Author: Common Dreams

I remember being thirteen and staying up to see if Trayvon Martin’s killer would be convicted. The announcement of the verdict kept being pushed back, but I kept watching — hoping that the anguish I was feeling would somehow be resolved by seeing George Zimmerman jailed. My mom said the delay was tactical: designed so more people would be too busy sleeping to riot when the verdict came up not guilty. I, naive and accustomed to being called smart for my age, thought it impossible. A kid—a Black Florida teenager, just like me—was stalked and killed for no reason....

The chaos and violence that are unfolding in Kenosha looks like the beginning of a civil war. I feel as though I am watching some natural disaster develop, suddenly overpowering any hope for social change “before it’s too late.” Is it already too late—that is to say, too late to disarm our concept of social order and, for God’s sake, safety? The American problem of guns is not only that there are so many of them, vastly more than there are people; and that they are deemed, by so many Americans, necessary for survival and empowerment, commanding a reverence...

“Trump is coming to [Kenosha] to use us as a prop in his commercial to scare White people to get votes.” – Rev. Jesse Jackson The community of Kenosha, Wisconsin countered President Donald Trump’s visit to the city on Tuesday, September 1, with a “Justice for Jacob” rally in the neighborhood where Jacob Blake was shot by a police officer last week, intent on spending the day focused on “resilience and compassion.” “We don’t need more pain and division from a president set on advancing his campaign at the expense of our city,” said Jacob Blake’s uncle, Justin Blake....