Author Archives: Rosaliene Bacchus

Thought for Today: America’s Spiritual Unraveling

30 Sunday Aug 2026

Posted by in Human Behavior, Recommended Reading, United States

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Front Cover: Crisis of the Common Good: The Fight for Meaning and Connection in a Broken America by US Senator Chris Murphy (USA, 2026)
Photo Credit: Macmillan Publishers (Jacket design by Rodrigo Corral)

Donald Trump is a symptom, not the cause, of America’s spiritual unraveling. Make no mistake: he is no ordinary symptom. He could prove fatal to our 250-year experiment in multicultural democracy. But our nation would make a grave error if we believed we could repair what is broken within us simply by defeating Trump—or his successor—at the ballot box. No, a deeper rot festers in the American soul: a callousness toward our neighbors, a me-first selfishness, a relentless focus on “getting mine” even if it leaves others behind. Today, we worship false cults—profit at any cost, consumerism instead of citizenship, a blind faith in technology, a winner-takes-all politics—that leave us feeling empty and devoid of purpose.

Excerpt from Crisis of the Common Good: The Fight for Meaning and Connection in a Broken America by U.S. Senator Chris Murphy, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, USA, 2026, pp. 7-8.

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“As New and As Old (I)” – Poem by Guyanese Poet Martin Carter

23 Sunday Aug 2026

Posted by in Poetry

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Guyanese Poet Martin Carter (1927-1997)
Photo Credit: Peepal Tree Press (UK)

My Poetry Corner August 2026 features the poem “As New and As Old (I)” from the poetry collection Poems of Affinity 1978-80 by Guyanese poet Martin Carter (1927-1997), published by Release Publications (Guyana, 1980). He is regarded as the finest of all Guyanese poets.

Carter was born in Georgetown, Guyana (then British Guiana), to middle-class parents of mixed African, Amerindian, and Portuguese ancestry. His father, a civil servant and avid reader, introduced him to a love of books and philosophy. His mother imbibed in him a love of poetry.

In his early twenties, he became a member of the anti-colonialist political party, founded in 1950. His early poetry reflects his concern about the human condition and freedom from colonial oppression. In “Tomorrow and the World,” published in 1951 (Footnote 1), he expresses his joy of being one with people on the streets and sharing their hope for a better world.

In verse one of four he writes: I am most happy / as I walk the seller of sweets says “friend” / and the shoemaker with his awl and waxen thread / reminds me of tomorrow and the world.

The political party’s gains towards self-governance were short-lived. In 1953, British troops landed and the British governor suspended the newly inked constitution. Together with other political leaders of the party, the poet-politician was arrested and interred at the British/American airbase for three months.

After his release in 1954, Carter published his renowned collection, Poems of Resistance from British Guiana. These poems reflect the anxiety of the times from oppression, fear, and bloodshed. In the poem “This Is the Dark Time My Love” (F2), he writes in verse two of three: This is the dark time, my love. / It is the season of oppression, dark metal, and tears. / It is the festival of guns, the carnival of misery. / Everywhere the faces of men are strained and anxious.

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The Changing Earth – Change

09 Sunday Aug 2026

Posted by in Anthropogenic Climate Disruption, Human Behavior

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France Wildfires 2026: Hottest July Ever Sparks Massive Fires and Evacuations
Photo Credit: Asianet News English, published on August 6, 2026

This is the seventh article in my series about our changing Earth from interviews with Native Americans shared in We Are the Middle of Forever: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing Earth, edited by Dahr Jamail and Stan Rushworth (USA 2022). My presentation does not follow the order of the interviews.

#7: Marita Hacker (Hunkpapa, Norwegian)
      (Chapter 9, pp. 124-139)

Marita Hacker is an elder of Dakota Hunkpapa and Norwegian descent, with a wealth of knowledge from her own lineage, and an ardent scholar of other world traditions. She’s a healer, spiritual advisor, former foster parent, and retired high school teacher and counselor. One of just a few female Apostolic bishops in the United States, she has also been involved with hospice care for almost thirty years.

As a member of the US military, Marita’s Native American father met her Norwegian mother when he was transferred to West Germany, where she was forced to relocate, thanks to Hitler. Before Marita’s birth, her father died in an accident. Following his wishes, Marita was raised in Germany and not the United States. After moving to California when she turned 21 years old, she left for Oregon where she lived off-grid for seven years, spending time on a Hopi reservation and in the homes of different Native folks as she “let them foster what I had within me.”

Today, Marita lives with her husband in his homeland of Apacheria in southern New Mexico, serving her community as well as others who travel to see them for ceremony and other spiritual work. She spoke with Dahr and Stan from the front porch of their humble adobe home, surrounded by the rolling hills and mountains of Apacheria.

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The Writer’s Life: Creating Authentic Female Characters

02 Sunday Aug 2026

Posted by in Human Behavior, The Writer's Life, Women Issues

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Chinese Actress Gong Li – My pick for antagonist Mildred Gomes nee Cheong
Photo Credit: Fandango

I was born and raised in a time and place where children did not enjoy the rights they do today. When adults or big-people (Caribbean English) were engaged in conversation or disagreement, children were not allowed to put their mouth in big-people talk. Children, they said, should be seen and not heard. Break the rules and you could get a licking (flogging). And so, from a young age, I learned to observe women’s behavior and listen in to their conversations.

Big-women often spoke in coded language that I learned to decipher when I entered my teenage years.

—Watch yourself around Mary husband. He hand fast.

—She sleeping with her boss. He promise her the world.

—Mary daughter get a big-belly for the landlord son.

—He take advantage of his own daughter/niece.

—Open your eyes, girl. The white man (British soldiers) only want a good time. When the time come, he going up and gone. And you get left behind as spoiled goods.

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Thought for Today: AI gobbles up land, energy & water

26 Sunday Jul 2026

Posted by in Technology, United States

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Aerial view of large-scale land clearing for a data center campus adjacent to a residential neighborhood – Clarksville – Arkansas – USA
Photo Credit: Brochovich Data Center (submitted by community member)

AI is no ethereal entity that lives in “the cloud.” It is a machine that lives in an AI Data Center. Not just one data center, but several data centers across our nation. Over 4,000 data centers operate in the USA. Many of them were built before generative AI came on the scene and captured our imagination with its superpower to create text, images, art, video, and sound in response to our instructions. We never questioned the origin of its source material. But that’s another story. My focus here is on the AI Data Center.

AI Data Centers that power your favorite chatbot—OpenAI ChatGPT, Google Gemini, or Anthropic Claude—are massive structures. What’s more troubling is that these centers need vast expanses of land, as well as lots of energy, and water to power their AI machines. With lots of money to be made during the generative AI boom, data centers are sprouting up everywhere across the United States. Your community could be their next target.

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“Watch” – Poem by American Poet Dan “Sully” Sullivan

19 Sunday Jul 2026

Posted by in Poetry, United States

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American Poet Dan “Sully” Sullivan
Photo Credit: Sullivan and Sullivan Studio, Poet’s Official Website
Front Cover – Poetry Collection O Body by Dan “Sully” Sullivan
Photo Credit: Haymarket Books

My Poetry Corner July 2026 features the poem “Watch” from the poetry collection O Body (Haymarket Books, 2023) by Dan “Sully” Sullivan, an American poet and educator based in Bloomington, Indiana, with nearly two decades of experience in Open Mic Poetry performance and teaching. Born in Chicago, Illinois, he earned an MFA and MA in English Literature and Creative Writing from Indiana University (2016-2019). Since 2019, he holds the position of Student Support & Registration Representative – Advance College Project at the university.

O Body, Sully’s second full-length poetry collection, delves into questions of masculinity, fatherhood, home, and learning to live in and love one’s own body.

We learn in “Wave Built in the Form of Prayer” that the speaker/poet is on the heavy side (pp. 13-14):

I get this gravity from my mom’s side. My father was always thin
& I don’t mean to speak of him like he’s dead—he’s not
thin anymore. I know the earth pulls us closer as we age, but his softer
body does not make me think of tombs. I think of passage & mirrors.

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The Changing Earth – Kinship

12 Sunday Jul 2026

Posted by in Anthropogenic Climate Disruption, Human Behavior

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Infrastructure in permafrost areas is threatened by riverbank erosion, Mackenzie River Delta, Canada
Photo Credit: Bioengineer Magazine, January 16, 2025

This is the sixth article in my series about our changing Earth from interviews with Native Americans shared in We Are the Middle of Forever: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing Earth, edited by Dahr Jamail and Stan Rushworth (USA 2022). My presentation does not follow the order of the interviews.

#6: Dr. Kyle Powys Whyte (Potawatomi)
      (Chapter 6, pp. 73-95)

Kyle Powys Whyte, PhD is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. A faculty member of the University of Michigan, Illinois, he is a George Willis Pack Professor at the School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS). He is founding Faculty Director of the Tishman Center for Social Justice and the Environment, Principal Investigator of the Environmental Justice & Humanities Hub, co-Principal Investigator of the Global Center for Climate Change and Transboundary Waters, Faculty Associate of Native American Studies, Principal Investigator of the Secretariat for the Pathways Alliance for Change and Transformation, STRIDE Committee member, affiliate Professor of Philosophy, and Senior Fellow in the Michigan Society of Fellows.

His primary research addresses moral and political issues concerning climate policy and Indigenous peoples and the ethics of cooperative relationships between Indigenous peoples and climate science organizations. His articles have appeared in journals such as Climatic Change, Sustainability Science, Environmental Justice, Hypatia, Ecological Processes, Synthese, Human Ecology, Journal of Global Ethics, American Journal of Bioethics, Journal of Agricultural & Environmental Ethics, Ethics, Policy & Environment, and Ethics & the Environment. 

Dahr and Stan asked Kyle to address the following:

  1. How humanity got to this climate crisis and what’s connected to it.
  2. How the sense of panic in societies around the world might be differentiated from a sense of urgency.
  3. How we might comport ourselves as members of the larger world society to meet the situation before us.
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The Writer’s Life: Creating Authentic Male Characters

28 Sunday Jun 2026

Posted by in The Writer's Life

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Asian Actor Henry Golding – My pick for leading man Richard Cheong
Photo Credit: IMDb

When I began work on telling Richard Cheong’s story in my 2019 debut novel Under the Tamarind Tree, I faced a mental hurdle: Was I up to the task of creating an authentic male protagonist? As a newbie novelist at the time, I followed all the guidelines for creating a fictional character, as set out in the Writer’s Digest Book on Characters & Viewpoint by Orson Scott Card.

There was no shortage of Guyanese men of my father’s generation from whom to draw inspiration. Like my father, Richard’s father (deceased) was a Chinese immigrant to what was then British Guiana—the only British colony on the mainland of South America. They both lost their parents at a young age. Richard also enjoys reading and listening to music. But the likeness ends there.

Richard’s obsession with having a son was inspired by a landlord, in the 1960s, who longed to have a daughter. After three marriages and six sons, he never got a girlchild. Was this too much pressure for his wives? Will Richard’s obsession threaten his marriage if his wife, Gloria, fails to give him a son? Gloria knows nothing about his childhood trauma, following his little brother’s murder under the tamarind tree on the sugar plantation where they grew up.

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“Learn to Live” – Poem by Brazilian Poet Cora Coralina (1889-1985)

21 Sunday Jun 2026

Posted by in Brazil, Poetry

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Brazilian Poet Cora Coralina (1889-1985)
Photo Credit: Association of the House of Cora Coralina

In my Poetry Corner June 2026, I feature the poem “Learn to Live / Saber Viver” by one of Brazil’s great twentieth-century poets, known by her pen name, Cora Coralina (1889-1985). Baptized Ana Lins dos Guimarães Peixoto, the poet adopted the name at fifteen years old when she began writing her first poems. Cora comes from coração (heart) and Coralina from the red coralline algae: red heart.

I first featured this poem in April 2014. It soon became the topmost read post on my blog and retained that position for several years. The poet’s message is much needed in today’s upside-down world. Bear in mind that Cora Coralina lived through a turbulent period, both nationally and worldwide: two World Wars (1914-1918 & 1939-1945) and Brazil’s dictatorship (1964-1985). For those who have read my 2014 post, I offer new excerpts selected from her four poetry collections published during the period 1965 to 1985.

Born in the small town of Goiás Velho, then the capital of the State of Goiás, Aninha (as she was called) lost her father, a High Court judge, when she was a toddler. In her poem, “My Childhood,” we learn that she was not favored as the third of four daughters:

Among them, I always occupied the worst place. […] I grew up as a daughter without a father, / second-rate among my sisters. // I was sad, nervous, and ugly. / Yellowish, with a pale face. / With weak legs, falling over easily. / Those who saw me like that – said: / “This girl is the living image / of her sick old father.”

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Thought for Today: How Disinformation Is Sabotaging America

14 Sunday Jun 2026

Posted by in Recommended Reading, United States

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Front Cover – Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America by Barbara McQuade (USA, 2025)
Photo Credit: Seven Stories Press

Disinformation is the deliberate use of lies to manipulate people, whether to extract profit or to advance a political agenda. Its unwitting accomplice, misinformation, is spread by unknowing dupes who repeat lies they believe to be true. In America today, both forms of falsehood are distorting our perception of reality. In a democracy, the people need a shared set of facts as a basis to debate and make decisions that advance and secure their collective interests. Differences of opinion, and even propaganda, have always existed in the United States, but now, enemies of democracy are using disinformation to attack our sovereign right to truthful information, intellectual integrity, and the exercise of the will of the people.

[…]

Throughout history, authoritarians have used disinformation to seize power from the people. As a former national security prosecutor, I see self-serving forces sabotaging our country. Manipulators are using disinformation to poison discourse and stoke divisions in society…. Our country’s constantly changing demographics naturally bring differences of opinion, but the bitter divides are not the inevitable result of a pluralistic society with diverse ethnic, racial, religious, and social groups. They are the product of a deliberate attack through disinformation. Lies are becoming increasingly normalized, and our democracy is in peril. The conversation I propose is not a debate about Democratic and Republican politics. It is about the essential need for truth in self-governance.

Excerpts from the Updated Paperback Edition of Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America by Barbara McQuade, published by Seven Stories Press, New York, USA, 2025, pp. 5-6 & 13.  

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