Blessed Are the Firefighters: Putting Out the Fires of Division - Johnny Townsend

Résumé :
We don't need affordable healthcare. We need universal healthcare. We don't need access to education. We need tuition-free college and vocational training. In these essays, Johnny Townsend erases the weasel words and gets right to the point. The only way any of us can live in a safe, healthy society is if we all do. Every worker needs a living wage. But more than that, we need a thriving wage, and Universal Basic Income is a practical starting point. ? It's not enough to give coal miners and oilfield workers good pay. They also need jobs that promote the health of their communities and the rest of the country. Since we have no choice but to transition away from fossil fuels, we must provide both training and new work opportunities for those who will be displaced as we confront an ever-worsening climate crisis. Pursuing gender and racial equality, LGBTQ rights, the elimination of for-profit prisons, the separation of church and state, and making peace more profitable than war form the core of any successful strategy for success.

Biographie:
A climate crisis immigrant who relocated from New Orleans to Seattle in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Johnny Townsend wrote the first account of the UpStairs Lounge fire, an attack on a French Quarter gay bar which killed 32 people in 1973. He was an associate producer for the documentary Upstairs Inferno, for the sci-fi film Time Helmet, and for the deaf gay short Flirting, with Possibilities. His books include Please Evacuate, Racism by Proxy, and Wake Up and Smell the Missionaries. His novel, Orgy at the STD Clinic, set entirely on public transit, details political extremism, climate upheaval, and anti-maskers in the midst of a pandemic.