“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion, but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence,” Samuel Huntington stated bluntly in The Clash of Civilizations & the Remaking of World Order. “Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do.” Translate “the West” to “white people” and you’ll see why powerful white politicians are terrified by Critical Race Theory. Deep down, they know “white heritage” is a legacy of stolen wealth....

Only the old-timers among us can remember a world before ours, where white Christian males reigned with impunity and everyone else knew their place. By the 1960s that world had begun to crumble, and its former rulers were thrust into a bewildering new reality. Women, minorities, gays, even Muslims began talking and acting like their equals. Music, movies, and the nightly news depicted an America they no longer recognized, and which no longer seemed to recognize them . . . And now it’s our...

To protest the Palestinian blood on Kamala Harris’s hands, some people I know plan to vote for Jill Stein or Cornel West. Stein has even described her campaign as a way to “punish the Democrats.” The blood is real and the punishment well-deserved, but I’m afraid these people are living in an America that no longer exists. The beast with two heads – the elephant and the donkey – that has ruled U.S. politics for so long is dead. And third parties have no place in a one-party totalitarian state....

Every day Donald Trump and Kamala Harris attack each other with outrageous insults and accusations. But I suspect that their respective supporters on the left and the right have more in common than the candidates want us to see. For starters, all of us are being screwed by wealthy, powerful corporations who back both parties and profit from the faultlines that divide us. This artificially exaggerated dis-unity weakens the once-United States and benefits our enemies, both foreign and domestic....

When Joe Biden passed the baton to Kamala Harris, it snapped the nation out of a sickly spell of déjà vu, and just in time. We no longer face a re-match of two elderly white males. But the danger of a second Trump presidency is no less real, and the stakes far higher this time around. Nothing less than a landslide victory of the future over the past will carry us through. This requires everyone who cares to turn out and vote, even – or especially – those who have lost their faith in voting....

In Part 1, back in May, I suggested that the corporate economy owes its imperial powers not to some “Divine Right of Corporations” but to the money we spend to buy its products. Global corporations rule the world on our behalf, exploiting its labor and resources to supply our needs, wishes, and whims. But like the 17th-century European kings who chartered the first modern corporations, we have lost control of the “Megamachine” that is supposed to serve us. It’s time to reclaim our sovereignty....

A global race is on to see who will host the next nuclear disaster, and as always the U.S.A. is determined to take the lead. On June 18 the Senate passed the so-called ADVANCE Act, pledging billions of taxpayer dollars to the most expensive, inefficient, and toxic form of energy ever devised. Thanks to the $37 billion expansion of Plant Vogtle, Georgia Power ratepayers like me know what that means: record-breaking profits for utility companies, record-breaking power bills for the rest of us....

This essay originally appeared in Co-Options, published by our food co-op, Sevananda. I worked there for nine years and ran its recycling program. I also did layout for the paper for a while, including several of my own essays. Dawn and I have been co-op members for over 30 years and it’s still my favorite place to shop. A volunteer-run recycling center behind the building back then was the precursor to Atlanta’s curbside pickup program, which those same volunteers persuaded the city to start...

Though I have only one vote to cast on Election Day, opportunities to vote my conscience come along every day of the year: every dollar I spend is a vote for some commercial enterprise eager to supply my demand. Just because I hand that dollar over to strangers in exchange for goods or services doesn’t mean I am no longer responsible for it. It winds up in someone’s bank account, stock portfolio, campaign contribution or lobbyist’s paycheck. It’s my sweat and toil they’re spending, not theirs....

Arriving in the U.S. in 1970, a missionary kid coming “home,” I missed the Sixties completely. But I had a front-row seat for the sequel, the Seventies. Plunged into sudden immersion in an alien culture, I witnessed firsthand the colonization, commodification, and commercialization of Cool. The cult of Cool, however, was only the latest incarnation of a culture-wide devotion to the Great God Fun – and we have now come to a crossroads where our addiction to distraction could prove our undoing....

The billionaires of the One Percent see climate change coming just as we do, bringing economic chaos, social mayhem, floods of refugees and ecological breakdown. But while we see it as a threat to our families and communities and the world we love, they see our alarm and activism as the real threat, and tighten their control – while escalating their investment in fossil fuels. Why? Perhaps the rise of the ruthless and unscrupulous to the top was not the result of civilization, but its cause....

“You’re just imagining things,” we’re told as children. But where else do music and art, new inventions and brilliant solutions come from but our imaginations? Few can imagine an earthquake-sized shift in our way of life, though the pressures are building. An abrupt right turn into a totalitarian nightmare; a tremor beneath an aging nuclear plant; a glitch in our missile-launch systems; an irreversible climatic tipping point. But fewer still can imagine a shift toward empathy and compassion....

The sooner we can unplug mentally and spiritually from the extractive, exploitative world-view that built our toxic civilization – the mindset of the Machine – the sooner we can get busy creating a human-scale, community-focused, nature-based culture that can survive the collapse of the house of credit cards called the global economy. This doesn’t mean giving up our individuality; it means choosing a part to play in the vast and varied movement for evolutionary change that is uniquely ours....

Good news! Homo sapiens will probably not be among the thousands of species doomed by the Sixth Great Extinction. It’s only civilization that will be lost. We have constructed an artificial ecological niche that is too specialized to be sustainable. But can we let our power-mad power structure and ecocidal economic order collapse while somehow hanging on to what matters most? It’s time to re-join the natural world and build communities of mutual support for long-term sustenance and survival....

Every culture has its myth of an ancient Golden Age and a version of The Fall, when humans lost the favor of the gods and were exiled from some variation on the Garden of Eden. These tales may be encrypted memories of the transition from the prehistoric Stone Age to the age of Civilization, a.k.a. “history.” Some thinkers trace all our 21st-century troubles to that shift, when our ancestors embarked on the glorious era of empire and conquest – not only of their neighbors, but of nature itself....

“It’s the end of civilization as we know it!” The cartoon prophet means the “civilization” we learned about in school: technology, government, the economy, arts and culture, the media. But these are like the shell a seagoing crustacean builds to live in as it grows. “Civilization” is what lives inside the shell, the fragile creature protected by its calcium walls: our capacity to act in a civilized manner. Speak respectfully. Remember our manners. Treat one another humanely. In a word,...

The movement to save Atlanta’s South River Forest is a microcosm of the front-line struggle that’s heating up everywhere to halt both the devastation of our planet’s life-support systems and the alarming erosion of democracy worldwide. Please read on for a brief update, followed by a poet’s-eye view of the larger issues behind this fiery confrontation between a Democratic and largely African-American city government and the people it claims to represent. Then use the links at the end to learn...