The oppression of children is the wheel that keeps all other oppressions turning. Without it, misery would have to be imposed afresh on each new gene… - Aurora Levins Morales

So, what about the stealing of land? What about all the colonized places on Earth? What of indigenous peoples forcibly removed by invaders? The crime here is a deeper and more lasting one than theft, akin in some ways to enslavement. Before land can be stolen, it must become property. The relationships built over time between the land and the human members of its ecosystem must be severed just as ties of family and village and co-humanity were severed so that slavers could enslave. The indigenous peoples of the Americas did not own land in the European sense. They lived with and from the land and counted it as a relative.

Trauma is not the opposite of joy; it's the husk around its seed. The more we face into the world, the more we let ourselves know how other people live, the more we learn about not only their pain and rage but also their love and resilience, their defiance and hope, and it's from that full spectrum of knowing that we fill in the details and colors of the world we want. There is a joy that rises from being with what's true, even when that truth includes the terrible.

It was hopeful to have a socialist with really good policies go as far as he did in this rigged process. The ideas his campaign put forth helped us imagine a different outcome, a world in which sensible, humane policies that support people and planet were the law of the land. I imagine that world every day. Bernie Sanders’s campaign made that easier. It changed the conversation. In different ways, so did Elizabeth Warren’s. And then it was over. But it’s the campaigning that’s over, not the conversation, and certainly not the fight for a different story, which is what all organizing is about.