| Guitar hobbyist | Finally started learning to play when I turned 50 in 2017. Am hooked. |
| Theatre artist at heart | Spent 25 years doing theatre (MFA from ACT in SF), had to give it up to escape poverty |
| Recovering political junkie | Still paying attention, but it's become too toxic to stay as glued as I used to |
| Peace | anti-war, anti-fascist, anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobia, anti-transphobia, anti-xenophobia, et al |
Hey, maybe rethink posting about your prayers for those affected by a religion-fueled war? Why pour more religion on a fire started by it? 🤦
Prayers comfort the person praying, and do nothing for those being prayed about. Try donations, volunteering, or other ways of actually helping.
RIP Jimmy Buffett
A bit belated, RIP Robbie Robertson.
My guitar is the rhythm guitar in your right ear.
Hey Hollywood studios and the corporations that own them:
You have $billions because of writers, actors, and other artists. Without them, you have nothing.
Agree to union contracts that compensate artists fairly, or gtfo.
(hint: AI-generated fiction will be heartless, it won't be watched )
Having trouble remembering where I put my celebratory sense of patriotism.
Might have something to do with how our SCOTUS and republican-majority state legislatures have been stripping freedoms from wide swaths of The People.
"[Celebrating the Fourth of July] is further complicated by the fact that it is precisely the forces that are working hard to subvert democracy and the people supporting those who are leading the reactionary assault who will be celebrating the loudest today."
~ Thomas Zimmer
#FourthofJuly #patriotism #WhiteChristianNationalism
/1
https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/the-ambivalence-of-the-fourth-of
"The social vision of the courts manifests itself in both the personal corruption of the judges and in the political thrust of their decisions: eviscerating the rights of women, clamping down on the social mobility that affirmative action provides to marginalized racial and ethnic groups, rolling back long-held labor rights, and curtailing the regulatory and policy-making power of Congress and the president."
~ Jeet Heer
#SupremeCourt #corruption #democracy
/1
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/supreme-court-french-revolution/
In less than a week, the Not-So-Supreme Court has forced these personal beliefs (of theirs) onto the rest of us:
Only white people matter.
Only rich people matter.
Only straight people matter.
Only christian people matter.
Their bible matters more than our Constitution.
RIP Bill of Rights.
"Slavery existed for 250 years in this country, and it’s only not existed for 150. And, you know, the way that I was taught about slavery, growing up, in elementary school, we were made to feel as if it was something that happened in the Jurassic age, that it was the flint stone, the dinosaurs and slavery, almost as if they all happened at the same time."
~ Clint Smith
#Juneteenth #slavery #Emancipation
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/6/19/juneteenth_special_historian_clint_smith_on
We feature a special broadcast on the newly created Juneteenth federal holiday commemorating the day in 1865 when enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, learned of their freedom more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. We begin with our 2021 interview with historian Clint Smith, originally aired a day after President Biden signed legislation to make Juneteenth the first new federal holiday since Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Smith is the author of How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America. “When I think of Juneteenth, part of what I think about is the both/andedness of it,” Smith says, “that it is this moment in which we mourn the fact that freedom was kept from hundreds of thousands of enslaved people for years and for months after it had been attained by them, and then, at the same time, celebrating the end of one of the most egregious things that this country has ever done.” Smith says he recognizes the federal holiday marking Juneteenth as a symbol, “but it is clearly not enough.”
William Lindsey 
