With racist violence and murder escalating and the nation well-past its crisis point, the looming midterm election is an eleventh hour opportunity to turn this mess around. Willie Nelson got involved during election season to cut a song with a clear message: “Vote ‘Em Out.” The legendary outlaw country star knows where he stands on national issues like immigration policy and gun safety: At home in Texas, he’s supporting Beto O’Rourke for Senate in the statewide race against Ted Cruz. We can’t all write songs and reach hearts and minds like Nelson can at a rally or with a tune, but we can all be effective in our homes and workplaces. We can take time in the next week to canvass or phone bank for the candidates and issues we support. We can speak out when the people we know, including friends and family, try to defend or ignore the racist/sexist sickness that has infected the highest elected and appointed officials in the land. And on November 6, we will cast our votes: It remains a tool to counteract the hate with nonviolence, or as Willie sings it, “The biggest gun we’ve got is called the ballot box.”
Read this month’s column. And thanks for voting.
Filed under: anti-war, Arts and Culture, Protest Songs, Texas, "Vote 'Em Out, Beto O'Rourke, midterm election song, Willie Nelson
Last Saturday on Balmy Alley, a street entirely devoted to local mural art in San Francisco’s Mission District, the latest work to grace the backside of a building on the block-long street was finally unveiled: Women of the Resistance was conceived and painted by a collective of women artists, many of them local to the neighborhood and trained at the San Francisco Art Institute. I had the opportunity to speak to three of the painters, Lucía Gonzalez-Ippolito, Fernanda Parker Vizcaino and Michelle Williams, and to learn the story of how they chose the 38 women of the resistance to paint into the mural. Pictured here is the mural just before the unveiling and blessing ceremony, but you can read my interview and to see photos by the Aperturist of the mural in all of its 
Denise Sullivan 