades of food aid, and rampant disease including the recent polio virus.  At the current rate of killing and death, 15 to 20% of Gaza’s people could be dead by the end of the year, a UN expert stated and almost entirely exterminated within a few years.

“Ground Water,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 / Clip2Comic, 2024

Prior to the current war, Gaza had 150 small-scale desalination plants to produce potable water.  By mid-October 2023, Israeli missile attacks destroyed the drinking water desalination plants; and its almost total blockade cut off fuel to run the other water treatment plants, as well as metal parts to repair them.  Gaza’s drinking water production capacity dropped to just 5 percent of typical levels,

With no power to run Gaza’s five wastewater treatment plants, sewage has flowed freely through the streets, causing a record increase in cases of diarrheal illnesses.  By December 2023, cases of diarrhea among children under 5 in Gaza jumped 2000%, because of which children under five are over 20 times more likely to die than from Israeli military violence.

More than three quarters of Gaza’s 2.2 million people are internally displaced to southern Gaza and, even there, continually forced to re-locate because of Israeli bombing.  In some of the most overcrowded shelters in southern Gaza there is one toilet per 600 internally displaced persons and little to no running water. 

Every human being in Gaza suffers soul-shattering existence from this war variably described as genocide, ecocide, domicide (destruction of homes) and scholasticide (destruction of schools and universities). Indeed, two American trauma surgeons who have volunteered for surgical missions in crisis situations all over the world, stated that they have never seen cruelty like Israel’s genocide in Gaza.  Women and their children are its gravest victims: 70% of those killed are women and children.  Daily in Gaza children are having one of both legs amputated without anesthesia.  More than 17,000 children have lost 1 or both parents.  

Recently American doctors who volunteered in Gaza and spoke at a press conference during the Democratic National Convention accused the Biden administration of “hypocritical action” in saying they are working on cease-fire while providing the weapons massacring Gazans.  They pleaded with Kamala Harris to “embrace an arms embargo on Israel and immediate cease-fire.” The doctors attested that the killing and suffering is on “an entirely unprecedented scale.”  None has seen anything “so horrific, so egregious, so inhumane.”

Impacts of war on women

As of early 2024, The U.N. estimated that some 700,000 women and girls in Gaza experience menstrual cycles but lack adequate access to basic hygiene products like pads, toilet paper, soap, running water and toilets because of the war nor privacy to manage menstrual hygiene.  These conditions put women and girls in Gaza at grave risk of reproductive and urinary tract infections.  The challenge of trying to find an available bathroom is especially difficult for pregnant women who have pressure on their bladder, and women who have just given birth and are going through weeks of postpartum bleeding.

By early March 2024 Relief/Web reported: there has been a steep rise in malnutrition among the more than 155,000 pregnant and breastfeeding women. Every day about 180 women give birth in unimaginable conditions, no longer having health-care facilities to deliver their babies.   Many mothers who have given birth since the beginning of Israel’s war are too malnourished to produce milk for their newborns.

Although mothers and adult women are tasked with sourcing food, they are the ones who eat last, less, and least.

What can be done? Nothing without Israel and the United States agreeing to end their totalistic war.   Dima Nazzal, a systems engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology believes that while rebuilding Gaza is “a daunting prospect,” with “cooperation, coordination and courage, it is achievable.”  But “the war must be ended.”

Israel has sought security through militaristic means since its founding: expelling 750,000 Palestinians in 1948 (the Nakba – “catastrophe” in Arabic), claiming Palestinian land by force, apartheid conditions for Palestinians in Israel, establishing colonizing settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and now omnicide in Gaza.  The only way for Israel to live in security is through a political compromise, in the spirit of Isaiah 59:8, that guarantees the human and political rights of the Palestinians who have lived on the land of Palestine for thousands of years.  Without justice – the US ending its criminal trafficking of weapons to Israel, a permanent ceasefire, the UN recognizing Palestine as a state and then organizing the rebuilding of Gaza with supportive countries – there can be no peace.

Pat Hynes gave a talk on the plight of women in water-starved Gaza during a conference on  Memorial Day weekend sponsored by the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom entitled Water on the Frontlines for Peace. This piece is a much abbreviated and updated version.

Putting humans at the top of the evolution chain as the crown of intelligent life, a western worldview, is–as some keenly grasp–mistaken.  The baleful consequences of this simplistic hierarchy are everywhere: out-of-control climate, accelerating rates of animal and plant extinction, dead zones in the oceans and mass mortality of coral reefs; the vast pollution of land, air and water and the mounting likelihood of human extinction with nuclear war.  All caused by humans, humans with financial and political power much more egregiously than others.

Certain scientists who study plants–from the simplest to the exotic–are stirring controversy with their “Are plants intelligent?”  Consider that we humans owe our lives to plants for their food, medicines, and critical balance of 21% oxygen in air we breathe.  If our human intelligence has discerned over thousands of years which plants are edible and nutritious and healing, wouldn’t the evolutional ingenuity of plants which feed and sustain us and all life also constitute intelligence?

“Plant Intelligence,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v. 3, 2024

Studies have found that elephants recognize themselves in a mirror; crows create tools; dolphins demonstrate empathy and playfulness; and cats exhibit similar styles of attachment as human toddlers.  The given explanation is that they have brains with neurological capacity for consciousness and intelligence.

But plants do not have a central brain.  Could their mode of learning to evade insect predators and maximize their growth come from a diverse form of intelligence, possibly be distributed across their roots, stems and leaves?  Could the whole plant, then, function as a brain?  Recent studies of plants have stirred the possibility that they are conscious and intelligent.  Take communication, something we humans claim as our domain through language and more recently acknowledge that animals also possess.

Botanists have found that not only do alder and willow trees alter their leaf chemistry to defend themselves against an invasion of tent caterpillars, but that leaves of faraway trees also change their chemical composition similarly.   Warned, as they are, by airborne plant chemicals released from the original trees under attack.   Goldenrods signal an attack by a predator through strong chemical communication sent to all other goldenrod neighbors, just as humans warn their neighbors about a nearby fire or flood or crime. 

Without any recognizable ears, plants sense sounds.  The vibration of a predator insect chewing on its leaves causes a plant to make its own defensive pesticide.  Beach evening primrose responds to the sound of honeybees in flight by increasing the sweetness of its nectar to attract them for pollination.  Tree roots grow toward the sound of running water, including in pipes, where the roots often burst through causing great difficulties for municipalities.  How do the various plants hear these stimulating sounds?

Plants have memory, some anticipating from past experience when a pollinator will show up for the plants’ pollen.  Plants express social intelligence: members of the pea family form relationships with bacteria living in their roots to have the bacteria supply beneficial nitrogen for the plants’ growth.  Several kinds of plants provide a home and food for compatible ants who then attack the plants’ ant pests.  Perhaps you have you noticed that late summer asters and goldenrod tend to grow as companions.  Why? Together–their combined beauty–attracts more pollinators.

In finishing, I express my immense respect for the indigenous worldview where wind, rocks, air and rain are our kin, together with plants and nonhuman animals.  We, humans, the most recent beings, depend on all of these elder kin; and this awareness, this worldview of connectivity among all beings, is our path back to Earth well-being. 

Featured Image, “Web of Intelligent Life,” Digital, Dream / Realistic v. 2, 2024

Greenfield, Mass. (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – As I write, five of nine governments with arsenals of nuclear weapons – capable of destroying life on our planet many times over – are engaged in war: the United States (in multiple wars and stoking one with China), Israel, Russia, and NATO members Britain and France in a proxy war with Russia. For decades now, respected nuclear weapons scientists and policymakers have estimated each January how close we are as a world to civilization-ending disaster, by setting the hands of the Doomsday Clock, where Midnight represents apocalyptic nuclear war. In January 2024, the Doomsday clock was set at 90 seconds to Midnight, the closest it has ever been since its inception in 1947. Throughout 2023 nuclear nations spent 13% more than in 2022 on necrophilic nuclear weapons with the US accounting for 80% of this increase–all while we rush headlong into climate disaster, so palpable this summer. How much closer to Midnight will we be in January 2025?

As a counterbalance to this insanity, we have the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons adopted in 2017 by 122 sensible non-nuclear weapon States. The Treaty entered into force in 2021. By January 2024, 93 countries had signed the Treaty and 70 countries ratified it with more on the way. This UN Treaty is our best insurance as a world against any nuclear weapons use and has as its goal their complete elimination.

“Hiroshima,” by Juan Cole, Digital, Dream / Dreamworld v. 3 / IbisPaint, 2024

But, what can we do as citizens living in a country whose government first developed nuclear weapons; used them on Japanese civilians on August 6 and 9, 1945; and led the arms race ever since? The U.S. spent nearly $98,000 per minute in 2023 on modernizing nuclear weapons and now stands on the brink of using them again given its war-prone posture in the world.

Back from the Brink, a national nuclear weapons abolition organization “believes that we all deserve a say on policies that pose a direct threat to our lives, our families, our communities, our planet, humanity’s future.” A major priority of Back from the Brink is to engage and cultivate leadership in local cities, towns and states to influence federal legislation and policy ultimately to abolish nuclear weapons. One creative suggestion they urge is to ask our local and state politicians to issue a Proclamation on the anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (August 6 and 9), signaling that “abolishing nuclear weapons and preventing nuclear war is every community’s business.”

In that spirit, here is the Resolution we have asked Greenfield, MA Mayor Ginny Desorgher to send to the city’s state and federal elected officials on behalf of her citizens.

“Whereas, a world in which nuclear weapons exist and threaten our community and humanity’s very existence is a deeply unjust world;

Whereas, seventy-nine years ago, on August 6th and August 9, hundreds of thousands of human beings died – many instantly– or suffered severe health consequences in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan when the United States dropped atomic bombs;

Whereas, many people and communities within the United States have been and continue to be grievously harmed and suffer health consequences from the development, production and testing of nuclear weapons and uranium mining;

Whereas, nine nations collectively have approximately 12,100 nuclear weapons in their arsenals, most of which are far more destructive than those used against the people of Japan. The detonation of even a small number of these weapons could affect everyone on the planet, causing catastrophic human and environmental consequences that would threaten human civilization itself;

Whereas, current Cold War-era nuclear policies and spending are contributing to a costly new global arms race, do not make any nuclear-armed country safer and increase the risk of nuclear war;

Whereas, in 2023 U.S. taxpayers in Greenfield spent $4,033,796.19 cents on nuclear weapons–funds which would be better spent addressing urgent community needs for housing, education, infrastructure, jobs, health care, poverty alleviation, climate resilience and environmental protection;

Whereas, the people of Greenfield join with the people of Hiroshima in their plea “that all cities and citizens of the world unite together in expanding the circle of solidarity transcending national boundaries, partisan politics, and religious creeds to strengthen the bond of human friendship and solidarity.”

NOW, THEREFORE, I THE MAYOR OF GREENFIELD, DO HEREBY PROCLAIM AUGUST 6 AND AUGUST 9 TO BE:
LIFTING COMMUNITY VOICES FOR A WORLD FREE OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS DAY

Consider asking your Mayor or Town Council to issue a similar proclamation, if not for this year, then for 2025. But start now.

The war on women is everywhere: in the home, locally, nationally and globally.

Greenfield, Mass. (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – In 2018, the US National Sexual Violence Resource Center published that 81% of women reported experiencing some form of sexual harassment and/or sexual assault in their lifetime.  Further, the majority of violence against women is perpetrated by male intimate partners and acquaintances.

There are myriad other misogynist wars on women worldwide – including military wars; sex trafficking, prostitution and pornography; the theft of female and lesbian sexual identity by some in the trans movement; child marriage, female genital mutilation, and so on.  But none at this moment is so intensive as Israel’s and the US’ genocidal war on Gaza: 70 percent of those killed are women and their children.   Israel’s bombing of hospitals with maternity wards; the starvation of pregnant and breast-feeding women and the record-acute malnutrition among newborns and young children speak loud and clear — End Palestinian women’s potential to give life and the survival of Palestinian babies and children.

How cruelly ironic that as US weapons murder life in Gaza and elsewhere in the world with impunity, 14 US states have criminalized women’s choice of abortion as murder, not even allowing abortion for the hateful acts of rape or incest, six more states have early gestational limits. There were 65,000 rape-related pregnancies between July 2022 and January 2024 in those US states banning or putting extreme limits on abortion, with the end of Roe v Wade in the 2022 Dobbs’ Supreme Court decision.

Today a majority of US-adults including from every religion, race, ethnicity; moderate and liberal Republicans and a vast majority of Democrats (women and men), agree that abortion should be legal. Thus, the end of Roe v Wade in the 2022 Dobbs’ Supreme Court decision is a both a War on Women and a War on Democracy, given that the will of the majority of US citizens does not prevail nor influence government policy. 

According to the Economist, the United States ranks among “flawed democracies.”   Another recent, comprehensive study of democracies worldwide concluded that “only 15 percent of people globally live in places where women and lower income groups have at least somewhat equal access to power.”  No surprise that the US, cluelessly vaunted as the indispensable nation, is not one of them.

What fuels the control of women’s bodies in our country?  It is misogyny and injustice.  After all, there is no comparable moral or medical control of men’s bodies.

Yet the moralistic urgency to preserve life in the womb evaporates once a poor child is born.  One in six children under five years of age lives in poverty – the highest rate of all industrial countries; four million youth are homeless.  Clearly, controlling a woman’s right to her own body, is not about the unborn’s right to life; otherwise, all kinds of social legislation for maternal and child health, adequate housing, a living wage, and well-funded education would accompany legislation criminalizing women for abortion. 

Regarding women’s loss of economic democracy, women have higher rates of poverty than men.  And why?  For at least three reasons:

1.)   Domestic violence causes women victims to lose altogether an average of 8 million days of paid work per year and is a strong factor in women’s homelessness.

2.)    Women’s reproductive labor – giving birth, breastfeeding and caring for children is not compensated with free childcare and paid parental leave in the United States, unlike all other comparable countries. Thus, women who give birth are cheated of savings, pensions and Social Security.  No surprise then that the greatest risk factor for being poor in old age is having been a mother..

3.)   More women than men struggle to cover everyday expenses due to the gender wage gap, which has remained stagnant for 20 years – at 82% – a significant factor contributing to the substantial disparity in poverty rates between women and men age 75 and older.  Even for college graduates in 2024 the same economic inequality persists: male college graduates have been hired at an average sightly over $30/hour; women, at slightly over $25/hour. This wage inequality of 82% will follow these women college graduates all their working lives and in retirement.

Salary is symbolic: Why are we women worth 82% of men in the workplace?.

Ponderous realities:

More American lives were lost in the 20^th century through violence against women than during all 20^th century wars and civil strife.  Yet, while thousands of monuments throughout the United States honor those who lost their lives for their country in war, only one —the first of its kind—is currently being planned for women who lost their lives giving birth to the country’s children.  The counterpoint reality is that feminist revolutions to gain human rights and equality for women (however incomplete that goal remains) have freed and saved the lives of millions of women and girls—without weapons, without fists, and without a drop of blood spilled.  

Women have more than a lot that men can learn from: men commit 90% of homicides and almost all sexual violence; men are the primary wagers of war.  Were our skills, our social and intellectual intelligence, and our wisdom valued and promoted in all places of social and political decision-making: in every home and all national governments and the UN, the world might get a chance at global peace and restoring our beautiful planet.

*Given as the keynote talk at Bigger than Dobbs:  The War on Women and War on Democracy, a June 23 event sponsored by the Reproductive Justice Task Force of Franklin County Continuing the Political Revolution with multiple co-sponsors.  

Speeches of the presenters will be available soon at http://www.fccpr.us 

Related Video link added by IC: MSNBC: “How GOP may lose 24: Trump conviction collides with MAGA legal ‘war’ on women, minorities, equality”

LET GAZA LIVE

FREE PALESTINE

CEASEFIRE – NO ARM$ TO ISRAEL

NEVER AGAIN FOR ANYONE

Why? 

Johanna (Jo) Rosen stands on the Common because she is “heartbroken and outraged by the death, destruction and displacement in Gaza.”  As a Jewish American, she believes she has “a particular responsibility to speak out against the US government’s material and diplomatic support for Israel and its military aggression…I am motivated,” she adds, “to build the world we want to live in where everyone has a safe home, healthy food, clean water, and can celebrate their culture in dignity.”

Since last October, Jo, a member of Jewish Voice for Peace, has called Congress almost daily, written letters to newspapers, participated in marches and rallies, donated to aid and advocacy organizations.  She joined hundreds of activists to disrupt the State of the Union address and works to support the students at Smith College, her alma mater, advocating for the college to divest from weapons manufacturers. 

Lianna Hart “feels powerless to stop” the war in Gaza” and simultaneously complicit in it as a taxpayer in the United States and as a Jewish American who was raised believing in Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people.” As Americans, we “cannot pretend…that we are not complicit in these atrocities…The least we can do is show up in our communities and say that we do not agree, that we refuse to watch this happen without speaking up against it.” 

Standing on the Common with others, holding her artist-made Free Palestine, she finds the moments of connection with those driving and walking by who give “just a honk, a wave, a thumbs up” motivating.  For her, “visibility is meaningful, we cannot and should not go about our lives as if this war isn’t happening.”  Like Jo, Lianna has been engaged in many and various actions in western Mass, organized or co-hosted by Jewish Voice for Peace and other organizations.  She, too, donates to many relief and aid organizations working with Gazans suffering from this genocidal war.

Theirs are just two passionate, moral voices of many dozens who have gathered with us each Saturday for months, reinvigorating our years of standing on the Common against war and for peace with justice.

Those of us, whose activism on behalf of peace and justice was sparked by the US war of aggression in Vietnam or the Civil Rights movement, the Women’s Movement, the Environmental Movement (and, for some, all of these movements) are now joined with these younger generations.  They match our generations’ passionate protests; and we are heartened, energized, inspired by their integrity and deeply grateful to them.

Related video: NM PBS: “Jewish Voice for Peace Stands with Students”

Together we express what a majority of Americans polled recently support: that the U.S. call for a permanent ceasefire and stop sustaining Israel’s genocidal war with our government’s military aid and weapons.   Ranging in age from our 80s to early 20s, we also stand together in supporting student encampments on their university and college campuses across the country, calling for their administration to divest from necrophilous weapons industries that are sucking up profits from the deaths of Gazans, 70 percent of whom are women and children.

Despite what mainstream news chooses to carry – mainly photos of violence in student encampments, and President Biden recklessly defending police crackdowns on students causing “chaos,” the evidence gathered reveals the opposite.  A study of 553 campus protests between April 18 and May 3 across the country found that 97% “remained non-violent” and peaceful.   Further, half of the 3% where violence broke out were clashes with militarized police sent by university administrators to remove the otherwise peaceful student encampments. 

As we stand here on the Greenfield Common, teenage Israeli military resisters are there in Israel prisons for refusing to serve in the Israel Defense Force.  Two refusniks, before reporting to jail, wrote a letter to President Biden charging that his “unconditional support for Netanyahu’s policy of destruction has brought our [Israeli] society to the normalization of carnage and the trivialization of human lives…You are responsible for this alongside our leaders…you have the power to stop it.”

It took little more than 100 days of bombing for Israel to destroy most schools in Gaza and all 12 universities, killing students and teachers, and ending education for Gazan children and youth.  Yet only two US schools, Evergreen State College and Union Theological Seminary, and Ireland’s Trinity College have agreed to work toward divestment from “companies that profit from gross human rights violations and/or the occupation of Palestinian territories.”

“My message for the American students,” writes Palestinian Nawar Diab, “is that…their protests and their solidarity with Palestine and Gaza gave us a glimpse of hope. And they didn’t leave us left alone.  They didn’t leave us feeling helpless.”

Her action leading to the 6-day ceasefire recalled two women whose work for peace in the United States culminated in Mother’s Day on the second Sunday in May.  Prior to the Civil War, Ann Reeves Jarvis of West Virginia organized “Mothers’ Day Work Clubs” with classes for women on sanitation in food preparation and drinking water in a time of high infant and child mortality. After the war, she organized “Mothers Friendship Day,” bringing together mothers from both sides of the Civil War to support their reconciliation.

Julia Ward Howe, a passionate anti-war activist and promoter of world peace, inspired the first public “Mother’s Day for Peace” rally held in New York City on June 2, 1872. Her 1870 Mother’s Day Proclamation passionately heralded action to stop future wars:

“…Arise, all women who have hearts …

From the bosom of the devastated earth, a voice goes up with our own. It says, “Disarm, disarm!”’…

This recent Mother’s Day in Palestine, Mazin Qumsiyeh of Bethlehem University wrote “I remember my own mother who fought for peace” in the spirit of “Julia Ward Howe’s call for mothers on Mother’s day to end wars and stop sacrificing people on the altar of men’s racism, greed and egos.”

France 24 English Video: “Some 300,000 Gazans have evacuated east Rafah, Israeli army says • FRANCE 24 English

The current obliteration of Gaza is a record-breaking war on mothers and their children.

• An average of two Gazan mothers die every hour of the war leaving their families devastated and their children with diminished protection.
• After four months of Israel’s carpet bombing, more Gazan children were killed than the number of children killed in the last four years of wars around the world combined. 
• With starvation imposed on Gaza by Israel’s blockades of food aid –“unprecedented in modern history” – mothers and adult women are the ones who eat last and least.

• Many mothers are too malnourished to produce milk for their newborns; but no powdered milk in the markets and next to no clean water with which to mix it are available.
• Each day about 180 women give birth in hellish conditions, with most of Gaza’s 36 hospitals lying in rubble and their existing medical supplies nearing exhaustion. Two American trauma surgeons who have volunteered for surgical missions in crisis situations all over the world, stated recently that they have never seen cruelty like Israel’s massacre in Gaza.
• Some mothers have resorted to washing clothes and bathing their children in the sea, polluted with sewage, risking their lives under Israeli strafing.
• As of late February 2024, The U.N. estimated that some 700,000 women and girls in Gaza experience menstrual cycles but don’t have adequate access to basic hygiene products like pads, toilet paper, running water and toilets because of the war. These conditions put them at risk of reproductive and urinary tract infections.

Shahd Sataria, a human rights defender with the Palestinian Working Women Society for Development in the West Bank, visited Gaza every summer as a child until her family could no longer get a permit in 2004. “In Gaza, you got to visit the sea,” she recalled. “We are big families. We would gather at my grandma’s house, and sleep on old mattresses on the floor… those were great nights.”

She remembers the plants, the deep blue sea, nights full of stories, and a lot of singing. In the morning, the women of the family would gather around her grandmother, chatting.  Sataria couldn’t see her grandmother before she died, denied a permit to visit Gaza.

“Women have lost their chance to have education, to be in decision-making, and to be empowered.” Despite the horror of death, destruction and starvation, Sataria speaks of hope. “I believe that people in Gaza are resilient.  If the war would end today or tomorrow, I believe that they will rise up.”

This Mother’s Day my deepest desire for the surviving women of this genocidal war, is that they live to see their beloved Palestine become a member state of the UN with the resources to re-build, as Jewish women survivors of the Holocaust did with the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. 

No other peoples “have been kept stateless for so many decades” as Palestinians.  But the world must be with them not just in words but in deeds.

“ Half a year of unfathomable suffering.

Half a year of irreparable trauma.

Half a year of irreplaceable loss.

Every positive change in human behavior is always preceded by an expansion of consciousness, and Gaza is expanding western consciousness like nothing ever before.”

I want my taxes to help fund universal health care for everyone in our country.  All but 43 countries offer free healthcare or access to health care for at least 90% of their citizens.  Why cannot we, the world’s wealthiest nation for over 60 years, divorce ourselves from corporate capitalist healthcare?

What of other social and economic issues as we near Tax Day?  Take poverty:  140 million people – 40% of US people – are poor or near poor, defined as one emergency away from economic ruin, according to the Poor People’s Campaign. The “140 million” are people of every race, ethnicity, age, faith, sex and sexual orientation, while poverty is highest among Black, Latino and Indigenous peoples due to systemic racism. More women than men are poor due to systemic sexism.  The pay gap between women and men – 21.8% on average – has persisted for 30 years, an injustice that deteriorates our democracy. 

I want my federal and state taxes to lift people out of poverty and end inequality in income. It can be done. Cities are leading the way in raising minimum wage; and they outpace the best states, while the federal minimum wage languishes at a despicable $7.25 per hour

 These 10 Cities have the Highest Minimum Wage in the U.S.

• Tukwila, Washington: $20.29.
• Seattle, Washington: $19.97.
• SeaTac, Washington: $19.71.
• West Hollywood, California: $19.08.
• Mountain View, California: $18.75.
• Emeryville, California: $18.67.
• Sunnyvale, California: $18.55.
• Denver, Colorado: $18.29.

Today, the highest minimum wages, by state and Washington, D.C., are in D.C., ($17), Washington ($16.28), California ($16), Connecticut ($15.69) and New Jersey ($15.13).  New York has raised its minimum hourly wage in New York City and its suburbs to $16. 

But we need to do better: A livable wage in Connecticut, that is, an hourly wage that enables a single adult to pay for necessities, including housing, food, utilities, transportation and health care, would be $24.13.  Overall, most single Americans need to earn at least $20/hour to pay their bills, given cost of living where they live.   More than 1/3 fall short. 

I want my federal and state tax money used to raise minimum wage to a livable wage in the name of economic justice for everyone.

PBS NewsHour Video: “Families slip back into poverty after pandemic-era child tax credit expires”

In 2023, the Department of Defense (aka the Department of War) was allocated $816.7 billion dollars in our national budget, while failing to pass its sixth straight audit.  US war spending in 2023 dwarfs that of other countries, totaling more than the next ten highest military budgets combined.  Since October 7, the gunboat-diplomacy Biden administration has approved over 100 weapons sales to the government of Israel, an average of 1 every 36 hours.

I want my tax money to “beat swords into plowshares” by supplanting masculinist militarism with intelligent, committed, unrelenting diplomacy that lifts our country above our abject ranking of 131 least peaceful country out of 163 countries on the Global Peace Index.

Our arduous path back from flawed to healthy democracy will only be through engaged citizens, activist organizations and unions in cities and some states not shackled in the stranglehold of anti-abortion, anti-immigrant, Trumpian, and extreme religious right politics, nor held hostage by their weapons manufacturers.

• “Voters inCalifornia, Vermont and Michigan in November 2023 adopted amendments to enshrine abortion protections into their respective state constitutions.” More states are expected to advance similar measures, because constitutional protections are considered the most ironclad and are very difficult to amend.
• In February 2024 the city of Flint Michigan recently approved a universal cash program for babies, called Rx Kids, that provides new mothers $1,500 and $500 monthly for their child’s first year.
• The same month, Detroit became the largest U.S. city so far to pass a “Move the Money” resolution, following the lead of neighboring city Hamtramck, Michigan. The measure, approved unanimously by the City Council, calls on the U.S. Congress and the president to shift public money away from the military to fund social services.
• In June 2023 the US Conference of Mayors unanimously passed a resolution “Calling for Urgent Action to Avoid Nuclear War, Resolve the Ukraine Conflict, Lower Tensions with China, and Redirect Military Spending to Meet Human Needs.”
• In March 2024 the New York State Appellate Court ruled unanimously to affirm Kingston, New York’s Rent Guidelines Board mandating 15% rent reduction, given the scarcity of rental units and tenant organizing for housing justice.
• More than 100 US cities, including Chicago and Seattle, have passed resolutions on the genocidal Israel-Gaza war with most calling for a permanent ceasefire, exchange of Israeli hostages and Palestinian political prisoners and free flow of aid to the Gazan people.

I want my taxes to be used for our true national security: lifting people out of poverty, hunger and homelessness; providing universal health care; ensuring affordable housing for everyone needing it, assuring a livable wage, ending violence against women, affirming that Black Lives Matter, and fostering peace.