Monthly Archives: April 2021

Reflections on Our Collective Guilt

25 Sunday Apr 2021

Posted by in Social Injustice, United States

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Former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin during trial for death of George Floyd
Photo Credit: KTIV Television

Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.

On Tuesday, April 20, I was relieved when the jury declared Derek Chauvin guilty on all three counts for the death of George Floyd. Would the Floyd family have obtained justice without national and international outcry? However, there was no justice for George Floyd. Trading with a twenty-dollar counterfeit bill was all it took for his summary execution by a knee chokehold. The CEOs on Wall Street, who took down both the US and global financial systems and destroyed the lives of millions of workers and mortgage holders, were too BIG even for a trial much less the death penalty.

Considering that the police continue to kill blacks without due process, I think it foolhardy to believe that Chauvin’s guilty verdict is any sign of progress towards police reform. While institutionalized systemic racism persists, police killings of black and brown bodies will persist.

How complicit and guilty are we as a nation in the training given to our police force that has no qualms in eliminating black and brown offenders, however trivial their alleged crime?

Our centuries old, racist, social-economic system extends way beyond policing. This entrenched system determines where we live, the schools our children attend, our access to a healthy diet, the health care we receive, our exposure to toxic air and water, and much more. We need to address these inequities in our policies and actions to Restore our Earth, not just for a few but for the 99 Percent.

For how long can we continue to enjoy the benefits of an unjust and inequitable system and not share collective guilt?

Earth Day 2021: Restore Our Earth

18 Sunday Apr 2021

Posted by in Nature and the Environment, United States

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Earth Day 2021 – Restore Our Earth
Official Earth Day 2021 poster by Brazilian Street Artist Speto
Photo Credit: Earth Day Official Website

April 22, 2021 is Earth Day. The theme this year is Restore Our Earth, an optimistic outlook given the ongoing challenges humanity faces with a climate emergency, now coupled with yet another year of a global pandemic.

“Restoring Our Earth is about solving climate change through the world’s natural systems, such as regenerative agriculture practices and reforestation, as well as through existing and safe technologies,” said Kathleen Rogers, President of EarthDay.org. “Restoring our planet will also require commitment of our world’s leaders to support climate literacy and civic skill building so that we can create a global engaged and active citizenry, a green consumer movement, and an economy that is just and equitable across all countries and across all demographics.”

There will be three days of climate action, beginning on Tuesday, April 20, with a global climate summit led by Earth Uprising. In the evening, the Hip Hop Caucus and its partners will present the “We Shall Breathe” virtual summit.

On April 21, Education International will lead the “Teach for the Planet: Global Education Summit.” It will be a multilingual virtual summit spanning several time zones. If we’re to solve the climate emergency, we must learn about it. We can’t build a sustainable environment without educating the next generation. That’s why EarthDay.org is spearheading a campaign to have “compulsory, assessed climate and environmental education with a strong civic engagement component in every school in the world.”

Do join me in signing the petition as an individual in support of universal climate literacy.

On the big day, Earth Day Live: Restore Our Earth will be streamed live beginning at 12:00 p.m. Eastern Time on April 22. You can tune in on EarthDay.org, Facebook, Twitter, Twitch, YouTube, and GEM-TV. For those of us who live on the Pacific Coast, this means tuning in earlier at 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time.

Joining forces with EarthDay.org, TED Countdown will premiere several original TED Talks during the livestream, providing additional top-tier content by climate leaders.

For more information on events and participants, go to https://www.earthday.org/earth-day-2021/ 

We can restore our Earth with reforestation. It’s one of the cheapest ways to sequester atmospheric carbon and tackle our climate emergency. But reforestation is not easy. It has its pitfalls. Learning from past failures, EarthDay.org developed The Canopy Project.

Do join me in planting trees to fight climate change by donating to The Canopy Project where $1 plants 1 tree.

Human activities have destabilized Earth’s life systems. The signs are all around us. It’s time to restore the balance. Tune in to one of Earth Day’s events. Learn. Engage. Let’s make a difference. Act now.

“Cruel Radiance” by Cambodian American Poet Monica Sok

11 Sunday Apr 2021

Posted by in Poetry, United States

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Cambodian American Poet Monica Sok
Photo Credit: The Chautauquan Daily

My Poetry Corner April 2021 features the poem “Cruel Radiance” from the debut poetry collection A Nail the Evening Hangs On (Copper Canyon Press, 2020) by Cambodian American poet Monica Sok. Born in 1990 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Sok is the daughter of refugees. She is a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University and teaches poetry to Southeast Asian youth at the Center for Empowering Refugees and Immigrants in Oakland, California.

Sok dedicates her poetry collection to her grandmother Bun Em who arrived in the USA in 1981, two years after escaping genocide under the Khmer Rouge regime with her four daughters and two sons. A master silk weaver, Bun Em’s loom, grief, joy, and perseverance infuse Sok’s real and imagined collective memory.

In “The Weaver,” Sok transforms her grandmother’s grief into nourishment for others around her. It made her happy / as she worked on silk dresses / and her hair never ran out. / Sometimes, when she was tired, / she’d tie it up / and let all the tired animals around her house / drink from her head. Her loom becomes an old friend and an ancestor she prays to in the poem “Ode to the Loom.” Her grief is re-imagined as nails falling like rain in the darkness, so that when her hair falls / not as rain does / but as nails the evening hangs on, / and her hands slip no longer / from silk but on walls in the dark / hall to her room…

As the daughter of genocide survivors, Sok grew up with familial silence. Her poems came out of silence, she told Danny Thanh Nguyen during an interview in May 2020. “I’m writing about the genocide, but I’m writing more about the inheritance of that trauma…. I had to give myself the permission to write the stories and I went into myth-making, tried to mythologize my family’s narratives.” But the narratives are not just about her family’s experience, she noted. Rather, she was working towards a collective history of all Cambodian families.

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