“There Is No Dignity in This Kind of America” by Jamelle Bouie, New York Times (If he isn’t on your reading list, you should consider adding him.)

“The denial of dignity to one segment of the political community, then, threatens the dignity of all. This was true for Douglass and his time — it inspired his support for women’s suffrage and his opposition to the Chinese Exclusion Act — and it is true for us and ours as well. To deny equal respect and dignity to any part of the citizenry is to place the entire country on the road to tiered citizenship and limited rights, to liberty for some and hierarchy for the rest.Put plainly, the attack on the dignity of transgender Americans is an attack on the dignity of all Americans. And like the battles for abortion rights and bodily autonomy, the stakes of the fight for the rights and dignity of transgender people are high for all of us. There is no world in which their freedom is suppressed and yours is sustained.”

Today marks a year of heroic resistance by the Ukrainian people!

What we are witnessing in the recent decade is the rise and consolidation of authoritarian movements and rule in every region of the world. And it is an authoritarism of the left as well as the right.

What can you say about a party that is not only callous and indifferent to the very lives of children and the young, but goes into overdrive after each of these horrrific killings of our young to shamelessly block, with the assist of right wing media, even the most modest legislative measures to curb mass violence. If its leaders shed tears, they are tears of duplicity, hypocricy, and artifice.

For sections of the peace movement here, the insistence that Russia unconditionally withdraw from Ukraine is a minor key in their analysis and politics. Nor do we hear any criticism of Putin’s insistence from these same peace activists that Russia’s claim to the eastern regions of Ukraine is non-negotiable.

Instead, we hear righteous calls for negotiations and peace. One would never know that one country in an invading power and the other isn’t. That one country is fighting for its right to political independence and independent development and the other isn’t. And that one country has a preponderance of military power over the other were it not for the assistance of the NATO countries.

What commands near singular attention is a “proxy” war between Russia and the U.S., in which Ukraine either goes unmentioned or is reduced to no more than a pawn in a chess game. What is more, the dangers that might lie ahead if Russia is successful in its illegal and immoral war are never considered. A strange kind of internationalism.