Without Kindness, We Lose Our Common Dignity

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As I’m riding the overnight train from Chicago to New Mexico, an elderly African-American man in a wheelchair is taken off the train by paramedics, police, and the conductor. Earlier, I had heard the car attendant say something about a minor heart attack. The man, a double amputee, shivers in the cold night air as […]

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Bombs Will Not Heal Our Broken Hearts

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In the past 36 hrs, I have watched and listened to hundreds of reactions of ordinary people to the attacks in Paris. With a clenched gut, I feared the reiteration of the sequence of 9/11: anger, shock, fear, calls for vengeance, war, and more violence. Instead, I saw the unexpected, and a tendril of hope […]

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Cacerolazo: Pots and Pans Protest

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Know Your Nonviolent History (You’re Gonna Need It) According to Wikipedia: “A cacerolazo, cacerolada, or casserole is a form of popular protest practiced in certain Spanish-speaking countries – in particular Venezuela, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Uruguay, Cuba, Spain – and more recently English and French-speaking countries, most notably Québec, as well as in Turkey during the […]

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What if animals, trees, rocks, ecosystems are sentient?

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Do animals have sentience? How about trees? What about rocks? Or ecosystems? In Billionaire Buddha, I tell a story about a man who makes a fortune from trees and then questions the morality of wealth, property, ownership, and an economic system that destroys people and the planet. The central character wonders how humanity can justify […]

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