UCSC for short. Friday my electronic mailbox received this message from the Chancellor of the University of California at Santa Cruz, no doubt sent to the entire Alumni Association:

Dear UC Santa Cruz Community,

Ring In the New Year!

Many of us have thoughts on the old year, as we ring in the new. R.J. Eskow (The Zero Hour on Youtube) recently published his musing about the past year, and I found my own thoughts on 2023 to be reflected in the essay. The piece is called '2023: The year the monster showed its face'.

Eskow quotes MLK speaking about the three triplets - racism, extreme materialism and militarism - which Eskow likens to the three faces of a monster:

They’re the three heads of a single creature with many arms: social, ecological, imperial, even spiritual. We knew about this monster years ago. The people we admired, like Dr. King and Malcolm X, talked about it. It was debated, protested. Then it was forgotten. Soon, people doubted it was ever real.

But it is. It has shown its face in the destruction of Gaza.

Pro-Palestinian supporters blocking I-5 in Seattle. From this article, with many more pictures, on the protestors calling for a cease fire.

Doing This Yet Again? I Guess We Have To

After the start of the current Gaza war Dennis Kucinich wrote a really good essay about why we should not do war, should not support war (even if it's Israel in their latest pogrom) and so on. The essay is called, 'Thou shalt NOT Kill' and is pretty darn good. It got me to thinking, 'Maybe, maybe it's not entirely useless to protest this damned war and the Ukrainian war and all the others...' Anyway, the essay is worth reading. It does make me wonder, is the obvious disagreement between Kucinich's and RFK, Jr's ideas about the Israel Gaza war what made Kucinich leave the campaign?

Pro-Peace/Palestine March in Washington, DC from NPR

It's obvious that America, being the most thoroughly-propagandized nation in the world, has been taught to love some pretty unsavory things. A cursory look at our political class will reveal this:

On November 7, 2000, I was watching the presidential election very closely. I stayed up late and had already searched county level results in Florida long before it became the focus of national media.