EMPATHETIC MORALITY: “Dad Sports Skirt to Support Cross-dressing Son”

Many fathers insist that their cross-dressing sons change clothes before stepping outside—especially if neighbors are starting to snicker. A German dad is quickly becoming an international hero for taking an entirely different approach.

When Nils Pickert moved his family from open-minded West Berlin to a more conservative small southern German town, locals rolled their eyes at his dress-wearing son. His 5-year-old boy became too embarrassed to put on his favorite frocks.

Pickert decided to teach his son a lesson in self-confidence and started wearing skirts around town himself.

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h/t: MoveOn.org

IN REMEMBRANCE: Anthony Arnove / “Howard Zinn Turns 90: The Great Legacy of the People’s Historian”

Howard Zinn would have turned 90 this Friday if his seemingly boundless energy and youthfulness had not been cut short in January 2010.

[…]

It’s worth remembering that A People’s History of the United States first came out in 1980 as a tide of reaction was seeking to bury the social movements that inspired Howard’s book and which he saw as the hope for the future.

[…]

Howard challenged these ideas in a terrific speech he gave in 1970: “If you don’t think, if you just listen to TV and read scholarly things, you actually begin to think that things are not so bad, or that just little things are wrong. But you have to get a little detached, and then come back and look at the world, and you are horrified. So we have to start from that supposition—that things are really topsy-turvy.”

Howard had that rare ability to step back and help us understand our topsy-turvy world primarily because he approached politics and history from the standpoint of someone who thought it was possible to turn our world right side up — to put people before profit, the environment before the interests of mining companies.

¡Howard Zinn presente!

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RELIGIOUS SATIRICAL POETRY: Bill Moyers / “The Poetry of Philip Appleman” / VIDEO

Bill talks with and invites readings by renowned poet, novelist, and editor Philip Appleman, whose creativity spans a long life filled with verse, fiction, philosophy, and religion. The author of nine books of poetry, three novels, and six volumes of non-fiction, Appleman’s most acclaimed work includes explorations of the life and theories of Charles Darwin. A scholar of Darwin, Appleman edited the critical anthology Darwin, and wrote the poetry books Darwin’s Ark and Darwin’s Bestiary, earning him praise for illuminating the “overwhelming sanity” of Darwin’s thought with clarity and wit. Appleman’s latest poetry collection is Perfidious Proverbs.

Watch video here . . .