Thanks to Prof. Sue Kim of UMass Lowell for Sharing this Baltimore Sun opinion column about the root of authoritarian control—somebody on the ground has to enforce the authoritarian ruler’s orders. As mentioned in the column, Trump and Bannon did not stop people from entering at the airports. Civil disobedience…
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Thanks to the Huffington Post for this link to US Sen Elizabeth Warren’s fiery speech to progressive Democrats today. Read the whole speech here.
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Garrison Keillor, author, long-time radio host of “Prairie Home Companion,” and one-time visitor to Lowell on the stage of Lowell Memorial Auditorium, has a new essay that appeared in papers all over the country this week. He titled it “Trump Is What He Is, and God Help Us Now.” He…
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Eliot A. Cohen writes in ATLANTIC magazine that we are in a “clarifying moment” in our national journey. Many conservative foreign-policy and national-security experts saw the dangers last spring and summer, which is why we signed letters denouncing not Trump’s policies but his temperament; not his program but his character.…
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Student Mario Savio at UC Berkeley during the Free Speech protests in 1964.
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Web photo courtesy of ABC News Over the weekend, we saw two competing visions of America in the form of citizens standing (and marching) for what they believe is best for the country, all of it in public view on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. I wrote this poem…
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I wrote this poem in late 2008 after Barack Obama was elected president but before his inauguration. The title is from his campaign chant that he got from a woman who supported him: “Fired up! Ready to Go!” The poem is not so much about him as the sense of…
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Following are a few email messages between Malaysia and Lowell this weekend. The story begins with Swagata Sinha Roy finding a poem of mine, “Deep in the Weave,” on the web, very likely in a post by my blogging colleague Marie, who shared on this blog a post from the…
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I am surprised this topic is back in play. So, what’s the thinking by those who want to put a new high school on the South Common? Are they saying to themselves that it will be no problem to blow up that useless empty lot where there are not many…
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Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris in 2002 captured businessman, now president-elect, Donald Trump talking about his favorite movie, “Citizen Kane.” Here’s an interview with Morris and a film clip. Thanks to lithub.com for the source material.
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