The aftermath of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan got me thinking about leadership, messianism, and anarchist tactics.
On the day of the assassination, I found myself picking up and starting to read a book that’s been sitting on one of my backlog piles for years, Vittorio Lanternari’s 1963 The Religions of the Oppressed: A [...]
“Stop me if I start to turn this into a story. It’s not a narrative that makes sense. It’s just what happened.”
That’s what I said to my former therapist a couple of years ago when I went back to her for help in working through the aftermath of a rape that had happened the year [...]
As many Catholics celebrate midnight mass, I’m remembering one of my all-time favorite activist actions. Back in the early 1990s, I was a member of the Ann Arbor chapter of ACTUP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). One day, a bunch of us were having coffee after a meeting when we realized that a disproportionate number [...]
Did this every happen to you in childhood? Someone does something wrong while the teacher isn’t looking. Getting no response to her demand that the perpetrator step forward or be named, the teacher punishes the whole class. You didn’t do it. You don’t know who did it. Even if you did know who did it, [...]
