Collective Action or Collective Misery Lessons from the Life, Transformation and Actions of Nelson Mandela We celebrated Nelson Mandela day on the 18th of this month. On the same day at the highest levels the cry came out that if we do not undertake collective action on the climate situation…

Months ago, I started the complicated process of trying to participate on-site at a United Nations Headquarters intergovernmental meeting on migration. Hey, it was not easy, as I am just a representative of a Dallas institution that happens to have status as a non-governmental organization with that world body, and…

My biological father was Ukrainian. I lived with his last name until my late twenties. He had met my mother in a refugee camp in Germany right after World War II. Of Bulgarian origin, she was a refugee who had been taken by the Nazis in the Soviet Union during…

Patting his forehead, with his ‘father’ on Zoom, I watched and felt as life slipped away from my four-legged ‘nephew’ and companion, Puga. A white shepherd he only five or some thirty odd years in our two-legged terms. …

So, we are all tired of ‘it’, however we define it. We go to shop, get out of the car and realize we have to put the mask on. Where is it? On the car seat? No. In the handbag? Fumble a bit and come out with two, one in…

Another Thanksgiving with the pandemic, however you define it, however you deal with it. I made a promise to myself that I would listen to all definitions and the ways that different people deal with it. But, of course, I can do it, because I am ‘grandmother’ Thanksgiving, having been…

We are at the opposite ends of our lives. I am seventy-four and you all of eighteen. At twelve I started writing ‘Letters to the World’, in which I talked about impending doom. That was just when we were about to enter the nineteen sixties. You are famous and perhaps…

The last week with the events in and surrounding the Afghanistan tragedy and the continuing coronavirus pandemic have brought out some deep memories. I have been glued to the internet, going back and forth from news through google with its various news sources, mainly the ones from the US, German…

Wonder why the two are equated? Well, consider getting up in the morning. Are you looking forward to a coffee, getting out the cereal, to a jog, to checking on the kids? Are you going to the bathroom? Do you notice the sound of the toilet flushing? Well, what if…