The world has changed — let’s make it a change for the better.
During the Great Depression, unemployed people developed community councils to provide for their neighbors by preventing or reversing evictions, keeping the heat and lights on, and other disaster relief activities. This kind of community response is called “mutual aid” by activists and organizers, and with the recent uptick in their prevalence as a response to COVID-19, there has been a normalization of the term in the mainstream vocabulary. Even congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shared a “how-to” resource on the subject.
Mutual aid is an important part of crisis…
Two seemingly disparate crises — COVID-19 and Climate Change — may actually share much deeper roots.
The novel coronavirus COVID-19 is believed to have emerged at a “Wet Market” in the province of Hubei, China. These markets are said to sometimes sell the meat of wild animals, among a variety of other goods. Due to the lack of a deeper interrogation of the complex ecological factors involved, many have come away with a shallow understanding of this process. A simplified version of events has been used by many, including the President of the United States, to justify racist attitudes and violence against people of east Asian descent.
It’s just failing the poor, exactly as designed.
This is a harsh reality: As people around the world contract and spread the novel corona virus COVID-19, low-wage service workers, people of color, and other marginalized people stand to lose the most. They will disproportionately lose their lives, lose their incomes, lose their homes, and lose any financial safety net they managed to squirrel away as this pandemic stretches on through the months.
The richest among us, however, stand to gain. On March 20th it was reported that 4 U.S. senators — from both sides of the isle — who had inside information about the virus, sold off major…
Postponements and universal mail-in ballots are the only way to ensure the safety of voters.
In the lead up to the March 17th batch of Democratic primary elections, we were just beginning to understand — or accept — just how contagious and transmissible the novel corona virus COVID-19 really is. While some states were beginning to implement restrictions, most others were still a week or more away from taking the pandemic seriously enough to mandate stay-at-home orders or the shuttering of non-essential businesses.
Notably, this was not the case in Illinois and Ohio, where bars and restaurants were ordered to shut down as of 9pm on the 15th — Two days before those states’ primary…
Ursula Wren
Ursula Wren is a political dissident, software engineer, environmental advocate and vegan. 🌻🏴
