We live in dangerous times.

- Dangerous because too many of us don’t know where the next job’s coming from or whether the job we have is going to last.

- Dangerous because too many of us have lost our homes or might lose our homes, are on the edge of losing homes or maybe even are living in homes that we don’t even know could be threatened and yet foreclosures are rampant beyond almost any other time in our history.

- Dangerous because too many of us don’t know how we’re going to make ends meet and a rising number of us don’t know how we’re going to feed our kids. With job prospects so bad and making ends meet so questionable, crime is on the rise and our patience and generosity with each other is more deeply challenged than in my lifetime.

We live in dangerous times, we shouldn’t have to worry about being a danger to each other out of anger or fear or blame. This should be a time when we come together we remember that deep in the roots of our state rests the stories of mutual aid and joint action.

Mutual aid that led to the creation of town meetings. And mutual assistance as farmers and small town’s people built up an existence. Mutual aid in working together that led to a representative government which included the power of the purse strings, the power over how our taxes are spent. And the mutual action that came together before a shot was ever fired, when our forefathers and mothers evicted the British and their loyalists, the Tories from over 90 percent of the Massachusetts colony before the tea ever got dumped in the harbor. The kind of joint effort that led to slavery being outlawed first in Massachusetts of all the states and made us the home of the first women’s convention and the images that fill our imagination of the Bread and Roses Strike and the coming together of regular working people to make sure that our lives were decent and the remuneration for our work enough to live on.

The firsts here based on our work together as regular people are numerous. The time has come again for us to rediscover that investment in each other across whatever differences we’ve come to see in each other and remember the deeper experience and shared humanity that will have to feed the dreams and the realities of a better future for all of us.

Please consider joining us in action on an issue that concerns you most...
- yours, The Grace Team