Today, with the latest military attack, I feel overcome by grief and rage. So much of the world is dominated by autocrats heading up violent militaries, imperialist invaders seizing land, oilfields, water supply; militias hounding ethnic minorities, expelling people to concentration camps (whatever they call them); slaughtering at will, bombing apartment buildings and tents; destroying orchards and forests.

These men are in power by the rationales of patriarchy and racism, the supremacy of wealth, dominations upheld by oligarchic power, sold with nationalist and extremist religious myths. "I am your retribution." "Kill Amalek." "Restore the Caliphate." "Counterinsurgency." Greater Russia, Greater Israel, the Donroe Doctrine. Stoking fear and ethnic hatred to impose authoritarian force, and enact a surveillance society. Democracy in name only, authoritarian suppression of basic human rights.

Dominant men at the helm of a top dog social hierarchy, the wealthy few ruling over the many, but purporting to be for the people. Who are lured by the promise of Number One by proxy. Plenty bought into it; some are now seeing the real cost to their own families as the wealth is being looted. Under these regimes, though, you don't get to change your mind, or get a re-do. These top dogs do not hesitate to use force.

Institutionally, there has been little effective opposition, and too much compliance. In the US, Schumer and Jeffries slow-walked a bill affirming the power of Congress to declare war. Both parties enthusiastically funded and supplied the genocide in Gaza. Cheatocrat defies the Constitution and federal court orders with impunity, backed up by Rs in Congress, even some Ds. He is openly plotting to suborn the vote by multiple means, including disenfranchising married women who took husbands' names, and kneecapping vote-by-mail by allowing the Post Office not to postmark on time, or even to deliver mail. They're also floating forcing everyone to re-register, with notaries.

Misogyny and racism shape the agenda, along with naked greed and open self-dealing that no one seems able to stop. They've installed a new normal of wall-to-wall corruption and open repression of basic rights.

The main thing we have going for us is that people are standing up, like Minneapolis has done, LA and Portland. Several purchases of huge plants scheduled for ICE concentration camps have been shut down, and the same goes for water-and-power-sucking data centers.

People are already in the streets against the bombing of Iran—and it's not because they like the ayatollahs. Maybe 40,000 Iranians lost their lives in the streets, calling for their overthrow. An Iranian friend told me the other day, people there don't want the Pahlavi dynasty to return, but that's probably who Trump and Netanyahu want to install.

Everything is churning now. Best not to lose our heads. But I had to vent. Things could be so different on our beautiful planet, with thriving forests in the Amazon and orangutan habitat in Papua, boreal forests instead of tar sands desolation. With funding going to medical research, disabled support services, and child care instead of the gargantuan military industrial complex. These things can happen, but not while women's leadership and rights are scorned, and Indigenous rights are trampled.

Our challenge to build a just and cooperative society will have to start at the grassroots. It's not coming from the top.