The Deluge

by Stephen Markley

The solutions to this crisis, it turns out, will also require an even greater ambition, a more just global order. We need to build a new energy infrastructure. We need to reinvent agriculture. We need to put everyone in this country to work in high-paying, meaningful jobs. We need to make housing, health care, and education universal rights, so we’re not all hungry, addicted, angry, and alone. We need to destroy the power of the surveillance capitalist economy, the people who profit from fomenting hate. We need an immediate release of the political prisoners, people like Dr. Anthony Pietrus, who have done nothing wrong except try to warn us of what’s coming. We need an end to the harassment, imprisonment, and torture of activists, protestors, religious and racial minorities, whether that’s at the local mosque or the local chapter of A Fierce Blue Fire. We need justice for the mothers who’ve lost children to heroin addiction in Kentucky, just like we need justice for the fathers who’ve lost their sons to bullets in Dallas. We need our freedom and our hope returned to us. We need to find our way back to each other.”