The day after inauguration day, on January 21st, over one million people converged on the capitol to make their voices heard at the Women's March on Washington.

I went there to inquire what some of them thought about loving kindness. I suspect that if politically-organized loving kindness is espoused and carried out, activism becomes more immune to infiltration, cooptation, and in-fighting. A social movement based in loving kindness makes it harder for the corporate media and authoritarian politicians to convince the general public we are to be feared, hated and repressed. This article also asks some important questions of our readers.
 

Prominent Americans, peace activists, and organizations have created an open letter to President Donald Trump asking him to end U.S. war in Afghanistan. It reads:

The U.S. war in Afghanistan is well into its 16th year. In 2014 President Obama declared it over, but it will remain a political, financial, security, legal, and moral problem unless you actually end it.

The hashtag #DeleteUber has trended amongst the Twitterverse and in doing so has translated into boycott-oriented action on an impressive scale. Thousands have deleted the transportation app Uber and have shared screenshots of their acts of protest on their timelines. This controversy came to fruition on Saturday night in accordance with President Donald J. Trump’s 120-day Refugee Ban and 90-day travelers ban.

Happy Year of the Rooster!

Thank you for inviting me. Thank you to Archer Heinzen for setting this up. Of course I wouldn't have come had I known UVA's basketball team would be playing Villanova at 1 o'clock. I'm kidding, but I'll catch it on the radio or watch the replay without the commercials. And when I do I can guarantee only this: the announcer will thank U.S. troops for watching from 175 countries, and nobody will wonder whether 174 wouldn't be just about enough.

I wish I could also guarantee that UVA will win, but this is where sports monkeys around with rational thinking. I don't actually have any say over whether UVA wins. So I can turn my wish into a prediction "We will win" and then declare that "we" won as if I'd been involved. Or let's say that UVA blows it. Then I can remark that "we" decided to keep London Perrantes in the game even though he had a sprained wrist and the flu and had just lost one leg in a car accident, even though the obvious fact is that were I really the coach I would never have done that, just as -- if I fully controlled the U.S. government -- I wouldn't actually spend a trillion dollars a year on war preparations.

The sense of resistance was fierce:

“Grab ’em by the profits” . . . “Keep your hands out of my wherever” . . . “NOT DECLAWED” . . .

But it was also, oh Lord, joyous — in a scraped raw kind of way, you might say. For instance, the young woman with the bullhorn, who led the chant where I was walking, had almost no voice left as she shouted “Show me what democracy looks like!” But as soon as the marchers shouted back, “This is what democracy looks like!” she threw her vocal cords back into it, and somehow, oh, somehow, I could feel it: the birth of a movement.