At 1:30 p.m. in Springfield on May 29 there will be a rally to protest racist police officers who kill black people. The rally will be outside 130 Pearl Street. It's being organized by Jobs With Justice and other groups. As of 9 a.m. on May 29, about 150 people had RSVP'd on Facebook. More information is at:

www.facebook.com/events/662147417698084

*********

On May 23 in Brattleboro there was a climate rally. About a dozen people at the rally were visible in photos posted on Facebook by the group that organized it: Extinction Rebellion Southern Vermont. The activists wore face masks and stayed six feet apart.

************

Priscilla Lynch is Codepink's western Massachusetts coordinator. On May 26 she told the Valley Post that Susan Triolo organized a caravan by seven cars with peace signs that went through the Pioneer Valley towns of Sunderland, Hadley, and Northampton. “It turned out we were the pre-parade for the Hadley Memorial Day parade, so lots of people were along the route,” Lynch said.

Some 13,000 years ago, through luck, white people ended up in the area now known as Iraq, which at the time had better farmland than the area where black people lived. This allowed white people to store surplus food, and allowed some members of their society to spend time doing things like inventing steel. This and other innovations are why white Europeans later took black Africans as slaves, rather than the other way around. This story is told in the book “Guns, Germs, and Steel” by Jared Diamond.

Today, the USA uses its military to steal oil and other resources from Africa, and to keep dictators in power. With 4 percent of the world's population, the USA spends as much on the military as the rest of the world combined.