We are six days from the South Carolina Democratic primary. Bernie Sanders took New Hampshire, and Hillary Clinton won Nevada. Both are at a virtual tie in Iowa. Super Tuesday — with 12 primaries in varying southern states, as well as Massachusetts and Minnesota — looms before us.

I still haven’t made a decision on who to vote for. But before we discuss voting preferences on the Democratic side in 2016, I want to go over the last time we faced such a period of social momentum: the 1960s.

I have been lucky enough to witness five Democratic presidents in office. During the last Uranus-Pluto aspect of the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement was the social spur in the side of the establishment. President Lyndon Baines Johnson, or LBJ, strong-armed congressmen and senators to yield to vote for legislation creating the Great Society. Under his administration civil rights was signed into law banning racial discrimination in housing, public facilities, interstate commerce and the workplace. Republicans weren’t as rabid as they are now, and Democrats were far more conservative then.

Under Johnson, public broadcasting, Medicare, Medicaid, aid to education, the arts, urban and rural development, public services, and the “War on Poverty” was started. The Voting Rights Act banned certain requirements in southern states used to disenfranchise African Americans. With passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, immigration was reformed, removing all racial origin quotas and replacing them with national origin quotas.

From today’s lens, it was a miracle that a former senator from Texas (a southern state) was able to move legislation to bring about the Civil Rights Act and Medicare. But the miracle had to have public pressure from below to make the rafters of Congress shake and make progress. Johnson was strongly supported by his own party and was assisted in part by the growing economy fueled by World War II and the Cold War.

The world LBJ created with his legislation became the third rail — an integral fixture of American government along with Social Security. This is the foundation that the Republican Party — slowly and from the ground up — has been working to dismantle. It started with the tax revolt that paved the way for the Reagan Era, the chipping away of voting rights, and even disabling a progressive agency started by the Nixon Administration — the EPA.

At every turn, Republicans took advantage of their time in the White House and Congress to nominate Supreme Court Justices who reflected their conservative aspirations. With each appointment, they achieved greater mainstream viability for their views and agenda — while us poor, dirty hippies and black and brown folks faded into the background, or were sent to prison.

Which brings us to today, 2016, with all of us pushed against the wall. Even with a Democratic President in his last year in office, we have a Republican majority in Congress — and now, with Scalia’s death, a deadlocked Supreme Court. This is a structure not built to last; instability is imminent. If the push is not from the inside, the outside will do the work. Therefore, the use of the word “revolution” as used by the Sanders campaign is something we cannot take lightly.

Not with the forces we are pushing out against. The conservative movement started slowly, assembling after Nixon’s resignation to prevent that from ever happening to a Republican president again. That movement is now a powerful, established base that has not only gerrymandered congressional districts — with the aid of a conservative Supreme Court — but infiltrated school districts, governor’s offices, city councils, libraries, commissions, as well as local and regional courts.

Bill Clinton’s impeachment in 1998 was a coup d’etat that Republicans hope to repeat again in 2016 with Hillary’s emails and Benghazi brouhaha. With Sanders, all they have to do is touch a filament on this spider web they have woven with the message of “socialist” to keep the whisper campaign against him hot, scaring the bejeezus out of gun-toting, Bible-beating conservatives in small towns across the US.

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There is a reason why the current Democratic leadership — the Democratic National Committee (DNC) — is as wary of Sanders as the nominee as the Republican National Committee is of Donald Trump. Trump has the charisma and money to buy the election and screw the base that Republicans took decades to build. There is a Republican majority in Congress to support him.

Sanders followers are highly wary of the DNC because they represent the corrupt establishment. Yet it is there the foundation of a Democratic agenda and platform, built by Howard Dean, can take place in congressional, senate, regional and local elections. Ground up. It is there that a necessary congressional majority can be built for either Democratic nominee. Will the Democrats be as splintered as the Republicans are becoming? Time will tell.

A revolution needs everything. From sewing needles to yard signs, weekly organizing meetings to coffee, cookies and pizza for phone bankers to make things happen. And not just for presidential elections, but for midterms, governor’s races, city councils, and government commissions. Not just this year but next. We have a lot of work ahead of us, and enthusiasm can get it started; but persistence must sustain it if we want to see the changes we yearn for now.

So my choice today is to see what happens in South Carolina and the rest of the states next Tuesday. My choice is to see who remains standing so that together we can start a long march down the road of sanity to bring this nation and planet to the future we all deserve.

When word of Justice Scalia’s death reached me, I was deep in rehearsals on a play about the history of Asian immigrants in the Bay Area. As one of the cast members announced it during a break, we all stood there in stunned silence. It was an unreal moment. Time stopped dead in its tracks.

I always feel a little uncomfortable making light of the dead, but I couldn’t help but titter when I found a Facebook post with a picture of the late Supreme Court Justice with the caption “Antonin Scalia killed by Gay Marriage.” Another Facebook post by a friend of mine chimed “Ding dong the witch is dead,” confusing every last one of our international friends; but we, his American colleagues, knew exactly who he was talking about.

Appointed by President Reagan in 1986, Antonin Scalia was an arch conservative fixture, a bristly thorn in our progressive backside for 30 years. Yes. Thirty years. Tempered by the more moderate and liberal justices on the bench at the beginning of his term, Scalia was a bit of a throwback, a big departure from the liberal Warren court.

He provided florid entertainment in his rigid definition of case law, always taking the conservative side. Yet we saw in our peripheral vision, with the aging and retirements of the more moderate and liberal members of the court, that the SCOTUS was starting to list center-right even back then.

It’s like how, if you have a mole on your skin, you tend to watch — at the advice of your physician — to see how it develops. The slow evolution of the court was a mole that needed watching. In 2000, the alarm was raised when the Supreme Court’s Bush v. Gore decision handed the Presidency to George W. Bush.

The listing of the boat was no longer subtle or slow, but completely turned around. We were definitely veering right. Roughly halfway into Scalia’s tenure in the Court, he, Justice Clarence Thomas and his fellow justices stretched the law beyond its limits, subverting the will of the electorate. We know what happened next. The appointment of conservative John Roberts by President Bush completed the hold of power by conservatives in Washington. The right-wing revolution started by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s was complete.

Which brings us to today, 16 years later; a two-term Democratic President is in his last year in office. The Democratic Party — a minority now in the House and Senate — is energized by young people who have grown up in a world where the conservative movement has tried to wrest control their lives, bodies and livelihoods. We are at a tipping point, with young adults pushing to move the country left. In the meantime, Republicans are pushing to go over the cliff.

Looking at the history between 1986 (the year Antonin Scalia was appointed) to 2016 (the year he died), we’re at the apex of a pendulum’s movement. Everything’s at its most extreme. The only way we’re going is an immediate and clearly discernible reaction — a long time coming — and likely a complete departure from what was coming at us back in the 1980s. Just as how what we encountered in the 1980s was a reaction to what happened in the late 1950s and ’60s, and so on and so on.

So explains that moment of stunned silence and disbelief with the news of Scalia’s passing at rehearsal Saturday. It was a minute of time standing still for all of us old enough to remember the first shock, followed by more and more of the rising conservative movement — the Reagan Revolution — that brought us to this point in time.

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Justice Antonin Scalia was the arbiter of that movement and its culture. Scalia tipped the scales his own way, always sliding towards the right, no matter how time and even his fellow conservative justices leaned in towards the middle. But that is how scales should work, be it the scales of justice or the large cosmological scales that hold our collective destinies.

I have to continue reminding myself that, as with the I Ching, every action instigates reaction. Moment to moment, movement to movement. Every obstruction meets with the water of emotions reacting against it, flowing through and around it, wearing out the block.

Looking at it in that way, Antonin Scalia — the thorn in our liberal behinds — gave us reason to be relentless in pursuit of bringing justice back in balance. We had to work hard to perfect our arguments to overcome Scalia’s judicial interpretation. He was a hard-edged rock, a justice whose constant conservative tipping of the scales gave us impetus to fight harder for gay marriage and for women’s reproductive freedom.

He was an antagonist we had to come to respect no matter how much we disagreed with him. Since SCOTUS appointments are lifetime positions, we had no choice. In his role he strengthened our resolve, giving us liberals and progressives the muscle to push back. So as much as I have disagreed with him, today I tip my hat to the adversary who made us better fighters in the end.

Dear Planet Waves friends around the world:

I am reclining on my pillow, an hour or so before the midnight of my 61st solar return. It’s so windy outside our house in Oakland I can hear tree branches scrawling the house on either side, as if they’re writing on the walls of the building. As my Santero friends would say, “Oya, goddess of winds and earthquakes is speaking. Change is coming.”

There’s a windstorm outside tonight, weather-wise and metaphorically. My trusty iPad is a fine friend to blog with, allowing me the comfort of writing while semi-horizontal and under warm blankets this late January night, waiting for what the day will bring tomorrow here in Oakland, California, or in Des Moines, Iowa. It’s hard to say.

It feels like we’re at an anaretic degree — if not astrologically, at least sociologically and politically. One thing is for certain, while the state of Ohio is the last indicator on election night of who is going to the White House in November, it’s the Iowa caucuses that click into place the first piece of the American presidential puzzle in February. It’s going to be a long nine months, and the seeds are being planted today.

For all of us around the world interested in the American elections, you can feel a sea change here. Whether we begin the nomination process of putting the first female Presidential candidate or the first Jewish Democratic socialist on the ticket, we are again — as in 2008 — doing something new. For this round, at least in the non-Trump party, we are by varying degrees pushing for change.

As a Democrat (as I have mentioned before), I remain outside the circle of participants for any candidate. I have elected to sit this one out to see how the process works its way through — at least until March and Super Tuesday. All my friends from previous campaigns are feeling the same way. Which way to go?

Do we change incrementally, as President Obama suggested we do, and move in a slower, more grinding pace to force the intractable — the government — to move? Or do we change more aggressively, following the path of resistance against the forces that still have a stranglehold on American politics?

The big decisions come with even greater factors — how much more do we want to watch an unyielding Congress hold yet another mindless fact-finding committee hearing, slowing government down to a halt? How much more of the middle class do we watch slip away as families struggle to make ends meet?

Our problems are based on an ongoing argument: How much government do we want and need? And where is it needed most? Democrats — the more progressive of the two parties — are asking that question while up against a Republican Party so hell-bent on destroying government, that our country would be unrecognizable as a republic should they prevail. Today, it’s that big a deal here.

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Many of us are scared, uncertain of where we’re going. That goes for both parties. Some of that fear has been coerced. Many of us know where it comes from, but also many don’t care — they just feel scared. That anxiety colors everyone’s feelings and thoughts this primary day in Iowa.

Yet, I also (foolishly perhaps) trust Iowans. At least for the primaries. It’s a community-based, consensus building, highly literate population. They don’t like being told how to think. They think for themselves.

So I am, like so many today in the other 49 states, waiting and watching for the clock to tick past the seconds leading to the final tally on this February 1st, my sixty-first solar return. Secretary of State Clinton and Senator Sanders are running in basically a dead heat, according to the Des Moines Register. Donald f*&%ing Trump is leading all other Republican candidates, and will likely be the Republican nominee.

We’re on the cusp of a story waiting to be told about the temperature, grit and sanity of our body politic. Today, our people begin to speak. How crazy are we going to get? Send us some good energy out there. We’re going to need it.

Even though 2016 marks the beginning of the political calendar in America, as the Republican Party winnows its nominees and steps up its game in Iowa and New Hampshire, this Fe-911 is going to take a side road into popular culture to start this new year.

As those of you who follow my Facebook posts know, I celebrated the incoming New Year at a Patti Smith concert at the Fillmore in San Francisco.

To say it was a flashback to all the Grateful Dead and Santana New Year’s Eve celebrations would only be partially correct. First of all, acting as designated driver for the evening, I was completely dry. Second, the tolerance threshold for my knees, standing up for five hours straight after a day of running errands and tidying things up at the office, was reaching its maximum limit.

But I found that after forty-odd years, my rock-and-roll soul was still intact. As were the rock-and-roll souls of the majority of grey beards and silver vixens in attendance. The Pluto in Leo generation is alive and living well, living hard, and living boldly. Particularly this chilly New Year’s night. Performing a day after her solar return, Capricorn Patti Smith was the ultimate Pluto-in-Leo queen: irrepressible, raucous, dramatically outspoken and free. She and her band reprised the entire album Horses.

Listening to her songs again after so many years, the timeless truth in her lyrics is as firmly etched as letters carved in stone. This was amplified by listening to her work again while Pluto traverses her natal Sun sign, making her work even more transformative now, in retrospect.

I never really was a Patti Smith fan when I was young, as she burst upon the music scene in the ’70s. I was fresh out of Catholic school and pretty naive and innocent of the world, though I did like to pretend I was politically progressive — at least as politically progressive as an 18-year-old can get living in Watsonville, California.

I remember enjoying “Because the Night” when it first came out, especially working late night in the studios at San Francisco State University, completing courses for my art degree. There was something about the drive in that song that made me feel the burgeoning of my own adult, independent and feminist individuality. I never bought any of her records back then. Patti’s was never the music we could play with parents in earshot, which we know now was part of her original appeal.

Observing her as a generational peer, her life’s work as an artist and activist is an inspiration. She’s sounded off on war, religion and government, and has been doing it for decades. “Jesus died for your sins, not mine”; the closing words of her version of “Gloria” rings true today in its defiance of oppressive religious convention, which even now attempts to contain us, especially women. God I love that line.

Watching and listening to her at the Fillmore the other night, the body of 40 years of her work loomed large. Poet, author, punk performance artist, collaborator with Springsteen, lover of Robert Mapplethorpe: the big picture of her life revealed a woman standing on her own, expressing a passionate individuality. The cumulative history of her art and activism became as clear and full as a Michelangelo sculpture.

If I seem like just a bandwagon fan because I saw her live for the first time this year, I need to clarify. I have a newfound appreciation for Patti Smith because hers is the voice of the castaway woman, the one whose presence makes you face your truths — dark and light. You can’t help but think of Eris when you listen to the emotional timber of her voice. It’s a voice that comes from somewhere deep, crying out for love and justice in a single breath, punctuated by her spitting on the stage.

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When we study artists, living or dead, it’s important to remember when and where their art comes from. In what context was it created? What was happening in the early ’70s that made us dark and angry, and how is it represented by Patti Smith’s music?

There still was war in Vietnam, spreading into Cambodia and Laos. Nixon was president, and discontent was the aftermath of the late Sixties. The changes we wanted were not coming fast enough, and those in power were interested in only one thing: keeping it. It was the birth of the new conservatism that evolved to what we see now as the metastasized Republican Party: Mr. Cruz, Mr. Trump, et al. Some things don’t change easily.

The young ethos of Patti Smith’s rise and the punk rock music scene’s burgeoning is now mature with a wisdom that history and current events validate. Our culture generated this voice of loud dissent and fury, and it still has value today. So many of the same conditions that birthed it remain. We have a reason to be creatively furious enough to generate noise and make big energy. There is inertia to overcome.

As balloons cascaded down and confetti rained on us at the stroke of midnight, Patti reminded us on this New Year’s night that we should not listen to the assholes running for President, or to the government, or to religions.

We still have our own minds and hearts; and we are, each of us, free people. Remember that, for the year to come, wherever you are in the world — and as we in the United States enter the dog race for President, which begins in hyper-drive this month.

“People Have the Power.” Use it.

I’ve been home with my family for 24 hours and because of the cold, wet, wintry days, we’ve been either cooking, eating, punching the keyboard or wrestling with the dog. My niece’s dog Taz — a German Shepard-Labrador mix — is less than a year old and looks as though she’s big enough to eat my sister.

Because she is a puppy, she still thinks when she jumps up on you that you’d be happy enough to let her leap into your arms. But at 75 pounds and growing, we’re a bit past that point.

Our days together are peppered with intermittent screams of “Taz, don’t eat my shoes!” Or “Taz why do you have to be under all our feet while we’re trying to cook?” Or that desperate, searching, panicked question, “Taz, what is that in your mouth?”

If you haven’t guessed by now, the family gathering at my sister’s house for the holidays is a warm mash of love and chaos. And we like it that way. We’re in celebratory mode. Both my sister’s kids are newly employed in the ‘real world’ while our generation — their mom, pop and me — beam proudly, with a big sigh of relief to the side. My niece’s young man is celebrating his birthday with us, a Solstice Eve natal return. His fourth one in a row here.

We’re a family that’s growing and expanding, and this week we’re experiencing our gathering once more at the solstice fire. A busy eventful year has come to an end.

Witnessing my niece and nephew grow into adulthood, I still hold on to mementos from phases of our family’s history. I have a picture I took with my niece when she was just three years old in a photo booth at the Santa Cruz boardwalk. In my bathroom, I keep a hand-built ceramic vase my nephew made in his middle school art class. It’s been broken in a few places over the years and I have re-assembled it each time, repairing it kintsugi style: using epoxy and gold mica powder to fill the cracks, the repair of the vase making it more beautiful than it was before. Perfect in its imperfection.

Approaching the year’s end, you can’t do anything but think about time. How far we’ve come. What has been. Time, for me especially, continues to be observed and measured in children — actual and creative. These days as a dramaturg I’ve been either writing, editing, or looking at everything from scripts to videos that cover twenty years of my working in the Medea Project.

Yesterday, I caught a glimpse of myself on stage in a video shot twenty years ago. As I looked at that me on the tape, and then looked up at a mirror close by, I had a clear opportunity to see on my face where time did its work. Because I have allowed the creative to be expressed all my life, I was happy to see that time’s work was gentle. I felt appreciation, not regret, for the life and the choices I have made. And for that, I am grateful I never had any kids. Not physical ones. All my creations were my children, and I’ve been pregnant for a long time.

For me, the measurement of time — because I now have a body of work to look back upon — has begun to include the trueness of the art. Do my creations still have relevance or were they satisfactory just for the moment? What does my work say to me now? Does it still even need to say anything? Does it still make sense?

Then I realize I’m not just measuring time in duration but in meaning. I realize there is a pattern forming in my work and in my life that’s moving outward and growing. A seed planted long ago has become the tree, branching upward.

I’m putting away the past, reminding myself to stay in the present. I am a work in progress, a self-exploring, often doubtful, volatile-minded woman who is still trying to open more doors inside, to see what mysteries await there.

How much love is there to have? How many notes are there to sing? Does everything have to be meaningful? Can’t life just be? And then you realize there are still more questions, bigger questions that you need to ask — and to answer for yourself.

Throughout my life I’ve always wondered how I would reconcile my love of and attachment to family with my aspirations outward. But my chart drew it out for me long ago like a map. My 5th house South Node, Jupiter and Uranus in family-loving Cancer was reaching across the wheel to my 10th house Venus in Sagittarius and 11th house North Node in Capricorn.

My familia. We’ve held ourselves together by tradition, love, down-to-earthness, fun and nourishment. Some days I feel like running away from them. Others, I miss them so that I need them like a flower needing rain. I come home now to recharge the batteries as well as to stay in touch. I then go back to the city and to my life, ready to take the reins back and drive. I don’t forget that because my family is such a grounding force, I can fly.

It’s not always going to be like this. The kids will one day have their own kids and we will all be older. But today, reflecting on the past year this Solstice, a little love and chaos on the longest night on our half of the Earth isn’t at all bad, even with a dog with a history of questionable somethings in her mouth. It’s all family. And whether it’s your blood family, adopted family or preferred family, wherever you feel most comfortable being you in all your various facets, flaws and feelings, that is perfect even in its imperfection. It’s what I define as home.

See you in the comments.

More than 100 leaders are meeting right now to haggle over the details of a response to global warming that will not stem what is already happening: rising ocean temperatures are melting polar ice caps, increasing sea levels and changing global weather patterns.

This temperature rise is the cause of drought, famine, deadly storms, the drowning of small island nations and, in the case of Syria, may be the root cause of a deadly civil war initiated by internal struggles over water usage due to a savage drought. This war has ultimately led to a mass migration of 4.3 million Syrian refugees to countries in Europe, Asia and the Americas, creating immense economic and social pressure on all nations involved.

Yet, because of global warming, there will be more migrations to come. This is not an “if” or a “maybe” but a “when.”

We know current global economic interests cling to an energy infrastructure that world economic powers are loathe to dismantle. There is the elephant in the room: the achingly slow-moving train of the largest polluters — the US and China — to do something, anything, significant to change significantly or at least modify our energy consumption and production.

Any meaningful change is too far away on the horizon to stop what is happening to us right now on the ground. Not with a Congress in the pockets of oil and coal money, and a Supreme Court that made political money from corporations a form of free speech protected by the Constitution.

If this all seems to indicate the planet is in trouble, it is. And yet, people on the ground are rising up. Sunday, the day the Saturn-Neptune square was exact, more than half a million people worldwide participated in demonstrations in advance of the COP 21 Paris Climate Summit. The BBC reports that over 200 climate change protesters were arrested in Paris yesterday. Simultaneous protests occurred yesterday as well in Brazil, Colombia, Australia, the US, the UK, Chile, Kenya, the Marshall Islands and Australia. It was a global alarm clock waking us from our political slumber.

Given the results of the Copenhagen Climate Summit in 2009, I am far from hopeful that the COP 21 will be successful in stemming the political and actual tide in 2015. But perhaps the urgency of the matter is even more in the face of these global leaders, who are attending the talks in Paris just two weeks after an alleged IS attack on the city itself — and with the ongoing global humanitarian crisis facing millions of Syrian refugees still humming loudly in world news.

A global commitment to making change, even a half-hearted one, may be better than none at all. It’s just that the price seems to be going up with each passing day as we delay and compromise. Will we see real commitment for tangible results? There are many challenges and opportunities that face these leaders, specifically from the US, UK, China and Japan — the world’s biggest consumers and polluters. Will they see the big picture at all?

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In the title of her book When the Elephants Dance, Tess Uriza Holthe describes the struggle of Filipinos to survive while the US and Japan fought World War II in the Philippines. The big powers — the elephants — fight while the rest of us — the chickens underfoot — run so as to not be crushed.

It’s the same today. The big polluters are the elephants who are dancing while we chickens on the ground tremble in their wake, hoping, praying, protesting and fighting against the wheel that could crush us all.

But it will take that to prevent what seems to be the inevitable from happening; a mighty push from the ground below, as well as a change in the consciousness of those in the grand meeting rooms of the Paris summit. It already has happened and we must all act to prevent it from getting worse.

All our eyes are watching Paris this week and our arms are raised, ready. Even us chickens on the ground can get enough wing speed to rise up and fly. The time to do it was yesterday, but right now will do too.

“Nothing spoils tomorrow more surely than fear of it.” — Len Wallick

Never were more truer words said than what our colleague Len Wallick wrote in his Friday column. From the Mayor of Roanoke, Virginia to the 47 Congressional Democrats who broke against the president and voted with Republicans to place a moratorium on accepting a modest number of Syrian refugees — 10,000 women and children — we have become prey to the easy lie, denying a safer and more hopeful tomorrow for people escaping the terror of war.

It’s easy enough to get people who are only given a certain set of facts to believe a lie. Check out Donald Trump’s tweet: “Eight Syrians were just caught on the southern border trying to get into the U.S. ISIS maybe? I told you so. WE NEED A BIG & BEAUTIFUL WALL!”

What his 130-character summation does not tell you is that members of two Syrian families presented themselves to authorities at the Department of Homeland Security at the Southern Border. The women and children were taken to a family residential center while the men were transferred to a detention center, DHS said.

But because of our terror of ISIS, Syrians, Muslims, and the ghost of 9-11, our minds cannot absorb facts, and so when a lie is repeated, again and again, in various forms and variations, the surface gloss of an innuendo-loaded statement becomes solid evidence. See how easy and dangerous that is?

But we’re not only failing these war refugees. By the very truths that we hold dear, by the very foundation upon which this country was built, we’re failing ourselves. As best said in an editorial in The Cincinnati Enquirer:

The selective nature of the proposed moratorium — targeting refugees from only one country — is also troubling because there’s no confirmed, direct link between Syrian refugees and the Paris attacks. All the suspects identified so far hailed from France or Belgium. The call to block Syrian refugees is being made despite the evidence, not because of it. […]

Our refugee resettlement program — yes, even for Syrians — represents a core American value, one that reflects and continues our identity as a melting pot. We are a country founded and fueled by immigrants. We are a nation powered by the proposition that we value oppressed people — of all colors and creeds — who seek shelter.

I began last weekend heartsick with the familiar ring of politics ginning up people’s fears. When will we ever learn? It wasn’t helpful that the Republican presidential candidates used the refugee moratorium to rev up even more xenophobia on the stump, winning the news cycle in tandem with their Congressional compatriots. All we need right now is another fear-based political campaign to hoist a demagogue into the White House.

I have been tired of this since 2003, as are most of the people in my community in the San Francisco Bay Area. Yes I know we’re not middle America, and by all measures the view of us — correct or not — is that we are crypto-liberal extremists too willing to sell the country out to the Communists. Whatever. But throwing my shoe at a CNN news reporter on television was not going to help. Neither was yelling at the car radio on my commute home. My anger was nourished by the fear.

I tried to put my mind’s focus on other things this weekend: going to a play on Friday; and on Saturday, catering for the artists at the International Body Music mini-fest at Berkeley’s traditional music institution, Freight and Salvage.

There were forty artists, all “hyphen-Americans” representing various cultures — African-American, Mexican-American, Eastern European-American, and East Indian-American — representatives of the society that we have become. Pieces of our American multi-ethnic fabric. It was an evening of percussive, jazz, dance and traditional music all done without instruments.

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After our pre-show meal everyone circled up to be together before curtain. The house was packed. As the Festival’s co-director Evie Ladin said: “The world is in a shit storm right now, and the people out there need us to lift them up.”

People were looking for the same kind of relief I was from the last week’s xenophobia and each and every one of the artists stepped up. No one held anything back.

The finale was a gathering of all artists from their various ethnic traditions leading the audience out of the auditorium into the lobby for a wide open celebration of clapping, stomping and chanting for the audience and the artists. There was nothing but smiles in that lobby. The show was medicine.

Looking back now, this show was a living snapshot of what our core American values are and what the Cincinnati Examiner editorial referred to: inclusion and appreciation of the differences and similarities of our human experience on this planet. We’re all in one country that is a part of this one world.

I told my best friend Rhodessa about the show. As of right now she is flying east for Thanksgiving to visit her family in Georgia. Before she left to get on the plane, she said to me the same thing Evie said: “The world is in an uproar. Time now to give our friends, family and community our best and with love.”

We have so much to be thankful for: we’re safe, definitely food-secure, and we have a community of friends and family to help us shoulder our burdens and re-assure us with love and support. For us, the only war going on right now is for our minds and hearts to believe in a fear that could not only spoil, but end tomorrow. Even with that we can choose not to play.

When we open our mouths to pray in thanks this week, let’s work to open minds and hearts as well — ours and others. Love, fear and lies don’t mix. Love cannot exist with lies and fear cannot exist with love. Love conquers them both. Easily.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Sunday morning, Nov. 15. I’m writing 48 hours after the first explosions were heard at the Stade de France where France was playing Germany in a soccer match. In restaurants, a bar, and the Bataclan concert hall in the 11th Arrondisement of Paris people were attacked and killed by three ISIS teams using kalashnikov rifles and suicide vests.

The assailants all spoke perfect French.

As I write this, CNN’s “Paris-Terror Attacks” coverage drones unendingly on the television. Paris is stunned, in a state of shock. Authorities fear the crisis is not over. The word “fear” is liberally dispersed throughout the coverage, amplifying the general atmosphere in France and abroad as a low-lying hum of horror. At least to the viewers here and elsewhere CNN provides coverage.

I am certain the people of France and Belgium — where some members of ISIS terror cells allegedly are based — are apprehensive. I am certain major cities of Western Europe are on high alert. At this moment, the investigation is uncovering an even wider range of suspected ISIS activities beyond France. There are questions about security risk of the Syrian refugees entering Europe, as they try to escape from the devastation wrought by their country’s civil war.

It all breathes, feels and tastes like Sept. 11, 2001. If we haven’t had enough of the march towards war, the news media makes sure we work ourselves up into an appetite for more with hints of it. Fear is as much a social and political nutrient as rainwater is to weeds, providing as much fuel for our current political discussions as Donald Trump’s bluster, Ben Carson’s inanity and Hillary Clinton’s emails.

I am certain of one thing: There are enough of us who are plenty fed up with the bullshit orchestrated these days in the era of asymmetrical warfare. We have proof that the alleged weapons of mass destruction in Iraq were a lie. A lie used to begin a pointless, expensive and stupid war. That was attested to by George W. Bush himself, admitting as much in his memoir Decision Points.

What makes ISIS any different from Al Qaeda? Same game, different players. We know that ISIS was a direct result of the instability of our installed regime in Iraq and our support for the anti-Assad rebellion in Syria. Countries in the midst of civil war are fertile ground for insurgents of all stripes. Al-Qaeda, once America’s bete noir, has been taken backstage as ISIS rises to play the lead of terrorist du jour. Our initial impulse is to stamp them all out by the cudgels of war, but you can’t kill a movement with a cudgel. Not when young, disaffected and disempowered men and women are attracted to the seductive online recruitment provided by ISIS.

Yet France’s President Francoise Hollande uses the words “act of war,” similar to what Mr. Bush said after the twin towers fell — raising the apprehension of possible NATO involvement, or further incursions on the ground in Syria. France had launched airstikes in Syria earlier in September.

Again and again, it all feels so hauntingly familiar. Are we on the highway to making another stupid mistake? Or are we hovering nearby, cruising at less than highway speed from a frontage road following the events and their aftermath in Paris?

I am waiting for news that the investigation by French and other international agencies will focus first on the cause before an easy, immediate and impulsive answer is implemented. I hope for measured response and reasoned examination. A brink of some kind was reached — you can see it in the chart of the event, at the bottom of this post (you can also view a simpler chart on Eric’s Facebook page). And we have a choice to blindly accept what is being fed us or to question our choices beginning now.

While we’re at it, perhaps we should remember that while Paris was attacked, so was Beirut — a vibrant city that still struggles to find stability, but knows no end of violence. Are they consigned to our neglect while the jewels of the Western world burn?

I am certain of this: the people of France want and deserve answers, as does the world. I know this seems simplistic and naive, but while investigating ISIS as a credible and dangerous threat, perhaps we should re-evaluate what has been wrought through our economic and military adventures and their impact on the rest of the world this last decade.

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Regional instability in the Middle East has gone on so long that it has formed new and ugly flowers in Europe, Lebanon, Iraq, Kenya and Palestine. Action creates reaction. Is this how we want the world to be?

I found this parable, posted by a friend of mine on Facebook the morning after the attacks:

One evening an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people. He said, “My son, the battle is between two wolves inside us all. One is Evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt,resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority and ego.

“The other is Good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather: “Which wolf wins?”

The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”

I don’t know what comes next with these ongoing investigations in France and its neighboring countries. I know I am hoping for better than what our recent history has shown us. I know I am sending a heart-load of intention on this sunny Sunday in California that we find out what really happened Friday night, and deal with it with as little bloodshed as possible. This world has had enough.

There is so much we haven’t been told. I am also certain that there are many, many people here and around the world tired of being fed the easy answers. The people of this good, beautiful, tumultuous and complicated planet deserve so much more. For once, please, let the good wolf win.

Chart for the Nov. 13, 2015 ISIS terrorist attacks in Paris. View glyph key here.