Editor’s Note By Rivera Sun
As if a global pandemic weren’t enough, doctors, nurses, and other healthcare workers have been rising up against injustice for a broad range of issues across the globe. In Myanmar, they continue to resist the military coup. In Sudan, they’re demanding that the hospitals be spared from attacks by security forces bent on repressing protesters. In the US, they’re taking action for better wages, hazard pay, and for affordable healthcare for the entire nation. And, they continue to take care of surging patient loads as Omicron rips through the world.
In North Carolina, citizen watchdogs aka “aerial detectives” are using drones to keep a close eye on the pollution run-off from enormous hog farms. Meanwhile, in Uganda, pigs are running hog-wild through parliament after the activist group, Jobless Brotherhood, set a couple of squealers loose in the building to call attention to the greedy corruption of officials. Unrelated to the pig escapade, Ugandans are also defending free speech with “radical rudeness” after a mean-spirited tweet put a novelist in jail for mocking the dictator’s son.
A few other notable highlights in this week’s news: a group of hotel housekeepers has won an impressive $25/hr and free family health insurance. A hundred people marched in frigid New York City to halt evictions. South African dairy workers are on strike and calling for the industry to be nationalized. French teachers are on strike over the mishandling of the pandemic’s surge. In the US, where many state governments and school districts would like to go back to “business-as-usual”, students are taking matters into their own hands and walking out of schools to demand a return to remote learning until the Omicron wave has passed.
For 2022, resistance is the only new normal. Keep it up, everyone. Our world needs you.
In solidarity,
Rivera Sun
Photo Credit: Myanmar healthcare workers, nurses, and doctors resist the coup.
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