We strolled into a Gestapo office in central Warsaw and faced three self-assured Aryan. They were easier to snuff than a cigarette, Renia K. wrote later.  Dragon sisters we called ourselves. We guised as farm girls with braids, kerchief tied around. Took them and like sacks of potatoes left them in the shade. The blond dye and chutzpah, rage, a deep buried hope, a housemaid job, belts for the contraband, an iron will. Women so unlike me--they were the fight to my flight--hope was daily, a put on like lipstick you reached down for it, the rest of your face obsessively cluttered in a jute bag.  I was sixteen when I left Hungry for Palestine, but had come back to Europe. The "courier girls" confused me, the active pride of them at parties held by a smuggler. They had money too, and fake IDs, plenty of jokes to relieve fear, and said  marmalade jars were perfect for grenades. One said my smile wasn't fake enough and I should practice looking at my Nazi killers directly ...

As of January 2021 over 300,000 prisoners have tested positive for COVID-19. "Imagine that in a cell" writes Mumia Abu-Jamal. According to the Sentencing Project, tracking COVID-19 Diagnoses in Juvenile Facilities, the number of known cases reached 3,753 youth February 22 . Their report finds, "Most troubling, facilities in Ohio, Louisiana, and elsewhere have placed youth into quarantines that is little different from solitary confinement in violation of international human rights standards." On Day 32 of her Lent of Liberation, Mills points to the prophet Amos's worship of the God whose love for Black Lives is today fulfilled in our hearing. "Are not you Israelites the same to me as the Cushites?" declares the Lord. "Did I not bring Israel up from Egypt, the Philistines from Caphtor and the Arameans from Kir?"--Amos 9:7 NIV Note: The Cushites are Black people. The word cush means "burnt face."   -*-*-*-*- "Is there hope for hi...

   In Stanley Nelson’s “ Tell Them We Are Rising: The Story of Black Colleges and Universities ” students are the agents of change, but time and again framed by White Power structure as deviant, out of control. The first is the view of protest on campus held by the white President of Fisk, who, after stripping all clubs, activities, sports, and instituting movements by bells, had invited to speak at commencement in 1924 the leading intellectual of the day, W.E.B. Dubois, whose daughter was graduating.  Students have returned to their beds by ten o’clock curfew after a banging pots protest crying out Du Bois, a kind of rally cry after his speech on campus that they must stand up against such oppressive discipline. They are taken from their beds to jail. Making national news, other Black colleges similarly take up protest.      Late in the film, describing a 1972 boycott at Southern University in Louisiana, when four students are arrested and the students vis...

 My thoughts on nonviolent direct action are mainly about community building. To put myself on stack with today's subcommittee mobilizing awareness for the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons--addressing nonviolent direction in just minutes: Most of our divisions will come from the concern of risk, but equally, whether or not a visionary message can be concretized at a specific site. For instance, I have seen that Diane Turco pointed out from Bruce Gagnon's St. Patrick Day zoominar on War in Space, that on Cape Cod, next to the Saginaw Bridge, Space Radar PAVE PAWS, pictured 16:00 and part of poster 27:00 "an instrumental role in helping to direct missile warfare systems" he says minute 16:00,  https://youtu.be/npB_IdogGHs It isn't immediately grabbing as having traction for this committee on the TPNW, but makes me feel that there is a kind of geographic responsibility as being an actor in this region to name and resist targets in this vicinity. I point ...