Challenges of Peace Activism: This Weekend at Left Forum in New York City!

"Challenges of Peace Activism" - a Left Forum 2018 panel

(Dear friends: I've been away, but I haven't been gone. I've been working with World Beyond War, which I'll be representing this weekend at Left Forum 2018 in New York City. I've also had to do a super-quick rebuild of this site after the previous version ran into a bit of technical trouble. I hope you like the new design better. Here's the article I wrote for the World Beyond War website about what I'll be up to this weekend!)

Why I'm Still On Facebook

Cambridge Analytica facebook screens used in 2016

I’m a peace activist who has been working with online targeted advertising and member profile databases for over 20 years. My head is spinning right now as I try to follow lots of breaking news about Facebook and Cambridge Analytica and 50 million stolen profiles, about the Mercer family (which financed much of this to help elect Trump), and about the mysterious British military contractor SCL Group (which seems to own it all) ...

Time To Leave The Cave

A Cave
Immediately after Donald Trump was "elected" last November, I started doing some emergency reading. The first book I picked up was Martin Luther King's autobiography. It was a book I'd already been meaning to read, and I knew MLK's example of peaceful, stubborn, courageous protest was about to become intensely relevant again in the United States of America. Later, more recently, I returned to a book I'd read a few times before: Plato's Republic ...

A Nickel For Charlottesville

Monticello in real life and on a Nickel
I've spent a lot of time in and around the beautiful city of Charlottesville, Virginia. It's a special place, voted the happiest city in America by the US National Bureau of Economic Research only three years ago. It's a university town with a mellow, dignified ambience, nestled nicely near the Shenandoah and Blue Ridge mountains ...

Bold Words: Inspiration from Zola in the Age of Social Media

Emile Zola, speaking out
Before the election this past November, and up until the inauguration in January, I deactivated my Twitter account and abandoned my Facebook account of almost ten years. I was worn out and depressed by the negativity I saw every time I scrolled through my phone or logged into a computer, and I hated social media for the mess of trolls and hate-filled people it seemed to produce, and for the friends of mine I saw cut down, harshly disregarded, silenced by underhanded insults, and even in some cases threatened ...

The Pacifist's Path

Lisa Perez author photo
On Election Day, I stared at the Presidential Election results in complete disbelief. I cried. I demanded a re-count. I saw rallies and people in the streets. Then, on Saturday, January 21st, 2017, I celebrated as women banded together in solidarity across the nation and around the world to express their anger and discontent. I cried happy tears. I cheered.

Red Alert: We Won't Follow Trump To War

Red Alert: We Won't Follow Trump To War
News of war tends to bring out our natural gullibility. When the con-man in the White House announced a missile attack on Syria two nights ago, some otherwise intelligent pundits immediately began gushing with inexplicable praise. Fareed Zakaria called Trump "presidential" on CNN, while NBC's Brian Williams swooned over the "beautiful" images of Tomahawk smoke trails in the sky ...