Visionary Vibes: A Blog by Aberjhani

Author Octavia E. Butler & The Fire This Time

1/22/2025

Introduction

Long lauded for her masterful blend of science fiction and realistic social observations, author Octavia E. Butler’s name over the past decade has grown to command greater and greater attention as a highly-significant American master of literary innovation. That conviction has intensified with the tragic fires which decimated communities in southern California during the first half of January 2025 and left survivors on edge as they waited to see what a years-long drought, and the legendary Santa Ana winds, would deliver in the second half.

The historic tragedy, along with the return of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency, led many posting on social media to bestow the word “prophetic” upon Butler’s classic 1993 novel, Parable of the Sower, due to the author’s seemingly prescient allusion to them. Butler herself famously coined the term histofuturism , making her a histofuturist, to describe her method of researching and analyzing past societal trends to gain understanding of problematic present-day conditions and devise strategies for correcting such dangerous imbalances.

The cautionary implications of Butler’s work were evident enough 15 years ago that she was one of 5 Notable Women of the Past and Present featured in my special Black History Month and Women’s History Month article series published on AXS’s former Examiner platform in 2010. It should be noted that Butler’s novel did not become a New York Times bestseller until 2020. For the first time since the Examiner platform folded, the tribute article to Butler is presented (with minor edits) in full along with the review of Parable of the Sower then included. [Although fire caused extensive damage in Los Angeles County’s Eaton community within Altadena , where Butler is buried, her grave-site reportedly sustained minimal damage.]

A Grand Dame of Sci-Fi

Octavia Estelle Butler achieved the unprecedented feat of winning three major science fiction awards––the Nebula, Hugo, and Locus Awards, all in 1985––before going on in 1995 to also win the MacArthur Foundation Genius Award. This achievement, in addition to a number of other honors, established Butler as a “grand dame” of science fiction. It also placed her within the genre on a level comparable to that of Toni Morrison or Alice Walker within mainstream literary fiction.

The daughter of Laurice and Octavia M. (Guy) Butler, the author was born June 22, 1947, in Pasadena, California [where approximately 8,000 structures have been destroyed by fire in January 2025]. After attending Pasadena City College, California State University in Los Angeles, and the Clarion Science Fiction Writers’ Workshop, she went on to launch her literary career in 1976 with the publication of the novel Patternmaster. Over the three decades that followed, until her death February 24, 2006, she would publish almost a dozen more novels including Kindred and Parable of the Talents; and the short fiction collection, Bloodchild and Other Stories.

Innovative Literary Vision

Butler’s work explores and expands the basic language of science fiction. In particular, she utilizes an interest in such subjects as psionic abilities, genetic engineering, different forms of power, and advanced alien intelligence to explore more earthbound themes of racial and sexual awareness. The various categories into which human beings place each other might be seen through Butler’s literary glasses as hierarchies that do more harm than good by encouraging and sustaining degrading forms of dominance rather than mutual respect or tolerance. In an essay for NPR titled U.N. Racism Conference, she observed the following:

“Back during the early 1960s there was a United Nations television commercial, the audio portion of which went something like this: ‘Ignorance, fear, disease, hunger, suspicion, hatred, war.’ That was it, although I would have added, ‘greed’ and ‘vengeance’ to the list. All or any of these can be the catalyst that turns hierarchical thinking into hierarchical behavior. Amid all this, does tolerance have a chance?

“Only if we want it to. Only when we want it to. Tolerance, like any aspect of peace, is forever a work in progress, never completed, and, if we're as intelligent as we like to think we are, never abandoned.”

The author was particularly noted for her creation of unique yet believable female characters and her accomplishments in this area paved the way for such contemporary Black women speculative fiction writers as Tananarive Due and Nalo Hopkinson.

Speaking to Los Angeles Times reporter Jocelyn Y. Stewart, Tananarive Due stated, "In black speculative fiction, we are a tiny family and Octavia Butler was our matriarch.”

Parable of the Sower

precisely as many say it is doing in 2025Within the first dozen pages of Parable of the Sower, readers encounter a typical family armed with guns on their way to church, a headless corpse, a naked homeless woman, a community walled in by terror, and a young woman dreaming of stars.

The dreamer is 16-year-old Lauren Oya Olamina, the would-be-sower and teller of the parable. The place is California. The time 2024-2027 A.D. And nothing in America is how it used to be. The world to come, as Butler presents it in this novel, is one ruled by the more brutal forms of anarchy [with the threat of autocracy steadily increasing, precisely as many say it is doing in 2025].

(Original photograph of Octavia E. Butler by Cheung Ching-Ming. Edit with Butler quote by Bright Skylark LP)

Everyday life becomes an actual war between the “haves” and “have-nots” battling over each other’s few pitiful possessions. Children are stolen into slavery; women are raped at will. Dogs roam the land as wild killers. Policemen are barely distinguishable from criminals, and drug-crazed maniacs run around setting fires for the high of their lives.

Such is the world in which Lauren finds herself as she comes painfully of age. Black, bold, and brilliant, she has the misfortune of having been born with “hyperempathy.” This hyperempathy “is what the doctors call an ‘organic delusional syndrome’… I get a lot of grief that doesn’t belong to me, and that isn’t real. But it hurts.”

The syndrome is one that literally puts flesh on the spiritual equation that hurting another is equal to hurting oneself. The disadvantages of her condition are magnified that much more when she is constantly forced into gunfights to save her own or someone else’s life. For example: “I knew at once that I’d hit him. He didn’t fall, but I felt his pain… Then he toppled, and I collapsed with him.”

Described as a “sharer,” Lauren deals with her condition and her world by immersing herself in the composition of “Earthseed.” At first, “Earthseed” is nothing more than a kind of juvenile poetry that aids her understanding of life in general. She later decides it is nothing less than a revelation of universal truth regarding the permanent nature of God as on-going change:

“Any change may bear seeds of benefit./ See them out./ Any change may bear seeds of harm./ Beware./ God is infinitely malleable./ God is change.”

For Lauren, serious change comes at the age of eighteen when marauders kill her family along with numerous others and burn down their neighborhood. She is forced to team up with two neighbors she has never really liked. They set out somewhat vaguely for possibly Oregon, Washington State, Alaska, or Canada. As they travel, like Dorothy and company on their way to see the Wizard of Oz, they are joined by others searching for the magic of sanity. Ex-slaves, former prostitutes, a once-wealthy doctor, and orphaned children all eventually find their way into the caravan, all courageously led by Lauren.

Despite constant violence, hunger, and the threat of firestorms sweeping across the land, they maintain their vows to protect each other and even find love among their numbers. Nearly at the bottom of hell, Butler’s characters levitate naturally toward a sense of family in order to survive and flourish. Racially, socially, and temperamentally mixed, they manage to achieve a strained but functional unity. Without realizing it, Lauren evolves into a kind of warrior prophet, a futuristic Harriet Tubman leading her rainbow coalition of survivors beyond the reach of Armageddon.

From the quotes at the beginning of each chapter, readers know that Lauren’s ideas and teachings inevitably become “Earthseed: The Books of the Living.” The book is clearly a manual for surviving social, political, and personal chaos. Lauren leaves little doubt as to where she stands:

Embrace diversity.
Unite––
Or be divided,
robbed,
killed
by those who see you as prey.
Embrace diversity.
Or be destroyed.

Octavia Butler set her novel some thirty-five years in the future from the date she wrote it, which as of this writing (in 2010) places it fifteen years in the future. Most of what Parable of the Sower has to say regarding contemporary times is implied rather than overtly stated. However, the man Lauren eventually marries, Bankole, realizes that all the horrors of their time are not new:

“In the early 1990s while I was in college, I heard about cases of growers doing some of this––holding people against their wills and forcing them to work without pay. Latins in California, blacks and Latinos in the South. Now and then, someone would go to jail for it.”

Imagine that: a man in what was then the future commenting on a past so eerily relevant to what is now the present.

by Aberjhani
Author of These Black and Blue Red Zone Days
Co-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance
and creator of Silk-Featherbrush Artstyle

For More on Octavia E. Butler
and California Wildfires

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Revisited: Philosophy of the Midnight Skylark in a Jazz Suite Mode 2023

4/26/2023

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("Midnight Magenta Skylark" art by Aberjhani)

Writers, poets, and artists often draw creative inspiration from each other in ways that produce memorable moments. Such was the case in 2012 when Death of a Bebop Wife author, Grange "Lady Haig" Rutan, happened upon a post of my poem, “Philosophy of the Midnight Skylark in a Jazz Suite Mode,” on the former Creative Thinkers International community website.

I was slightly familiar the music of her former husband, jazz pianist Al Haig. However, I knew nothing at all about her own work at the time, and consequently was stunned when she sent me a message to express the impact my poem had had on her.

What follows, in observation of Jazz Appreciation Month, National Poetry Month, and Poem In Your Pocket Day, is the poem Rutan found moving enough to write me about, and the response from her which I treasure still. The communication is presented in her original all-caps style:

Philosophy of the Midnight Skylark in a Jazz Suite Mode

          Hot rumbling notions of bittersweet blueswomen
          fog elegant sidewalks with the ghosts of tears
          howling saxophonic testimonies to lies
          told on history––and blame placed on love.

          Street lamps and big cats wear my face gently
          like a mask of painted poems and nude prayers.
          In a midnight skylark jazz suite mode
          the downbeat climbs its way back up to clarity.

          Perfumed adagios of purple lull twilight to sleep
          as rivers of winged reflections wake the power of dreams.
          Feather and bone unravel while tongues of song
          spit overloaded gigabytes of pain exploding faith.

          Stoned lions roar nuclear lyrics about the way
          it used to be never coming back again. Tough shit so
          truly uncool. In a midnight skylark jazz suite mode
          piano sorcerers translate prophecies of angst

          into silk equations of bebop equals mc/square sublime.
          by Aberjhani
          (from The River of Winged Dreams)

DEAR MOST TALENTED WITH A GOD GIVEN TALENT FOR WEAVING WORDS OF HEARTFELT WONDER,

DEAR ABERJHANI,

I AM IN A FESTIVAL OF AFTER DARK WITH YOUR WORDS RUMINATING AND FALLING OVER AN ONTO MY HEART, MY BEBOP HEART.

"PERFUMED ADAGIOS OF PURPLE LULL TWILIGHT TO SLEEP" HAUNTS ME AS I SPEAK ABERJHANI AND I AM HUMBLED.

"TONGUES OF SONG SPIT OVERLOADED GIGABYTES OF PAIN EXPLODING FAITH" BRINGS SUBTLE TEARS AS I WRITE.

"STONED LIONS ROAR NUCLEAR LYRICS ABOUT THE WAY IT USED TO BE NEVER COMING BACK AGAIN" AND I AM STILL HERE, STILL IN MY WORLD WEARY BEBOP JOINT NOW ELEVATED TO THE HIPPEST, JIVE GIG IN TOWN AT TAMM E. HUNTS JAM.

AND I WANT TO BRING YOU SOLACE; I WANT YOU TO FEEL GOOD ABOUT WHAT YOU WROTE BECAUSE IT IS EXQUISITE. I ALMOST FEEL YOU WERE THERE YOUR WORDS ARE SO AUTHENTIC AND I WANT YOU TO KNOW THERE IS NO BLAME TO BE PLACED ON "LOVE" BECAUSE THIS IS WHY YOU WROTE THIS "PHILOSOPHY OF THE MIDNIGHT SKYLARK IN A JAZZ SUITE MODE AND...

THIS IS WHY I WROTE DEATH OF A BEBOP WIFE: BIOGRAPHY OF AL HAIG: THE CHOSEN PIANIST OF CHARLIE PARKER AND DIZZY GILLESPIE...I DID IT FOR THE DOWNBEAT OF "CLARITY" AND MY LOVE FOR THE BITTERSWEET TAPESTRY WOVEN OF ALL THE PLAYERS THAT ARE NOW ON THE BIG GIG IN THE SKY .

I DID IT FOR YOU, I DID IT FOR ME. AND I ASKED CHARLIE PARKER TO COME INTO THIS JAZZ NETWORK AND SPEAK TO YOU AND TO ALL OF US, CHARLIE TALK TO ABERJHANI:

CHARLIE PARKER:
"IT'S JUST MUSIC; IT'S TRYING TO PLAY CLEAN AND LOOKING FOR THE PRETTY NOTES BUT ITS

DISTINCTIVE FEATURE IS ITS STRONG FEELING FOR THE BEAT. THE BEAT IN A BOP BAND IS WITH THE
MUSIC,
AGAINST,
BEHIND IT,
IT PUSHES IT,
IT HELPS IT;
HELP IS THE BIG THING;
IT HAS NO CONTINUITY OF BEAT,
NO STEADY CHUG-CHUG JAZZ HAS,
AND THAT'S WHY BOP IS MORE FLEXIBLE (EXCERPT FROM TO BE OR NOT TO BOP BY DIZZY GILLESPIE AND AL FRASER).

THANK YOU FOR YOUR EXQUISITE POEM.

GRANGE LADY HAIG RUTAN - AUTHOR
CADENCE JAZZ BOOKS

In Jazz Suite Mode Conclusion

Why Rutan’s words moved me so deeply on a personal level should be evident enough. Beyond that, I celebrate her lyrical appreciation because it falls so solidly into the tradition of call-and-response that gives jazz music much of its vitality and artistry. Within the lines of Philosophy of the Midnight Skylark in a Jazz Suite Mode she heard a call to give voice to her own bebop inclinations. By doing so, she honored and contributed to a musical art form which continues to inspire and empower with exuberant creativity and humanity that she did.

Aberjhani
Author of These Black and Blue Red Zone Days
Co-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance

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Marking a Savannah Milestone

1/13/2022

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Editors at Time Magazine in July 2021 reached the same conclusion as editors of the Literary Savannah travel anthology in 1998. They decided the city of Savannah, Georgia (USA) was one of the “world’s greatest places” and listed it alongside such frequently-visited locales as: Cannes, France; Seattle, Washington; Arouca, Portugal; KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa; Nuuk, Greenland; and North Goa, India.

Among the distinctions noted by Time Magazine for placing Savannah on its list of “100 extraordinary destinations to explore” was its impressive revitalized riverfront. Hill Street Press, 24 years ago as of 2022, included the city on its roster of “Travel Literature” titles following the phenomenal success of author John Berendt’s “nonfiction novel,” Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

Surviving to Tell Our Stories

With my poem “Return to Savannah” concluding the volume, I was one of eight living writers (out of thirty-seven total and not counting editor Patrick Allen) included in the Literary Savannah travel anthology published by Hill Street Press in 1998 (and by Trinity University Press in 2011). Of the other authors living at the time, James Alan McPherson and I were the only ones actually born in the city. (Long-time resident, and Savannah State University professor, Ja A. Jahannes, 1942-2015, was a native of Baltimore, Maryland).

As of this writing, I am one of four of the anthology’s remaining living authors and the only native. The others are John Berendt, Rosemary Daniell, and Ben Greer. Publication of the compilation is something I celebrated in Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah, and, an event I commemorate now because too many noteworthy literary voices become targets of historical erasure prompted by commercial indifference or literary genocide.

The publication of Literary Savannah represented a major cultural arts milestone because it was the first to showcase a comprehensive diverse selection of living and historic authors associated with the city. As writer Lynn Hamilton put it:

A Cultural Arts Milestone

“…What will attract buyers to Literary Savannah will probably be the rich collection of stories and bon mots by the cream of Savannah’s local and living (kicking and screaming) literati. The wry, slightly wicked, Tom Coffey is not omitted from these pages... poet and story teller Aberjhani is a presence with his contribution… Though there’s little subversion present in the pages of Literary Savannah, Ja A. Jahannes does provide a surprisingly pointed comment on the exploitation and subsequent historical revisionism of the Yamacraw Indians which is not just good protest, but also beautiful and powerful poetry.” (Savannah Creative Loafing, Vol 5, No. 40, Dec 29, 1998)

Just like the city itself, now 24 years after the book was first published, Literary Savannah continues to demonstrate why so many still find America’s 13th colony such an exciting and intriguing travel destination.

Aberjhani
Author of Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah
& Greeting Flannery O'Connor at the Back Door of My Mind
Creator of Authentic Silk-Featherbrush Artstyle

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Poems Matter: Text and Meaning in Claude McKay’s ‘If We Must Die’ (part 2)

7/22/2021

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In the current era, a highly-publicized disproportionate threat to African Americans due to unnatural causes––specifically, violence inflicted upon unarmed African-American men and women by armed policemen–– has been acknowledged by the Black Lives Matter Movement, the United Nations, and numerous social justice organizations around the world. A similar threat in 1919 existed in the form of lynching, essentially the practice of murder by hanging, then often castrating, and often burning African-American men.

Barely 10 years old at the time, the NAACP stood as almost the sole voice of protest against the socially-accepted and legally-tolerated practice. The simple reason is because in 1919 Jim Crow laws were exactly that: laws which openly supported an apartheid government and society in America.

Whereas the more overt apartheid legislation has been repealed, in 2015 there was much talk of a “New Jim Crow” [now described as Jim Crow 2.0 in 2021]. That Blacks and Whites have made tremendous advances in securing social and political equality for all Americans is something most reasonable thinkers would not deny. The conditions as they existed in 1919 were the kinds that challenge poets of any race to prove the significance of their craft. In the case of Harlem Renaissance author Claude McKay (1889 –1948) they prompted him to pen the classic poem “If We Must Die”:

IF WE MUST DIE

If we must die—let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die—oh, let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
Oh, Kinsmen! We must meet the common foe;
Though far outnumbered, let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

--Claude McKay (from Harlem Shadows, Harcourt Brace, 1922)

Poetry has often proven an effective instrument for amplifying the voices of those who believe they have been targeted for unfair social and political discrimination; or, worse, tagged for a campaign of potential genocide. Where McKay’s powerful lines are concerned, the author noted the following in his 1937 autobiography, A Long Way from Home:

“Our Negro newspapers were morbid, full of details of clashes between colored and white, murderous shootings and hangings. Traveling from city to city and unable to gauge the attitude and temper of each one, we Negro railroad men were nervous. We were less light-hearted… It was during those days that the sonnet, ‘If We Must Die,’ exploded out of me…”

Encouraged by the support of friends, editors, and publishers, the Jamaican-born McKay considered “If We Must Die” both a critical and a political triumph. The distinct rhyming scheme and compact 14 lines of the poem make it easily identifiable as a sonnet. Yet it is a very different kind of sonnet from those with which a reader might associate poets such as Countee Cullen, Gwendolyn Brooks, William Shakespeare, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, or Rainer Maria Rilke.

Literary Distinction

What sets McKay’s poem apart from other well-known sonnets is its unrepentant call to militant action. By contrast, the sonnets of Cullen or Shakespeare generally focus on philosophical musings or romantic passion. By fusing his lines with unyielding outrage, McKay’s appropriation of the sonnet form became itself a revolutionary act.

Original July 1919 cover of LIBERATOR Magazine in which Claude McKay's poem "If We Must Die" was first published. Featured on the cover is art by George Bellows.

After its original publication in the July 1919 edition of the Liberator magazine, “If We Must Die” was published in political advocate Cyril Briggs’ (1888-1966) Crusader magazine, labor leader A. Philip Randolph’s Messenger magazine, and dozens more along with a string of anthologies throughout the “roaring twenties.” In 1922, it became part of the poet’s Harlem Shadows collection, one of the first volumes to signal the growing momentum of the Harlem Renaissance.

The poem exploded through the American psyche at a time when African-American leaders were grappling with the same question with which they are wrestling nearly a century later. They do so as Black boys and men are killed under highly questionable circumstances virtually every week, and imprisoned daily for minor provocations that are more often ignored when the transgressors happen to be White boys and men.

By Aberjhani

ALSO CHECK OUT:
Red Summer: Text and Meaning in Claude McKay’s poem ‘If We Must Die’ Part 1
Poems Matter: Text and meaning in Claude McKay’s “If We Must Die” part 2
Fighting Back: Text and Meaning in Claude McKay’s “If We Must Die” part 3
Timelines: Text and Meaning in Claude McKay’s “If We Must Die” part 4

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Celebrating the PEN Centennial Part 3: Change in Action

5/10/2021

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Introduction

This third installment of Bright Skylark Literary Productions’ observation of the PEN International and PEN America Centennial is a condensed version of an article previously published by AXS Entertainment. It addresses the arrest of Ethiopian journalist and publisher Eskinder Nega, the history of PEN’s stance against racism, and the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

From Journalist to Founder of Political Party

Since the 1990s, Eskinder Nega has been arrested at least a dozen times on charges generally denounced by the world community as false. They have ranged from inciting riots and attempts to overthrow the government to participation in a murder. He and his wife, journalist Serkalem Fasil, were both jailed on charges of treason charges for their writings on government suppression of protests questioning the validity of parliamentary elections.

After his arrest in 2012 for editorials criticizing government policies and supporting the rights of citizens to protest them, PEN joined with Amnesty International and other organizations to advocate on Nega’s behalf. He was awarded the PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award on May 1, 2012. He received the International Press Institute (IPI)’s 69th World Press Freedom Hero award on May 18, 2017.

Nega has modeled his style of advocacy and activism on the example of Nelson Mandela and once said, “Like my hero Nelson Mandela, my soul is unconquered, my spirit unbroken, my head unbowed, and my heart unafraid.” True to Mandela’s model of political activism and persistence, he served nearly seven years at Kaliti Prison in Addis Ababa. In addition, he experienced subsequent arrests and assaults before going on to establish the Balderas for Genuine Democracy Party in January 2020.

Nega once offered the following critique of his government and citizens of Ethiopia: “This being Ethiopia, though, leaders seldom enjoy the privilege of honest advice from subordinates... By the power tradition, leaders are told what they want to hear and not what they should… The rule in this world is simple: Thrive with opportunism and sophistry. Perish with honesty and integrity.” His growing popularity may be an indication he has found a functional balance between the divisive extremes.

The One Constant

As history has demonstrated many times over, change may arrive slowly or quickly but it is the one constant, in one form or another, on which we can all count. A lasting shining example of positive change in action is PEN America itself.

Front cover of book "Mrs SAPPHO The Life of C.A. Dawson Scott 'Mother of International P.E.N." by Marjorie Watts.

In her biography of PEN co-founder Catherine A. Dawson Scott, Marjorie Watts (her daughter) observed that both Dawson Scott and PEN president John Galsworthy had a “dislike” of “racial prejudice.” Yet the PEN American Center in 1943 was all of two decades old when Harlem Renaissance authors Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps exchanged letters about the absence of any African-Americans in the organization. Responding to query from Hughes, Bontemps wrote on September 24, 1943:

“…You are right. No Negroes are members. I know of two attempts. It was rumored in Chicago that Dick (Richard Wright) was suggested for membership in N.Y. shortly after Native Son became a best seller but something came up and the idea was dropped.”

Still, three years later Wright was a guest at PEN centers throughout Europe. Ten years after that, Ralph Ellison, esteemed author of Invisible Man, was invited to join the American Center. And the rest, as “they say,” is now an unparalleled portrait of triumphant diversity.

However, the more important point in 2021 is that because it chose to embrace change for the betterment of all humanity at a time when many opted to resist it, PEN America can now celebrate 100 years as part of the world’s oldest human rights and literary advocacy organization. In other words, someone had to embrace positive beginnings before anyone could celebrate successful conclusions or continuations.

The Challenge of Making Change Work

wo of the most interesting comments regarding the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in 2012 came from Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. himself when he stated: “It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.” And: “…it is not our role to forbid it or to pass upon its wisdom or fairness."

Some commentators have extended interpretations of those statements, plus additional comments, as Chief Justice Roberts’ way of saying his job in this ruling “was to find a way to make the Affordable Care Act work.” How unprecedented and extraordinary is that? (Since the historic ruling, former US President Donald Trump initiated policies aimed at restricting access to the program but current President Joe Biden, upon his election, reversed Trump’s actions and expanded access.)

It is fully possible that the Affordable Care Act (popularly referred to as “Obamacare” after former U.S. President Barack H. Obama) and the movement toward humane applications of immigration laws are the beginnings of a potentially golden age for democracy. It is also possible that Eskinder Nega and the other journalists calling for greater freedom of expression in Ethiopia are heroes whose courage eventually will help elevate even more than concepts of freedom in their homeland. First steps are always the hardest but until they are taken the notion of progress remains only a notion and not an achievement.

To read Part 1 of this series please check out: Celebrating the PEN Centennial Part 1 The Art of Paradigm Dancing
You can read Part 2 of this series here: Celebrating the PEN Centennial Part 2 The Pattern of Dynamics

Aberjhani
Co-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance
Author of Greeting Flannery O'Connor at the Back Door of My Mind

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Author Octavia E. Butler & The Fire This Time

Introduction

A Grand Dame of Sci-Fi

Innovative Literary Vision

Parable of the Sower

For More on Octavia E. Butler
and California Wildfires

Please use this form to contact Author-Artist Aberjhani, or the one below it to comment on this article.

Revisited: Philosophy of the Midnight Skylark in a Jazz Suite Mode 2023

Philosophy of the Midnight Skylark in a Jazz Suite Mode

DEAR MOST TALENTED WITH A GOD GIVEN TALENT FOR WEAVING WORDS OF HEARTFELT WONDER,

In Jazz Suite Mode Conclusion

Aberjhani
Author of These Black and Blue Red Zone Days
Co-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance

Contact Aberjhani at Bright Skylark Literary Productions

Marking a Savannah Milestone

Surviving to Tell Our Stories

A Cultural Arts Milestone

Aberjhani
Author of Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah
& Greeting Flannery O'Connor at the Back Door of My Mind
Creator of Authentic Silk-Featherbrush Artstyle

Contact Author-Artist Aberjhani at Bright Skylark Literary Productions

Poems Matter: Text and Meaning in Claude McKay’s ‘If We Must Die’ (part 2)

Literary Distinction

Contact Aberjhani at Bright Skylark Literary Productions

Celebrating the PEN Centennial Part 3: Change in Action

Introduction

From Journalist to Founder of Political Party

The One Constant

The Challenge of Making Change Work

Aberjhani
Co-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance
Author of Greeting Flannery O'Connor at the Back Door of My Mind

Contact the Author at Bright Skylark Literary Productions

Aberjhani

Archives

Categories

Author Octavia E. Butler & The Fire This Time

Introduction

A Grand Dame of Sci-Fi

Innovative Literary Vision

Parable of the Sower

For More on Octavia E. Butler and California Wildfires

Please use this form to contact Author-Artist Aberjhani, or the one below it to comment on this article.

Revisited: Philosophy of the Midnight Skylark in a Jazz Suite Mode 2023

Philosophy of the Midnight Skylark in a Jazz Suite Mode

DEAR MOST TALENTED WITH A GOD GIVEN TALENT FOR WEAVING WORDS OF HEARTFELT WONDER,

In Jazz Suite Mode Conclusion

AberjhaniAuthor of These Black and Blue Red Zone DaysCo-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance

Contact Aberjhani at Bright Skylark Literary Productions

Marking a Savannah Milestone

Surviving to Tell Our Stories

A Cultural Arts Milestone

AberjhaniAuthor of Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah& Greeting Flannery O'Connor at the Back Door of My MindCreator of Authentic Silk-Featherbrush Artstyle

Contact Author-Artist Aberjhani at Bright Skylark Literary Productions

Poems Matter: Text and Meaning in Claude McKay’s ‘If We Must Die’ (part 2)

​Literary Distinction

Contact Aberjhani at Bright Skylark Literary Productions

Celebrating the PEN Centennial Part 3: Change in Action

​Introduction

From Journalist to Founder of Political Party

​The One Constant

The Challenge of Making Change Work

AberjhaniCo-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem RenaissanceAuthor of Greeting Flannery O'Connor at the Back Door of My Mind

Contact the Author at Bright Skylark Literary Productions

Aberjhani

Archives

Categories

For More on Octavia E. Butler
and California Wildfires

Aberjhani
Author of These Black and Blue Red Zone Days
Co-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance

Aberjhani
Author of Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah
& Greeting Flannery O'Connor at the Back Door of My Mind
Creator of Authentic Silk-Featherbrush Artstyle

Literary Distinction

Introduction

The One Constant

Aberjhani
Co-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance
Author of Greeting Flannery O'Connor at the Back Door of My Mind