“Untrained people who pretend to be a physician and dispense medical advice and treatment that doesn’t work or is harmful have their counterparts in the realms of government and activism.” — Richard Martin Oxman After reading her heartbreaking essay on water in Detroit, I wanted to connect with Valerie Burris, but… once again direct contact info wasn’t made available by an[Read More…]

  “Walt Disney never did justice to Chicken Little’s hurdles.” — Richard Martin Oxman There’s a NEW obstacle, a fresh difficulty you must face in your race to right the wrongs of society… if you’re a proactive concerned citizen dealing with any one of our many collective crises. And there are far too few activists engaged in meaningfully confronting the multiple challenges which[Read More…]

  “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s in ability to sit quietly in a room alone.” — Blaise Pascal “I feel monotony and death to be almost the same.” — Charlotte Bronte Self-discipline and self-mastery can be considered — for all practical purposes — the sole basis of true freedom. True good — compassion and each of its lovely[Read More…]

“Gonna raise me an army, some tough sons of bitches I’ll recruit my army from the orphanages” — from Bob Dylan’s Thunder on the Mountain “All trustworthy souls are orphans.” — Herman Melville “The whole purpose of life is to learn, teach and love,” Douglas Schifter wrote in his final Facebook post. In addition to driving for four decades, he[Read More…]

People are crazy and times are strange I’m locked in tight, I’m out of range I used to care, but things have changed  — from Bob Dylan’s Things Have Changed The year 1966 brought an unwelcome hiatus from Bob Dylan’s ceaseless productivity; he was in a terrible motorcycle accident, and took some time off to recover. To fill the void, Columbia Records[Read More…]

  Recently, an article of mine was posted which received a record number of responses (for my pieces). I’m using that work as a point of departure here for providing another submission which I hope will generate as much interaction, feedback. If you glance at the short previous work first (link above), the ten points below might resonate better than[Read More…]

  A week after the U.S. 9/11 I was in France conducting an art workshop for painters from various parts of the globe, and I was thinking about the Chilean 9/11. I suggested a little quiz — ten definitions of an activist, and from those ten those engaged in plein aire painting had to choose four definitions that would combine[Read More…]

“At present, virtually all schools are preparing students for a future which will be unrecognizable, not acknowledging the social or environmental ‘deadlines’ that will dominate their lives.” — One of the author’s home schooled teens Malaria kills one child every 30 seconds, about 3000 children every day. Over one million people die from malaria each year, mostly children under five years of[Read More…]

  “You can indulge your righteous rage, but the things it comes out of are pretty cheap. The trick is to make yourself an instrument of your own policy. Whether you like it or not, that’s the highest effectiveness man has achieved.” — Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead Principles invite us to do something about the morass of[Read More…]

“Be proud you’re an Indian, but be careful who you tell.” — from the documentary Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page really got rocked the first time he heard Link Wray’s Rumble. A lot of people did, musicians and others. In fact, you could say it was what the monolith was to those primates in the “Dawn of Man” segment[Read More…]

  “It became apparent to me that a people would never abandon their means of livelihood, good or bad, capitalistic or otherwise until other methods were developed which would promise advantages at least as good as those by which they were living.” —- Job Harriman (quoted in a Counterpunch article) I saw a notice in a local newspaper recently in[Read More…]

  “A major challenge for activists is to acknowledge that they need to develop a sense of language, a feeling for words. One needs to become acquainted with their shape, their color, and their flavor. There are three easy ways to do this: extensive use of the dictionary, extensive reading and — of course — listening. Activists at the barricades[Read More…]

What to do? What’s necessary? Not a vow of poverty, but close to it. Not a vow of abstention from gratuitous violence in entertainment, but close to it. Not a vow to totally transform the ground of being of American education, but close to it. Not a vow of silence, but an opening up to listening much more than preaching[Read More…]

“Nowhere is a place in its own right: everywhere is a resource waiting to be exploited. No one is a person in their own right; everyone is a worker, consumer or debtor whose potential for profit generation has yet to be realised. Satiety, well-being, peace: these are antithetical to globalised growth, which demands constant erasure and replacement. If you are[Read More…]

  “Why aren’t they screaming?” — from Philip Larkin’s The Old Fools Belleville gets a bad name from people who’ve never been there or who feel threatened by diversity. Immigrants and refugees from all over — Vietnam, Cambodia, Japan, Algeria, Morocco, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Pakistan, Greece, Armenia, Poland, Russia, Auvergne and many French provinces — have settled there and worked side[Read More…]

In the realm of songbirds one never finds any creatures attempting to force others to embrace their singular song. Humans do exactly that with their wars abroad. And with their domestic political squabbling, expecting those with different points of view to sing the same tune.

“Gonna raise me an army, some tough sons of bitches I’ll recruit my army from the orphanages….” — from Bob Dylan’s Thunder on the Mountain In Madness and Civilization Michel Foucault makes the claim that the period of the Enlightenment in Europe effected a transformation in the way deviancy was managed. Whereas Medieval and Renaissance society allowed beggars, thieves, and lunatics to[Read More…]

In the opening of her 1953 short story “The Life You Save May Be Your Own”, the deplorable tramp Tom T. Shiftlet cannot keep his eyes off of “the square rusted back of an automobile.” He totally falls in love with a Ford that hasn’t run in fifteen years, which is sitting in a shed. His love-at-first-sight trembling is interrupted[Read More…]

And so the two of us highly recommend what Arundhati Roy — author of that 1997 Booker Prize for her debut novel, The God of Small Things — suggests is absolutely necessary. That is, that we find some new way of bonding as concerned citizens, so that our movement in solidarity isn’t undermined down the road quite as easily as it has been throughout the very long history of resistance in this troubled world. A huge, monumental undertaking, admittedly, this big bedeviling challenge.

I recently applied for a position of Youth Counselor for traumatized youngsters living at a Residential Treatment Center in Sonoma County, California. I submitted a resume which I can’t but help feel puts me way at the head of the pack of candidates. But no one’s replied to date to my outreach. Don’t know, but the silence might have something[Read More…]

Co-Written by Rachel Olivia O’Connor and Richard Martin Oxman “Cleopatra’s nose, had it been shorter, the whole face of the world would have been changed.” — Pascal One year before meeting with Tycho Brahe in 1600, Johannes Kepler had determined to make use of the Danish nobleman’s highly valuable astronomical instruments. He revealed his game plan in a letter to his mentor: “Any single[Read More…]

“Direct action is necessary for democracy to work, bold moves walking a fine edge, going over the line at times. But talk about ‘revolution’ in the U.S. is premature, to say the least. The thing is, if one wants democracy to function, there must be leadership which is trustworthy. People are either too cynical to embrace that notion, or they[Read More…]