Tag: Activism

There is no revolution without winning the hearts and minds of the very people who must fight it for you.

It not only matters that the information travels, but in how it travels. There are those whose job is in the painstaking research, often resulting in books, if only the footnotes in the same. There are those whose job is in straight, “unbiased” reporting for mainstream publications, local papers or scholastic journals. I think it is important to continue to support 4th estate. Without your subscriptions, how can entities like “The Nation” survive?

What is just as important to remember? Most of these very institutions have been pressed, in the name of “objectivity” to abdicate their duty to report without actual bias. Facts seem to have a penchant for a “liberal bias” by undermining the propaganda arm of the Right’s agenda.

Worse yet? Disgusted by the right-wing bloviating as “reporting” by dubious “news” channels like Fox, the Left has become unwilling to OPINE. Edward R Murrow would be spinning in his grave. There was a time, ladies and gentlemen, to do as he did and call McCarthyism what it was, and there is a time, and that time is now, to call Assangism what it is. Both things are an attempt to prevent the dissemination of ideas, cover up wrongs and demonize truth tellers to protect predatory capitalism. There are now constraints in place, constraints created by the very entities that benefit from the status quo that are put upon journalists who wish to make a living writing.

That is where we ground-level writers must do our duty, and fill the void. We have nothing to lose, and must speak the things the muzzled cannot…. speak them until it becomes impossible for the MSM to not address.

So it has come to pass that Elizabeth Edwards has died.

Despite having more things thrown at her than anyone I’ve ever had the chance to support in my entire political life, she managed to represent, in her very presence, a sense of grace and kindness and concern for those who were looking to have a better life than the one they had now, and I don’t know that I could ever live up to the quiet courage she showed as her life came to an end.

And, bless her heart, it appears that she took the time to make sure that her kids knew her, and that she helped them put away enough “past” to, hopefully, ease some of the pain of the future.

But now the time has come to look beyond death, and, John…that’s why I want to talk to you today.

I think what concerns me most about American society these days is how so many wish to commodify everything, especially other people.  The subject has weighed heavily upon me recently because I’m going to get married fairly soon.  I’ve been reflecting back upon the history of those I’ve dated as a means of judging larger trends in my development.  There were a few instances where I was valued more for my potential net worth than for my heart.  It is one thing to see the possibility of personal growth in a partner, but it’s another thing altogether to see them as a stock portfolio which has yet to mature.  People are not savings bonds or bank accounts.  The dreams of some involve the acquisition of funds, and to them, marriage is the perfect merger between conglomerates.  “Our” dreams are, in fact, “my” dreams with your financial assistance.  Woe be unto those whose economic star does not rise.    

As the mood of the Cancun Conference tells us there is no realistic hope that anything meaningful can happen to stop the effects of climate-change. The United States has, from the beginning of the process, dragged its feet on taking responsibility for doing anything, however minor, to stop the process of climate-change. There’s a lot of noise and rhetoric that has come out of the government and corporations in order to mount PR campaigns but it is without substance. Even clear win-win situations like providing funding for green-energy as a way to revive struggling American funding is underfunded and cruelly mishandled. I refer here to an article written by Monica Potts in the American Prospect that shows that government money to train workers for green jobs does not and will not translate into real jobs because there’s little support for the alternative-energy industry and the dominant fossil fuels industry who thrive on public subsidies for their cheaper energy don’t want competition. The government, as near as I can tell, has no intention of even attempting to support anything like the Kerry-Lieberman bill which would  have been a start in moving us towards strengthening the industry and slowly weaning us from the domination of fossil fuels. Of course the administration knows any environmental bill is DOA in today’s political atmosphere of gridlock.

Cross posted on Orange.

I find heros in the oddest places.

Those who are willing to stand up and be heard while facing all odds.

I learned of such a hero today – Beverly May. Beverly is an opponent to Coal Mountain Top Removal in Kentucky. Beverly’s story is told via PBS documentary Deep Down.  She along with Terry Ratliff organize their community and push back  

So many of our causes, passions, and movements could be characterized in terms of David versus Goliath, requiring superhuman strength to set right.  At the outset, the odds are stacked against us.  Business corruption must not be allowed to metastasize, lest the country be utterly eviscerated by it.  Environmental pollutants must not destroy our fragile ecosystem.  The military must have its spending curtailed in order to prevent massive waste and a swelling national debt, a belief held even by  those who do not object to the very existence of a military.  The prison-industrial complex must not be allowed to grow ever larger, while it incarcerates men of color at rapidly growing rates.  It’s easy to get burned out, knowing the vast size and sweep of these problems, and easier still to believe that no amount of effort expended for any length of time will make one iota’s worth of difference either way.

(Crossposted from Orange, and also posted at Writing in the Raw.  buhdy, my friend, this one is for you, because you catalyzed this at least in part.)

This has been a hell of a year.

And I don’t mean that in a good way.  It’s been the culmination of four years of stress, grief, anger and pain.

A silver lining exists, though, and that has been the journey I began in late spring, trying to reconnect with my deepest self.  Recently, an exercise in my ethics class (UUF) really shocked open the vague sense of unease that had been nagging at me for a year or two.  The exercise was the selection and ranking of my ten most important values.

Author’s Note:

This is a loving parody, not to be taken too seriously. I myself identify as Feminist, but I wanted to try my hand at satire. It is Friday, after all. Apologies are due to God, Moses, or whomever compiled the original text of Genesis.  

We often think people are motivated to do something solely by facts alone.  Instead, they are spurred to action by the feeling these facts produce.  People make choices and decisions based to some extent on figures and concrete details, but it is the emotional impact these soberly presented bits of information create that really matters.  It has been noted many times before that polls and other human-made means of discernment have limits because no one can truly understand what lies inside a voter’s heart.  This, in part, is what I mean.  Unlike the typical columnist, I do not intend to use this introduction as a segue-way to rip into President Obama and the ineffectiveness of the (for now) Democratic-controlled Congress.  Rather, I’d like to go well beyond.