A prize he thinks can be handed out by Thanos Kalamidas

Donald Trump’s latest performance art arrived wrapped in the language of honour and peace. Speaking with the casual entitlement of a man who believes all institutions are subsidiaries of his will, he declared it “would be a great honour” to accept a Nobel Peace Prize from Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, should she decide to share it with him. The sentence collapses under its own weight. It misunderstands the Nobel Prize, misrepresents power and exposes a worldview where prestige is something to be redistributed by personal whim, like a hotel upgrade or a gold-plated trophy.

The Nobel Peace Prize is not a souvenir that can be split, reassigned or gifted by aspiring heads of state. It is not a loyalty token nor a diplomatic coupon. It is awarded by a committee that has, for better or worse, its own logic, rules and independence. Trump’s comment treats the Nobel Committee as if it were a wing of the ...Trump Kennedy Center, staffed by loyalists waiting for instructions from a man who confuses global institutions with branding opportunities. In his imagination, history itself is malleable, provided the narrative flatters him.

This is not merely ignorance. It is a symptom of a deeper disorder in Trump’s political imagination. Authoritarianism usually thrives on discipline, coherence and an iron grip on symbolism. Trump’s version is sloppier, louder, and increasingly untethered from reality. He does not just demand loyalty; he demands applause for fantasies. The danger is not only that he misunderstands how power works; but that he believes humiliation is a currency others should gladly pay to stand near him.

Enter María Corina Machado, a figure who has become a symbol of resistance to Venezuela’s authoritarian decay. Her struggle against Nicolás Maduro has earned her admiration far beyond Venezuela’s borders. Yet admiration is not immunity from criticism. Trump’s comment forces an uncomfortable question, how far is Machado willing to bend, smile or remain silent to secure international backing for her political ambitions?

The optics are grim. When an opposition leader allows herself to be rhetorically absorbed into Trump’s ego theater, she risks shrinking her cause to fit his self-image. Trump does not see allies; he sees accessories. If Machado becomes one more prop in his quest for validation, the moral clarity of her movement blurs. Power gained through humiliation is never clean power. It stains everyone involved.

There is a tragic irony here. Trump speaks of peace while embodying a politics that thrives on division, spectacle, and personal grievance. He frames himself as a misunderstood peacemaker, persecuted by elites who refuse to recognize his greatness. In this narrative, the Nobel Prize is not an award for concrete achievements, but a missing jewel stolen by enemies. If only the “right” people were in charge, he implies, the prize would naturally find its way into his hands.

This mindset mirrors the very authoritarian impulses Machado claims to oppose. Authoritarianism is not just about repressing opponents; it is about redefining reality so that institutions exist only to confirm the leader’s virtue. Trump’s confusion of the Nobel Committee with a personal award panel is not a joke. It is a glimpse into how he believes legitimacy is manufactured: by loyalty, by flattery, by submission.

Machado’s challenge, then, is not only Maduro. It is the temptation to treat Trump’s attention as an unqualified asset. Support from powerful figures can be useful, even necessary, in international politics. But there is a line between strategic engagement and self-erasure. Every nod, every shared stage, every unchallenged absurdity chips away at the dignity of the cause she represents.

The humiliation is subtle but cumulative. It begins with silence, with polite laughter, with the decision not to correct the obvious falsehood. It ends with a movement reframed through someone else’s delusions. Trump will move on, as he always does, once the applause fades. Machado, and Venezuela, will be left to deal with the consequences.

Trump’s statement is not about peace, Venezuela or Machado. It is about himself, as always. It is about maintaining the illusion that he sits above institutions, that history awaits his approval, that even prizes dedicated to peace must orbit his ego. The real question is not whether he understands the Nobel Peace Prize. It is whether those who seek his favour understand the cost of playing along.

For Venezuela’s future to be credible, it must be built on principles stronger than borrowed egos. International solidarity matters but not at the price of dignity. Machado’s leadership will ultimately be judged not by who praises her but by what she refuses to become. Aligning with delusion may offer short-term visibility, yet it corrodes the very democratic promise her struggle claims to defend. Absolutely essential.

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

An additional note to the article:
It is amazing that we live in an era where the Norwegian Nobel Institute needs to clarify something we all know, the Nobel Peace Prize cannot be transferred, shared, or revoked.

In a statement, the institute said the decision to award a Nobel Prize is final and permanent, citing the statutes of the Nobel Foundation, which do not allow appeals. The organization also noted that committees awarding the prizes do not comment on the actions or statements of laureates after receiving awards.

“Once a Nobel Prize is announced, it cannot be revoked, shared or transferred to others,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee and the Norwegian Nobel Institute said on Friday. “The decision is final and stands for all time.”

Maduro #Poem #Painting by Nikos Laios

They searched
Through rubbish
In the streets
Of Caracas,
They searched
For scraps of food,
They were the new
Homeless and a result
Of Maduro’s promised
Socialist wonderland,
But he brought them
Instead a savage
Totalitarian
Dictatorship,
Where inflation,
Was above 500%.

Then Maduro
Was gone and
The liberals in
The US protested
His demise,
While masses
Of Venezuelans
Around the world
Celebrated
The liberation
Of their people.

 *******************************
With a digital painting from Nikos Laios

 *******************************
Check Nikos Laios' eBOOK, HERE!

The wolf at the door by Lucas Durand

January 12, Jack London’s birthday is an awkward date to celebrate in polite company. London is one of those American writers who refuses to stay embalmed in the amber of high school syllabi. He keeps pacing, growling, shedding. Read him closely and he has the unnerving habit of sounding contemporary, even predictive. In the era of Donald Trump, London’s work reads less like historical adventure fiction and more like an x-ray of American instincts we prefer not to examine for too long.

London was intoxicated by strength, competition, and survival, but he was also deeply suspicious of systems that rewarded cruelty while calling it virtue. That tension animates nearly everything he wrote. He believed in struggle, yet he never romanticized what struggle did to the human soul. In that sense, London feels like an unofficial chronicler of a nation forever torn between rugged individualism and collective responsibility, a conflict that Trump did not invent but dramatized with reality-television flair.

Take The Call of the Wild. Buck’s transformation is often misread as a simple endorsement of brute force. But London’s point is subtler and darker. Buck survives by adapting to a world that has become harsher, less moral, and ruled by whoever holds the club. Civilization collapses quickly; instincts rush in to fill the vacuum. The lesson is not that savagery is noble, but that it is contagious. Trump-era politics thrived on a similar logic. Norms were dismissed as weakness, empathy reframed as naïveté, and cruelty marketed as honesty. Buck does not become a wolf because it is good; he becomes one because the world demands it.

London understood that power is rarely gentle when it feels threatened. In The Iron Heel, his chillingly prescient dystopia, an oligarchic elite crushes democracy under the pretense of order and patriotism. The book is often cited as a socialist tract, but it is also a psychological study of authoritarianism. The ruling class does not see itself as villainous. It believes it is saving the nation from chaos, decadence, and ungrateful masses. Replace London’s steel trusts with billionaire donors and algorithm-driven outrage, and the structure feels uncomfortably familiar. Trump did not dismantle American democracy; he stress-tested it by amplifying the impulses London warned about: resentment, fear of decline, and nostalgia weaponized into policy.

London was fascinated by masculinity in crisis. His heroes are rarely calm; they are anxious, overcompensating, forever proving something to an invisible jury. This is where the Trump parallel sharpens. Trump’s political persona would have made perfect sense to London. Not admirable, necessarily, but legible. London knew that when men feel their status slipping, they often reach not for solidarity but for spectacle. They demand applause, enemies, and simple hierarchies. Complexity feels like betrayal.

What makes London especially relevant now is that he never let readers off the hook. His stories do not allow moral spectatorship. You are implicated. You root for Buck even as he becomes more dangerous. You understand the Iron Heel’s appeal even as it horrifies you. This mirrors the Trump era’s most unsettling truth: it was not an alien invasion. It was a homegrown phenomenon sustained by millions who found comfort, entertainment, or validation in its excesses. London would not have been surprised. He believed societies revert under pressure, and America, for all its progress, is not exempt from gravity.

Yet London was not a nihilist. Beneath the ice and blood, there is a moral argument pulsing through his work. He believed in solidarity as a counterforce to domination. His socialism was less about doctrine than about dignity, the idea that survival should not require the abandonment of humanity. In the Trump years, this idea was mocked as weakness. But London would argue that a society organized entirely around winners and losers eventually runs out of winners. The wolves eat each other.

Reading Jack London today is not an exercise in nostalgia; it is a warning disguised as a birthday celebration. He reminds us that America’s greatest danger is not decline but denial, the refusal to see how quickly ideals erode when fear takes the wheel. London knew the wolf at the door was never just outside. It was always pacing inside us, waiting for permission.

Insert Brain Here: Primitive Facebook #Cartoon by Paul Woods

 

Originally from Port Macquarie, Australia, Paul Woods is a Cartoonist and Illustrator based in South London who also plays drums, works as a Cameraman and likes bad horror films. His series of cartoons is entitled "Insert Brain Here"

All Insert Brain Here Cartoons, HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

---

Maples & Oranges #058 #cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

Taunting oranges in the midst of other fruity links,
constantly spreading the wares of their juicy gloom.

For more Maples & Oranges, HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

---

U.N. System Weakened by U.S. Retreats by René Wadlow

On 7 January 2026, the U.S. government announced that it was withdrawing from membership (and thus financial contribution) to 31 United Nations' bodies and programs.  According to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, these institutions and programs are "redundant in their scope, mismanaged, unnecessary, wasteful, poorly run and captured by the interests of actors advancing their own agendas contrary to our own."  He added "Many of these bodies promote radical climate policies, global governance and ideological programs that conflict with U.S. sovereignty and economic strength."

The U.S. withdrawal comes at a time when the U.N. as a whole (the 193 member States) is in the process of evaluating U.N. structures and programs (UN 80).  The results of this evaluation should be presented later this year.

A good number of the programs from which the U.S.A. is withdrawing are based or have activities in Geneva, Switzerland. As an NGO representative to the U.N. in Geneva, I have interacted with many of these programs and the Secretariat members. At this time when there are real challenges in the world society, the withdrawal of the U.S.A. weakens the U.N. system as a whole.  The representatives of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in consultative status will increase their activities so that the intellectual dynamics will not be weakened, but NGOs cannot fill the financial gap.

One of the bodies marked for withdrawal is the International Law Commission.  A colleague from Egypt who taught international law at the University of Geneva was a leading member of the Commission and had a deep understanding of Middle East culture. Stronger respect for international law in the Middle East remains a real need.

Another institution is the Geneva-based International Trade Center where I had a good friend in the Secretariat.  The Trade Center helped developing countries negotiate contracts with transnational corporations.  These corporations usually have sophisticated lawyers to write contracts, not the case for many developing countries.  Thus the work of the Trade Center filled a real need.

The U. N. Institute for Training and Research has its headquarters in New York, but many of its activities were Geneva-based and so the Secretariat cooperated with Geneva-based NGOs.  The same holds true for the UN University with headquarters in Japan but with many Geneva-based activities.

The U.S. is withdrawing from support for the Office of the Special Representative for Children in Armed Conflict, from the U.N. Entity for Gender Equality, and from the Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict - all issues on which the Association of World Citizens has been active.  The U.S. is leaving the U.N. Alliance of Civilizations at a time when cross-cultural understanding is a vital need.

Many of the U.N. activities which the U.S. is leaving have dedicated U.S. citizens in the Secretariat.  I am not sure what their status will be once the withdrawal is complete.

The U.S. is also withdrawing from the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, the key instrument on climate change issues.  The consequences of climate change are being increasingly felt, and U.S. action would be needed.

As I noted, the representatives of non-governmental organizations will have to increase sharply their activities in the United Nations bodies and programs. The challenges facing us are heavy, and constructive action is urgently needed.

 ********************************

René Wadlow, Association of World Citizens

Snow’s sigh #ShortStory #Fiction by Olivia Mendez

Ella wrapped her scarf tighter around her neck and pulled her coat’s hood snug over her head. The biting cold of Sweden’s winter seeped through her layers, sending a shiver down her spine. She couldn’t believe she had let Ingrid, her college roommate and best friend, convince her to come all the way from South Carolina to Sweden in January, of all months. Snow was something Ella had always dreaded, a rare inconvenience back home, but here, it was a suffocating blanket that transformed the world into a frozen wasteland.

“Ingrid, why couldn’t you have visited me instead?” Ella muttered as she stepped into her borrowed snow boots, sighing at the sheer absurdity of it all. But Ingrid had promised her warmth, not in temperature, but in experience.

That morning, after endless teasing about Ella’s snow-phobia, Ingrid had handed her a steaming cup of hot chocolate and nudged her toward the door. “Go take a walk by the lake,” she said, grinning. “It’s magical after fresh snow.”

Magical? Ella thought as she trudged through the deep drifts, the wind nipping at her cheeks. More like miserable. The snow crunched under her boots, the sound oddly soothing in the quiet stillness of the forest path.

The lake appeared ahead, a shimmering expanse of ice framed by snow-laden trees. The sight stopped Ella in her tracks. It was beautiful, she admitted reluctantly. The kind of beauty that felt unreal, like stepping into a postcard. The air was crisp, the silence profound, and for a moment, Ella forgot her discomfort.

She ventured closer to the edge of the lake, her breath fogging the air. Just as she was about to turn back, she heard a crunch of snow behind her. Ella spun around, startled, and came face-to-face with a tall man bundled in a dark coat and a knit cap.

“Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you,” he said, his voice carrying a soft accent.

Ella blinked, caught off guard by the sudden intrusion. “It’s fine,” she managed, her Southern drawl creeping into her words.

He smiled. A warm, genuine smile that made Ella’s cheeks heat in a way that had nothing to do with the cold. “You’re not from around here, are you?” he asked, his eyes sparkling with curiosity.

“No,” she said, laughing nervously. “Is it that obvious?”

“Only a little.” He chuckled, the sound rich and inviting. “I’m Lukas. I live nearby. I come here often, especially after a snowfall. It’s quiet, peaceful.”

“I can see that,” Ella said, glancing back at the frozen lake. “It’s... breathtaking.”

“You say that like you’re surprised.”

“I kind of am.” She hesitated, then added, “I’m Ella. From South Carolina. Snow isn’t really my thing.”

Lukas tilted his head, studying her. “Yet here you are, standing in the middle of it.”

“Ingrid, my friend, said I should come. I think she just wanted me out of the house.”

“Smart friend.” Lukas grinned. “Sometimes you have to push people to see the beauty they’re missing.”

They fell into an easy conversation, walking along the lake’s edge. Lukas told her about his childhood in the area, the way he used to skate on the lake with his siblings, and how the forest seemed to hold secrets if you listened closely enough. Ella shared stories of warm Southern summers, porch swings, and her grandmother’s pecan pie.

The hours slipped by unnoticed, the snow underfoot crunching in rhythm with their steps. For the first time since arriving in Sweden, Ella forgot to feel cold.

When the sun dipped low, casting the sky in shades of gold and pink, Lukas stopped and turned to her. “The sunsets here are worth the frostbite,” he said softly.

Ella looked up, her breath catching at the sight. The lake mirrored the fiery hues of the sky, and the world seemed to glow.

“You were right,” she murmured. “It is magical.”

Lukas smiled, his gaze lingering on her. “I think you’re starting to like the snow.”

“Maybe just a little,” Ella admitted, her lips curving into a smile.

As they stood there, the silence wrapping around them like a blanket, Ella felt something shift. The snow no longer felt oppressive; it felt like a gift, a quiet, sparkling invitation to something new.

And as Lukas reached out to tuck a stray strand of hair behind her ear, his touch gentle and tentative, Ella realized that sometimes, the things you dread the most can lead you to the places you’re meant to be.

That winter, Ella fell in love. Not just with the snow, but with the man who showed her its magic. And every January after, when the first flakes fell, she would think of that day by the lake, where her life changed forever in the whisper of winter’s embrace.

The end

Invisible chains by Shanna Shepard

National Human Trafficking Awareness Day arrives each year with the quiet insistence of a calendar square that wants more attention than it gets. It is not marked by fireworks or sales, and it resists easy symbolism. Human trafficking is not a single story with a single villain. It is a system, adaptable and patient, thriving not on darkness alone but on our collective willingness to look away when the picture becomes complicated or uncomfortable.

We like to imagine trafficking as something distant and cinematic: shadowy border crossings, locked shipping containers, whispered pleas in foreign languages. This framing is convenient because it reassures us that the problem belongs elsewhere. In reality, trafficking hides in plain sight. It works the late shift at nail salons, cleans hotel rooms before dawn, harvests crops under the sun, and scrolls through social media looking for loneliness to exploit. It wears the face of normal commerce and the language of opportunity.

What makes trafficking so durable is not only cruelty but ambiguity. Many victims do not recognize themselves as victims, at least not at first. They are offered jobs, housing, affection, or stability. Consent is blurred, then eroded. Debt replaces wages. Threats replace promises. By the time force appears, escape feels impossible, not because the doors are always locked, but because the consequences of leaving feel worse than staying. This is not a failure of individual strength. It is the predictable outcome of power stacked carefully against the vulnerable.

Awareness days often ask us to learn the signs, as if trafficking were a puzzle that could be solved with sharper observation. Awareness matters, but it is not a moral finish line. The uncomfortable truth is that trafficking persists because it is profitable and because its profits are woven into the everyday economy. Cheap labour, fast services, and disposable people are not glitches in the system; they are features we quietly tolerate as long as the costs remain invisible.

There is also a temptation to turn outrage into spectacle. We share shocking statistics, retell the most brutal cases, and then move on, satisfied that our emotional response counts as engagement. But horror alone rarely produces change. It can even numb us. When every story is extreme, the ordinary suffering that defines most trafficking cases fades into the background. The victim who does not fit the narrative of absolute captivity becomes easier to ignore.

A more honest response would force us to examine our own comfort. It would ask why certain jobs are structured so that exploitation is almost inevitable, why immigration systems trap people in dependency, why reporting abuse so often leads to punishment rather than protection. These questions are less dramatic than rescue fantasies, but they are where responsibility actually lives.

National Human Trafficking Awareness Day should make us suspicious of simple solutions. Raids and arrests can matter, but without long term support, survivors are often returned to the same conditions that made them vulnerable in the first place. Justice cannot end at extraction. It must include housing, legal status, medical care, and the slow rebuilding of autonomy. Otherwise, awareness becomes another performance that centers our sense of righteousness rather than the lives at stake.

Perhaps the most difficult shift is recognizing that trafficking is not only a crime problem but a social one. It flourishes where inequality is sharp, where social safety nets are thin, and where people are reduced to their economic usefulness. As long as we accept a world where some lives are cheap by design, trafficking will find room to breathe.

On this day, the most radical act may be restraint. Fewer slogans. Less self congratulation. More listening to survivors who describe not just what happened to them, but what failed around them. Awareness should unsettle us, not comfort us. It should linger after the day ends, complicating how we think about work, consumption, and dignity.

Human trafficking survives on invisibility, but not the kind cured by a single spotlight. It thrives in the gray areas we prefer not to name. If this day is to matter, it must leave us with fewer illusions about innocence and more willingness to accept shared responsibility. That discomfort is not a flaw. It is the beginning of something more honest.

Change rarely announces itself loudly. It arrives through policy debates that feel tedious, budgets that reflect values, and daily choices made without applause. Awareness, if it is to mean anything, must evolve into sustained attention, patience, and the courage to disrupt what benefits.

Trekking Chat #001 #Cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

They trek across surreal cartoon streets, armed with quirky sarcasm
and boundless humor. They map uncharted valleys, befriend bizarre creatures
and find the real adventure in their square frames.

For more Trekking Chat, HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

---

When personal morality replaces law by Marja Heikkinen

When a president declares that the only thing capable of stopping him is “my own morality” and “my own mind,” while dismissing international law as unnecessary, it is not bravado. It is a warning. Power that answers only to itself is not leadership; it is impulse elevated to policy. History has taught us, repeatedly and painfully, that when rulers frame restraint as optional, the costs are paid by ordinary people, usually far from the microphones and well beyond the reach of accountability.

Those words matter because they set the tone for action. They announce a worldview in which institutions are inconveniences, laws are obstacles, and oversight is an insult. In such a climate, enforcement agencies do not merely execute policy; they absorb attitude. They learn quickly what is rewarded, what is ignored and what will be excused. When the message from the top is that morality is personal and law is negotiable, abuses stop being aberrations and start becoming features.

Nowhere has this been more visible than in the behaviour of ICE and Border Patrol forces operating with the swagger of occupation units rather than civil servants. Reports of people being arrested without clear cause, beaten during encounters, shot under dubious circumstances, or killed with investigations quietly stalled are not rumours whispered on the fringe. They are patterns. And patterns, by definition, are not accidents. They emerge when power is unleashed without meaningful consequence.

The most disturbing aspect is not simply that noncitizens have been brutalized. It is that American citizens have also been caught in this dragnet of impunity. Citizenship, supposedly the ultimate shield, has proven flimsy when confronted by armed agents emboldened by political cover. When a government tolerates, excuses, or outright defends illegal actions by its own forces, it sends a chilling message: your rights exist only at the pleasure of those enforcing them.

Defenders of this approach often retreat into the language of security. They speak of threats, invasions, emergencies, and necessity. Fear becomes the solvent that dissolves principle. But security without law is not security at all. It is volatility. It replaces predictable justice with arbitrary force and calls the result strength. In reality, it weakens the very foundations it claims to protect, eroding trust between the state and the people it governs.

Trump’s insistence that he does not “need international law” reveals something deeper than nationalist bluster. International law is not about foreign approval; it is about shared limits on state violence. Rejecting it is a declaration that limits themselves are optional. Once that idea takes hold, domestic law soon follows. If treaties can be shrugged off, why not statutes? If norms can be mocked, why not constitutional principles? The slide is not sudden; it is normalized step by step.

This is how democracies decay without a single dramatic collapse. The uniforms remain. The elections continue. The slogans still promise greatness. But beneath the surface, the moral contract frays. People begin to expect abuse. Victims are told they must have deserved it. Accountability is reframed as disloyalty. And the president’s “own morality” becomes the final court of appeal, immune to evidence, insulated from consequence.

An administration that reflexively covers for illegal actions by enforcement agencies does more than shield individuals; it institutionalizes wrongdoing. Investigations are slow-walked. Prosecutors decline cases. Internal reviews clear everyone involved. Each non-decision reinforces the lesson that force will be forgiven if it aligns with political goals. Over time, officers who might have acted with restraint either adapt or leave, replaced by those comfortable operating in moral fog.

The tragedy is that none of this is inevitable. Laws exist precisely because individual morality is unreliable. Minds change. Tempers flare. Ambition distorts judgment. The rule of law is the collective agreement that no one, especially those with guns and badges, gets to decide unilaterally how far is too far. When a president openly rejects that premise, he is not projecting confidence. He is confessing contempt for the guardrails that protect everyone else.

In the end, the question is not what can stop one man. It is what will stop a system from becoming accustomed to cruelty. If the answer remains “nothing but his own mind,” then the nation has already accepted a dangerous lie, that power needs no restraint. And lies like that do not remain theoretical. They leave bruises, graves, and a country wondering when morality became a substitute for law.

What makes this moment especially perilous is the normalization of exhaustion. People grow tired of outrage, numb to headlines, resigned to the idea that nothing will change. That fatigue is itself a political outcome. It clears space for further excess, because resistance requires energy and belief. Journalism, protest, and courts are portrayed as annoyances rather than necessities. Yet democratic survival has always depended on refusal, refusal to accept cruelty as governance, refusal to excuse violence as policy, refusal to let any leader redefine law as a personal inconvenience. Without that refusal, silence becomes consent, and consent hardens into complicity. History watches quietly, but consequences arrive loudly, reshaping lives long after speeches fade and denials crumble beyond the comfort of power.

MINNEAPOLIS: 7th January 2026 #Poem by David Sparenberg

A Merry, Merry Christmas
and a Happy New Year!
Let’s hope it’s a good one
without any fear.  -John Lennon

The Brown Shirts are in the streets again:
the intention is terror
the plan is murder.

They will as quickly shoot a woman in the head*
as shoot a man.
They will as readily traumatize and orphan a child
as intimidate and abuse an elder:

separate children from their mothers
bash, break the bones and bloody the faces
of Constitutionally sanctioned protesters.

The Brown Shirts (SA
Sturmabteilung, the stormtroopers)
are in the streets again, armed and dangerous.
And they believe the streets belong to them.

With raised clenched fist of cultic loyalty
they do not consider themselves outside the law.
In the ideological tempest of their 4^th Reich
they are convinced they are the law.

Those of us who do not learn, pundits say
are condemned to repeat.
The boots are on the ground.
The Brown Shirts are in the streets again.
The agents of ICE
believe the streets belong to them.

*In memory of Renee Nicole Good
and the shot seen and heard around the world.

---

David Sparenberg is a humanitarian & eco-poet, international essayist and storyteller. He published four OVI eBooks in 2025, the latest, TROUBADOUR and the Earth on Fire was published on International Migrants Day, December 18th. David lives in the Ecotopian hub of Seattle Washington in the Pacific Northwest of the United States and identifies as a Citizen of Creation.

---

Don't miss David Sparenberg's latest eBook Troubadour and the Earth on fire ,
Download for free, HERE!