This post follows Part 1 of Be Audaciously Aware and Responsive here.
Vote Out Conspirators and Unqualified Candidates
In every election, vote against politicians and candidates complicit in fraudulent attempts to overturn our many-times certified 2020 election. Equally unqualified and unfit to serve are candidates who refuse to commit to future election results.
Subscribe to honest and trustworthy newspapers and media, and get to know the candidates. Advance politicians who earn your trust through their consistent prioritization of the safety and welfare of all interdependent beings and the native organic environment that sustains us.
Use Your Consumer Dollars to End and Prevent Political Bribery and Oligarchy
The shock of our deadly January 6 insurrection caused some organizations and corporate PACs to suspend their donations to the politicians who fueled our criminally charged ex-president’s pathological projection of election fraud. Despite evidence from the bipartisan January 6th Committee that our ex-president and his MAGA followers planned, funded, and promoted their seditious conspiracy to overturn our democratic election, many of those same organizations resumed their donations to those accountable.
The nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) posted the 1,367 complicit corporations and industries who donated more than $64 million to accountable politicians. As of mid-November 2022, the biggest funders listed included Koch Industries ($1,031,000), Boeing ($897,500), Home Depot ($660,000), Valero Energy ($657,500), UPS ($559,000), and Lockheed Martin ($549,000).
Research all complicit backers of accountable politicians for yourself. Spread the word and urge your connections and member organizations to boycott those backers to proactively prevent even worse deadly violence.
Inspiration can be drawn from the responsive companies CREW also reported. From the hundreds of companies who pledged to halt their donations to accountable politicians after January 6, thus far, 66 “kept their promises.” Responsive organizations “span industries from tech companies like Microsoft, to retail companies like Nike, and the hospitality industry giants Marriott and Hilton. They include household names like Disney and Target, as well as local and lesser-known brands.”
Boycott Accountable Media and the Advertisers Complicit in Lies that Can Endanger Us All
Also accountable are dishonest media and the advertisers who fund them.
“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” – Bishop Desmond Tutu
To transcend false and divisively exploitative sides, find or develop the integrity and strength of character to insist on the whole unifying truth. There is no legitimacy to a lie posed as the opposite side of an inauthentic story, rather than the false equivalent it so blatantly is.
Top among the media to boycott is the incompetently false and criminally divisive Fox News. A 2011 national survey by Fairleigh Dickinson University concluded that partisan ideologues, “especially Fox News, lead viewers to become even less informed” than those who say they watch “no news at all.”
The survey found viewers of Fox News among our least informed citizens, and listeners of National Public Radio and viewers of Sunday morning talk shows among our most informed, followed by viewers of The Daily Show then hosted by Jon Stewart.
The findings of Fairleigh Dickinson corresponded with those of my traditionally conservative father who dismissively waved away Fox ideologues as “a bunch of people who shout at each other.”
It can be easy to recognize Fox News watchers by their exploitative outrage and consequential panic over projections of lies and abuses they had accountably neglected to verify and eliminate or proactively prevent.
Boycott Fox News advertisers, as well. On July 30, 2021, AdAge listed the largest advertisers on Fox News from Jan. 1 through July 29, 2021, as Fox News ($8.5 million), Balance of Nature ($4.6 million), Liberty Mutual ($3.9 million), Fox Nation ($3.8 million), NewDay USA ($3.7 million), MyPillow ($2.3 million), Relief Factor ($2.2 million), USAA ($2.0 million), Indeed ($1.8 million), Nutrisystem ($1.6 million), Fox ($1.3 million), Progressive ($1.3 million), Safelite Auto Glass ($1.3 million), Applebee’s ($1.0 million) and ADT ($1.0 million).
“I don’t get it,” said my stepson, Justin, of anyone who attempts to obstruct or block policies that would immediately end and prevent the deadly oligarchy that is a menace to their own safety and to that of all beings now.
Potentially Reverse the Worst Climate Disasters and Extinctions Now
While it may be too late to stop global warming altogether, we must do all possible to urgently mitigate and, as yet, potentially reverse even worse catastrophic superstorms and droughts, heat waves and famines, and habitat and animal and plant extinctions.
Insist politicians reform campaign finance laws and eliminate political bribery and revolving-door corruption across government and industries.
Vote for honest and trustworthy government and industry decision makers who inspire a world of unity and faithfulness. At all levels of governance, insist leaders and spokespeople — including entertainers — prioritize peacemaking as what is truly safe and courageously responsive.
As guardians of one another, eliminate attempts to scapegoat and trivialize or romanticize what President Dwight Eisenhower called “the horror and the lingering sadness of war” and violence. Incarcerate and replace officials and spokespeople who spew the criminally abusive and unfree hate speech that can endanger us all.
Immediately end and prevent illegal attempts to obstruct and restrict every citizen’s constitutional right and, indeed, responsibility to vote. Insist politicians reverse and prevent laws that can enable election interference by obstructionists whose criminal intent is to block and overthrow votes. These anti-democracy extremists are unfit to serve in any capacity.
Vote and petition to redirect the trillions of dollars the United States, alone, squandered on unwinnable wars and apocalyptic weaponry that must never be used to lifesaving peacemaking, eco-friendly infrastructures, and the urgent restoration and protection of our regenerative organic environment.
Where you live, shift from calamitous and costly nuclear power and fossil fuels to 100% clean renewable energy suited to your locale and resources, as in Burlington, Vermont, and elsewhere. Insist on universally clean drinking water purified with non-toxic processes; a high-quality education, housing and healthcare for all; independent safety testing of pharmaceutical products and processes; equal taxation and pay; and an equitably free and fair one person, one vote.
Insist on safely chem- and GMO-free agriculture and landscapes; the humane treatment of animals; and nontoxic products and processes across industries. Transform deadly violence and wars into empathy and shared understanding and universally enriching partnerships.
Prioritize Universal Safety and Well-Being
Celebrate the complementary talents meant to distinguish our richly diverse nation of Native Americans and immigrants. Industrious “immigrants act more as ‘job creators’ than ‘job takers,’ and non-U.S. born founders play outsized roles in U.S. high-growth entrepreneurship,” wrote of MIT News on May 9, 2022. A wide-ranging study of registered businesses nationwide by MIT reported that “per capita, immigrants are about 80 percent more likely to found a firm, compared to U.S.-born citizens.” Immigrants also hire more employees.
Urgently end and prevent the criminal fear- and hate-mongering that resulted in our predictable labor shortage.
“For nearly 20 years, United States authorities have deported over 1 million immigrants originally from Central America’s Northern Triangle to their home countries through Mexico,” wrote Dany Bahar and Pedro Casas-Alatriste in the July 14, 2022, issue of Up Front with The Brookings Institute. “These potential workers are essential to the U.S. right now: Historically immigrants have been young and joined our workforce in occupations very few Americans are able or willing to fill.”
Bahar and Casas-Alatriste noted how migrants risk their lives as a testament to their need and responsive determination. To grow and compete in the global economy, Bahar and Casas-Alatriste advised American politicians and policymakers “to transform the energy and resources poured into keeping these immigrants away into creating enough legal pathways for migrants to join the American labor force without further delay.” (The need for Central Americans to flee their home countries stems in part from the alleged inequalities of United States corporations and government operations — an urgent issue yet to be widely reported and addressed.)
I still grieve for immigrant families yet to be reunited after our last administration’s criminally barbaric separation of parents and children in for-profit detention centers with neither sufficient safety protections nor recordkeeping and plans to ensure their urgent reunification. Hardly the predators, murderers, rapists and thieves that asylum seekers had been projected to be, all the parents studied by the Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) responsibly feared for the safety and well-being of their children.
A February 2020 study by PHR found criminal attacks against asylum seekers “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment” at the “level of torture.”
PHR clinicians found that even parents reunited with their children after 60 to 69 days exhibited persistent symptoms of trauma. Nearly every one of PHR’s interviewees exhibited symptoms such as “pure agony” and confusion. Other psychological symptoms included overwhelming anxiety and lack of appetite, shortness of breath and headaches, mental and emotional anguish, preoccupation and chronic worry, weeping and severely depressed moods, nightmares and difficulty sleeping, “incredible despondency” and hopelessness. Similar symptoms in children extended from their loss of developmental milestones to their regression from age-appropriate behaviors and fearful clinging to their parents.
The Executive Summary of the PHR report posted on February 25, 2020 states, “The U.S. government must uphold domestic and international standards by fulfilling its obligations to provide redress to victims of torture and ill-treatment, including in the form of rehabilitative services; ensure the families of disappeared children know the truth of their family members’ whereabouts by dedicating adequate government resources that ensure timely reunification for all separated families, including deported parents; and prosecute U.S. officials who have broken the law.”
The Friends Committee on National Legislation on January 28, 2022, urged the Biden administration to eliminate harmful immigration practices and barriers to citizenship “that preserve family separation.” These practices include illegal and barbaric immigrant detention and the officially ended yet ongoing metering or turning away of legal asylum seekers in violation of their due-process rights under our U.S. Constitution.
Vote and petition Congress to end immigrant detention and metering and, also, cruel attempts to extend Title 42 expulsions at the border. Found to be arbitrary and capricious, Federal Judge Emmet Sullivan of the U.S. District Court in Washington D.C. in Autumn 2022 ordered this pandemic-related policy to end. The Biden administration attempted to lift this policy in spring 2022, after The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found Title 42 expulsions ostensibly to prevent Covid “no longer necessary.” This is especially true given the dangers that expulsions pose to immigrants and the availability of test kits. As fellow immigrants, voters must vigilantly insist on what Judge Sullivan called “the codified procedural and substantive rights of non-citizens to seek safe harbor.”
On June 3, 2022, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security posted helpful updates and instructions from the Family Reunification Task Force that President Biden created in February 2021 to identify and reunify families separated under a criminally accountable Zero-Tolerance policy at the U.S.-Mexico border “between January 20, 2017, and January 20, 2021.”
The abusive exclusions and vilification and exploitation of asylum seekers — all based on cruel and immoral lies and projections — violate basic human rights laws.
In September 2022, the Biden administration began to streamline the asylum process. He granted asylum officers, as well as backlogged immigration judges, the power to decide within two to five weeks which migrants get to stay in the United States. Though it will reportedly take hundreds more officers to administrate this overdue expansion with an expedience that is also virtuous and fair.
My immigrant grandparents and family succeeded because of the enthusiastic appreciation and support we shared. When my father built the red brick New Jersey home that my siblings and I grew up in, he had the help of my maternal Grandfather, Giuseppe Testa, and Uncles Joe and Bob. Later when my Aunt Jean and Uncle Steve moved their family into a new home, several of us assisted — just as my Uncle Steve and his family later helped my sister, Diane, and her husband, Greg, ace their family’s home renovations.
My second-generation Italian-American family builds on a lifetime of empathetic partnerships. As a young divorcée, when I moved with my Old English Sheepdog from Hopewell, New Jersey, to nearby Pennington, my Aunt Mary, parents and Bill happily helped. Fifteen years later, when I remarried and moved to Pennsylvania, Bill took time to sell my historic Federal Colonial home frequented in 1824 as Smyth’s Tavern.
None of us realizes our potential on our own. Immediately end and prevent attempts to obstruct or deny the gifts our ever-expansive families, friends and communities are blessedly grateful to share.
In 2015, Maryanne helped nurse my mom, 85, in home hospice. Four years after, Maryanne nursed my dad at age 95. When Maryanne told my mom, “I wish I could do more for you,” my mom looked at her and said, “I wish I could do more for you.” Both my parents appreciated spending their last days at home with visits and phone calls from my aunts and Uncle Bob, grandkids and great-grandkids, cousins and friends. Diane helped Maryanne with nursing, while Bill made the necessary arrangements and I cooked our parents’ favorite soups. We did all we could to care for our generous and unconditionally loving parents who had enthusiastically done so much for every one of us.
People Who Love One Another and Our Environment Are Happiest
In March 2022, the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network named Finland the world’s happiest country for the fifth consecutive year. Some Finns say it’s because they care for one another — a quality reflected in their well-governed public services, widespread trust in authority, and relatively low levels of inequality and related crime.
“The lesson of the world happiness report over the years is that social support, generosity toward one another and honesty in government are crucial for well-being,” wrote the report co-author Jeffrey Sachs, according to Agence France-Presse in Helsinki in the March 18, 2022, issue of The Guardian. “World leaders should take heed.”
Finns also love nature and treasure their essential forests and lakes. They, too, elected a woman leader.
Similarly admired as one of our world’s happiest countries is New Zealand, also led by a woman. Residents there, too, are recognized for their generosity, everyday closeness and desire to support one another.
This sense of connection and related emotional well-being reportedly gave New Zealanders resilience, and one of our world’s lowest crime rates. It also gave New Zealand among the fewest COVID-related deaths. New Zealand’s .1% of Covid-related deaths per 100,000 population, as of mid-November 2022, according to the Johns Hopkins University & Medicine Coronavirus Resource Center, compares with our high here in the United States of 1.1%.
To continuously improve New Zealand’s responsiveness, in 2019 Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern introduced one of our world’s first wellbeing budgets. It equitably addresses challenges that span climate change and digital transformation to social inclusion and housing, child poverty and domestic violence.
While here in the United States, industry-paid politicians criminally push to drill for more fossil fuels and to arm more angry and frightened reactionaries with military-style weaponry and guns. Worse, criminally accountable politicians incite unhinged violence and fear.
Vote to Urgently Shift Reigns of Vengeance to Rules of Law
In her speech to the Philadelphia Bar Association luncheon in 2003, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg used Greek mythology to discuss the progress and potential of her law profession. “Pallas Athena was celebrated as the goddess of reason and justice,” she explained. “To end the cycle of violence that began with Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter, Athena created a court of justice to try Orestes” and, thus, established “the rule of law in lieu of the reign of vengeance.”
The spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, recently called on twitter for more women leaders. Also justly transformative are empathetic male leaders with a healthy appreciation and insistence on qualities sometimes considered feminine, such as compassion and oneness.
Although at the height of our Covid pandemic, it dismayed me to see women as well as men with considerable resources parrot fearmongers and bristle at the modest protection of a face mask and six-feet of recommended space between us. As risk deniers raged — to the insane issuance of death threats against school officials who did what they could protect our students, Covid deaths climbed. All the while, personal and health care workers with fewer resources are among the many who risked their own lives and that of their families to tend to our sick and dying.
I fretted for them and my stepson, Justin, whose overflow of Covid patients as an emergency-room physician extended his California ER out into the hospital parking lot under a tent.
At the central New Jersey hospital where my cousin Patty’s husband, Jim, serves as Chief Medical Officer, despondent colleagues used a refrigerated truck as a temporary morgue for their overflow of deceased patients.
Insist Elected Officials Protect All Beings and Our Interconnected Environment
President Biden may have more exploitative divisiveness from previous reigns of vengeance to reverse, but he accomplished admirably more than some acknowledge. With the wisdom of his increasingly unifying public service and partnership with independent politicians, such as Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, the Biden administration has delivered in its first year, our:
- demonstrable commitment to urgently mitigate and possibly reverse the worst climate catastrophes and extinctions;
- $1.9 trillion in Covid emergency relief that included residential payments, rent and restaurant support, increased investments in school nutrition, and free Covid tests;
- bipartisan $1.2 trillion infrastructure investment in our national network of bridges and roads, airports and public transport, waterways and energy systems and, also, national broadband internet — all planned to create or retain approximately 15 million jobs over 10 years;
- decline in unemployment from 6.3 percent to 3.9, our lowest level since 1969;
- renewed end to notoriously fallacious and inhumane federal executions;
- appointment of the most federal judges since President Ronald Reagan; and
- renewed support for transgender service members, among other inclusive protections and supports.
Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor, Berkley professor and co-founder of @InequalityMedia, warned us to be aware of myths that surround inflation. Corporate profits “are close to levels not seen in over half a century,” Reich wrote in the September 25 issue of The Guardian. Reich attributed inflation to unchecked greed and excessive price hikes, rather than to wage increases and government assistance.
“Current inflation, emerging from the pandemic, is analogous to the inflation after the second world war when economists advocated temporary price controls to buy time to overcome supply bottlenecks and prevent consequential corporate profiteering,” he explained. “Limited price controls” are needed now “for the same reasons.”
Accountability is divvied among dishonest corporate interests and the politicians they pay to confuse complicit followers to prioritize their own unsustainable profits over the safety and well-being of us all.
For example, rather than lead and invest in our world’s development of clean energy, the fossil fuel industry reportedly paid millions to deny the science of our climate crisis, which the oil and gas industry had empirically researched and known about since 1977. The three-part PBS Frontline documentary, The Power of Big Oil, exposes decades of our missed life-saving opportunities and, consequently, actions to hold Big Oil to account.
“New Jersey has joined the ranks of Rhode Island, Delaware, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota and Vermont as the latest state to sue some of the world’s largest oil companies for their role in delaying climate policy and increasing the climate impacts, risks and costs borne by state governments,” reported Amy Westervelt in the October 18, 2022, issue of The Guardian. “Like Minnesota and the District of Columbia before it, New Jersey has included the industry’s top US trade group, the American Petroleum Institute, in its lawsuit” that includes liability and fraud claims against five oil companies: ExxonMobil, Shell Oil, Chevron, BP and ConocoPhillips.
“Some two dozen climate liability suits have been making their way through the courts since 2015, bolstered by media investigations and attribution studies that are able to …pinpoint the precise contribution climate change has made to the (deaths and) damages inflicted by extreme weather events.”
Sludge quoted from an email from environmentalist and 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben, “I think we’re at the point in the global warming story where anyone with an eye to history might want to ask, ‘Do I really want to be trying to profit off the wreckage of the planet?’”
Insist on the Peace of Truth and a World of Joy
Be a leader, rather than a sheep who follows an inattentive and panicked herd over the doomsday cliff before us. Apply your talents and abilities to expedite our shift from millennia of catastrophic patriarchal and hierarchical violence to the peaceful truth and infinite potential of unconditional oneness and love.
As the 13th-Century Sufi mystic poet Rumi wrote, “Start a huge, foolish project, like Noah (this post and my upcoming book, Communicate! When Push Comes to Love). It makes absolutely no difference what people think of you.”
Ask questions and conduct your own independent research, rather than assume or project. For example, just because an abusive patriarchy claims that a soul enters a woman’s body at conception in no way makes that true.
Neither would the loving God who answers my prayers deign to consent to condemnation or conceive of hell.
The only hell in our timeless universe is that which we perpetrate and ostrich enable for ourselves and one another here. Divisive lies and projections of exploitative exclusions and abuses are the unloving opposite of pro-life.
Promote honest and trustworthy leaders who are demonstrably grateful and faithful to all interdependent beings and the native organic environment that so wildly beautifully sustains us. – Aggie Perilli
How are your communications gratefully and faithfully uniting us all?
Aggie Perilli is president of Aggie Perilli Communications International (APCI).
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