Author: YES!

With obvious links between anti-war movements against U.S. militarism and Black Lives Matter activism against police brutality, many are suggesting that it is time for activists to join forces. When U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar decried Israel’s 11-day aerial bombardment of Gaza in May and declared that “Palestinians deserve protection,” Florida’s Republican U.S. Senator Marco Rubio responded by saying that Israeli violence and U.S. support for it were justified because Israelis “live in a very tough neighborhood.” Rubio did not invent that phrase or its use in describing Israel’s place in the region where it sits. In 2016, 82 hawkish...

Forty years ago the CDC reported the first cases of what would come to be known as AIDS among five previously healthy gay men. I was a teenager at that time, coming to grips with my sexual orientation. When I moved to San Francisco as a 23-year-old gay man, AIDS was a full-blown epidemic. With no treatment, vaccine, or cure in sight, the awakening of my sexuality came with a death sentence. While sex, sexuality, illness, death, and dying are not typical topics of conversation among young people, it was all my friends and I talked about. It wasn’t...

If you had asked me six years ago to write a call to action to inspire people to participate in my social justice group, it would have gone something like this: “The United States of Amerikkka has always been and will always be an ecocidal White supremacist settler-colonialist police state. Join our never-ending intersectional struggle to dismantle the hegemonic forces of racial capitalism, imperialism and cis-hetero-patriarchy.” I am exaggerating, but only a little. (I would have used only one “k” in Amerika). Will you join my group? Wonderful, now we are a coalition of two. Recent life changes landed me...

Weeks after the last cannon sounded and the gun smoke cleared in April 1865, slavery in most of the United States had come to an end, unless you were an enslaved person in Texas. It was not until June 19, 1865, a full 71 days after the surrender at Appomattox and 37 days after the Battle of Palmito Ranch, that 2,000 Union troops arrived in Galveston Bay, Texas, to announce that the Civil War was indeed over; and that all enslaved people were now free. In Texas, this was known as “Juneteenth,” and it marks not only the day...