President Biden said things, which Jim Wallis cited, that many Americans had not heard ever before. Political junkies know them already, but many Americans watching the speech jumped to Google for a definition of "oligarchy," according to a news show I saw today. Many Americans were not sufficiently aware of the manipulation of news and opinions by social media like X and Fox News. The sponsorship of many TV ads and other disinformation has just recently been traced to Koch Industries, well known as plutocratic partisans. If the recently awakened and more to be awakened in the near future mobilize to resist the "new order," freedom may yet survive.
Thank you for focusing on the brilliance and inspiration of his final speech. It was deeply moving to me and consoling and inspiring with "orders" for all of us.....let's see how many of us are "up to it" - and for me, only as I stand with others.....
President Biden, Kamala Harris, Secretary Blinken and numerous members of Congress (most of Congress) are horribly beholden to Israel and Netanyahu, and have stood by twiddling their thumbs and waving their Israeli flags while the IDF drops 2000# on women and children and entire families in Gaza, decimating them. These are war crimes. Biden, Harris and Congress have gleefully enabled and emboldened war crimes while a smiling Netanyahu keeps his foot on the throat of Gaza as Israel has done and practiced for the last 75 years. How does Jesus feel about that, Jim? Jesus has been throwing up since the first bombs were dropped on October 8, 2023. Netanyahu and the IDF are soulless demons.
We need to name & distinguish the frightening distortions of the Bible in all this: “Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation, enabling the abuse of power...the truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit.”
Tha k you so much for this enlightening piece. I am feeling so discouraged at the moment. But you are reminding us that we have prophets in our own time.
I imagine some other people who leave comments here will think like me. While Jim is right in citing most of what Biden said as a dire threat to democracy and a fair society (tech oligarchs, attack on free press, wealth inequality, separation of powers), it is amazing that Jim somehow respects Biden for saying these things when he himself and his own party are equally to blame for many of these problems, nowhere better displayed than his administration's total loyalty to a terrorist, genocidal state and the countless public and the lies it promoted in favor of it. Biden's administration oversaw the beginning of the largest attack on free speech in America with the attempts by venal and cowardly university administrations to crush student protests, even as his own administration's many lies about its own apparent inability to do anything about Gaza clearly showed who he really supported in relation to the students.
I don't understand why Jim seems so blind to this fact, just as I don't understand why he would have had a public discussion with Senator Coons about religion and politics without excoriating him about his own rank support of Israel's crimes, as well as the degree to which he has aided the wealth inequality and become utterly loyal to large corporations. Biden's surrogate presidential candidate Kamela Harris lost precisely because Biden's term was based on 'no change' in any serious sense for most people in the country (a strategy which Kamela promised to continue) all while pitifully whining about how Trump and the Republicans are a fundamental threat to democracy in general. As Chris Hedges has said, the people ruling the country are now divided into two camps: the corporate capitalists like Biden, Harris, and their donor class, and the warlord capitalists like Trump and Musk. Believing the former represent any meaningful change to America's economic decline and its relentless militarism abroad is wrong, even if they offer slightly more time for anti-imperialists in the country to organize a movement for change, compared to Trump and his lackeys.
Yes, now it is up to us. My play "La Posada" ends with the following lines. In our October 2023 production, we divided the lines between several characters, but here is the original:
"Anything you create, like Colter’s masterpiece [La Posada] all around me, can fall apart. The artist doesn’t have control over her work. It can fall apart or it can, transcending time, come back to life—like peace treaties and economic security. (He quotes.) “You may never know what results come of your actions, but if you do nothing, there will be no results.” Gandhi. The work doesn’t end. I won’t be around forever. Don and Doña Pájaro weren’t either—if you believe in such things. Fred Harvey wasn’t around forever, and neither was Mary Colter, though sometimes I feel as if they visit here from time to time. There’s always work to be done. I did what I could. As the last Don Alphonso de los Pájaros said when he walked away from his family home, “Keep watch for me after I’m gone.” https://www.mickishelton.com/full-length-plays
President Biden said things, which Jim Wallis cited, that many Americans had not heard ever before. Political junkies know them already, but many Americans watching the speech jumped to Google for a definition of "oligarchy," according to a news show I saw today. Many Americans were not sufficiently aware of the manipulation of news and opinions by social media like X and Fox News. The sponsorship of many TV ads and other disinformation has just recently been traced to Koch Industries, well known as plutocratic partisans. If the recently awakened and more to be awakened in the near future mobilize to resist the "new order," freedom may yet survive.
Thank you for focusing on the brilliance and inspiration of his final speech. It was deeply moving to me and consoling and inspiring with "orders" for all of us.....let's see how many of us are "up to it" - and for me, only as I stand with others.....
President Biden, Kamala Harris, Secretary Blinken and numerous members of Congress (most of Congress) are horribly beholden to Israel and Netanyahu, and have stood by twiddling their thumbs and waving their Israeli flags while the IDF drops 2000# on women and children and entire families in Gaza, decimating them. These are war crimes. Biden, Harris and Congress have gleefully enabled and emboldened war crimes while a smiling Netanyahu keeps his foot on the throat of Gaza as Israel has done and practiced for the last 75 years. How does Jesus feel about that, Jim? Jesus has been throwing up since the first bombs were dropped on October 8, 2023. Netanyahu and the IDF are soulless demons.
We need to name & distinguish the frightening distortions of the Bible in all this: “Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation, enabling the abuse of power...the truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit.”
Tha k you so much for this enlightening piece. I am feeling so discouraged at the moment. But you are reminding us that we have prophets in our own time.
I imagine some other people who leave comments here will think like me. While Jim is right in citing most of what Biden said as a dire threat to democracy and a fair society (tech oligarchs, attack on free press, wealth inequality, separation of powers), it is amazing that Jim somehow respects Biden for saying these things when he himself and his own party are equally to blame for many of these problems, nowhere better displayed than his administration's total loyalty to a terrorist, genocidal state and the countless public and the lies it promoted in favor of it. Biden's administration oversaw the beginning of the largest attack on free speech in America with the attempts by venal and cowardly university administrations to crush student protests, even as his own administration's many lies about its own apparent inability to do anything about Gaza clearly showed who he really supported in relation to the students.
I don't understand why Jim seems so blind to this fact, just as I don't understand why he would have had a public discussion with Senator Coons about religion and politics without excoriating him about his own rank support of Israel's crimes, as well as the degree to which he has aided the wealth inequality and become utterly loyal to large corporations. Biden's surrogate presidential candidate Kamela Harris lost precisely because Biden's term was based on 'no change' in any serious sense for most people in the country (a strategy which Kamela promised to continue) all while pitifully whining about how Trump and the Republicans are a fundamental threat to democracy in general. As Chris Hedges has said, the people ruling the country are now divided into two camps: the corporate capitalists like Biden, Harris, and their donor class, and the warlord capitalists like Trump and Musk. Believing the former represent any meaningful change to America's economic decline and its relentless militarism abroad is wrong, even if they offer slightly more time for anti-imperialists in the country to organize a movement for change, compared to Trump and his lackeys.
Yes, now it is up to us. My play "La Posada" ends with the following lines. In our October 2023 production, we divided the lines between several characters, but here is the original:
"Anything you create, like Colter’s masterpiece [La Posada] all around me, can fall apart. The artist doesn’t have control over her work. It can fall apart or it can, transcending time, come back to life—like peace treaties and economic security. (He quotes.) “You may never know what results come of your actions, but if you do nothing, there will be no results.” Gandhi. The work doesn’t end. I won’t be around forever. Don and Doña Pájaro weren’t either—if you believe in such things. Fred Harvey wasn’t around forever, and neither was Mary Colter, though sometimes I feel as if they visit here from time to time. There’s always work to be done. I did what I could. As the last Don Alphonso de los Pájaros said when he walked away from his family home, “Keep watch for me after I’m gone.” https://www.mickishelton.com/full-length-plays
Change will happen, is happening in the cosmos.