The One Thing That Can Save America

 🌈The One Thing That Can Save America

BY JOHN ASHBERY

Is anything central?

Orchards flung out on the land,

Urban forests, rustic plantations, knee-high hills?

Are place names central?

Elm Grove, Adcock Corner, Story Book Farm?

As they concur with a rush at eye level

Beating themselves into eyes which have had enough

Thank you, no more thank you.

And they come on like scenery mingled with darkness

The damp plains, overgrown suburbs,

Places of known civic pride, of civil obscurity.

 

These are connected to my version of America

But the juice is elsewhere.

This morning as I walked out of your room

After breakfast crosshatched with

Backward and forward glances, backward into light,

Forward into unfamiliar light,

Was it our doing, and was it

The material, the lumber of life, or of lives

We were measuring, counting?

A mood soon to be forgotten

In crossed girders of light, cool downtown shadow

In this morning that has seized us again?

 

I know that I braid too much on my own

Snapped-off perceptions of things as they come to me.

They are private and always will be.

Where then are the private turns of event

Destined to bloom later like golden chimes

Released over a city from a highest tower?

The quirky things that happen to me, and I tell you,

And you know instantly what I mean?

What remote orchard reached by winding roads

Hides them? Where are these roots?

 

It is the lumps and trials

That tell us whether we shall be known

And whether our fate can be exemplary, like a star.

All the rest is waiting

For a letter that never arrives,

Day after day, the exasperation

Until finally you have ripped it open not knowing what it is,

The two envelope halves lying on a plate.

The message was wise, and seemingly

Dictated a long time ago.

Its truth is timeless, but its time has still

Not arrived, telling of danger, and the mostly limited

Steps that can be taken against danger

Now and in the future, in cool yards,

In quiet small houses in the country,

Our country, in fenced areas, in cool shady streets.

Election 2024

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Election 2024

 

Planned Parenthood receives record gov't funding despite drop in health services

 

Planned Parenthood receives record gov't funding despite drop in health services Curated for you byCP Editors Good afternoon! It's Tuesday, September 20, and today's headlines include details on Planned Parenthood's increase in government funding despite it providing services to fewer clients, California Gov. Gavin Newsom's new billboard campaign that endorses abortion availability in the state by citing a Bible verse that includes the words of Jesus, and an interview with Dr. Michael Brown. Planned Parenthood's 2020-2021 report has revealed that it received more than $633 million in "Government Health Services Reimbursements & Grants" for the year ending June 30, 2021, which accounts for more than one-third of its total revenue. The abortion giant provided services to 2.16 million clients, down from the 2.4 million it served during the same period the year before. While the organization, which is the nation's largest abortion provider, revealed an 8% increase in the total number of abortions performed, services and testing for sexually transmitted infections decreased by more than one million, while cancer screenings were down by nearly 200,000, and contraceptive services decreased from more than 2.5 million to less than 2.2 million during the same period. Adoption referrals also decreased from 2,667 to 1,940. Planned Parenthood acknowledged the reduction in services in the report, stating it was "proud to provide abortion." It further blamed the COVID-19 pandemic for a reduction in services but asserted that "[a]bortion is essential health care that cannot wait for the end of a pandemic or the whims of politicians." Live Action News' Carole Novielli weighed in on the report, noting that Planned Parenthood has seen a 30% decrease in the number of clients it has served when compared to 2009-2010. Novielli also noted that Planned Parenthood conducted 6.4 million abortions from 2000 to 2020 but provided prenatal care services to a little over 303,000 pregnant women. "To put it in perspective, Planned Parenthood has committed about the same number of abortions every year that it offered in prenatal care services over two decades combined," Novielli wrote. Continue reading. P.S. Did you hear? CP has launched Freedom Post, a free, twice-weekly newsletter highlighting breaking news and headlines on key issues ranging from freedom to religious liberty. Sign-up today to get FreedomPostdelivered to your inbox every Monday and Thursday. Check out these headlines from our latest issue of Freedom Post: $1M California website informs minors, out-of-state women how to get abortions University suspends all clubs after court orders approval of LGBT group Disney employees arrested in child sex sting operation

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TOP STORIES

Michael Brown talks Christians and politics Dr. Michael Brown believes that Christians should be involved in politics, but he is concerned about political obsession. In a recent interview with The Christian Post, the author of the recently released book, The Political Seduction of the Church: How Millions of American Christians Have Confused Politics with the Gospel, shared his concerns about Christians merging the Gospel with the elections "as if a political party was the key to advancing God's Kingdom on the earth." Noting the importance of the upcoming 2024 presidential election, Brown explained that "healthy" Christian nationalism is an approach where people say, "I love Jesus, and I love my country," while "unhealthy" nationalism is that which equates America's destiny with the Kingdom of God, and the "very dangerous" version comes when modern-day Christians say, "We're we're going to have to take up arms against the government in the name of Jesus." Read more. Also of Interest... Being a patriotic American doesn't make you a 'Christian nationalist': Dr. Richard Land weighs in on the debate I have voted Republican for many years, but I don't put my trust in a political party Women disrupt Bishop Lamor Whitehead's Sunday service Brooklyn Bishop Lamor Whitehead was detained by police on Sunday after he forcefully removed a woman who disrupted his sermon and allegedly threatened his family two months after he was robbed at gunpoint. Two women engaged in a heated exchange with Whitehead during the sermon. Whitehead began praying for the women in tongues before yanking 47-year-old Tarsha Howard by her neck and forcing her out of the church. The other woman fled. Whitehead was briefly detained while police sorted out what happened but was later released without any charge. Howard was charged with trespassing and disrupting a religious service. Read more. Televangelist defends $1,500 prayer course Televangelist and self-proclaimed prophetess Juanita Bynum is defending her $1499.99 four-week intensive prayer course, calling the online criticism she has faced an "insult." Some have compared her course to a prayer meeting, with Chicago-based internet preacher and U.S. Army veteran Marcus Rogers telling his nearly 1 million Facebook followers the price tag was "outrageous." Bynum, who describes herself as a "pioneer" in high-level prayer, addressed naysayers during a Facebook Live Broadcast on Thursday, saying, "I’m not going to insult myself to even discuss the price. It’s an insult to who I am after being in ministry for over 50 years." Read more.

America divided

 

Dear Reader, The story of “America divided” has played out in the media and political news for decades. Isn’t it time to find areas of agreement and common evolution on moral and political attitudes? One striking trend line is with regard to animal rights at the ballot box. Whether it’s Florida or California, Massachusetts or Missouri, it turns out that animal rights have won 70 percent of the time at the ballot box over the past three decades. That’s a political supermajority. The potential for building a wider moral consensus in a divided country from an animal rights perspective is worth exploring. The Independent Media Institute’s Earth | Food | Life project gives readers a path to consider the lives of the animals who are raised for our food or who share our environments, as you’ll see in IMI’s recent stories below. It’s important to keep in mind these and other moral issues that unite this country under the surface, even as the divisions and challenges facing society continue to build. Check out the recent work our journalists have been up to:

Pictured: Steven Rosenfeld, Editor, Chief Correspondent and Senior Writing Fellow

During the 2022 midterm election year, all 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 35 of the 100 seats in the Senate will be contested. As Americans gear up to vote Tuesday, November 8, Steven Rosenfeld, Voting Booth’s editor, chief correspondent, and senior writing fellow, reliably provides the play-by-play. In his recent reporting, he notes that while the far right gains ground in the East, out West among the five states that held their 2022 primary elections on May 17, a string of GOP candidates for office who deny the 2020 presidential election results and embrace various conspiracies were rejected by Republicans who voted for more mainstream conservatives. And yet, Pennsylvania state legislator Douglas Mastriano, an election denier and white nationalist, won the gubernatorial primary with votes from less than 7 percent of the 9 million registered voters in Pennsylvania. Unlike many Republican candidates who are mimicking Donald Trump’s claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, or who initially rejected Trump’s claims but are now flirting with conspiracy theorists, Maricopa County’s top elected Republicans called out Arizona’s attorney general, Republican Mark Brnovich, for lying about the 2020 election. Meanwhile, Georgia Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who in November 2020 refused Donald Trump’s demand to “find” the votes for the ex-president to win the state and defended the accuracy of Georgia’s results and recounts, is “being bent to the will” of 2020 election deniers as his May 24 primary approached, civil rights advocates say. Rosenfeld’s reporting remains an independent account of the truth that is essential to restoring shared public faith in democracy.

Pictured: Sonali Kolhatkar, Chief Correspondent and Writing Fellow

Reproductive health care, global warming, and student loan debt are among the numerous social justice issues that are at stake. New York Times bestselling author and Economy for All writing fellow Thom Hartmann dissects Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s Dobbs v. Jackson draft opinion, the abortion case that could reverse Roe, concluding that at its heart, it’s just insidious religious doctrine. The abortion battle is not just about religion, however; Hartmann also argues that the abortion firestorm is also a dangerous racist panic about the end of white supremacy in America. Student debt, like medical debt or the inability to pay increasing rents, is just another feature of a capitalist, market-driven system designed to ensure the health of Wall Street over the wellness of people. And those financial stresses affect people of color the most, writes Economy for All chief correspondent and writing fellow Sonali Kolhatkar in “Why Canceling Student Debt Is a Matter of Racial Justice.” “It’s time to end this collective financial burden, and the president can do so with the stroke of a pen,” she writes. Climate change too is the result of a deadly calculus: human lives are worth risking and even losing over the profits of global corporations. It’s a no-brainer for the world to quickly and without delay transition to renewable energy sources, writes Kolhatkar, in light of the World Meteorological Organization’s alarming conclusion about how close we are to reaching 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels and facing the most dangerous impacts of climate change. Instead, President Biden has fallen woefully short on his campaign promises to address the climate crisis and failed to stand up to corporate interests. But while the market-driven economy favors environmental doom, public opinion is on the side of science.

Pictured: Reynard Loki, Editor, Chief Correspondent and Writing Fellow

Can we abandon pollutive fossil fuels and avoid an energy crisis? It’s a question asked by Earth | Food | Life contributor Richard Heinberg, senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute and the author of Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival. “When it comes to maintaining energy flows, there is a closing window to avert both climate catastrophe and economic peril,” he writes. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the West’s response of imposing sanctions on Russia are forcing a reckoning, and yet we treat these fuels as though they were an inexhaustible birthright; but they are, of course, finite and depleting substances. Energy is often an area where a narrative of division prevails, and yet what’s essential for the environment is inextricably linked to what’s good for the energy industry in the long run. Meanwhile, monkeys infected with transmissible diseases are being trucked across the United States, writes EFL contributor Lisa Jones-Engel, a primate scientist and Fulbright scholar who has conducted academic research on the consequences of infectious diseases moving between human and macaque populations. Highly emotional and intelligent, macaques are seed dispersers, making them a keystone species in the environment. They are being rounded up from forests and urban areas and shipped thousands of miles across the globe, ostensibly to provide us with lifesaving treatments and vaccines. Despite macaques’ vast immunological and biological differences from humans, the cruel and unethical extraction of macaques from Asia for use in biomedical research is a multibillion-dollar industry that is pushing them over the edge. Perhaps to truly learn about nature, life, and love, we need to build better relationships with our nonhuman family. In an excerpt from Sy Montgomery’s book The Hawk’s Way produced for the web by EFL and Atria Books, the naturalist and bestselling author describes the crucial role and sharpness of the vision of birds based on their eye size in proportion to their bodies. And because of our differing brain circuitry, birds capture at a glance what it might take us many seconds to apprehend. For birds, seeing is being. “Too often humans see through our brains, not through our eyes,” writes Montgomery. “This is such a common human failing that we joke about the absent-minded professor or the artist so focused on an imagined canvas that they walk into a tree.”

The IMI team is hard at work producing these and many other important stories. Please join our cause to produce media that can change the world. And in case you missed it, here is more of our most recent work:

How Small Farms Are Reclaiming Culture in Palestine April M. Short - May 24, 2022 - Local Peace Economy GOP Split: Far Right Gains Ground in East, While Losing Out West Steven Rosenfeld - May 20, 2022 - Voting Booth Monkeys Infected With Transmissible Diseases Are Trucked Across U.S. Lisa Jones-Engel - May 17, 2022 - Earth | Food | Life As the Planet Warms, Let’s Be Clear: We Are Sacrificing Lives for Profits Sonali Kolhatkar - May 14, 2022 - Economy for All God on His Side? Doug Mastriano’s Rise in Pennsylvania’s GOP Gubernatorial Primary Steven Rosenfeld - May 13, 2022 - Voting Booth The Art of Building a Human-Hawk Relationship Sy Montgomery - May 10, 2022 - Earth | Food | Life Abortion: Why Is the Court Using Religious Belief to Alter What Should Be Secular Law? Thom Hartmann - May 10, 2022 - Economy for All Maricopa GOP Leaders Call Out Arizona Attorney General for Stolen Election Lies Steven Rosenfeld - May 9, 2022 - Voting Booth Why Canceling Student Debt Is a Matter of Racial Justice Sonali Kolhatkar - May 8, 2022 - Economy for All How Collectives Are Empowering People to Understand the Tricky Financial Side of Life Aric Sleeper - May 4, 2022 - Local Peace Economy Georgia SOS Raffensperger Flirts With Trump Propagandists in Reelection Campaign Steven Rosenfeld - May 4, 2022 - Voting Booth