March 2026 Update 

By Dr. David Dobbins

I grew up in the city of Indianapolis, with little exposure to nature, and had no real interest in our environment. All of that changed when I went camping with the Boy Scouts in Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio and Illinois.

Photograph by Chris Guiles

Camping inspired my enthusiasm for nature, and, also, my career as a researcher and a professor of biology, botany, horticulture and environmental science.

For 20 years, I engaged in research in the rain forests of Australia and Central and South America. While studying and teaching, my mind kept returning to the same question: “How had we allowed our world to become so nonbiological and unnatural?”

Throughout my career, I’ve noticed stark changes in people’s attitudes. In our headlong rush to raise our own standard of living, we have completely shortchanged our quality of life.

We bought houses with lawns we admire, but have little idea how to healthfully maintain.

Chemically sprayed lawns consist of a single species of grass. No thriving ecosystem in the world consists of a single species!

To maintain what is unnatural, some poison their grass with increasingly toxic herbicides, fungicides, and insecticides — linked with deadly diseases. Further, carbon-releasing herbicides and synthetic fertilizers (and pesticides) that emit greenhouse gases from manufacture through application may be accountable for more than a third of climate change.

Fighting against nature has led to the wholesale pollution of our air and soil, streams, rivers, ponds, lakes and coastal areas. This has also jeopardized the safety and well-being of humans and animals, forests and essential plants and pollinator insects.

How do we restore and protect our natural environment Plant native organic woods, tall meadow grasses and wildflower-rain gardens. These ecosystems provide healthful habitats for the diverse organisms that make up the bulk of our food chain.

In suburban areas where lawns may still the landscaping standard, maintain safely organic native properties. Like wild parks, organic landscapes are most beautiful and allow all life to thrive.

One of a family of foxes who live in the woods behind our house.

Create Native Organic Landscapes in 7 Easy Steps 

By Aggie Perilli

 1. Allow chemically addicted landscapes to lie fallow for up to three years to withdraw from their destructive chemical dependency.

Raise your standards. Enjoy the healthful tranquility of restorative parks in your own yard and community.

2. Before you treat any property, test the soil to determine what, if any, nutrients it needs.

Many states test soil at no charge. In Pennsylvania, you can buy a $9 testing kit at the county offices of Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences and submit your soil samples for a free analysis.

My neighbor, Katherine Hopkins, replaced her front lawn with native organic pollinator flowers and plants.

3. If your soil is compacted, aerate it and improve your land’s natural drainage and vitality.

Use an aerator with hollow tines. Solid tines may further compact your soil.

In richly alive organic soil, aeration or oxygenation can naturally sustain itself.

4. Transform all or part of dull unhelpful lawns into inspiring wildlife habitats!

Avoid carcinogenic and other costly carbon-releasing killing agents linked to diseases and dysfunctions, climate change, and that repel and kill our essential pollinators. They also kill the healthy microorganisms in richly alive soil, and poison our air and water.

Rather than prevent weeds, herbicides counterproductively exacerbate the deadening conditions that cause weeds to spread.

Eliminate equally harmful synthetic fertilizers that emit greenhouse gases from manufacture through application. If necessary over the summer, lightly apply an organic mix of the fertilizer that your soil analysis recommends.

A bark path leading from the front of Katherine’s house, to the back.

Help create a critical mass of certified gardens that attract and protect our pollinators and wildlife. It’s easy and fun to provide the four basic elements needed: food, water, shelter and sustainable homes within our gardens and landscapes.

5. Hand weed and grow organic native trees and unsprayed self-seeding meadow grasses and pollinator flowers and plants. Use autumn leaves as mulch.

To reduce the need for hand weeding and mulch that can attract termites, plant native woods, spreading shrubs, and fields of pollinators. In autumn, cost-effectively spread fallen leaves as mulch. This adds and retains a balance of nutrients, and allows the beneficial insects who live in our leaves to thrive.

My sister-in-law, Laurel Brown, photographed by my brother-in-law, Chris Guiles, as they hike through a park so popular on Instagram that they have to hike early to avoid crowds.

Shop at organic nurseries. Other nurseries may spray dangerous killing agents.

If your garden has poisonous weeds you may be allergic to, place your weeding hand in two solid bags that extend past your elbow. Pull the weeds and place them in an opened garbage bag. From the top, slip the weeding bags off your arm and into the garbage and carefully avoid skin contact.

6. Avoid weakening your property by micromanaging it.

Allow grass to grow as tall as municipal law allows. Leave your grass with nutrient-rich blades tall enough to shade out weed seeds. A thick turf can sustain itself.

7. In autumn, seed or over-seed your lawn or just those areas that are weedy or bare.

Buy safely organic uncoated seeds suited to your soil, climate and land use. Be sure to select seed varieties native to your area.

As we shift to safely organic native landscapes, encourage land owners and landscapers to persevere.

It may take up to 3 years for a chemically deadened property to return to its wildly beautiful nature.

How is organic landscaping (and agriculture) raising the quality of all life in your area?

Aggie Perilli is president of Aggie Perilli Communications International (APCI).

Note: If you have found this post helpful, you can subscribe to my blog here at no charge! Thank you for sharing your organic landscaping insights here on Facebook and Twitter.

Recommended Media

Beyond Pesticides’ free Parks for a Sustainable Future program.

Products Compatible with Organic Landscape Management and Organic Lawn Care 101 by Beyond Pesticides.

Tools for Change from Non-Toxic Communities that thrive in wildly beautiful and cost-effective organic landscapes.

Alternatives to Synthetic Products for Managing Landscapes and Pests

New Alarm Bells About Chemicals and Cancer by Nicholas Kristof.

Pollinators Are in Trouble: Here Is How Transforming Your Lawn Into A Native Wildflower Habitat Can Help by Discover magazine.

Bringing Nature Home – How You Can Sustain Wildlife with Native Plants by Douglas W. Tallamy.

Documentaries: Down to Earth with Zac Efron, Kiss the Ground with Woody Harrelson, The Biggest Little Farm, and more.

Organic Manifesto by Maria Rodale.

Silent Spring and any communications by Rachel Carson.

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APCI creates empathetic and unifying communications and transformative campaigns for nonprofit and for-profit organizations and spokespeople. Consistently recognized for excellence, we engage and align your audience to exceed your expectations within budget and on time.

With more than 30 years of award-winning experience, APCI is proud to provide you with:
– research planning and development;
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Representative clients include author and Nobel Peace Prize Nominee Reverend John Dear and Campaign Nonviolence with the Pace e Bene Nonviolence Service; Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and Roche; St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center; X-Factor Communications; Affinity Federal Credit Union; Family Promise founder Karen Olson; The Arc of Somerset County, which supports people with developmental and intellectual disabilities; and much more.

Honors from APCI’s results-driven partnerships span recognition from the global Association of Information Professionals to the Communicator Awards from 6,000 entries judged by the Academy of Interactive & Visual Arts with industry leaders from Wired, Disney and MTV.

To continuously exceed your expectations while inspiring a world of connection, contact APCI.

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by Aggie Perilli

My husband, Michael, and I adopted a 15-pound Bichon Frise Poodle named Raphie from the Last Chance Ranch Animal Rescue in Quakertown, Pennsylvania. Ranch volunteers had rescued Raphie from a high-kill shelter, where he lie in a fetal position trying to hide in the back corner of his cage.

Rescuer Barbara Maroney had led Raphie into the lobby to meet Michael and me, and the skeletal Poochon dropped belly-up at our feet.

Playfully, Barbara spun Raphie around on the concrete floor.

“He’s so sweet, you can really have fun with him,” she said.

Cautiously, Raphie clung to Barbara.

Michael and I looked at each other and smiled. Raphie needed a home, and we ached with grief over the passing of our aging Maltipoo two months earlier.

As Michael drove the three of us home, Raphie sat on my lap resting his paw on Michael’s arm. The three of us bonded instantly.

As Raphie settled into his new home, he chased his ball with so much exuberance that he skidded into the wall, clonked his head on the coffee table and resumed running as if nothing had happened.

No longer trying to hide, Raphie stands tall with eyes bright and his tongue hanging out in a wide-open smile.    – December 5, 2011

The Last Chance Ranch and other animal rescues could use your donations. One of the most rewarding ways to donate is to adopt a pet. Bask in your grateful rescue’s shared love and enthusiasm!

*******

Aggie Perilli is president of Aggie Perilli Communications International. 

Note: If you’ve enjoyed reading this post, you can subscribe to my blog here at no charge! Thank you for sharing stories with me here on Facebook and Twitter.

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– FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT

Aggie Perilli Communications International (APCI) creates empathetic communications and unifying campaigns for nonprofit and for-profit organizations and spokespeople. Consistently recognized for excellence, APCI inspires your audience to exceed expectations while creating a world of peace and nonviolence, health and well-being, and climate action now.

Wishing you the peace and playful joy of summer,

Aggie and our team at APCI

The post Happy Summer! first appeared on Aggie Perilli Communications International.

The Poetry in Transit program in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, selected the above poem for inclusion in their 2024 rotating bus exhibit. In six lines or less, writers focused on the theme of bodies of water.

Lancaster County is among areas worldwide proud to showcase the poetry of their writers in mass transit systems for the inspiration of millions of riders daily.

The post Riding Waves of Joy first appeared on Aggie Perilli Communications International.

November 2, 2022

Vote Out Conspirators and Unqualified Candidates

In every election, vote against politicians and candidates complicit in criminally 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 complicit donations to those accountable.

The nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) posted the 1,367 criminally 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 accountable backers and 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 complicit politicians after January 6, to date, 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” to take sides with the oppressor. – Bishop Desmond Tutu

To transcend false and divisively exploitative sides, find or develop the courage and integrity to ensure 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 disgustedly 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 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, ensure leaders and spokespeople — including entertainers — prioritize peacemaking as what is truly safe and courageously responsive.

As guardians of all interdependent beings, 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 criminally obstruct and restrict every citizen’s constitutional right and, indeed, responsibility to vote. Insist politicians reverse and prevent laws that enables 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 safely organic native 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 Shared 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 Peter Dizikes 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 from corrupt conflicts of interest across government and industries — a lifesaving issue yet to be sufficiently reported and urgently ended and prevented.)

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 or 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 regression of developmental milestones and 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 find 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 criminally vicious and immoral lies and projections — violate universal 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. Urgently end and prevent consequential attempts to obstruct or deny the gifts our ever-expansive families, friends and communities are supportively grateful and faithful 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 and comfort our generous and unconditionally loving parents who had selflessly and 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 healthful 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 had to use a refrigerated truck as a temporary morgue for their overflow of deceased patients.

Insist Elected Officials Protect All Interdependent Beings and Our 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 climate crises, 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 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?’”

Ensure the Peace of Truth and Inspire 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.

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.

Ensure 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).

Note: If you find this post helpful, you can subscribe to this APCI blog here at no charge! Thank you for sharing your insights with me on Facebook and Twitter. 

The post Being Audaciously Aware and Responsive, Part 2 of 2 first appeared on Aggie Perilli Communications International.

by Aggie Perilli

Before the days of social and mobile media, I playfully emailed news commentary and editorial cartoons to interested family members and friends. Predictably, I found myself on the e-lists of networkers similarly inspired to share their ideas and concerns.

It felt healthy and fun to engage in nonpartisan dialogue then. The false projections of divisive ideologues had been relegated to later-than-late-night talk shows, while I slept to awaken fresh for another day at the helm of my business, Aggie Perilli Communications International.

An overnight email from a late-night networker alerted readers to incitements to war against the sovereign oil-rich nation of Iraq by oil-invested ideologues.

No way, I began, when the veracity of his message rang ominously true. Too enraged to be fearful, I responded, “Then we have to kick butt with our love!”

Suddenly, my home office filled with the fragrance of roses. I glanced around, but no one had joined me and nothing visible had changed. I left my office to pour myself a glass of water, and observed the rosy aroma permeate every room. I recognized the fragrance from Reiki healing circles as Divine oneness and love.

Earlier I had identified the opposite of love as fearful reactivity rather than attentive awareness and responsiveness. Protective of soldiers as well as civilians, I researched honest and trustworthy sources to independently verify the whole unifying truth.

As a former journalist, I traced the lies as well as the money, especially queries and objections ridiculed and censored by perpetrators and ostrich enablers who defensively protested too much.

Beyond clear conflicts of oil interests, I explored unverified terror alerts and discovered the true countries of origin of all non-Iraqi 9-11 hijackers. I read unequivocal reassurances from independent inspectors who had repeatedly searched and found no weapons of mass destruction hidden in Iraq.

Afterwards I shared my research with my own list of email networkers.

To partner with peacemakers, I marched with tens of thousands of war protesters in Washington, D.C. At home, I joined weekend war protests with the Coalition for Peace Action in Princeton, New Jersey — and, on Sundays, attended Princeton Quaker Meeting where I purchased a lawn sign that read, “Peace is Patriotic, No War in Iraq.”

That winter, as I attempted to hammer the sign into my partially frozen Main Street lawn and the retired general who lived across from me ran over to help. I glanced at him in surprise and he reassured me, “I agree with you.”

Ensure the Only True and Lasting Power and Infinite Potential of Love

As a Catholic School teenager during the Vietnam War in the early 70s, I wrote poetry and prose to try to make sense of contradictory inequities rife in dishonest patriarchal and hierarchic exploitations of politics and religion. I found it impossible to reconcile benevolence with a heavenly mother or father who would deign to consent to condemnation or conceive of hell.

For what positive purpose would one want to obscure or deny the only true and healing power and potential of unconditional oneness and love?

Later I’d learn from theologians in Princeton and elsewhere that some Bible authors intentionally distorted the passages they wrote in an attempt to perpetuate inequality and the exploitation of women and the vulnerable.

I found myself reflecting back on the Vietnam war and the unimaginable devastation of soldiers and the South Vietnamese after relentless bombings and sprayings of the toxic defoliant Agent Orange across inhabitants’ lush forests and fertile river-valley farms.

I remembered how escalation of the deadly Vietnam War drew hundreds of thousands of protesters from professors to students and clergy to atheists onto college campuses and the streets of metropolises, such as Washington, D.C. Police clashed with protesters projected to play into the hands of communists with expansionistic intentions.

I watched my dad watch the news and wondered whether it would revive sad memories from his days as a marine on the front lines of World War II. My dad rarely mentioned the war in which he and his older two brothers and two sisters served, the former as a marine and a coastguardsman, and the latter a nurse and a singer and entertainer in the USO.

War Wreaks Devastation, Poverty, Hunger and Heartache

Only once did my dad mention two war-related incidents. The first incident in Okinawa still left him shaking his head in disbelief. It involved a surprise air attack in an open area where he had no choice but to dive behind a stockpile of bombs for cover.

Memories of the second incident reduced the characteristic ebullience in my dad’s voice to a grief barely audible. “We received a government telegram saying that my brother, Bill, drowned in a boating accident off the Pacific Islands,” he lamented. “None of us ever saw him again.”

After my dad passed in 2019, I read a letter he had saved from Uncle Bill dated October 15, 1944. In the letter, Uncle Bill had graciously recounted his combat experiences:
“As you already know, I have been in the invasion of the Marshall Islands, and then returned to our base camp for a brief rest of little more than month. …We then left for the Mariana Islands, in which I was in the invasion of the island of Saipan and, also, Tinian. I needn’t tell you that our adventures and experiences were a little rough. In spite of that fact, we are all proud, for we’ve done our best in accomplishing the one thing we are all fighting for. Our faith is strong, and with our trust in the Good Lord, I’m sure that we will not be let down and, soon, we will all be together again to live our lives in peace everlasting.”

My dad had also saved a newspaper article about his sister, Louise, after she had returned from military service as a Lieutenant Army Nurse at station hospitals in Italy.

In the interview, Aunt Louise acclaimed the admirable courage and faithfulness of soldiers. As the daughter of my Italian immigrant grandfather, she grieved over devastated war-torn areas of Italy where violence had “brought destruction and poverty, hunger and heartache.”

From top left to right, my dad, Gus Perilli, as a Marine; Aunt Mamie with a pianist at their USO Broadcast in Iceland; and Uncle Bill as a Marine, Aunt Louise, a Lieutenant Army Nurse, and Uncle Maurice, a Coastguardsman.

Like my dad, all of my aunts and uncles embodied the humble sense of responsibility described by journalist Tom Brokow in his book, The Greatest Generation. Their first-hand experiences led my dad to caution that “war and violence are the dangers we must proactively prevent.”

In the days leading up to the Iraq war, my dad vehemently objected. “They told us we had to go into Vietnam,” he protested to me. “That turned out to be untrue! That war was political. Now they’re trying to say that we have to go into Iraq. This war is political too!”

Can I quote you on that I asked my dad, whose strict conservative Catholic upbringing I had liberally protested as a teenager.

My dad nodded his tacit approval.

“Some may dislike what I write,” I cautioned.

“Well you know you can’t let that stop you,” he replied with even more caution.

Remain Proactively Attentive and Responsive

Too few of us questioned and insisted the United States end dishonest provocations that led to the Iraq war launched against international law and the opposition of hundreds of millions of us. Those in vehement opposition included the heads of 54 countries and both the National and the World Councils of Churches, the latter with 350 member churches.

In the wake of the Iraq war around 2004, I drove to Washington, D.C., along with more than 200 peace activists to lobby for a Bill reintroduced by, then, Ohio Representative Dennis Kucinich to establish a cabinet-level U.S. Department of Peace. We learned about the Bill from a professional lobbyist and best-selling author Marianne Williamson, Peace Alliance co-founder and, later, Democratic presidential candidate.

As the sole citizen lobbyist from New Jersey, I visited my then Representative Rush Holt on Capital Hill. I explained how our Bill would help end and proactively prevent violence and wars with funds immediately applicable to diplomacy and conflict resolution from global affairs to relations within our own cities and schools.

Thankfully, Holt took time to read and sign our Bill. Its passage, however, required more than the total signatures our citizen lobbyist group could gather.

Today, my gratitude extends to California Democratic Representative Barbara Lee (the only Congressional representative in 2002 to vote against the use of force in Iraq) who, since 2013, has reintroduced a similar Bill to establish a United States Department of Peacebuilding.

Recognition of our vital need for a United States Peace Department dates back to 1793. Founding father, Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and an elected official, a psychiatrist and doctor, and founder of Dickenson College, published an essay that recommended the United States give “perpetual peace” equal footing with the War Department, our forerunner of today’s Department of Defense, according to the collaborative Peace Economy Project (PEP).

“Like most of our founding fathers, Rush feared the emergence of militarism and its consequences,” posted PEP in April 2017. Rush envisioned a Peace Office to “celebrate life” and proactively “discourage the horror of bloodshed.”

Ensure Passage of the Bill that Prioritizes Peacemaking

No doubt our dangerously bloated military budget led to the unwarranted influence of today’s military-industrial complex that President Dwight Eisenhower had warned against in his 1961 farewell address. The United States reportedly spends more on our military than the following nine countries combined: China, India, the United Kingdom, Russia, France, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Japan and South Korea.

Voters must insist the United States redirect trillions of dollars squandered on tactics devised to annihilate, rather than save and support ourselves and all interdependent beings now. Voters must ensure we urgently resume global denuclearization and, also, end and prevent criminally heinous biological weapons programs.

As Eisenhower implored, “Together, we must learn to resolve our differences not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose. Disarmament with mutual honor and confidence is our continuing imperative.”

Speech Is Never Free When Someone Is Lied To and Exploited

Today, a world of nations is united behind measures to save Ukrainian lives and sovereignty from Russia’s deadly illegal invasion of Ukraine. Early in the war, Jewish Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky empathized with Russian soldiers who, without a free and independent press, could more easily be bullied into believing their war would free Ukrainians from nonexistent Nazis.

Ukrainian President Zelensky likened his country’s invading forces to confused children being used. Then, a Russian soldier burst into tears after Ukrainian civilians gave him tea and food and helped him phone his mother. When that soldier realized he had been lied to, he threw down his weapons.

More Russians must ensure an immediate end to their unprovoked and indefensible war. As of this writing, tens of thousands of Russians as well as Ukrainians have passed, tens of millions of Ukrainians are displaced, and vital cities and essential infrastructures lie in ruins.

Be the Infinitely Powerful Peace We Wish To See

In a revelatory gaffe during his condemnation of Russia’s illegal war against Ukraine, former United States President George W. Bush inadvertently referred to his own administration’s invasion of Iraq as wholly unjustified and brutal. While the Iraq war ended on December 15, 2011, the United States had yet to officially end its illegal and counterproductive U.S.-led so-called global war on terror.

The July 2022 drone blast that killed al-Qaeda leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, shook the ground of an affluent Kabul neighborhood and left terrified residents and shopkeepers confused, then outraged by the source. War-weary Afghans condemned our violation of their new-found peace and possible incitement of retaliatory attacks.

“We’ve had so many years of war, and things were just beginning to settle down,” a jobless schoolteacher selling vegetables from a cart reportedly said to Washington Post journalists. “The conflict is past and no one has the right to violate our sovereignty” and, I’d add, still fragile peace.

Assassinations of anyone’s untried sons and daughters represent an unlawful departure from our historic role in the United States as a champion of human rights. One haunting example reported in The New York Times involved an uncle who sat in a public cafe urging his nephew to abandon all ties to violence when a drone bomb that tracked his nephew killed both of them and everyone there.

I thought of South Africa in 1962. What if that country’s white-imposed government had ruled to execute global peacemaker Nelson Mandela for his participation in what escalated into an armed struggle against apartheid?

After Mandela spent more than 27 years in prison, he went on to become president of South Africa in its first multiracial elections since apartheid began in 1948. Even before Mandela’s release from prison in 1990, President Frederik Willem de Klerk had privately negotiated with Mandela to replace their country’s institutionalized racist segregation and discrimination with the majority rule of a democratic government. Both men jointly received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 for their co-leadership in South Africa’s peaceful transition from apartheid to a new democracy.

Frederik Willem de Klerk

Nelson Mandela

Some of our world’s most powerful and successful peacemakers learned from their experiences as former warriors. Their forgiving patience and tolerance and empathetic partnerships have been transformative.

For his part, Israeli President Shimon Peres said in a 2013 interview with The New York Times, ”The man with a hammer thinks every problem is a nail. Problems are not nails. When there is good will, they can all be overcome.”

Is world peace impossible Then 89 years old, Peres said he had most often seen faith triumph over cynicism or skepticism.

A Sustainable Peace Requires Honesty and Accountability

Thankfully, in January 2022 dozens of Congressional Democrats led by Elizabeth Warren urged President Biden to systematically reform our country’s secretive and unaccountable military (and industry) operations.

In response to increased awareness, in August 2022 Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III announced an overhaul of United States combat operations to protect civilians from military and drone attacks. His partial response follows the April 2022 Pulitzer-Prize-winning investigative series by The New York Times on missed (illegal) targets, disproportionate destruction, and civilian killings from military strikes.

The 2022 Symposium: Still at War – Where and Why the United States is Fighting the “War on Terror” presents all policymakers and our voting public with essential questions. Among the questions posted in March by Tess Bridgeman and Brianna Rosen of Just Security at the Reiss Center on Law and Security at the New York University School of Law are: What do decision makers “seek to achieve through the use of force that it could not (actually) achieve through other means?” Other questions include: How do our wars end What are humanely “viable policy alternatives to the use of lethal force in an armed conflict context that could achieve U.S. security goals What are the consequences of remaining on a perpetual war footing?”

Our Pentagon asserted the United States has shifted its priority from so-called counterterrorism towards “greater competition with Russia and China.” However, the February 2021 map and research posted by Stephanie Savell and research assistants with the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University revealed increased widespread air and drone strikes, ground combat and other military operations in 85 countries from 2018 to 2020.

In January 2018, Karen McVeigh of The Guardian reported on a global survey that found more than 15,000 civilians killed by deadly weapons in U.S.-led attacks against Isis militants in 2017 — a 42-percent spike.

As early as 2010, Australian publisher and whistleblower Julian Assange exposed our alleged war crimes on WikiLeaks. He included our lawless detention of men held at Guantánamo Bay with neither criminal charges nor trials.

Assange had filled our country’s void of fearless or courageously independent investigative journalism. Included in the information Assange released — with redactions and withheld documents he had reportedly discussed with U.S. government officials beforehand — is a video of the crew of an Apache helicopter in Baghdad who reportedly killed a dozen civilians. Those who passed included 22-year-old Reuters photographer, Namir Noor Eldeen, and his driver, Saeed Chmagh, 40.

“Namir and Saeed would have been forgotten statistics of that illegal war, if not for Assange,” Dean Yates, a former Baghdad Bureau Chief of Reuters reported in the January 2022 New Age Opinion.

As of mid-November 2022, however, President Biden’s Justice Department has yet to revoke our exploitative ex-president’s request to extradite Assange from the United Kingdom ostensibly on allegations of espionage for publishing classified information said to have endangered lives.

Even though, Yates reported, “Brigadier general Robert Carr testified that his team of 120 counter-intelligence officers couldn’t find a single person killed in Afghanistan or Iraq because of WikiLeaks disclosures.”

Free Assange and Protecting Freedom of the Press

The Justice Department under President Barrack Obama had decided against prosecution of Assange to protect both our democracy’s pivotal right to freedom of the press and our constitutional balance of power, especially after other media had reportedly made the same disclosures without the same redactions.

“Publishing information that is in the public interest is a cornerstone of media freedom,” agreed Secretary General Agnes Callamard of Amnesty International in the organization’s April 20, 2022, post.

Vital media freedom is also protected by international human rights laws. “It’s not too late for United States authorities to set things right and drop their charges,” Callamard said. “In the meantime, given the politically motivated nature of this case and its grave implications for our democratic freedom of expression,” Callamard urged the United Kingdom to “refrain from representing the United States in further appeals.”

Charges of espionage against Assange have been described by Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg as an attempt to criminalize the objective journalism necessary for a democracy to be healthy and thrive.

During the Vietnam war, Ellsberg enlightened the United States public of civilian casualties and suffering, which helped end the Vietnam War.

More than every voter’s right to know what our government is doing is our responsibility to proactively end and prevent deadly lies and conflicts of interest.

In 2012, former President Jimmy Carter had also raised alarms about our alleged war crimes in his New York Times op-ed article, A Cruel and Unusual Record. “After more than 30 airstrikes on civilian homes this year in Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai has demanded such attacks end, but the practice (continued) in areas of Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen that (were) not in any war zone,” Carter wrote. “We don’t know how many hundreds of innocent civilians have been killed in attacks approved by the highest authorities in Washington. This would have been unthinkable in previous times.”

Carter cautioned that our own unjust bombings could turn “aggrieved families toward terrorist organizations,” “arouse civilian populations against us,” and drive “repressive governments to cite such actions to justify their own despotic behavior.”

Carter urged the United States to reclaim its leadership role as a nonviolent “global champion of human rights.”

A fearless or courageously aware and responsive public insists on honest and trustworthy leaders. The honest rally diverse talents and interests around equitably inclusive partnerships. Trustworthy leaders prioritize the safety and welfare of all interdependent beings and the native organic environment that sustains us. They are unifiers who consistently learn and earn one another’s trust. They value the tough love of whistleblowers and journalists and insist on the criminal incarcerations essential to save lives.

I write these words in my Pennsylvania home-based office, in front of the porcelain-and-steel sign, 20th Century Publishing Co. Printing, that hung outside my grandfather’s business in the 1930s.

My dad knew firsthand of the fearlessness and courage it takes to share speech that is truly free for everyone. He and his four siblings and mother helped my Italian-immigrant grandfather, Armondo Perilli, edit and publish their own Italian newspaper, Il Secolo XX or 20th Century, on the first floor of their New Jersey home.

Recently, I asked my aunts how my grandfather had gotten the scar I had seen across his left cheek in photographs. Aunt Louise said she’d never forget the day her father answered a knock on their front door and a man with a knife slashed her father’s face over an article published in their newspaper. Her father had grabbed a kitchen towel and pressed it to his face as he rushed to the hospital.

Too young to grasp the issues involved, Aunt Mamie said, “I have to give my dad credit. He fearlessly reported abuses by organized crime then.”

“Ink runs through your blood,” my dad used to tell me. Early in my communications career and, again, during my one of family’s last birthday celebrations with my dad before he passed, he gifted me with the same birthday card of Superwoman “who always finds a way to save the day.”

From one of the top shelves in my office, Superwoman stares down at me with hands on her hips as I write this pre-election post. I still recall the rosy promise of fearless and courageous responsiveness amid today’s criminally dishonest and exploitative exclusions and abuses.

Subscribe to Fearless or Courageously Trustworthy Newspapers

In the 1980s, my History of Journalism professor at Temple University in Philadelphia urged more fearless and courageous journalism.

Instead of more journalism, David Bauder reported in the July 1, 2022, issue of AP News on the demise of thousands of United States newspapers. A reported 70 million United States residents now live in a county with no local newspaper, or just one.

Competition from digital media for publishing profits and clicks is partly responsible.

McKay Coppins reported earlier in the October 14, 2021 issue of The Atlantic on a secretive hedge fund gutting newsrooms. He described how Alden Global Capital hollowed out the prestigious Chicago Tribune newsroom— “that had endorsed Abraham Lincoln and scooped the Treaty of Versailles, and that had toppled political bosses and tangled with crooked mayors and earned dozens of Pulitzer Prizes”— to a quarter of its former size.

“When a local newspaper vanishes, research shows it tends to correspond with lower voter turnout, increased polarization, and a general erosion of civic engagement,” Coppins wrote. Misinformation can proliferate.

Without a newspaper to hold the dishonest and predatory to account — as independent newspapers have done for hundreds of years, Coppins described how city budgets can balloon and corruption and dysfunction take root. Consequently, Coppins cited a Politico analysis that found our pathologically dishonest ex-president performed best during the 2016 election in communities without independent media to proactively counter his lies.

Voters must hold to account anyone who abuses the trust of soldiers and voters, and who tries to compromise the human rights and freedoms my father and so many others have since risked their lives to restore and protect.

Appropriately in 2015, when Pope Francis visited with grade-school students in Harlem, New York, he described the devil, rather than as an energy outside ourselves, as “one who sows sadness, distrust, envy and evil desires.”

“Happiness comes not from conformity, but unity,” he later elaborated.

Use your consumer dollars to restore and protect objective journalism free of conflicts of interest and owner bias.

For example, as of mid-November 2022, even The New York Times had yet to report the whole story about ChevronTexaco‘s long-overdue debt to Indigenous inhabitants and farmers in a remote region of the Ecuadorian Amazon rainforest. In 2011, the Ecuadorian court reportedly ordered ChevronTexaco to pay $18 billion in compensation, later reduced to $9.5 billion, for the oil-pooled wasteland and poisoned soil and water reportedly left behind when the company’s drilling contract expired in 1992, according to an April 2022 post of Amazon Watch, the Indigenous rights and environmental protection nonprofit.

Unlike a public relations agent, it is the responsibility of journalists to research and interview a variety of sources both involved and affected, regardless of whether Chevron pays for a media ad or post. Overdue is investigative coverage of ChevronTexaco’s much-needed remediation and reparations for the 16 million gallons of crude oil ChevronTexaco reportedly spilled over more than two decades, and the billions of gallons of toxic waste reportedly deposited “with reckless disregard for industry standards” in unlined pits to save an estimated $3 per barrel.

Also egregiously overlooked by The New York Times and other mainstream media are abuses of power that Amazon Watch described in an April 2022 post as “so far-fetched as to be almost unbelievable,” and that led to human rights lawyer, Steven Donzinger, to serve jail time and lose his yet-to-be restored law license and passport, the latter which blocks his helpful return to Ecuador.

Voters must join House Rules Committee Chairman, James P. McGovern, and House Natural Resources Committee Chairman, Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ), and other politicians who, on April 25, 2022, urged President Biden to pardon Donzinger and dismiss the criminal contempt case against him. They are among a coalition of 56 Nobel Prize Laureates, Amnesty International USA and other human rights organizations and members of the European Parliament who issued statements of protest against the questionable and “disparate treatment of Donziger by U.S. Courts,” and urged an investigation into alleged judicial abuses.

Further use your consumer dollars to boycott ChevronTexaco. Hold company officials accountable for the cost and cleanup of toxic spills and deposits left to Ecuadorians with far fewer means and, since, health and safety disasters.

“When Steve and I went to Ecuador and visited these communities together, there were places where the stench of toxic chemicals was so strong it burned my nose,” elaborated Chairman McGovern in his April 27 press release. “There were villages where nearly every family had been affected by cancer. These actions were appalling and immoral.

…Steve exposed their acts of corporate violence. And in response, Chevron executives used their unchecked power to rig the justice system against him—resulting in highly suspect and deeply troubling treatment by U.S. courts that made a mockery of justice, serving to bully and intimidate Steve and others who fight for environmental equity. The President should pardon Steve Donziger.

This is about more than a court case—it’s about sending a message that corporate polluters need to be held accountable for breaking the law, and that they shouldn’t be allowed to harass and intimidate those who seek justice.”

Truth and Accountability Are Essential to Earn Trust

Our country’s shortage of independent and unbiased newspapers and media can enable oligarchic abuses by judges, prosecutors, government regulators and legislators with financial ties to industry.

As temporary guardians of one another, we have no time for criminally deadly denials and delays in mitigations and yet possible reversals of today’s multiple catastrophic threats against all life on earth. Atomic scientists shortened the time on the Doomsday Clock they had set to reflect the risk of global-manmade catastrophe from 2 minutes to 90 seconds to midnight. “Our international security situation is dire, not just because these threats exist, but because world leaders have caused the international political infrastructures for managing them to erode.”

Beyond the threat of nuclear Armageddon and a heinous biological weapons race are the dangers of climate change and domestic and global terrorists.

Our country’s 2020 change of leadership restored hope that renewed United States partnership in interdependent world affairs would reverse our “global race toward catastrophe.”

Seditious lies about a stolen election and other deceptive provocations left unreported by absent and corruptly prosecuted whistleblowers and journalists threaten to undermine our elections and democracy. Today’s multiplicity of threats can also undermine trust and our country’s ability to reliably lead or partner in urgent mitigations and yet-possible reversals of our world’s worst threats since the creation of the Doomsday Clock in 1947.

Positive steps toward a safer world include our 2021 decisions in the United States to both extend the New START arms control agreement with Russia and rejoin our Paris Climate Accords. Also pivotal are resumed negotiations for an Iran nuclear deal.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and their Board of Sponsors call for greater urgency and unity to prevent the worst cataclysmic outcomes. Sponsors of the atomic scientists include 13 Nobel Laureates and, most recently, The Elders, a global group of independent leaders founded in 2007 by Nelson Mandela to establish world peace and human rights.

“Leaders around the world must immediately commit themselves to renewed cooperation in the many ways and venues available for reducing existential risks,” warn atomic scientists. “Citizens of the world can and must organize and insist their leaders do so.”

Voting to Reverse Multiplicity of Catastrophic Threats

Our need for universal partnerships comes at a time when, in April, corporate overseer Warner Brothers Discovery bought mainstream CNN and, just a couple of months before our 2022 election, ordered network anchors to obfuscate and avoid the phrase the Big Lie in reference to the criminally deadly lie that President Biden stole our many-times certified 2020 election. CNN’s new owners cut programs, such as Reliable Sources that reported on the fairness and objectivity of our media, and laid off a pernicious percentage of staff members. One of the biggest shareholders of Warner Brothers Discovery is multibillionaire John Malone, who donated $250,000 to the 2016 presidential inauguration and served on the board of directors of the Cato Institute, a decades-long climate-science denier. Today’s life-saving coverage of yet another mainstream media has been obstructed by the bias of its corporate owner.

Rather than support and encourage voters, Republicans in dozens of states that include Arizona and Georgia passed illegal voter suppression bills that restrict access and make it harder mostly for people of color to vote. Responsiveness is needed to end and proactively prevent voter suppression and equally illegal voter subversion bills that enable extremists to seize partisan control over election administration and sabotage or reject votes and, in actuality, steal future elections.

Before our 2022 election, Marc Elias, founder of Democracy Docket and Elias Law Group, urged U.S. voters to “elect pro-voting rights candidates into election offices — not just secretaries of state, but local elected officials as well.” He urged voters to deprive obstructionists of the tools they’d need to suppress pivotal votes.

Recent projections of voter fraud followed the criminally deadly January 6 domestic terrorist insurrection that resulted in the passing of seven people. Those who passed included five police officers. Incited by our criminally accountable ex-president, insurrectionists planted two pipe bombs and posted their murderous intention to hang Mike Pence. They had erected a gallows and shouted into a megaphone, “Execute the traitors,” then brutally battered law enforcement officers in their bloody rampage intended to be deadlier.

All complicit warrant an immediate criminal trial and incarceration, followed by either removal from office or, as the impeachment article for our accountable ex-president rules, “disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States.”

In every election, do your part to end and forever prevent today’s multiplicity of threats by dishonest perpetrators and ostrich enablers. Solidify plans for you and your family and friends to vote. If possible, register for your state’s mail-in or absentee ballot. Some states provide online tracking of ballot status and email confirmations when your ballot is both received and processed. When you vote in person, verify your active voter registration and current polling place beforehand.

(Continued in Part 2 of Be Audaciously Aware and Responsive here. Part 2 demonstrates how honesty, oneness and generosity towards all interdependent beings create the world’s happiest countries.)

How are you ensuring speech that is truly free and safe for everyone?

Aggie Perilli is president of Aggie Perilli Communications International (APCI).

Note: If you find this post helpful, you can subscribe to this APCI blog at no charge! Thank you for sharing your insights with me on Facebook and Twitter.

The post Being Audaciously Aware and Responsive, Part 1 of 2 first appeared on Aggie Perilli Communications International.

by Aggie Perilli

Communication is our superpower. It is always necessary and healthy to empathize and share understanding, especially when elected officials resort to dishonest and exploitative exclusions and attacks. The moment equitable inclusivity and other universally shared values are threatened or compromised, in the loving spirit of civil rights leader, John Lewis, you may need to get into good, necessary trouble.

Apply your talents and abilities to ensure universal safety and well-being as only you can.

More than 40 years in the business of communication and the practice of yoga and mind-body healing have taught me how mercilessly our unexplored emotions and biases can deceive us. It is our intuition or gut instinct that tells the objective truth about the interconnection of all creation I came to see illuminate what is. 

As a previously single divorcée, I witnessed our illuminating interconnection following an evening yoga class in bucolic Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

I had glided seamlessly through a yoga flow class in the flirtatious hope I’d impress my fellow yogi and casual date. The intensity of our moving meditation left me as gently buoyant as if I had landed cross-legged on a lightly grounded cloud. 

As I drove home along the dark backstreets of rural Bucks County, it felt oddly natural to discern a subtle yet vibrant radiance link lush woodlands with mailboxes and street lamps from the haloed ground in between. Had I doubted what Vietnamese Buddhist Monk, author and Zen Master, Thich Nhat Hahn, described as humanity’s “interbeing,” I never could again.

Inspired, I remembered the timeless wisdom of the 13th-century Persian mystic poet, Rumi, who observed, “There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

Photo by Brandon Montrone

I have happily since remarried the younger non-yogi bicyclist and nature lover, Michael Evans, and continue to enjoy inside-out communications. As Michael and I grow older, I’ve learned to enhance health and productivity with at least 15 to 30 minutes a day dedicated to meditative reflection on the truth and palpable peace and joy of our unconditional oneness and love, which includes tough love.

Mobilize Inside-Out Empathy and Shared Understanding

In a PBS 1985 interview, mythologist and author Joseph Campbell called the greatest human transgression “the sin of inadvertence, of not being alert — not quite awake.” Campbell urged viewers: “follow your bliss” and “enjoy the refreshment and life within us all the time.” 

Like a proud parent or guardian, my most enriching joy comes from my gratitude and faithfulness towards all blessedly diverse beings and the wildly beautiful organic environment that sustains us.

Faithfulness for me revolves around writing. Since 1984, when I launched my career as a journalist in Princeton, New Jersey, I have had the humble privilege of sharing my bliss as a writer and communications professional lifelong. For the past over 30 years, I’ve also enjoyed sharing the bliss of clients and partners of my business, Aggie Perilli Communications International (APCI).

One of APCI’s most inspiring client partnerships involved the The Arc of Somerset County. Together with The Arc, APCI provided a voice for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, enhanced their equitable inclusion and community participation; promoted ways to prevent some disabilities; and increased financial donations and both the organizations that hire people with disabilities and the projects provided to Arc occupational centers.

The COVID-19 pandemic has since heightened global awareness of our interdependence with all beings and, also, our environment. 

Our global time-out opened a window for more of us to become attentively aware and proactively responsive. It provided nonessential workers with a pause from being too preoccupied with often conflicting obligations and digital distractions to empathize with themselves, let alone anyone else.

Today’s interrelated catastrophes serve as a wake-up call. Here in the United States, deadly partisan politics delayed equitable funding for nationwide coronavirus testing, medical equipment and supplies, and life-saving healthcare reporting.

Many of us continued to safeguard one another by social distancing and remaining largely in lockdown. In international news, we enviously learned how nationally tested New Zealanders safely returned to their workplaces and shops, restaurants and sporting events, and sizable gatherings in little more than two months.  

That’s all the time it took for New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and her united team of 5 million to contain and eradicate COVID-19 for more than 100 days. When new coronavirus cases foreseeably emerged, prepared New Zealanders resumed their phased lockdowns with transparent testing and contact tracing and, again, safely contained and eradicated COVID-19.

“Ardern never put us on a war footing,” noted New Zealand’s microbiology professor, Siouxsie Wiles, in an NPR interview. “Her speeches weren’t about attacking an invisible enemy,” or anyone. Rather, she empathetically conveyed the seriousness of the coronavirus pandemic.

With admirable humility and jokes about becoming a new mom, Ardern encouraged New Zealanders to safeguard, rather than to counterproductively fight one another.

Amid simultaneous crises from racism and violence to climate catastrophes, Ardern’s nonviolent politics of kindness serve as a real-life masterclass in breakthrough leadership communication.

It is essential for world leaders to learn from Ardern’s lifesaving boundaries and transformative oneness. In 2019, Fortune magazine had already recognized Ardern as one of our world’s greatest leaders. Fortune noted how Ardern, while still a new mother, “empathetically, and humbly navigated New Zealand through the worst terror attack in their country’s history” after a gunman fatally shot 50 people in two mosques in the coastal city of Christchurch.

Fortune credited empathetic Ardern with setting “a standard for dignity in the face of violence.” Within weeks, she earned near-unanimous support for New Zealand’s sweeping nationwide ban on most semiautomatic weapons including the type used in the attack. 

Photo by Raquel Costa

Life-Saving Oneness Emanates from You 

It is equally vital to learn from the success of investigative journalists and authors Robert Woodward and Carl Bernstein. During the 1974 Watergate scandal, Woodward and Bernstein’s “best obtainable version of the truth”  led to the resignation of then President Richard Nixon for his impeachable abuse of power, obstruction of justice, and contempt of Congress.  

As these seasoned journalists advise, follow the lies as well as the money and identify the motives behind attempts at exploitative divisiveness and distractions.

Neither compromise universally essential values, nor give in or give up.

Boycott incompetently unaware and exploitatively dishonest and divisive media. As a former journalist, if I or my colleagues falsified or denied the news and divisively misused the pronouns, “you” and “they,” we would have been justifiably fired. Rather than empathize and share understanding, ideological news programs, such as Fox “News,” exploitatively profited from their criminal provocations of fear and loathing. Fox’s consequential decline in profits in 2022 still reportedly exceeded $1 billion.

Independently research and boycott advertisers who perpetuate and ostrich-enable revelatory projections of guilt, shame and blame, rather than ensure the unifying truths and transformative peace that safeguard and inspire us all.

It can be easy to identify complicit followers and enablers. They culpably feed on false projections of divisiveness, then consequently grow frightened and confused. One way Thich Nhat Hanh jokingly advised us to avoid bitter projections is to wear T-shirts that ask, “Are you sure#8221;

Evil is never required. For example, accountable are all complicit in the unlawful arrest and detention of countless minorities and fellow immigrants, including children criminally torn from their parents at the United States border and detained for a profit — with inadequate safeguards and neither recordkeeping nor the intention or plan to ensure their urgent reunification. These barbarities are inhuman betrayals of “love your neighbor,” one of the greatest commandments from which all major world religions flow.

Have the courage and integrity to identify and eliminate the root causes of pervasive revolving-door corruption across government and industry, and do all possible to urgently end and prevent the worst catastrophic consequences across interrelated areas of our lives.

Firmly yet kindly, empathize and share understanding that opposition to a woman’s right to choose the abortion of souls yet to emerge in no way exonerates every voter’s accountability to equitably and enthusiastically care for the billions of interdependent souls here already.

It is most unloving to deny openhearted discussions about falsely fear-driven patriarchic and hierarchical exploitations of politics and religion, when these are among the areas where empathy and shared understanding are often needed most. 

The exclusion or abuse of any interdependent being for any projected dishonesty and exploitation is destined to backfire.

Develop discernment. Faithfully end and prevent potentially distracting obfuscations and denials, especially when the source is entrusted with decision-making power. In 2019, I lamented that hospitals like the one where my stepson, Justin, served as an ER physician would end up treating at least one patient who had ingested cleaning fluid at the provocation of our pathologically dishonest and disinterested United States president. 

Use your vote and consumer dollars to ensure what the spiritual book, A Course in Miracles, describes as the qualities of God’s teachers. Among them are honesty, defenselessness, generosity, gentleness and a joy deeper than happiness.

These and the interrelated characteristics of faithful patience and tolerance remind me of my peacemaker mom, Louise Perilli.

Growing up, when the same schoolboy tried to bully me, my steel-magnolia mom would say, “Ig-nore him. He’s try-ing to get a rise out of you.”

The first woman to provide accounting for a business where the job of accounting had been limited to men only, my mom never condoned the exclusion or disparagement of anyone for any projected exploitation or abuse ever.

As an adult, whenever I visited my parents, I’d feel a palpable peace the moment I stepped in their front door. Their unconditional love and joy inspired me to adopt the qualities of patience and tolerance or non-judgment as my applicable definition of forgiveness and pathway for change. 

Be or advance inspirational leaders who are trustworthy and audaciously aware and responsive. 

Proactively visit the nonprofit and bipartisan website, headcount.org, to make sure you are registered to vote. Verify your polling place and solidify plans for you and your loved ones to vote beforehand. Where possible, register for your mail-in or absentee ballot and vote early.

As John Lewis noted on Facebook, our vote is “almost sacred.” It is “the most powerful nonviolent tool we have in our democratic society.” Make sure your voice is heard.

Additionally, use your consumer dollars to ensure the respect and protection of all gratefully diverse beings and our interconnected environment. Do all possible to urgently end and prevent criminal inequities that can harm our most vulnerable beings first. 

Before one more destructive attempt to resort to the culpable extremes of violence and enabling indifference or hopelessness, take a restorative breath.  

With trust-building boundaries, communicate and empathetically partner with even your most ardent challengers. They may be inspired to become your most gratefully enthusiastic champions.

Ensure enhanced environmental protections, including safe and clean renewable energy and native organic land use — without delay! Expedite globally integrated mitigations to reverse the worst climate crises now. Otherwise expect increasing cataclysmic deaths and mass displacements, annual billion-dollar losses, and the extinction of a million species during our Earth’s already hottest years on record. 

Throughout the process, remember the teaching of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.: Be the peace you wish to see in the world. 

Studies conducted by political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan found that nonviolent civil resistance movements, such as the transformative pro-democracy boycott of white businesses during apartheid in South Africa, are far more likely than violence to produce lasting change.

Expedite our world’s lifesaving shift from the push of projected evil to the only true and everlasting power of our Divinely universal oneness and love.

How are you applying your talents and abilities to serve as a unifying force for love?  

Aggie Perilli is president of Aggie Perilli Communications International (APCI).

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We hope this post finds you safe and well. As you and your organization navigate unprecedented operational and business challenges, Aggie Perilli Communications International (APCI) is here to exceed expectations through empathetic and unifying communications and transformative campaigns. 

Our results-driven partnerships are consistently recognized for excellence. Throughout the Covid crisis and beyond, to engage and align your audience to exceed your expectations while inspiring a world of connection, contact APCI.

Aggie Perilli and our APCI team

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Aggie Perilli Communications International (APCI) welcomes Kristy Smith to our research planning and development team. Kristy brings 10 years of experience in research and development and editorial leadership with the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, US Department of State, USAID, World Vision International, Save the Children and more. Her accomplishments span countries in Africa, South and East Asia, Latin America and Europe.

Kristy received an Education Resources Award from World Vision; a David L. Guyer Research Fellowship Award from Save the Children; and a Fulbright Fellowship Award from the Lisbon University Institute in Portugal. She is also a Dean’s Bosworth Scholar Recipient from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in Medford, Massachusetts.

Welcome, Kristy! APCI is proud to have you join our team.

Note: We create empathetic and unifying communications and transformative campaigns. To engage and align your audience to exceed expectations while inspiring a world of connection, contact Aggie Perilli Communications International.

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