Tag: essays

An Essay of the Man From the North by Rivera Sun It happened so subtly, we missed the corporate coup. Like shadows, corporations surrounded our country and slowly strangled it. They crept into Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court, the FDA, the military, the Department of the Interior: everywhere you look, a corporation controls […]

It’s not every day that you run across an idea so elegant, so eminently practical that your jaw literally drops as you stagger beneath the shock of your huge “aha” moment. Solutionary Rail did that for me. Rail experts and long-time activists from Backbone Campaign have struck gold with their well-researched proposal to electrify America’s […]

An Essay of the Man From the North by Rivera Sun In ancient times, the unknown edges of maps held the words, Here be dragons. We’ve journeyed into those unexplored territories, and found not dragons, but monsters of our own creation, behemoths of the corporate state, which, like golems, rise to strength and power, undead […]

The United States is a laboratory for democracy – a centuries-long experiment in what does and does not work for people making decisions together. Moments of abject failure and soaring success punctuate long periods of disruption, shut-downs, and the regular ransacking of our laboratory. Our experimental efforts have often been thwarted by undemocratic interests. The […]

Reject the glossy and sensational for the gritty and educational. Wean your mind from corn syrup and eat your vegetables. We have become a diabetic, cancerous, obese, depressed, anxiety attack ridden culture from the consumption of glitter-sugary corn syrup politics, sound-bite news, vacuous entertainment, and catch-phrase economics. We are commercialized right down to our souls […]

by Rivera Sun A few weeks ago, my mother and I sat down at a shared table in a popular and crowded restaurant in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Our brunch partners were total strangers. As the husband and wife introduced themselves as US Air Force veterans, my mother shot me a look. The last time […]

An Essay of the Man From the Northby Rivera Sun The empire has no clothes. Be the boy who dares to speak the truth: there is no democracy. All around you, the courtiers are clapping and cheering, but their trembling hands are showing. They are terrified to admit the truth. There is no democracy in […]

An Essay of the Man From the Northby Rivera Sun Blockade the gangplanks of the Titanic! Shut down the boilers of the ship! Storm the stairs from steerage and seize the wheel! We have passed the point where token victories, small handouts, and crumbs from banquet tables will help us. We have struck too many […]

An essay of the Man From the Northby Rivera Sun Censorship is the foe of freedom. It comes in many forms. The choking grip of control silences dissent. The bullhorns of propaganda blare out lies and fictions of consent. The maddened clench of greed stifles outlets for a diversity of expression, creativity, opportunity, and invention. […]

Tis the season to talk about gratitude. And turkey. And colonialism, Indigenous peoples, Buy Nothing Day, Shop Local, consumerism, capitalism, and the growing list of ways humanity will come to an untimely demise. I’m going to leave all that aside for a moment. In other years, I’ve had a mouthful of opinions along with my […]

Note: The sequel to The Dandelion Insurrection is here! The Roots of Resistance is available here: https://riverasun.com/the-roots-of-resistance/ Despair rides in front of our opposition, an invisible wind that blows like plague through our hearts. Here, our stand begins. Moment-by-moment, day-by-day, we must keep despair at bay in the siege waged by the forces of destruction and greed. I […]

You’re Gonna Love This Story! The Roots of Resistance Is Coming In November. Greetings, everyone! As promised, here’s a special glimpse of the cover. Isn’t it a beauty? I’m having a blast getting ready for the release. It’s been a whirlwind week of editing, meme-making, and gathering quotes and excerpts. Starting tomorrow, I get my last […]

(Stormy over the mesa this afternoon. Here’s my writing “sketch” of the day. Enjoy.)   Sitting down to other writings, all that comes is the lonely haunting of a woman. Not a fragile willowy woman. A glimpse of powerful grace in the darkness of a foggy night, beyond the edges of firelight.   She has […]

Crimson, blood red, deep as the birth labors of our mothers, trillions throughout time, a swarm of human creel, tiny and minute against the vast ink oceans of universe, every great thrust of change, a whale swallowing us all. My fingers, pale and dripping with the depth of cherry-tart sweetness, slice tensile skin and rip […]

I used to think of love as a side dish to social political change – the green beans next to the meat and potatoes of power and struggle. But, the more I live in the gritty world of honest humanity, the more I suspect that love is the essential mineral lacking in our nation’s veins. […]

An Essay of the Man from the Northby Rivera Sun There are those who would have us fold up our banners and take down our protest signs. They urge us to be reasonable and polite. They expect us to cram our dissent into narrow boxes of occasional grumbling comments and take our frustration out at […]

An Essay of the Man From the Northby Rivera Sun Politicians have devolved into nothing more than schoolyard bullies stealing lunch money from small children, harassing the defenseless, and expecting to receive rewards and gold stars of approval. They plunder the public coffers, destroying shared wealth that we, the People, have worked arduously to build. […]

An Essay of the Man from the Northby Rivera Sun The challenges that confront us loom imminent, yet still unknown. Like dangers in the dark, we can sense but not clearly see them. Our government is preparing new assaults upon our rights and maneuvering more regressive unjust legislation through the machine of the political apparatus. […]

An Essay of The Man from the Northby Rivera Sun A self-organizing movement like the Dandelion Insurrection relies on the collective and individual capacity of our participants. We are only as strong as the synergistic sum of our parts. The weaknesses of each person affect the effectiveness of the whole movement. The wisdom or folly […]

  The Earth is crying out for our love, for humanity to return to loving the contours, complexity, and exquisite beauty of our world. We have forgotten, turned away, hardened our hearts, and closed our ears. We have fallen into the terrible habit of thinking of this Earth as an object, a resource, or the […]

  When times are bleak and darkness deepens, ancient yearnings of humanity stir in our hearts. We long for the simple things that our ancestors always sought: safety for our families, roofs over our heads, food in our bellies, rest for our weary bodies. In other words, we yearn for the basic human rights have […]

An Essay of The Man From the Northby Rivera Sun We are serving ourselves up on silver platters to the oligarchs and giant corporations. We have apples of misinformation in our mouths and sprigs of patriotic parsley tucked behind our ears. Must we complacently acquiesce to being pot-roasted pigs? Rise up! The situation is more […]

An Essay of the Man From the Northby Rivera Sun Corporate demons possess our nation’s soul. They crept in stealthily, full of trickery and deception, but now they’re lodged in place, as surely as if they had stormed our homes and halls of power with guns and tanks. Perhaps we’d recognize their coup if they […]

  (This is an excerpt from Rivera Sun’s novel, The Dandelion Insurrection, which you can find here.)   Charlie and Zadie drove down the main street of the rural Pennsylvanian town. The locals stood in the doorways, frowns carving their faces as they stared at the teeming soldiers. The waitresses at the diner peered through […]