Social media is just today's town square, graffiti or telegram. Thank you for your reflections during a big political turn. Perhaps, I am in political denial/apathy. Or perhaps I and many of us feel that the real power exists within us, our bodies, spaces, relationships, and the words, images, music, food, and touch that makes our lives...ALIVE.

Coming to New York and studying under the radical black thought of James Cone, Cornel West, and Sam Cruz and ecofeminists and psychoanalysts like Anne Ulanov and Chung Hyun Kyung helped see that America is much bigger and deeper than the picture of the United States government. That the fullness of "America" will come when everything "low" and "lowly" rises: That means, everything must come into mutual relationship with what is high: multi-billion dollar corporate influence.

This does not mean calling for violence or wishing upon more destruction, but bearing witness to truth of a living, interconnected whole we can call Truth, Love, Hope or God. And this means admitting that the government has a striking resemblance to Rome with its imperial architecture, sword, military expansiveness, ecological devastation, wealth inequality, racial police violence. It is the European intellectual superiority that depends on a ignorant and exploitative stance to anything that is "barbarian" and needs to be tamed: earth, women, people of color, "third world" peoples, crime, sexuality, resources, terrorism without checking the log in ones own eye.

Thank God I am given the gift of serving as artist/minister, to represent the Gospel of an radically inclusive Christian community that survived within and outside UNJUST either/or of Empire. Thank God for the stories of my elders who survived Soviet persecution. Maybe then, the "America" I love can grow into all it always was deep in its potential: a place where mama Earth, all Latin Americans, kidnapped peoples of African descent, women, LGBTQ, differently abled and Indigenous Peoples are given back their power and resources so that we may all share sustainably.