Rivera Sun's Blog: From the Desk of Rivera Sun, page 3

Dread Or Despair In The 2024 Elections – Or Something Different?

It’s four in the morning and my heart is in my throat again.

The presidential election in November fills me with nothing but dread and despair. 

On the one hand, we’re facing a candidate who spews hatred, advocates violence, and peddles sneakers and bibles while facing astronomical legal costs for his fraud, lies, sexual assaults and lawbreaking. One the other hand, we’re told that to stop him, we have to vote for a president who keeps sending weapons and billions of dollars to a genocidal nation that has killed more than 33,000 people (including more than 12,000 children) since October. 

This is not an election to sit out, either. 

The next four years are pivotal, not only for the United States, but for the fate of the entire world. The person in the Oval Office will have to deal with the climate crisis, rising inflation and economic instability, tensions with Russia and China, ongoing militarism and conflicts worldwide, the critical need to overhaul the healthcare system, the immigration conflict, the AI apocalypse, mass shootings and gun violence, the erosion of democracy, and the hate-based violence of certain sectors of our populace. (To name just a few of the urgent crises we face.)

One thing is certain: business as usual will not save us. Neither reactionary fascism nor neoliberal authoritarianism offer any real solutions to these times. In my view, neither candidate truly represents the urgent needs of our people. Nor do they share the same longings, hopes, and visions that we hold for our future. 

We need a bold, visionary, undaunted candidate for president. One who rejects the politics of hate. One who renounces the politics of greed. 

Most of us will never get to vote for such a person. I will.

I live in Maine, one of the few states with ranked choice voting. While most of the nation’s voters are being told to ‘hold your nose and vote for the lesser evil’, I will be able to go to the polls in November and vote according to my conscience. Then I can check a second box for my second choice. If my preferred candidate does not win, then my vote goes to the back-up. (And sometimes even a third or fourth person after that.) 

I am not naïve. I hold no delusions that my preferred candidate is going to win this time around. But the voters of Maine will be able to send a loud ‘shot over the bow’ to the two-party system. Our first choices are an audible protest vote against being forced between two candidates who are not measuring up to the demands of the times. 

In November, many of us will be choosing between dread and despair. But in December, make a choice for your conscience: push your state to adopt ranked choice voting.

It is a path out of the endless spiral of dread and despair that the two-party system has forced us into. It holds promise for we, the People, in terms of breaking free of the ‘race to the bottom’ of endlessly voting for the lesser evil. No matter how you vote this time around, make sure your next choice is to take action to get ranked choice voting on the ballot. 

_______

Rivera Sun, syndicated by PeaceVoice, has written numerous books, including The Dandelion Insurrection and the award-winning Ari Ara Series. She is the editor of Nonviolence News and the Program Coordinator for Campaign Nonviolence and a nationwide trainer in strategy for nonviolent campaigns.

The post Dread Or Despair In The 2024 Elections – Or Something Different? appeared first on Rivera Sun.

Imagine Ari Ara 100 Years In The Future

Ari Ara’s novels will live longer than any of us. What a thought! Just like we’re still reading Tolkien, exploring Narnia, and traveling to Never Never Land with Peter Pan, imagine readers of the future enjoying Ari Ara’s adventures 70, 90, or 110 years from now! What will people think in 2134? 

Imagine the children of the 2100s seeing Ari Ara as a cultural icon like Peter Pan and Wendy, Lucy and Edmond, or Frodo and Sam. Instead of fighting pirates, witches, or orcs, though, the children of the future will be playacting nonviolent struggles and embarking on imagined quests in peacebuilding. 

A literature scholar in 2100 might write something like this: “Living as we are now, in a time of unprecedented peace, it is hard to comprehend the significance of these books. To us, the adventures of Ari Ara are common sense – they are the tried-and-true methods of how we deal with conflicts today. But in the 2010s and 2020s when author Rivera Sun wrote these books, they were a sharp departure from the standard fantasy literature of her times. Appallingly (and perhaps unsurprisingly), the genre was still addicted to sword-slinging heroes, bloody assassins, and grotesquely graphic battle scenes.” 

That scholar might go on and write: “We must also remember that Rivera Sun wrote these books in a time of rampant militarism in a nation with the largest war budget in human history. They were an act of protest and a profound use of the radical imagination. The impact of these novels on a generation of peace activists cannot be overstated. From Ari Ara, the readers of her time, young and old, learned that peace is possible, and what’s more, they learned how it can be achieved. We may look at these narratives as common sense, but in the early part of the 21st century, they were a breath of fresh air and shockingly different from anything else published at the time.”

While adding a cautionary note about how much further peace work had progressed in 100 years, the scholar would mention that: “Sun’s stories took the best practices from peacebuilding, nonviolent action, conflict resolution, violence de-escalation, and more, and wove them into stories so compelling that they became a catalyst for the peace movement of the 2030s and 2040s. It is not an exaggeration to say that the peace we enjoy today is connected to the igniting of young readers’ minds in those decades.” 

And our scholar of the 2100s would have something to say about the Community Publishers who made the books possible: “Even more remarkably, the novels, which stood in stark contrast to the action heroes and teenage warriors of the day, were published by a group of visionary readers. When their world had lost sight of the power and importance of peace literature, they lit the spark that illuminated the path toward the world of peace that future generations would inhabit.”

The horizon line of change sometimes stretches beyond us. The problems of today can seem invincible and the abusive powers unbeatable. But if we look back at 1924, we can see how far we’ve come. While there is so much more work to do, we must also remember how many of us are taking action right now. By 2100, the fruits of our labors will have been harvested by the elders who are being born this week. 

Thank you all for having the passion and the vision to bring the Ari Ara Series into existence. May our descendants benefit from our dedication in these times … and look back kindly on us as ancestors who helped change the course of our world. 
 

Invest in the future of peace literature. 
Get River Dragon today.

The newest novel in the award-winning Ari Ara Series is published by people like you. By getting your book through our Community Publishing Campaign, you become part of peace history in the making! Thank you!

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Crossing The Deck

This is an excerpt from River Dragon, Book 5 in the Ari Ara Series.
You can get River Dragon through our Community Publishing Campaign.

Ari Ara rubbed her eyes and stared out the crosshatch windows of the ship. The morning had crawled by while she studied. The dense river ports had given way to smaller villages. Fish weirs dotted the reeds in the shallows. Large swaths of water-loving grains swayed on the flatlands, nourished with rich minerals from the annual floods. On a brilliant blue day such as this, entire villages poured into the wetland fields to stand ankle deep in the muddy silt, planting slender stalks of seedlings. Along the raised berms between the fields, a group of children ran and shrieked with laughter as they tugged at the strings of a kite.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

A persistent sound at the windows broke her reverie. She frowned as her eyes struggled to focus on the glass.

Tap. Tap-tap.

Ari Ara rose, scanning for a bird or a borer beetle or something that could make such a distracting tapping noise. She saw nothing. Baffled, she opened the window and stuck her head out. A tiny, hard object smacked her head.

“Ouch!”

“Whoops! Sorry.”

Finn’s voice hissed out a laughter-lined apology from above her. She craned upwards. He was hanging over the rail on the upper deck, grinning.

“You’ve had your head in that book all day,” he pointed out, tossing a toasted hazelnut at her. “Take a break.”

Ari Ara caught the nut and popped it in her mouth.

“Can’t,” she answered as she ate. Her hand flew up to cover her mouth. A queen didn’t eat like a cud-chewing cow, after all. “It’s not a long journey to the Sister River. I’ve got a lot to learn before then.”

Finn flung another hazelnut toward her, half in jest, half in annoyance. At this rate, they’d never spend any time together. Maybe he should just go back home.

“Too bad,” he told her with a shrug. “I thought of a game you’d like. It involves the Way Between.”

A gleam of mischief shone in his eyes.

“What’s this game?” she asked, enjoying the way the sunlight stranded through his curls.

“Search for the Lost Heir.”

Ari Ara burst out laughing. All the orphans knew that game, hiding while a seeker tried to find them. She’d played with the children at the monastery back before anyone – including her – even suspected she was the heir.

“Ah, but in this version,” Finn cajoled, the corner of his smile folding, “you, the real Lost Heir, use the Way Between to explore the ship before the Great Lady – ”

“ – or Shulen – ”

“Right, or Shulen, catches us and sends you back to that boring old book.”

It was a boring book, Ari Ara agreed. She waffled. Then shook her head.

“Brinelle will yell at me,” she warned, even as her resolve wavered.

“Not if you win,” Finn said with a wink.

Ari Ara’s laughter pealed. A grin slipped across her face. She slung her leg through the window frame. She’d be back before anyone noticed. Tucking her feet on the sill, clinging to the inside of the frame with one hand, she stretched upwards. Finn hooked his leg over the thick rail and around the vertical rungs. Leaning precariously, he clasped Ari Ara’s outstretched hand and heaved her up. Scrambling her feet up, Ari Ara pulled herself onto the top deck and crouched next to Finn. The captain stood by the round wheel, eyes fixed on the watercourse ahead. Finn pointed to the rowboat. Waiting until the captain squinted into the western sun, they crept behind its bulk. From there, they darted down the short flight of stairs to the main deck and hid in back of a stack of barrels.

“The first challenge is to cross to the stairs to the lower decks,” Finn told her in a whisper.

She peered through the narrow gap between the barrels. Across the bustling deck, the bulkhead to the lower decks had been propped open in the fair weather. A dozen crew members and passengers moved about their tasks. Finn could saunter past them whistling, but if they spotted Ari Ara, she’d be sent straight back to her studies. She rolled her shoulders and took a deep breath, settling into the taut focus of the Fanten when they did not wish to be seen. Her eyes studied the motions of the deck, the rhythm of gestures, the patterns of motions, the map of footsteps through errands and chores. With the soft tension of a stalking cat, Ari Ara dropped into the Way Between. She waited one breath. Two. Her eyes flicked east. A flock of marsh geese rose from the bank. Their raucous honking drew gazes. Ari Ara slipped out from behind the barrel.

Scarcely daring to breathe, Finn watched her turn, light as wind, delicate as snow, as unstoppable as water. She took three steps while everyone’s eyes tracked the flight of the brilliant, green-chested geese. She revolved around the back of a sailor as he turned back to his task. She slipped backward between a pair of her aunt’s servants as they parted ways. The mainsail mast blocked her from the view of the boatswain. The whoomph of the sail catching wind hid her from the cabin boy’s gaze in the crow’s nest. A crew member bent to coil rope; she darted behind her. Ari Ara moved between the backs of heads, distracted eyes, and turned gazes. She slid through the hidden space that threaded between tasks and duties, habits and gestures, circumstances and the unexpected. With a triumphant grin, she reached the bulkhead and dropped down into the shadowed hold, tossing a wink at Finn over her shoulder.

__________________

This is an excerpt from River Dragon, Book 5 in the Ari Ara Series.
You can get River Dragon through our Community Publishing Campaign.

The post Crossing The Deck appeared first on Rivera Sun.

“Heir Apparent” – Chapter One of River Dragon

“Heir Apparent” – Chapter One of River Dragon

This is an excerpt from River Dragon, Book 5 in the Ari Ara Series. It will be launched on March 16th through our Community Publishing Campaign. You can find the rest of the series here.

Gritting her teeth, Ari Ara waved to the crowd, a fixed smile plastered on her face. The horse fidgeted beneath her, sensing her discomfort and distraction. Her fitted jacket was so stiff that she could hardly move.

Designed to prevent slouching, Ari Ara thought in annoyance, and any other motion unbefitting to a royal heir.

Solid as a suit of armor – and just as uncomfortable – the jacket held her ramrod straight as she rode through the tight-packed streets. Thickly embroidered patterns of river dragons – the symbol of the royal house of Marin – curled around the cuffs, arms, collar, and panels of the jacket. The heavy fabric weighed more than the thin strands of silvermail beneath it. She’d argued against wearing the woven metal garment, but lost. The silvermail protected her from assassins’ arrows. As the double royal heir to two thrones, her life was not merely her own. Her discomfort with the weight of security was a small price to pay for the stability of the world.

It’s worth it, she told herself. When I’m queen, I’ll make it possible to ride through the streets without armor. She grinned, thinking of all the changes she longed to make when she wore the crown. Build peace. Retire the army. Use the money to build schools. Train children to solve conflicts, not fight them. Teach everyone how to make peace not only possible, but inevitable.

Since the Great Lady of Mariana had summoned her to return home, Ari Ara had imagined this day a thousand times. She hadn’t expected her arms to ache from hours of waving, however, nor for her legs to shake with cramps, nor her back to scream from riding a slow-plodding horse, nor for her cheek muscles to twitch from constant smiling. She tried not to squirm as the procession inched through the enthusiastic throng of people packed into the streets of Stoneport. At this rate, it would take them a week to reach the river dock where her aunt, the Great Lady Brinelle, waited to welcome the long-exiled heir and take her down the river to Mariana Capital.

Thank the ancestors we didn’t try to ride all the way there, Ari Ara thought.

She’d rolled her eyes when Shulen – her gray-haired mentor – had insisted that they travel from the Spires to the Stonelands discretely. He’d served as Captain of the Guard under two queens and saw assassins hiding behind every bush. But she’d overlooked the tedium of wading through teeming masses of people. Never mind flung daggers or poison-tipped arrows. It was more likely that cheering students would crush her with adulation. It had taken them hours to cross the city.

Every fishmonger, farrier, and farmer wanted to see the fifteen-year-old daughter of Queen Alinore of Mariana and Tahkan Shirar, the Harraken Desert King. Schoolchildren and scullery lads scaled the pillars of buildings to see the fabled Lost Heir who had been found at age eleven, hidden in the High Mountains. Street urchins and shopgirls scurried into the streets to catch a glimpse of a legend-in-the-making as she returned to her mother’s lands after being exiled. Porters and potters packed the sidewalks, gawking at the child of their mortal enemies, the Harraken. Merchants and milliners jostled for a view of the girl who evoked hope and hate simply by being alive. Dockworkers and river sailors debated whether she’d defend the nation or betray them to the desert demons. Cooks and housekeepers argued about her outspoken dedication to peace. Warriors wondered what the Heir To Two Thrones heralded for their future.

Ari Ara resisted the urge to loosen her collar. The day’s warmth made trickles of sweat run beneath the frothy cascade of shirt frills that fell like lily blossoms down her front. Her copper hair blazed in its braided crown and only the bronzed skin of her father’s desert-dwelling people kept her from burning red as a hot coal.

Ahead of her, Minli of Monk’s Hand swiveled on his horse’s back to toss her a bolstering grin. His golden stallion stood with infinite patience, head high, swishing his white tail as proudly as if he bore the royal heir. The desert horse had once belonged to Ari Ara, but had traded loyalties the instant he met the one-legged Minli. Ari Ara couldn’t blame the horse. She, too, held a ferocious loyalty to the fifteen-year-old boy. Minli was her best friend, her oldest friend. Under the tousled bird’s nest of brown curls lay one of the best minds of their generation. Clever, studious, and quick-witted, Minli had hauled Ari Ara out of trouble more times than she could count.

Unbound by the same expectations of stiff dignity as she, Minli fanned the front of his white tunic against the heat. The black symbol of the Mark of Peace inked on the back puckered and billowed. The circle rippled, the two halves of river waves and sand dunes shifted as if wind-stirred. Ari Ara twitched her shoulders where, hidden under her clothes, the same black circle had been emblazoned on her skin, the sign that she was the heir. Ari Ara’s eyes swept up to the flags that surrounded her procession, all bearing the same symbol, all borne by members of the Peace Force.

They carried no weapons. They fought no battles. They waged no wars.

They were followers of the Way Between, the ancient non-martial art of working for peace. They stopped fights and forged friendships. They resolved conflicts and aided reconciliation. They strove for a peace rooted in justice and had traversed the Border Mountains all year, quenching the smoldering embers of hatred that so often sparked the fires of violence into the inferno of war.

As soon as Ari Ara had been summoned to return to Mariana, twenty of the Peace Force members had gathered at her side. From their outposts in villages and mountain towns, they journeyed long and hard to assemble in a show of support. Commoners and nobles, riverlands residents and desert dwellers, elders and parents and youth, professors and carpenters: the Peace Force embraced them all. Ari Ara’s smile shone as she gazed proudly at her friends. Each one had vied for a place in her honor guard.

We wouldn’t miss this for all the coin in Mariana Capital, they’d written, sending word on the wings of messenger hawks. It’s a moment that will go down in history.

Ari Ara wished her father was here. But the Marianan nobles had specifically – and strongly – insisted on disinviting the infamous Desert King from joining the returning procession. Tahkan Shirar had ridden off into the desert wilds in a storm of fury. No amount of diplomatic efforts had been able to smooth the matter over. Not yet. Tahkan would not forgive this insult easily. He seethed with pride and clung to honor. The copper-haired man hissed with ferocious temper and fierce protectiveness of his people.

I am going into the mountains, he wrote to Ari Ara, where I can fling lightning bolts into boulders instead of at the heads of riverlands idiots.

Given the glowering looks shot at the Harraken members of the Peace Force, the Desert King’s absence was possibly for the best. Scars cut by millennia of wars would not be healed overnight. It had to be taken one step at a time.

Like this procession, she thought, sighing and craning ahead to see what delayed them.

The Peace Force members were slowly opening a path through the crowd, parting the dense pack of people with infinite patience. With easeful words and small chuckles, they formed the flanks of a gentle plow, opening a furrow for the procession to follow. As she inched forward, Ari Ara nodded at a beaming stone carver and winked at a solemn-eyed child sucking her thumb beside her mother. She caught the eye of a pack of students clinging to the shoulders of a tall statue and smiled. One of them clutched his heart as if shot by love’s arrow and toppled backwards into his friends’ surprised arms. Ari Ara stifled a giggle.

“Are you flirting with him?”

She pivoted toward the incredulous voice at her elbow. Finn Paikason’s black eyebrows pulled into a scowl. He craned over her horse’s neck to stare at the students. Rangy as a yearling elk, sturdy as a mountain goat, the youth drew as many askance glances as the desert dwellers. The Paika of the Border Mountains were loyal to none and sometimes enemies to all. The rumor that the heir to two nations had lost her heart to one rankled many. But Ari Ara didn’t care. She loved the stormy-eyed, wild-built boy – as he well knew!

“He’s flirting with me,” she retorted, rolling her eyes at Finn. “There’s a difference.”

“Not that I blame him,” Finn added, finally grinning. “You look amazing.”

She turned to him with a blazing sunbeam of a smile. Finn remembered all over again why he’d fallen in love with her . . . and why he chose to be at her side through all of this. Ari Ara de Marin en Shirar was the most remarkable person he’d ever met. She had trusted him when no one else did, listened when all other ears – and minds – were closed, and saved the clans of his family from death when few others thought them worthy of aid. She’d braved dangers with him and matched him in the Paika’s wild dances. He owed her. He loved her. And he’d ride alongside her as far as he could.

“You look every inch the heir,” he assured her, casting an appreciative glance up and down her fancy clothes. “All that scrubbing paid off.”

She made a face at him. Ari Ara had entered the inn last night dusty from the road, hair wild with the wind, the knees of her trousers streaked with grass stains, and her boots scuffed dull with crosshatched wear. She left this morning afraid to sneeze, not a hair out of place, the finest garments catching the light, coiffed beyond even her own recognition. The fleet of servants sent by her aunt, the Great Lady Brinelle, had taken one dismayed look at her and thrown her into the bathtub for a scorching soak. They washed her hair so many times, she suspected them of attempting to rinse out the telltale red of her father’s people. They scrubbed her from the tips of her toes to the edges of her ears. Ari Ara grumpily thought they were trying to rub out all signs of her madcap adventures, leaving only a bland, well-behaved, fifteen-year-old heir.

She doubted their strategy would work.

They turned off the broad avenue to the central port, following the quay-side docks to meet the Great Lady. The crowd thinned, giving way to the bustle of oxen teams pulling crated statues and winches hauling granite blocks onto barges. The river sailors paused their labors as the Lost Heir passed, leaning muscular arms on ship rails or waving from the rigging. On the landward side, the clerks of shipping companies jostled in the windows, vying to catch a glimpse of Ari Ara. As word spread, the midday taverns emptied. People filed into the street and pressed their backs up against the buildings to let the riders pass. Emir and Shulen scanned the narrow corridor cautiously. There wasn’t much room to maneuver.

Ahead of them, the sound of chanting arose. Ari Ara peered over her horse’s head, looking toward the intersection. A cluster of blue-garbed sisters, spiritual counterparts to the monks, huddled on the corner, eyes closed, swaying side to side as their lips moved over the words. They held their hands up, one arm crossed over the other, fists balled to block bad spirits or omens. Ari Ara furrowed her brows, straining to catch the words. The streets snarled with competing sounds – voices, bellowing mules, ratcheting winches – but she recognized the chant. She scowled. It was a warding prayer, a protection against evil. The monks where she’d grown up had used it once when a beast dug up a baby’s grave in the village. Ari Ara swiveled left and right in her saddle, looking for what they were chanting at.

Behind her was a wall. A plain brick wall at the back of a warehouse. She craned around again. As the riders clopped down the length of the cobbled street, the sisters pivoted, tracking them. One caught her eye and glared. Then the woman deliberately turned her head to the side and spat. Ari Ara’s mouth fell open in shock. They were chanting against her.

A rattle of words burst from the lips of the blue-robed woman, rising over the chanting:

“One will come who heralds ill, prophesized, foretold, feared. Death follows in her footsteps, war-breaker, change-maker. Chaos and upheaval chase her. Famines, floods, misfortune stalk her.”

Ari Ara gaped, recognizing some of the familiar words of the Prophecy of the Lost Heir – the one that foretold her existence. The phrases had been severed from context, mashed together with baseless claims, and twisted into a litany of doom.

“Shulen,” she muttered, annoyed.

“I hear them.”

The warrior’s reply came low and calm. Too calm. In his quiet, Ari Ara recognized the taut carefulness of high alert. He shifted to move his horse between her and the chanters, but before he could interposition himself, a round, hard object hurtled through the air. Ari Ara ducked low, flattening against the horse’s mane.

Something smashed against the bricks, a crunching splat followed by a gagging stench. A trail of slimy yellow oozed down the wall.

“Eggs – they’re just eggs!” Ari Ara cried out, nearly laughing in relief, moving swiftly to forestall Shulen’s instinctive reaction to a threat.

She ducked as another rotten egg whipped past her head. A third flew toward her as she straightened. Without thinking, she reached out for the egg. Her focus tightened. The world slowed. She dropped into the ancient practice of the Way Between. Neither fight nor flight, the non-martial art drew upon the teeming field of all other possible reactions. With four years of daily training under her belt, the graceful motions hummed in her bones and sang through her blood. Time elongated under the intense stare of her sharpened attention. Her breath sounded loud in her ears. The shouts turned muffled and dull. Delicately, she touched the edge of the egg’s shell, not catching it – anything that forceful would smash it – but merely redirecting its path. She gently tugged the egg into a long arc, rolling it through her fingers and palm, rotating her arm over her head in a circle, spiraling the egg around and sending it back–

Splat!

Slimy, yellow yolk and clear whites smashed on the blue robe of one of the sisters. Her snarling face shattered into a shocked gasp.

Heads swiveled. The chanting faltered. Shulen swore under his breath. In the moment before shock switched to fury, he signaled to the Peace Force to open the street and form a barrier between the sisters and the heir. Then he grabbed the reins of Ari Ara’s horse, kicked his own mount into motion, and led the riders out of the intersection, ignoring Ari Ara’s demand to go back and apologize, or talk to the women, or at least explain to everyone that they’d got the Prophecy of the Lost Heir wrong. It wasn’t all gloom and doom.

“Not now, Ari Ara,” he growled. “Let the Peace Force handle this.”

________

Curious what happens next? Get River Dragon through our Community Publishing Campaign starting on March 16th. You can find the rest of the series here.

The post “Heir Apparent” – Chapter One of River Dragon appeared first on Rivera Sun.

Love: A Feast Beyond Valentine’s Day

By Rivera Sun

Love is in the air . . . or at least occupying the airwaves this week, selling chocolates and roses and candlelit dinners for two. But this romantic love is just a thin slice of the feast of love that exists in the human heart. And when Valentine’s Day rolls around, I always rebel against such limited fare and demand the full deliciousness of all kinds of love.

Love of one’s family. Love between friends. Biophilia (love of nature). Agape (the selfless love that a person feels for strangers and humanity). Love for what Dr. King called the Beloved Community. And most especially, love-in-action, one of the many phrases for nonviolence.

The concept of love-in-action runs like a river through the ecosystem of my writings, nourishing the characters in my novels, giving them strength, courage, and nourishment as they stand up for change. In the slightly-fictionalized world of The Dandelion Trilogy, love shows up over and over again. Beyond the obvious love story of Charlie Rider and Zadie Byrd Gray, there’s a potent strand of a deeper, more provocative sort of love.

It is our love that calls us into action now. Our respect for life and our compassion for creation require us to stand up to the forces that cause oppression, suffering, and destruction. – The Dandelion Insurrection

Love is a powerful force in their world, galvanizing people into action. It’s not ‘nice’ or ‘well-behaved’. It doesn’t conform to convenient expectations or limit itself to one person or another. As Zadie discovers in a moment of soul-searching:

This was not the love of pink valentines or pecks on cheeks. This was a blazingly fierce and painful force that raked its talons through the soul and sliced all nonsense into shreds. This Love was here before the universe. It will remain when all is gone. It was coming to walk the Earth again . . . inside every human form.

Unsurprisingly, this kind of love doesn’t get a lot of airtime. It isn’t used to sell chocolates or roses. This fierce love propels people to confront injustice and abuse. It compels us to take a stand and to challenge bullies of all sizes. It is transformative and liberational, not just for some, but for all. It has the potential to heal the wounds we carry from centuries of divide-and-conquer strategies. It protects our souls as we dare to rise up against the horrors of the world, keeping us from becoming that which we oppose. It rattles the very foundation of empire. It changes everything.

Those who seek to profit at the expense of others refuse to give it airtime in our culture.

Those who want to exploit and abuse people and planet try to keep it out of the spotlight.

Those who gain power through fearmongering and spreading hate would rather keep our thoughts pinned inside the relatively narrow box of romantic love.

Because if finding true love is our primary goal, who has time to overthrow tyranny? The near-exclusive focus on romantic love is part of the propaganda of individualism – a worldview that is convenient to profiteering, but disempowering to the social movements who require our collective action to succeed. Unless we remember our love for community, people, and the Earth, then millions of us are sleepwalking through history, passively accepting the world’s injustices.

But if we remember our big, broad love? Well, that would change everything.

Revolutions happen because your heart throws down the gauntlet of its love. – The Dandelion Insurrection

Imagine if we fell in love with place as passionately as with that certain someone. Imagine if we swooned over humanity as a whole. Imagine if we dared to love our country – not with blind patriotism, but with deep commitment – enough to make sure it is living up to its stated ideals. If these kinds of love were unleashed within millions of us, it’s not a question of what we’d do. The question is: what wouldn’t we do?

As Dr. Cornell West said, “Justice is what love looks like in public.” In Winds of Change, the third book in The Dandelion Trilogy, Charlie, Zadie, and the Dandelions grapple with the long, hard work of translating love into policy and practice. They challenge national pride to take the shape of caring for people in tangible, meaningful ways. Living wages. Housing for all. Universal healthcare. If we truly love our people and our country, we would implement – immediately and without question – these pragmatic expressions of that love.

We, the People, love our people. And if you do not . . . then what exactly do you mean when you claim to love this country? – Winds of Change

At the heart of my ferocious, unrelenting critique of my country is a vulnerable confession of love for this strange place. I love some of the core ideals that have persisted in our often-sordid and unjust history. Liberty and justice for all is a worthy notion. Democracy is worth striving for. Equality is still a revolutionary idea for humanity. I’d like to see us achieve it. I share the sentiments of Charlie Rider when he wrote:

I want to love this broken-hearted country, this land of shattered dreams and dashed hopes. I want to help us rise, together, and embody our visions of equality and respect, caring and connection, justice and transformation. I want to fall in love again so that we all might heal and live and change. –Rise & Resist

I want us all to dare to love our country, not its cruel and hateful behaviors, but its ideals. It’s easy to hate, to despise ourselves and each other. Love is far more powerful though, and more transformative and revolutionary. It calls us into action. It inspires vision. It gives us the courage to demand the impossible. It makes us bold enough to dream and committed enough to persevere through the tough journey of turning dreams into reality. 

Love is far vaster than a Hallmark holiday. It is far more radical than sappy movies and sentimental cards. In our current times of competing and compounding crises, love unleashed would upend society in a heartbeat. If we loved this beautiful and imperiled Earth, we would willingly abandon the fossil fuels and pollutants that are killing our only home. If we loved the children – all children – we would ensure a livable future for them. If we loved our people, we would make sure none of them went to bed hungry or unhoused. If we loved humanity, we would stop all wars.

Love is a cornerstone of human existence. It is core to our nature.

Without love, we are walking dust, dead matter stumbling from the dawn of birth to the dusk of death. Without love, humanity sleepwalks like automatons, shoved through a nightmarish existence.

But with love?

With love the pivot of change emerges, the lever stretches long enough to move the world, the arc of the universe bends toward justice, the spirit of humanity soars, and the flood of life revives.

I write about love to remind us of our power. I write about love to break through the cloud of hate that confuses us. I write about love because it is the saving grace of humanity as we stand at the eleventh hour of our existence. Remember your love.

In this present moment, which hands like a bead of dew on the grass stem of time, where the life of the planet lies clouded by question marks and the body of humanity sprawls in a wasteland of our own making, the love song of our ancestors and descendants is calling us to rise.

______________

Author/Activist Rivera Sun has written numerous books and novels, including The Dandelion Insurrection and the award-winning Ari Ara Series. She is the editor of Nonviolence News and the Program Coordinator for Campaign Nonviolence. Her articles are syndicated by Peace Voice and published in hundreds of journals nationwide. Rivera Sun serves on the Advisory Board of World BEYOND War and the board of Backbone Campaign. www.riverasun.com

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Choose Respect In This Election Cycle

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

By Rivera Sun for Peace Voice

As the primaries heat up and the nation goes through the throes of another election cycle, cast your vote for something unexpected, something that defies the lies of politicians, something that could save our nation – and most certainly our souls.

Make a choice to weather this election year with respect and decency toward your fellow citizens, no matter our political views.

In past years, our election cycles have been marked with fear, distrust, polarization, heightened divisiveness, even violence. In 2024, if we do one thing as citizens, let’s end this toxic cycle.

Respect. Safety. Decency. These common values may or may not be reflected on the ballot, but we’ll be making choices for or against them this year. We’ll ‘vote’ for them through our actions and words in countless ways from now until November 5, 2024.

The choice is reflected in whether or not we:

Discuss the nominees and issues respectfully with family and friends.

Post articles that are inflammatory or factual on social media.

Be careful about spreading misinformation versus fact-based information.

Choose yard signs that are respectful or derogatory.

Show up at polling places calmly and without violence.

Help neighbors, elders, youth, and others get to the polls safely.

Refrain from harassment or intimidation of those who don’t share our views.

Hold back on insults and sneers at those we disagree with.

Take the time to listen to our fellow citizens and hear their just grievances.

Support poll workers and election officials in counting the vote fairly.

Accept the results of a fair and just election.

As individual citizens, we can do a lot to ensure that the escalating fear and division in our country stops with us. With deep respect for our fellow citizens, we can take a stand for common decency and ask others to join us. We can offer each other a basic dignity that transcends left and right political views.

In this manner, we cast a ‘vote’ for us, the people. It’s a choice that rejects the polarizing lies of pundits and politicians. It is a patriotism that we desperately need to remember, one that affirms our love of country and our sense of self-worth as a people.

It also helps us unravel the profitable hate-mongering that has brought us to our current predicament. Many of us already suspect that the violent rhetoric, the aggressive behaviors, belligerence, disdain and distrust fomented by both political parties isn’t serving us. As everyday people – workers, parents, citizens, neighbors – we have not gained job security or economic relief from the politics of hate. The violence that has marked the past years has not brought safety for our children. The intolerance of others has not improved the qualities of our lives.

Why not reject the politics of hate in favor of the culture of mutual respect? It’s one powerful political choice that every American can make this year.

There are many issues that we expect our president and politicians to sort out. But changing the way we behave during an election year . . . that’s on us.

The choice is yours. It’s ours.

______________

Rivera Sun, syndicated by PeaceVoice, has written numerous books, including The Dandelion Insurrection and the award-winning Ari Ara Series. She is the editor of Nonviolence News and the Program Coordinator for Campaign Nonviolence and a nationwide trainer in strategy for nonviolent campaigns.

The post Choose Respect In This Election Cycle appeared first on Rivera Sun.

The Winter Without Snow – A Wake-Up Call

We all have our reasons for getting alarmed about the climate crisis. With bare ground at Christmas and no snow on the horizon, my neighbors just got theirs. This Northern Maine valley nestles against the border of Canada – and winter without snow is unfathomable.

Snowmobiling is a big deal around here. While most of Maine suffers its tourist season along with the blackflies and summer sunburns, my neck of our vast woods gets its annual rush of visitors when the snow starts flying. 

They come to these northern reaches with their snowmobiles on trailers to go joyriding over our endless miles of trail system. There’s a breathless thrill to speeding over three feet of glorious snow at 30-80 mph. 

But not this year. The local hospitality bookings plummeted with cancellations when 40°F pouring rain melted our paltry snow in mid-December. My neighbors stare forlornly at the bare ground and reluctantly concede to taking their four-wheelers out instead of the snowmobiles. 

The weather forecast is freakishly sunny and the 1-2 inches hesitantly projected for the New Year won’t be nearly enough to snowmobile on. We might not even break out our shovels. 

For context, on a ‘normal’ year, by the time the second week of January plunges to -20°F in the daytime, we keep warm by hurling the latest 6-inch snowfall up over the 4-foot embankments along the driveway. Bare ground at this time of year is head-spinning. 

This is the climate crisis. 

Just down the road, the older gentleman who adamantly argued with me at the post office, denying the reality of global warming, must be scratching his head. A disquieted wondering must be going through him as he stares at the greenish grass. 

It’s okay to change your mind, I want to murmur to him. Millions of Americans are doing the same thing. 

They’re seeing their relatives evacuate their homes as forest fires – intensified through drought – burn closer and closer. They’re worried about older friends in the extreme heat that gets worse each summer. 

They’re sending money to church groups that help with flood relief when the 500-year floods strike twice in a decade. They’re looking at the faces of their children and grandchildren and realizing that the dire predictions of climate scientists are not an abstract future anymore. 

It’s the reality that their most precious loved ones will face. What will his grandchildren live through?

Up by the beautiful lake, where the ice-fishing shacks are still lined up on the shore waiting for the ice to thicken up enough to drive on, the local politicians – who have been ignoring the climate crisis like ostriches with their heads in the sand – must be tossing and turning with unease. Is it too late to do something? What can they do? 

In the 100-year-old farmhouse that has sheltered seven generations of potato farmers, the mother of three children and eight grandchildren is wrestling with the contradictions of our culture. She wants to preserve her farm and worried about low yields after a hot, rainy summer. 

She just got back from visiting one of her far-flung kids at Christmas. They say flying is one of the worst things for the environment. If she wants to save the farm, will she have to give up visiting her kids? 

You can almost hear similar thoughts rumbling through our valley: Is this normal? (No.) Should we do something? Petition public officials? Hold a protest? Let the kids go on school strike? What will make a difference? Does any of it really matter? (The answer to the last two questions is yes, by the way. Your actions now do make a difference and they do matter to the future of humanity.)

In 2024, we need to ask ourselves these kinds of uncomfortable – and sometimes downright terrifying – questions. What will we give up so that humanity and the planet can have a livable future? What kinds of change will we embrace with open arms so that our children can have a fighting chance of survival? What will we do today, tomorrow, and the next day to make a shift to a sustainable society?

There are sacrifices to be made, of course. Families are taking on debt to convert their houses to renewables. Utilities are investing in the switch. Companies have to go out on a limb to push their industry to change. We cannot sustain the level of air travel we currently enjoy. And yes, it is possible that we can’t justify the energy expense of pleasure-riding on snowmobiles. 

But if giving up your snowmobile could ensure a future for your children, would you do it? I know I would. 

On the other hand, there is a future – a beautiful one – waiting for us. It is healthy, clean, hopeful. And it’s already on its way. 

That potato farming mother has a solar farm in one of her fields. 

This year, those local politicians worked with our state rep to secure $35 million to restore fish habitat for endangered alewives, trout, and Atlantic salmon. 

Even my climate-denying neighbor put in a heat pump last year, grumbling about the jacked-up price of oil. 

We need to escalate these kinds of actions exponentially. There is something for all of us to do. 

Maybe you are a local loan officer who can approve energy efficiency loans to homeowners. 

Or a senior citizen with a retirement fund you can divest from fossil fuels. 

Perhaps you are a company manager who could cut back on air travel for your industry. 

Or an alumni of a university that could make the switch to renewable power. 

You may serve on a church committee that could help people prioritize care of the Earth this year. 

Or maybe you’re on a school board, town council, or county commission that could pass important climate measures. 

There are countless actions that we can take. And we must take them. Now, not next year. Let The Winter Without Snow be a wake-up call for all of us. There isn’t a moment to waste. 

_______

Rivera Sun, syndicated by PeaceVoice, has written numerous books, including The Dandelion Insurrection and the award-winning Ari Ara Series. She is the editor of Nonviolence News and the Program Coordinator for Campaign Nonviolence and a nationwide trainer in strategy for nonviolent campaigns.

The post The Winter Without Snow – A Wake-Up Call  appeared first on Rivera Sun.

Middens & Meadows

…

Middens & Meadows: A Year 2200 Story by Rivera Sun

If you enjoy this Solutionary Climate Fiction Story, you will also enjoy Ghosts & Gleaners.

…

“That crow lady’s back.”

“She’s more buzzard than crow.”

“Magpie, I’d say. Always on the lookout for shiny trinkets.”

Peering through the grimy window, clutching identical mugs of steaming herbal tea, the three workers watched the hunched woman scrabble through the debris field of the Middens. The grass-encrusted garbage mounds towered behind her, two lurking behemoths peering down through the morning mist. The lights of the air quality monitors blinked in a steady heartbeat, signaling assurances that the Middens had not shifted in the night and belched out deadly off-gasses. The three workers shuddered at the old woman’s lack of protective gear. A pair of gloves and a face mask were her only concession to the ever-present unknowns hidden under the surface of the twenty-first century landfill.

Forty-thousand known chemicals leeched and seeped through the decaying layers of garbage bags, construction debris, and barrels of industrial waste. As the sludge eroded, a near-infinite list of chemical reactions could be triggered. It made everyone nervous.

“Mad Mags is in fine form this morning,” one worker chuckled through a sip of chicory root tea, their region’s substitute for the olden-day coffee.

The woman brandished a lichen-dotted toilet plunger at the Middens and shouted at their implacable shapes.

“Have some respect.” The voice of their crew leader startled them. Aesa Murrey drew up beside the row of bland mugs. “Dr. Margaret Pierceson was the preeminent researcher in pre-Upheaval Archeology. She founded the field of Remediation and Recovery. She held the position of Head of Middens Research longer than you’ve been alive. Don’t mock her. And don’t ever let me hear that nickname pass your lips again.”

Her use of the past tense put a second shudder down the three crewmembers’ spines. Margaret Pierceson had been a groundbreaking scientist, a renaissance woman versed in six fields of study.

Outside the window, she lifted an old cookpot and put it on her head.

“That’s not Teflon-coated, is it?” the rookie worker squeaked nervously.

Aesa shook her head. This part of the debris field had already passed through Remediation’s scans and awaited the Recovery crew’s arrival. She would never allow Margaret into the toxic edges of the Middens. Not anymore. Aesa had installed a locator in the old woman’s favorite locket and kept an eye on her throughout the day. Most of the time, Margaret tottered from her house to the debris field and back, spending the daylight hours poking around the pre-Upheaval Era oddities unearthed from the excavation of the Middens.

All civilizations have their garbage heaps. Along the coastal coves of the Dawnland, the Wabanaki’s ancestors left piles of clamshells. Across the Atlantic Ocean, Europe’s medieval outhouses coughed up the history of agriculture. Further east, Lebanon’s hill of seasnail shells testified to the Roman emperor’s demand for purple-dyed robes. Such refuse piles revealed as much about ancient cultures as their homes, tombs, and temples. What a society throws away defines them as much as what they hold onto.

These Middens had been built two to three hundred years ago by the most appallingly wasteful civilization in human history. All across the planet, they blew up mountains and drilled holes to make the stuff that they threw into their landfills. Lay researchers spun countless – and inaccurate – theories about appeasing hungry gods, or sacrificial rituals for future prosperity, or taboos against using old objects.

Aesa knew better. She’d read the pre-Upheaval records. Even as their ecological systems collapsed, the twentieth and twenty-first century societies continued to devour, consume, and discard unfathomable amounts of resources for purely secular reasons. Religious hysteria was a tempting explanation, but the truth was far more chilling: they threw mountain ranges of junk away because it was convenient.

Like their counterparts across the former United States, the Middens of Maine were stuffed full of repairable, recyclable, and reclaimable objects. Carefully processed by Remediation, Aesa’s culture would be mining the Middens for decades to come and using the recovered items for generations. Cast iron cookware. Metal filing cabinets. Hammers. Glass that could be melted down and reshaped. (Even the oddest items had new purposes. Plastic trolls – their heads empty of decayed hair – were all the rage as mini-plant pots.) The kids these days kept begging for old car hubcaps to use as toy shields, but Reclamation needed the scrap metal. Besides, make-pretend war games were frowned upon. No one had the time, energy, or money to waste on the large-scale murder of other human beings.

Image by Public Domain Pictures on Pixaby

Recently, Margaret had been collecting marbles, which had set off some snide comments about the irony of her mental illness. When she caught the culprits, Aesa made them each find a dozen marbles for Margaret as an apology gift. These quixotic scavenger hunts in the debris field were far preferable to the days when Margaret Pierceson remembered that she was a scientist, but forgot the safety protocols for entering the dangerous parts of the Middens. Aesa still had nightmares about enforcing the decision to ban Margaret from the site of her life’s work. For a long time, she thought the aging researcher would never forgive her.

But it passed. Dr. Pierceson’s anger slipped away along with the floating anxious knowing that she should be working to solve the mysteries of the Middens. She never lost her curiosity about its lurking dangers and buried wonders. Even when she lost her grip on her mind’s knowledge, Margaret still delighted in ‘discovering’ gooseneck desk lamps, salad tongs, and plastic umbrellas.

There was little that could harm her in the debris field. The local Scavengers watched out for her as they picked through the heaps for trade items. Recovery crews greeted her by her title and gently drew the old woman out of their working area by requesting her expert opinion on something in another pile. As for Teflon and other household horrors, those had already been sorted by Reclamation. Teflon was immediately sent to long-term storage containment, miles beneath the surface, below the watershed and out of reach of the aquifers. The Middens researchers didn’t let that stuff slip into the repurposing chains or the trade network. Too dangerous. Too deadly. One day, Remediation would figure out how to decouple the basic elements and dismantle the fluorocarbons. Until then, the carcinogenic cookware had to be buried like the curse it was.

Teflon wasn’t killing Margaret Pierceson, though. Not on its own. The best medical doctors couldn’t sift through her lifetime of toxic exposures. Back in the day, the gas vents spewed deadly plumes into the air, each layer they uncovered released more chemicals, and the best protection gear failed. But, thanks to Margaret Pierceson, the Middens were far safer now than they had ever been. One of her first projects had been installing filtration huts over vents to prevent noxious substances from wafting toward nearby towns. The stone buildings that masked the complex technology of the filters had frowning statues at the door, lifting a warning hand in the universal ‘stop’ gesture. These Middens Guardians encircled the entire perimeter of the mounds. After the collapses of the Upheaval, they’d learned to be pragmatic about longevity. It would take tens of thousands of years for an old landfill like this to decompose on its own. Should anything happen to the Middens Research Project, their warnings had to last beyond languages and civilizations. The message had to translate to humans who may have lost the continuity of written records and oral history, alike.

But Remediation and Recovery (R & R) intended to shorten that timeline. The Middens Research team scrambled to study the past as the other teams dug up and remedied its toxins. It was painful, despairing work. Enough to drive anyone crazy.

Including Mad Mags.

Scrabbling through the exposed heap, the old woman peeled back layers of plastic and peered at a perfectly preserved newspaper inside. The crew leader sighed and signaled to the others. R & R had missed that one. A quick Rochambeau – rock, paper, scissors – sent the loser out to catalogue the newspaper before Margaret ran off with it. All print records were screened for the Gleaners Archives so the historians and storytellers could ensure that the horrors of the past stayed there. The 20th and 21st Centuries haunted them enough already. Most likely, the newspaper was just another unexciting reprint of the advertising section – it was incomprehensible what that old society squandered trees on – but it still had to be checked. One never knew when a new discovery would turn up.

Four years ago, Aesa Murrey had uncovered the chemical formula for fracking waste jammed into an eroded metal filing cabinet. In the heyday of the fracked gas madness, the formula had been deemed a trade secret and left undisclosed to regulating agencies. Then the greedy fools had injected it into hundreds of thousands of gas wells across the continent. They’d even sprayed the waste fluids onto roads to get rid of it. The gas companies had taken their secrets to the grave. For two hundred years, no one knew exactly what was in the slurry. Fortunately, the old filing cabinet had been hastily chucked into the waste truck instead of having its contents shredded by the bankrupt fracking outfit. Aesa had wept when she found it. They could now start cleaning up the mess.

Image by Heamna Manzur from Pixabay

So much had been lost during the Upheaval. The catastrophic floods and uncontrollable wildfires destroyed countless archives. Then the server crashes of the 2040s made a mockery of the turn of the millennium’s digitization craze. It had been an unthinkable time, boggling the logical mind with its contradictions, crises, and denials. On Aesa’s shelf at home was a rare 2023 archeology book about the remarkable digs of the era. As the global permafrost thawed, as drought uncovered riverbeds, as landslides revealed the bones of buried cultures, so many astonishing discoveries had been made. But the euphoria didn’t last long. The second half of the book bemoaned the precarity of archeological storage in the climate chaos. Museum catalogs flooded in basements. Vast archives burned in fires. Widespread disasters ravaged collections.

The irony of unearthing the past at a time that had no hope of a future was not lost on Aesa. Timing was everything in those books published in the 2020s. Seven years earlier, nothing shook the hubris of their civilization’s sense of infallibility; nothing rattled the archeologists’ assumption that their work would enjoy longevity. Seven years later, no one – archeologist or otherwise – had time to write books. Everyone was too swept up in trying to survive the climate crisis. By 2040, the field of archeology as they knew it would largely disintegrate. Not until 2100 would it re-emerge, this time in three distinct fields: the Gleaners, the Redeemers, and the Remediators.

The Gleaners studied the past to prevent its mistakes from repeating. They were a quasi-spiritual, semi-civic field that blended meditation and ancestor communing with more scientific research, archival research, and archeology. Aesa had trained with them as a young woman, but found the role of community leadership burdensome and intimidating. It had been a relief when her Gleaner mentor had suggested she move into a more research-oriented position.

The Redeemers – or Dreamers as they were called – took her under their wing next. They encouraged her to tinker with the technology of the past for safer applications in the present. She’d helped them fix the intake valve on the waterwheels at the Hook-up to keep fish from getting caught. They’d adapted the concept of street lamps to run on glowing algae bowls tended by a Lamplighter with a specialization in microalgae. Their definition of ‘tech’ was broad, of course. They also reworked collections of folktales to teach peace and problem-solving rather than violence and punishment. They revived long lost games for the children to play, shifting the rules to foster cooperation, rather than the competition of the older times. It had been a heady period of Aesa’s life, full of all-night conversations and two o’clock in the morning bursts of inspiration. Aesa had loved working with the Dreamers to salvage the gifts of history in ways that ensured a better future.

As for the Remediators, Aesa never thought she’d work with them. It was too dangerous, too frightening, too thick with failures. The effort to clean-up the mess of one short century – from 1950-2050 – was noble, but utterly heartbreaking. Most people tried to ignore the scope of contamination. Everyone learned a little bit about it in school, right after the segments on genocide, colonization, and nuclear bombs. They learned about lead in paint and water pipes, asbestos insulation, Teflon cookware, forever chemicals in flame retardants, hexavalent chromium, benzene-laced wastewater. The sheer scale of contamination gave everyone nightmares. Mapped across the former United States with color-coded overlays, there was hardly a place left to stand. The cancer rates of that hundred-year period were enough to induce panic attacks in students. One out of three people got sick, many died, all were subjected to the barbaric, painful, and expensive treatments of the period. Women would cut off their breasts just to survive. And cancer was just one of the dangers of the chemical contamination. There were also neurological disorders. Birth defects. Degenerative diseases. Chronic illnesses. Ecological collapse. Extinction of species.

The psychological toll alone was reason enough to stay away from R&R. The Healers kept a close watch on the workers; depression was common among them. For every toxin they learned to neutralize with algae and fungi, they discovered some other lurking chemical monster. Aesa had wanted nothing to do with this field.

Then the letter came, summoning Aesa home: Her mother was sick. Her father was dying. Her younger brother already dead.

They’d thought they were safe, miles away from the Middens. The towering mounds could not be seen even from the top of the tallest hill. They’d done the tests of the water, air, soil, and found only the usual levels of contaminants – nothing was pristine after the carnage of that century – but the ground shifted. A seam opened. In the depths of the Middens, a barrel of old farm pesticides cracked its crumbling iron rims. The seepage hit a leaking pile of buried paint cans. The chemical reaction gnawed through the rock, hit the vein of their watershed, crept into the well they’d tested. Day after day, the water burrowed its toxins into them, one sip at a time. Every pot of lentils. Every loaf of bread. Every cup of tea. Every shower. Every time they washed the dishes. Every bucket of water splashed over the head on a hot day.

Aesa lost her whole family in two years. The guilt never left her. While she’d been in another town, inventing the future with the Dreamers, they’d been dying.

I should have been there, she told her friends.

You’d be dead, too, they pointed out.

I would have noticed something was wrong, she argued, I could have done something, I could have saved them.

Grief subsumed her in its downpour. Rage shuddered through her bones. The Dreamers urged her to pick up her work again, she couldn’t. The 20th Century records ignited nothing but fury in her now. A hatred burned in her, hotter than the forest fires of the 2010s. The Gleaners took her back for a while, but she snapped one day and trashed the archive room in a fit of rage, hurling boxes off the shelves, toppling cabinets. If she’d had a match, she would have burnt the Archives to the ground. The Gleaners banned her from the building.

Image by Marc Pascual from Pixabay

Aesa walked out into the woods for a summer, unable to bear the hints of those poisonous ancestors lurking in the games of the children, or in the mechanics of solar generators. She hated humanity, hated the narcissistic conceit that left a legacy of ecological chaos and toxic waste. For a whole summer, she lived in silence in a small, hand-built hut, visited each week by a Healer. She swam in the nearby lake and tried not to worry about a poison-seam opening in its depths. She bartered wild blueberries for flour and lentils and hoped they weren’t full of forever chemicals. She endured the swarms of mosquitos and tried not to let her skin crawl over imagined rashes caused by unknown toxins.

She might have lived there forever, or at least until the bitter winter killed her with cold, but on the day the first frost laid its lacy fingers on each blade of grass, Dr. Margaret Pierceson came to visit her.

The renowned researcher did not seem mad, not back then. Dr. Pierceson’s brown, gray-streaked hair was tidily piled on top her head with a pencil stuck through it. A pair of reading glasses – vintage, plastic-framed – hung on a string around her neck. Old watches adorned each of her sun-browned wrists. One, a gold-plated, square-faced beauty from the 1920’s, had been meticulously restored and ticked away silently. The other, a 2020 smartwatch with no hope of repair, clung to her wrist with a cracking plastic band, reminding Dr. Pierceson of the folly of believing in the infallibility of tech. There was no room for such hubris in these times.

Margaret had already seen the early signs of her mind’s crumbling. Consummate scientist, she established a baseline, and proceeded to dispassionately watch the occasional patches of fogginess spread. Nothing alarming, just a slightly slower recall of the atomic structure of cadmium or a delay when she tried to remember the Latin nomenclature of a certain plastic-eating fungi. Little things that rarely bothered the average mind.

But Dr. Pierceson did not have an average mind. She had an eidetic memory. An analytic capacity that rivaled the operating systems of the Late Aughts. An intuitive hyperfunction that leapt to understandings it would take her colleagues years of meticulous research to finally prove and explain.

She knew her mind was going the day she lost a game of Go to her colleague. He chalked his win up to luck, but Dr. Pierceson quietly began her observation log that night. Two years later, the progression, though manageable, was undeniable. She lost her reading glasses unless they were stung about her neck. She left the tea kettle boiling to bone dry if she didn’t flip the whistle-lid down. She made an entry-level error in her calculations. Without fanfare, Dr. Margaret Pierceson began preparing for the final chapter of her life. She delegated key research duties. She turned down over-ambitious projects. She stepped away from her leadership role in the Association of Remediation and Recovery, claiming she needed more time for her research.

About that time, she’d received a furiously scrawled, tear-stained, handwritten letter from a young woman named Aesa Murrey.

How could you let this happen? How could you let my family die? You are the Head of Middens Research. You’re responsible for safeguarding us from its dangers.

Aesa had sent it off in a fit of despair and rage, desperately flinging blame in any direction it could stick. She did not expect a reply and she certainly never imagined that the short, sharp-eyed scientist would show up at her hut.

Margaret Pierceson had no tolerance for fripperies, foolishness, or polite niceties. She had no time for beating around the bush. With the cries of migrating geese calling mournfully over the trees, she spoke plainly to the girl.

“I am sorry for what happened to your family. No matter how fast we learn, no matter how much we know, it is never enough.”

To her horror, in front of this snarl-haired, smudge-cheeked, stony-faced young woman, Dr. Pierceson sank down to her knees in the rough shelter and wept.

Image by Rondell Melling on Pixaby

Mortality reared its scythe. Frailty shuddered under her skin. The fleeting light of autumn touched her eyes. Time. There was never enough time. Even if she lived to a hundred, what good was that compared to the timeline of these chemicals? Epochs would rumble past before the toxins decayed. Humanity would evolve or extinguish long before its plastics eroded. Margaret had only a brief handful of years left before her mind crumbled, years of faltering capacity. She felt the weight of all that was left undone, all that she would not accomplish before the end.

Aesa Murrey watched the Head of Middens Research sob into her palms and did the only thing she could: she made a pot of tea.

Aesa set her sole mug in Margaret’s trembling hands and poured another measure into her only bowl. Together, they took a sip in silence. Then another. By the third, they regained their voices and the capacity for words.

“I am ill, Aesa,” Dr. Pierceson confessed. “No one knows except my doctor. But they will. Soon. It will become obvious to everyone.”

“Why are you here?”

Aesa’s voice held a hint of bitterness, a brush of awe, and a gulp of confusion. The younger woman could not fathom what had brought this renowned scientist all the way out here. It was a long journey by horse-drawn coach or solar train. Dr. Pierceson would have to spend the night at the guesthouse in town.

“I want you to come work for me.”

“If this is out of pity -” Aesa erupted, insulted.

“It’s not. Hear me out.”

Perhaps it had been pity, at first, or charity, or guilt that her team had not prevented the tragic deaths of Aesa’s family members. But then Dr. Pierceson examined Aesa Murrey’s file. Gleaners and Dreamers both sought her out, the past and future called to her. Aesa had an aptitude for research and archival investigation, a background in chemistry, engineering, biology; an interest in history and cultural studies. Her former coworkers spoke highly of her, even despite her ransacking of the Gleaners Archive Room.

Aesa might be lost . . . but she could be found.

“Come work for me,” Dr. Pierceson urged her.

“I can’t,” Aesa stammered. “I hate that place too much. The Middens – you have no idea.”

But Margaret Pierceson did have an idea. She, too, had lost colleagues over the decades of her research efforts. Her lab manager was irradiated at an unmarked nuclear waste site. Her intern accidentally inhaled cyanide at an uncapped vent location. One of her workers died of chemical burns when a hidden frack waste container crumbled underfoot.

“We all hate that place,” Dr. Pierceson told her. “That’s why we work there.”

Not today, or tomorrow, but someday, the Middens would be gone. Every trash bag. Every broken television. Every rotting baby diaper. The fungal treatments would devour the plastics. The microbial washes would break down the toxins. Recovery would find new homes for all that could be saved.

“One day, Aesa, the Middens will be no more. A pair of meadows will grow in their place. And do you know what will stand in these meadows?”

The young woman shook her head.

“A memorial to all the people those toxins killed, the countless millions who died of cancer, neurological illnesses, degenerative diseases. My colleagues. Your family. Me.”

It would not be a stone memorial with dead names carved into lifeless lines. Instead, wildflowers would honor them: daisies, buttercups, yarrow, asters, Queen Anne’s Lace, colt’s foot, meadowsweet, cinquefoil, pearly everlasting, goldenrod, heal-all. Year after year, they would bloom, dedicating their short and beautiful lives to nectar and pollen; nourishing bees, birds, butterflies, insects, and all the animals that depended upon them. They would rise and perish and rise again, weaving sunlight and rainfall into the quiet miracle of a meadow.

Dr. Margaret’s voice grew soft and tender.

“There will be children among those flowers. Safe, happy, healthy children.”

The scientist’s sharp brown eyes, shadowed with knowledge of fleeting time, sought out the young woman’s.

“These children will be there one day because we were here today.”

In the dangers. In the toxins. In the mess. In hope, in fear. In love, in loss.

The future of our dreams cannot come unless we awaken.

Image by Rolanas Valionis from Pixabay.

Aesa gathered her belongings and followed Margaret Pierceson toward the vision of those Meadows. She faced down the nightmare of the Middens and confronted the specter of her ghosts. She learned how to transform the monstrous toxins into the harmless elements of life. She saw the mounds slowly diminish, year after year. Margaret’s vision would take longer than both their lifetimes, but each day, Aesa saw it come closer.

By the time Aesa became a crew leader on the Middens Research Project, Margaret had long since retired. White-haired, filmy-eyed, the old woman would wander the Middens’ edges in her battered boots, muttering made-up incantations to ward off fluorocarbons. She scavenged plastic action figures and turned them into shrines, worshipping deities that only she could name. When she lost reliable motor control, Aesa moved into Margaret’s spare room to help care for her. Each day, she brought the researcher a gift of reclaimed objects from the Middens. A set of records for the old turntable. A pile of 1980s polaroids. A box of Legos. Together, they ‘rediscovered’ their stories, inventing research that Margaret would forget within minutes. Aesa shared the progress the R&R team was making on breaking down old paints. She showed her the blueprints for an early detection system to prevent watershed contamination below ground. She told Margaret how the rookies were shaping up and how the old-timers were holding on. As Margaret’s mind slipped loose of its moorings, the Meadows were the last anchor that remained.

In the end, when Dr. Margaret Pierceson drew her last breath, Aesa was at her side murmuring stories of the Meadows. She recited the names of the flowers and the songbirds, the insects and burrowing animals. She invented prayers of sunlight and rainwater. She described winter’s hush of snow and spring’s burst of green. She sang lullabies of bees wings and coyote howls. She told sagas of field mice and fox kits. Margaret always grew calm in the telling. No pain or discomfort could disturb her so long as these images were invoked in her mind.

When the Middens researcher finally slipped out of life, the Meadows were the heaven that welcomed her home.

__________________

This Solutionary Climate Fiction Story was written by Rivera Sun. If you enjoyed this, you will also enjoy Ghosts & Gleaners.

Image by Michaela on Pixaby

The post Middens & Meadows appeared first on Rivera Sun.

Colombians March, Floating Anti-Nuke Protest & Hotel Workers Make Strides

Editor’s Note From Rivera Sun

From Sept 25-27, thousands of Indigenous Colombians marched in Bogata, calling for an end to paramilitary violence in their regions. They also voiced support for social reforms to alleviate poverty, pointing out the systemic connection between economic hardship, drug cartels, and the violence. It’s a connection that many places worldwide can, unfortunately, relate to.

In Los Angeles, hotel workers are making a little headway, securing a deal with a second hotel. The agreement covers 300 workers and offers increased wages, improved healthcare, more robust staffing, pension increases, and more inclusive hiring procedures for formerly incarcerated people and unauthorized immigrants. United Auto Workers have employed a similar strategy to the hotel workers, launching rolling strikes that have kept the industry scrambling and cost manufacturers $200 million so far. The UAW won one of their demands already, which was to gain battery factory union jobs for US workers as the industry shifts to hybrid and electric vehicles.

Perhaps due to the rolling strike strategy, mainstream media is coming up short in calculating the size of the strike wave happening. While their headlines mention thousands of workers on strike, the total is in the hundreds of thousands. A new report shows that at least 453,000 workers have participated in 312 strikes in the U.S. this year. This week alone, 75,000 Kaiser striking workers joined the 160,000 SAG/AFTRA actors, 32,000 LA hotels workers, 150,000 UAW auto workers, and many more who are on strike. Of course, if Quebec’s 420,000-person strong public worker union goes on strike (as they’re threatening to), Canadian labor action will outstrip the United States’ annual tally in one fell swoop. (It’s even more impressive when you remember the relative population size of the two nations: Canada has 36 million people. The US equivalent would be around 4 million workers on strike. May we see that day soon.)

In other Nonviolence News, Londoners marched against North Sea oil extraction; Haitians are protesting a US-backed, Kenyan military presence in their country; thousands of people worldwide once again protested Japan’s Fukushima wastewater discharges; and a 6-year campaign succeeded in getting rid of Chicago’s racist gangs database.

Find these stories and many more in this issue of Nonviolence News>>

There are so many creative actions this week. A pair of climate protesters locked down to the stage during a performance of the musical Les Miserables – and invited the audience to sing-along to their rendition of “Can You Hear The People Sing?” Portugal’s public art installations are in the crosshairs of a reckoning with the nation’s role in the slave trade. Germans launched a floating anti-nuke art show in a river. Italian climate activists built a 20-ft tall Trojan Horse to warn people that pretending the climate crisis doesn’t exist is a dangerous deception. An ecofeminist art show from tree-huggers to Greenham Common reveals the deep, abiding connection between feminism and nonviolent action.

There’s much to learn … and more to celebrate in Nonviolence News this week.

In solidarity,
Rivera Sun

Photo Credit: Thousands of Colombians took to the streets of Bogota to demand an end to violence and in support of the social reforms proposed by the Gustavo Petro government, September 27, 2023.

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5,059+ Actions During Campaign Nonviolence Action Days 2023

This post was originally published on Waging Nonviolence.

Twin Cities Nonviolent, one of the sites with our Nonviolent Cities Project, held two environmentally-themed musical actions as part of their 12 Days Free From Violence. On Sept. 30, the symphony group Classical Uprising performed “The (Uncertain) Four Seasons,” Vivaldi’s classic with a climate twist. On Sept. 25, another group performed “A Prophetic Opera For Our Times” with readings on humanity and our connection to the Earth. Twin Cities Nonviolent also participated in the “Hands Across the Mississippi March” that had an emphasis on clean water, air and land.

Children painting giant murals for peace and justice. Students learning de-escalation skills. Libraries displaying nonviolence books. Protesters sounding the alarm on the climate crisis. Activists blocking military bases.

During the 10th annual Campaign Nonviolence Action Days from Sept. 21 to Oct. 2, hundreds of local, national and international groups organized actions and events to build a culture of peace and active nonviolence, free from war, poverty, racism and environmental destruction. In 2023, a staggering 5,057 actions were planned across the United States and 20 countries. Over 60,000 people took part in these actions and events.

At first glance, their seemingly disparate issues are united only under a broad umbrella. After all, what does a silent minute of meditation have to do with a direct action to stop the climate crisis? Yet, a deeper look reveals the profound interconnection between the many forms of violence that bring people to the Campaign Nonviolence Action Days. Even more powerful is the interrelatedness of the solutions and alternatives that people are proposing.

We want a world beyond violence. We want a culture of active nonviolence. Across the issues, the many injustices people oppose bear the shared signature of systemic, structural and direct violence. People are tired of poverty, racism, war, shootings, climate disasters, militarism, hate crimes, xenophobia. As they stand up for change, each organizing group is putting into place a piece of the puzzle. The image it forms is a broad vision of a culture of peace and active nonviolence.

When Campaign Nonviolence began in 2014, a couple thousand people took part in 230 actions. Now, we’re seeing how this vision is shared by tens of thousands of people. Here are dozens of examples that show what a culture of active nonviolence looks like — and how many of us are willing to work for it.

One of the goals of Campaign Nonviolence is to “mainstream nonviolence,” taking the skills and practices out of the margins and into the heart of our communities. During Action Days, organizers go beyond the “usual suspects” and find ways to connect with unlikely allies, people who have never heard of nonviolence, and groups that don’t usually focus on these ideas. Urban gardens, bookstores, soup kitchens, even local bars: these are some of the places where people are taking action. Local teams are organizing participation among businesses (like soap makers in Lansing, Michigan), faith groups (like the 24-hour nonviolence vigil with a Tibetan Buddhist center in Louisville, Kentucky), or schools (like a district-wide peace essay contest in Little Rock, Arkansas).

Public libraries were major nonviolence champions this year. In Olean, New York, the library put up a month-long display on nonviolence and held two related author talks. The library in Beaverton, Oregon, hosted an event on peace, welcoming immigrants and preventing gun violence. In Owensboro, Kentucky, the library opened its doors to an anti-nuke documentary film screening and origami crane folding that will decorate a peace Christmas tree display later this year. In Caro, Michigan, organizers held a teach-in on nonviolent action at the library using the documentary film “A Force More Powerful.” Partnering with Nonviolent Seaford, the Seaford District Library in Delaware put up tables with nonviolence pamphlets, posters, training materials and nonviolent action coloring pages.

Education is an important part of Campaign Nonviolence’s goal of building a culture of peace and active nonviolence. This year, we called upon people to host nonviolence teach-ins, especially on Oct. 2, Gandhi’s birthday and the International Day of Nonviolence. A group in Louisville, responded to this call-to-action by holding daily nonviolence practice sessions each morning during Action Days. On Earth Peace hosted a virtual Kingian Nonviolence training. A peace group in Milwaukee held a peace action teach-in. In Tucson, Arizona, a university held a youth conference focusing on forms of nonviolence toward oneself, including self-care, empathy and mental health.

Portland Peace Team held a nonviolent resistance training in honor of nonviolent strategist Rev. James Lawson’s 95th birthday. Ignite Peace in Cincinnati, Ohio, took people on a deep-dive with a strategic nonviolence intensive. In Salem, Oregon, a nonviolent direct action training was offered as part of a campaign against a local weapons manufacturer making parts for nuclear weapons. An in-depth retreat in Kingston, New York, focused on “Nonviolence Is Our Future” with Kazu Haga and other presenters. Nearly 100 people joined the Nonviolence Study and Practice Group for a film screening and discussion of “The Third Harmony.”

And the list goes on. On Oct. 2, youth in Opelika, Alabama, discussed “How the Nonviolence Movement Affects Our Generation.” The Peace Resource Center in San Diego hosted a lively discussion titled “What’s Your Nonviolence IQ?” Casa Esperanza Catholic Worker launched a 5-week virtual training on “The Intersection of Nonviolence and Care for Creation.” Friends of the Gandhi Museum in Pune, India, took to the streets to distribute nonviolence literature. In Gambia, multiple days of training were held on a sunlit beach with 70 participants. In Germany, Malawi, Pakistan and Togo, educational events addressed social injustice, war, gender-based violence and street harassment. World BEYOND War’s virtual conference, “Nonviolent Resistance To Militarism,”brought 300 people together to hear from organizers in Honduras, Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, Ukraine and beyond.

Speaking of antiwar organizing, peace groups have been a backbone of Campaign Nonviolence Action Days since our inception. This year’s organizing included many targeted protests that took the peace message to the doorstop of the military-industrial complex. In California, a demonstration at the gates of Beale Air Force Base drew links between militarism and the climate crisis. In San Diego, Veterans For Peace held overpass banner actions to oppose the blatant militarism of fighter jet fly-overs during the Miramar Air Show. In Maryland, a group held a vigil at the doors of the Air Force Association’s Arms Bazaar where the major players in the weapons industry gathered. In New York City, Pax Christi New York State held a rally at the United Nations for the total elimination of nuclear weapons. In Santa Fe, New Mexico, a picket raised the issue of nuclear waste and the problems facing the US’ only long-term storage facility. Women Against Military Madness held an anti-war vigil on a bridge in Minneapolis. Zaporizhzya Protection Project was in Ukraine, organizing unarmed civilian protection to keep the Zaporizhzya nuclear power plant safe from war-related meltdowns.

By starting our efforts on Sept. 21, the International Day of Peace, and ending on Oct. 2, the International Day of Nonviolence, we’ve seen people increasingly understand that nonviolence is the means to the ends of peace. On the local level, groups are connecting the yearning for peace with the pragmatic work of ending violence, especially among youth. One of our partner groups, Sandy Hook Promise, held its annual Start With Hello Week from Sept. 18-24, reaching out to hundreds of classrooms to teach students how to break down social isolation, one of the factors in school shootings. In Detroit, Meta Peace Team trained an incoming freshman class in violence de-escalation skills, part of their multi-year effort to infuse school culture with student-led responses to violence. In Honolulu, a low-income neighborhood renewed its commitment to be a Zone of Peace and Nonviolence, holding a rally, march and community events. Peace Day Philly organized a 165-person “Footballs Not Firearms” march and rally to prevent gun violence. Free footballs were donated by the Eagles and touch football was played at the rally.

Other youth-centered efforts include Arkansas Peace Week’s impressive peace art contest, which received over 2,000 submissions and displayed the finalists’ work at the Arkansas State Capitol Rotunda. They also coordinated the Wildcats Walk For Peace at an elementary school in Little Rock, with 375 students marching through the neighborhood, chanting: “P-E-A-C-E, Wildcats Walk for Peace!”

Campaign Nonviolence’s vision is to help people see nonviolence as multi-dimensional. We can practice it toward ourselves (such as the community street festival in New York filled with free sessions with health and wellness practitioners), with one another (such as the conflict and nonviolent communication skills learned by an entire congregation in Colorado), and toward society through nonviolent action to eliminate structural and systemic violence. Yet, there is another application of nonviolence which is increasingly needed: nonviolence toward the Earth.

With the climate crisis heating up and disasters hitting communities hard, climate action is a major focus in Campaign Nonviolence. At the White House, a group of climate protesters with Nonviolence International engaged in civil disobedience to get President Biden to declare a climate emergency. Campaign Nonviolence’s Earth Action Team held Sound The Alarm For Climate Action protests at town offices, cultural events and churches in Maine, New York and Michigan. They set their phone alarms to go off and when the noise interrupted the events, they stood up and gave a short speech on the climate crisis, ending with “Time’s up. What are you/we going to do?”

This is just a glimpse of the more the 5,000 actions and events that took place. Campaign Nonviolence also mobilized people to engage in mutual aid solidarity, racial healing, divestment from weapons and fossil fuels and much more.

One of the long-term visions of Campaign Nonviolence is to make what we experience between Sept. 21-Oct. 2 an everyday occurrence in our lives. Imagine it: walking through our day, we encounter opportunities to remember the principles of nonviolence. Everybody we know attends workshops in interpersonal conflict skills (maybe after yoga class). Restorative justice in schools and beyond is the norm, not the exception. Every student, bus driver, teacher and librarian learns how to de-escalate violence. Friends and family understand nonviolent action and join protests, boycotts and strikes on a regular basis.

Businesses share the ethic of doing no harm, treating workers well and cleaning up their messes. Workers are organized and accustomed to using strikes and pickets, not just for better wages, but in support of social justice causes. Institutions take strides to be fair, inclusive and diverse. Nations disarm and downsize their military, choosing instead to fund peace teams and diplomacy rooted in justice. Our cities run on renewable power and widespread efforts focus on regenerative and restorative practices for ecosystems. Everywhere we look, our society prioritizes care of people and the planet.

It’s a world we want to live in. How about you?

A big vision like this takes a big movement. And Campaign Nonviolence Action Days is growing. Join us.

The post 5,059+ Actions During Campaign Nonviolence Action Days 2023 appeared first on Rivera Sun.