With last week’s jury decision in the sentencing phase of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s trial, we find ourselves at an interesting crossroads. The jury decided that Dzhokhar, found guilty last month, deserved the death penalty. He was 19 at the time he committed the crime of helping his older, more violent brother Tamarlane set off a deadly explosion at the 2013 Boston Marathon.

With this decision, the city of Boston finds itself in a crisis of conscience, disappointed that the jury in federal court was in favor of capital punishment. A recent poll found 85% of Bostonians opposed Tsarnaev’s execution.

Of that group some felt that with a death penalty the appeals process would take months — if not years — giving those who lost someone in the bombings and families of bombing survivors no chance of immediate closure. It would be better for them to imprison him the rest of his life and have done with it.

Tsarnaev’s sentence comes just as Americans are experiencing a growing shift away from capital punishment. Though 63% of the country still favor the death penalty, that number drops significantly — to 50% — when faced with a choice of life imprisonment without possibility of parole.

Though a large swath of the country trails behind Massachusetts’ view on capital punishment (and although many in Massachusetts simply did not want Dzhokhar to be made a martyr), it appears that an increasing number of states are distancing themselves from executing criminals. What has happened?

Massachusetts is one of eighteen states that have abolished the death penalty. Included in this list are Michigan, Illinois, Maine, Iowa, North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, West Virginia, Maryland, the District of Columbia, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont, New Mexico, Alaska and Hawaii.

Of the remaining states still employing capital punishment, eight are reevaluating use of the most common and less gruesome form of execution — lethal injection — because of the European Commission’s export ban on the drugs used for the procedure. These same states are fielding questions regarding the constitutionality of the death sentence in general.

Being against capital punishment is no longer the realm of liberals. Many former proponents of the death penalty have come out against it. As Eric covered in a 2003 edition of Planet Waves, one conservative — former Illinois Governor George Ryan — found Illinois’ criminal justice system so fallible and corrupt that he commuted the death sentences of 167 inmates on death row.

The federal government itself is reluctant to carry out executions. From 1973 to 2010, federal courts sentenced 69 inmates to death. Yet of those 69, only three have been executed, one of them Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber.

We’re in a moment of reflection on where we’ve been and where we’re going — as communities, and as a nation. There’s a strong undercurrent, rising slowly to the surface, surrounding the Tsarnaev judgment. People in Boston and the rest of the country at this point in our history are questioning what we’ve been doing and why. It’s a hopeful sign.

Soon after 9-11, military retribution against nations considered to be terror threats played a large part in our foreign policy, with disastrous results. The use of our criminal justice system to try alleged terrorists, or “enemy combatants,” in our domestic courts was considered unthinkable. That we tried Tsarnaev at all in a federal court is remarkable, especially since some “enemy combatants” still languish in Guantanamo.

By varying degrees Bostonians and the people of the region are united in their centuries-old aversion to the death penalty. They have held to this aversion even in this instance.

I am trying hard not to kid myself or you that we are on the downhill slope and heading fast towards abolishing capital punishment in America. Not with Texas as the frontrunner in prisoner executions, and with Florida and Oklahoma a distant second. We’re still running a death row machine in America. But America is following a slow downward trend in capital punishment, in fifth place behind China, Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

There’s growing acknowledgement that our judicial system is still human, and therefore flawed. Too many have been killed and their innocence revealed only after their executions. Then there is the very current example of Boston, a city with a crisis of conscience even in the wake of the death sentence of a young man who, still a teenager, followed and assisted his brother in committing a horrible act of terror the day of the Boston Marathon. There is some soul-searching going on.

It is a given that Tsarnaev’s defense team will probably post an appeal. What is more natural for a Mercury station and void-of-course Moon — the day the sentence was announced — than to go back over what has happened? As demonstrated by Bostonians’ dismayed reaction to Tsarnaev’s death sentence, the seemingly endless appeals process will mean Tsarnaev will be alive with an uncertain future in prison for a while.

“As a city upon a hill — the eyes of all people are upon us.” That is what Puritan John Winthrop said of Boston when it was established nearly 400 years ago. Boston is aware of that historic role and the symbolic hill it stands on, even today. All eyes are watching it as America struggles through the complexities of dispensing justice against the backdrop of violence and vindictiveness in its recent past.

What will history say of us at this moment five, ten, twenty, a hundred years from now? Are we watching a trend towards being more humane taking root in our society as it teeters on shaky legs? With violence of the last decade and the countless years of war littering our past from the late 20th century into today, that would be remarkable. It might even be real justice. History will tell us.

I am not officially on the Hillary bandwagon, but I am officially following after the Hillary train as it leaves the station. I plan to be on it soon enough. I don’t know when exactly, but I know I will be. I still feel a little ambivalent about Hillary Rodham Clinton.

That ambivalence started with the hotly contested South Carolina Democratic primary in 2008 when Bill and Hillary’s campaign was not shy to ‘go there’ about candidate Barack Obama’s blackness: they were dogwhistling — making racist innuendo — loudly, and in the South, about the great black menace creeping in on her campaign. But time, like water, marches on; she and President Obama kissed and made up, and she became Secretary of State.

Here we are almost eight years later. Now before we plunge into who is more liberal, progressive and left-leaning than Hillary, let’s start with where we’re at as a nation. Though my bouts of ambivalence about Hillary are slowly fading, I am not ambivalent about the state of disrepair of public discourse in America.

There are serious lessons we have yet to learn from the current administration and its social aftermath, which will probably affect the next administration, whoever will be leading it, and the possible reactions to it. It’s that potential aftermath that concerns me — unless a white man wins the office — and that feeling is more intense and focused than my ambivalence towards Hillary Clinton.

We’ve seen what kind of backlash nearly eight years of President Obama’s administration has inadvertently created: elected officials in Congress publicly using racist and demeaning language undercutting the President and his actions. When our leaders — a state representative, a congressman, senator or even a presidential or vice-presidential candidate — use terms like “terrorist,” “Muslim,” or “welfare-loving” in describing the President and his actions, it filters down to the rest of us that it’s okay to openly express this type of ignorance.

These words matter. The president’s opponents’ words act as a tacit sanction. It gives ‘permission’ to feel that way. The people who most feel that way will not only use those terms, some will use them as an excuse to act on them — especially if they themselves feel fearful, powerless and victimized. It also serves an agenda. You don’t have to go that far back in our recent history to see it happen. Check the news: Tampa, Ferguson, New York, Baltimore, Oakland. Look at the new voting prohibition laws in many states.

Under these circumstances what would a Clinton 2 presidency mean in 2016? Since Bill was president, Hillary Rodham Clinton has been called everything in the book. Yes, she’s a grownup and can more than handle it: she slams her detractors right back and doesn’t give a whit what they think. I think that’s what scares her enemies the most. So scared they start a whisper campaign two years before she even gives an inkling that she’s running. Check the news: Benghazi.

With the breathtaking number of new anti-choice laws in state legislatures around the country just in 2015 alone, the likelihood of backlash against women in a Clinton 2 administration is high. Reminding women of their place is a basic tenet of the extreme conservative agenda and has been for years. This includes how much you’re worth, whether you can press charges against your rapist and have them stand in court, and what you can do with your uterus. In short, the 21st century conservative backlash is in a 1950s overdrive.

Am I over-reacting? Maybe. But in the American experience these last eight years — starting with George Bush II’s twilight and moving into the current Obama Administration — we have scraped the veneer off the aging patriarchal monster that holds the reins of power. Tightly. And it still wants more. I don’t have a lot of faith that our leadership in Congress and in state government are going to evolve out of their current state of ignorance, racism and misogyny anytime soon. 

Yet, their fearfulness is the clue. The patriarchy is seeing its demise ever more likely on the horizon: eight years of a black president, followed by the possibility of a woman in the White House. With the steady voting block of the elderly — a conservative mainstay — diminishing, followed by younger, more progressive Millennial voters coming up, the patriarchy is driving harder and faster on a track we’ve covered long before. But we’ve been there, done that.

Patriarchies like Rome, like ours, die hard. That said, the campaign to put the patriarchy on palliative care needs to begin so that it can ease into hospice. We need to not only get out the vote, but educate the younger generation — starting from 16 years and on — to encourage them to get involved early and vote when they come of age. And maybe we can learn a thing or two from them on how to use our electronic devices better to master social media.

We could get our brothers and sisters up on our arthritic knees to post flyers and signs, because soon enough — less than six months before the real primaries begin — the rhetoric will start in earnest. It’s already begun as a new not-so-subtle whisper campaign dripping with condescension. Let’s see what we can do to punch back. Ambivalence over. Check.

Sitting here on this side of the great Atlantic Pond, my heart and mind had to take a day to absorb and reflect on the killing of Charlie Hebdo‘s cartoonists in Paris. I needed to bring myself to a place outside the borders of shock and horror. The announcement of the shootings arrived like a dagger in the heart.

As an American — or at least an American who has been paying attention — one cannot help but see similar reactions to the Paris shootings as we saw for 9-11.

Yet, even though the alleged perpetrators are the same, the events are different, the countries and cultures are different, and yes, the motivations and causes are disparately different. But what makes these two events similar — Sept. 11, 2001, and the Charlie Hebdo shootings of Jan. 7, 2015 — is that it is an attack of symbols, with the price paid in human life.

As an artist all my life and a political one as well, it is here that we must appreciate and recognize the magnificent, voiceless power of imagery. Image transcends rhetoric, which we misquote and always misuse. Images etch themselves firmly in the minds of those who look at and appreciate them. Images inform how we look at the world, any world, literally and figuratively.

I can only conclude therefore that in the minds of the killers who stormed Charlie Hebdo‘s offices this week, that they must have thought they were killing gods. At least, the gods of mirth.

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“This is now a national moment of grief, a national moment of pain and searching for a solution. And you’ve heard in so many places, people of all backgrounds utter the same basic phrase. They’ve said “Black lives matter.” And they said it because it had to be said. It’s a phrase that should never have to be said. It should be self-evident. But our history, sadly, requires us to say that black lives matter.” – NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio

For two nights in a row, after the announcement of no finding to prosecute Darren Wilson for the shooting death of Michael Brown by the Ferguson grand jury, I went to bed to the sounds of helicopters hovering over downtown Oakland.

Downtown is about a 15 minute drive from my house on the Oakland-Berkeley border. Like so many other nights in our country: following the riots and demonstrations on the streets of LA in response to LAPD’s brutality in the arrest of Rodney King; the shooting death of Oscar Grant by BART Officer Johannes Mehserle in Oakland; the Ferguson, Missouri, grand jury decision; and now New York’s grand jury refusal to indict NYPD officer David Pantoleo for the choking death of Eric Garner.

It comes again like a bad dream: the choppers, the cries, the mass demonstrations. The justice that never seems to come. And from this dream, we can’t seem to ever wake up. This is the heartbreak that living and dying while black or Latino or a person of color has become in America. Heartbreak in that the one thing that could be afforded — justice — is the least given. There is no one and nothing, not even the law, that could be counted on to help you. And for most, it has been that way for generations.

Since Barack Obama was elected President in 2008, at the start of Uranus and Pluto’s square, America’s current events seem to be tying the ends together: from electing our first African-American president, to the infuriating ignorance and racism — in forms both direct and subtle — very much alive every day and pulsing underneath the veneer of President Obama’s America. It’s change that is coming, no matter how painful. This is our war coming home.

It’s in the striking news photo of the St. Louis Rams — an NFL team — showing solidarity with the people of Ferguson by coming out on the field with their hands up. A gesture remarkably like that of John Carlos and Tommie Smith, their fists up in the air in a Black Power salute at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City (another time period affected by Uranus and Pluto’s conjunction).

It’s in the streets of Times Square, with thousands waiting for the grand jury decision. It’s in a time when parenting a black child — for parents like Mayor De Blasio — has the extra-onerous burden of making sure that child does not act in a manner that will trigger a policeman’s ill-judged trigger-happy reflex.

The chickens that have come home to roost during this Uranus-Pluto square are no longer on our doorstep. They are in our living rooms. And it’s a sobering, teachable moment of how much more work we have to do as a country, as individuals and a society. As Jon Stewart said last night: “We are definitely not living in a post-racial society, and I can imagine there’s a lot of people out there wondering, ‘How much of a society do we live in at all?’”

The work we thought we completed with the Great Society is not yet finished. There is so much else to do. Race matters. And the road ahead looks long. In response to the Ferguson decision, Atlantic Monthly columnist Ta Nehisi-Coates sums up our modern-day “post-racial” society in the age of our first African-American President this way:

“… the death of all of our Michael Browns at the hands of people who are supposed to protect them originates in a force more powerful than any president: American society itself. This is the world our collective American ancestors wanted. This is the world our collective grandparents made. And this is the country that we, the people, now preserve in our fantastic dream. What can never be said is that the Fergusons of America can be changed — but, right now, we lack the will to do it.

Perhaps one day we won’t, and maybe that is reason to hope. Hope is what Barack Obama promised to bring, but he was promising something he could never bring. Hope is not the naiveté that would change the face on a racist system and then wash its hands of its heritage. Hope is not feel-goodism built on the belief in unicorns. Martin Luther King had hope, but it was rooted in years of study and struggle, not in looking the other way. Hope is not magical. Hope is earned.”

It’s hard to feel positive these days with injustice rampant in our worlds here at home. Yet, I do not feel anger. I feel more like my friend and colleague, Rhodessa Jones, who ends all her correspondence with the words, “In the spirited struggle, life flows.” I feel resolved to contribute much more to the discussion and resolution of the wound of racism and sexism that locks us all together in a room, struggling through the rage, the guilt and the acceptance that must come if we are to move forward on a path to heal from the racial, cultural and social divides that keep us apart.

In that way, paraphrasing Filipino writer Carlos Bulosan’s book America is in the Heart, I say Ferguson is in mine. And I keep it there, like I do Oakland, South Central LA and New York. The  wound of racial injustice caused by racism — subtle and not so subtle — must be worked out through our thoughts, interactions and deeds. A lot like when the body works hard every day when injured or sick —  cell by cell, antibody by antibody —  gradually healing an illness out of the system. Now more than ever in the struggle for justice, everything we do matters.

I turned off the tv a few moments after President Obama concluded his remarks on the results of the Ferguson grand jury finding on the death of Michael Brown. CNN was breaking to their live coverage of the “anticipated violence” that indeed St. Louis police, federal and state troopers were all sent in to quell.

We heard about this three hours before. They knew — the press and the police — what the decision was going to be. And they were prepared for it. The commentators were hinting at it all along.

A voyeuristic circus of coverage followed Ferguson’s protestors, documenting a community in agony. This was no longer news. It was social and cultural pornography. “See? This is what THEY do.” Violent. Angry. No respect for property.

That was when I turned off the television.

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This morning’s post-election aftermath compelled a short bout of soul-searching on my part, as well as on the part of so many of us frustrated by the politics of today. Yet today, on Facebook of all places, I found a post written by Davey D Cook from my hometown of Oakland, CA that has so resonated with my thoughts that I want to share it with our readers. It provides a vivid moment of clarity during this post-midterm shit storm. — Fe-911
By Davey “D” Cook

Well folks, the people have spoken with their choice of candidate or their willingness to sit it out and make a statement of how unhappy they are with the system or the electoral process. The agendas of those who are now in control of both houses has been made crystal clear for a number of years. Hence look for them to carry it out full steam.

The privatization of schools, medicare, social security and the elimination of safety net programs are all on the menu. Look for them to go full steam ahead with pushing forth Keystone XL and TPP (Trans Pacific Partnership aka NAFTA on steroids). Both of those projects, this current President strongly supports.

Look for them to dismantle any progress legislatively made around Climate Change. Look for non-profits to come under close scrutiny and to be investigated by folks who are now heading up ethics and judicial committees who felt such orgs were thorns in the side. We all knew this going into last night’s election when we made our choices.

Some will say that it doesn’t matter. Bending to the will of the rich and powerful is what all elected officials do. ‘They were gonna jack up common folks anyway’ is what some will claim.

Perhaps. But the bottom line is this. The person you vote into office is done to give your MOVEMENT more time to build itself up with the goal of being an unavoidable, unbreakable factor…There was and should always be push-back on those who are in power until you get everything you want and need sans being severely compromised. In many parts of the country what will unfold is the strength or weaknesses in our movements. What will be made clear in the months to come is how and what ways do movements need to define and redefine themselves. And by movement we are talking about a group of people who are able to galvanize folks around an idea or vision and see it to fruition.

In terms of yesterday’s outcome, many will put analysis and all types of spin on the results. Was this the result of low voter turn-out? In some places one might make that claim. Was it voter suppression? In some places you could definitely see how. But to be honest, neither of these factors are excusable.

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