It has been quite some time since I added content to this blog. Around a year ago, things were picking up on the Rage side due to the events in Ferguson, Cleveland, and elsewhere, but life definitely got in the way again, and I still haven’t recovered. Continue reading
Nobody knows when it began, but it was first acknowledged broadly in 2011 with the Occupy Wall Street movement. In 2012, it was Fast Food Forward and the Fight for 15. In 2013, it was Walmart Strikers and the election of Kshama Sawant to Seattle City Council. Ferguson dominated 2014, and it looks like Leelah Alcorn has claimed early 2015.
Of course, I’m leaving out dozens, if not hundreds, of catalysts for the steady increase in American protests and simply focusing on some of the more popular milestones. The real point is that we’re taking to the streets in numbers not seen since Vietnam and the peak of the Civil Rights movement. Hundreds of thousands of protests, not just in the United States but across the world, calling out struggle and demanding something better in the United States.
Those who’ve stood up have been those most strongly affected by struggles: People of color, women, trans* people, the working poor, etc. They’ve created grassroots movements to demand general or specific changes in our culture, in our laws, in our institutions, and they are feeling more empowered than ever… not because they’re finding a receptive society, but because they’re realizing that they are loud enough to overpower a defiant society.
Reactionaries abound. Last year was the year of #NotAllMen, the year of “thugs,” the year of GamerGate. Protesters were “rioters.” Statistics were “race baiting.” Demands for accountability were met with demands to “respect and obey authority.” The all-too-familiar refrain of “get a job” rang through the sidestreets as protesters blocked the main road in an effort to disrupt a broken country.
What do they want? They aren’t looking to bring back slavery or send women back to the kitchen. Reactionaries aren’t necessarily against our causes, but their desire to remain comfortable is threatened by the disruption and challenges to authority that our movement requires to live and succeed. They’re afraid that the status quo will be destroyed and that their lives could be thrown into a state of disarray. They fear general strikes shutting down commerce, mass protests shutting down the road to the grocery store when the cabinets are empty, civil disobedience resulting in National Guardsmen firing shots like they did at Kent State. They fear the discomfort of a revolutionary society, and it’s a learned fear that will be hard to overcome.
What do we want? We want to fix the problems no matter what it takes to get there. With that in mind, here’s my 2015 open letter to my friends and family who fear the discomfort of a revolution:
Dear Friends,
In 2015, there are some things I don’t want to see or hear anymore. As a society progresses, we outgrow these things, and we become better through letting them go.
Politics is not too controversial, too pointless, or too boring. Politics is the shape of your society, your job, your family, your life. Politics should be central to your thoughts and actions, and should hold a strong place in your conversations. Fears of offending your great-uncle should be forgotten. The world doesn’t progress by appeasing the past, and his views on how easy slaves really had it have no place in 2015. State your views loudly, and back them up with activism.
Protest is not violence, it is not troublemakers rioting in your city, it is not unemployed thugs trying to loot your small business. Protest is the single most powerful act we have to make change, and throughout centuries, has been used effectively not just in the development of our nation, but across the world to build a better society. We have jobs, we have lives, we have families, we have things to get done… but first, we have a world to change. You can join us, you can start another movement of your own, or you can stay home and do nothing, but please get over your calls to “get a job.” You know I am a protester, and you know I work.
Civil disobedience is not ruining your country, your city, or your life. It may be ruining your day, but frankly, that’s the point. When you see us on the highway, it means we feel so strongly about the injustice in our country that we are willing to risk arrest and serious injury to help others understand and feel the frustration of a broken system. Park your car, get out, and come talk to us. Figure out what we represent and what we want, and if you feel like we make a good case, disrupt your own day and join us. If not, be happy we live in a country where we can stand up like this and just know we’ll be out of the way soon enough. It’s a small price to pay for changing the world. And MLK was a big fan of civil disobedience, so stop confusing “peaceful” with “lawful.” Our own police departments have confirmed that law and peace are often mutually exclusive.
If I have to sum it up in one short phrase, in 2015, I simply want you to give a shit. If you can give a shit, it will become much easier to stand up for your views, and to stand against injustice wherever you see it. Talk about politics, piss people off, disrupt, disobey… just give a shit.
Don’t write off the folks who just want to stay comfortable. If we continue to agitate and take away their ability to pretend this isn’t happening, eventually they will embrace the concept of speaking up and standing up, and they will help our society progress even more in 2015.
(The following article is a line-by-line rebuttal of this piece, published by a member of the Wisconsin Police Department last week. I recommend reading the original piece first for clarity.)
Today, I started caring about my fellow man. I started caring about my community, my neighbors, and those I work with. I started caring today because a once noble profession has become despicable, hateful, untrustworthy, and mostly unnecessary.
I started caring today because parents must teach their kids to be careful and obedient to a fault around power-hungry law enforcement. I started caring today because kids see police take their parents away for having a joint, embedding a fear from year one. Moms hate them in their schools because we remember a day when children could learn without a gun and a badge waiting for a reason to interject in school matters.
They would rather stay unseen by civilian cameras, but still confronting civilians, readily available to “beat sense into” some kid. I started caring today because we work to keep our streets safe and organize peacefully, protesting within our Constitutional rights, only to be tear gassed for it, and sometimes even thrown in a cell because an officer didn’t like the way we looked at him.
At the very least, they are just another tool used by government to generate “revenue.” I started caring today because police use their power to intimidate adults and children alike with their guns, and use oppressive drug laws to justify SWAT raids and beatdowns. They often kill innocent people with unjust violence. They will deploy a Taser at the slightest provocation, and are not afraid to put a bullet in whoever crosses them.
And when they do shoot, we ask “why is this escalation of force always so necessary when German police shot 85 bullets in all of 2011?” And when one of them is killed by the attacks that do happen (and it is routinely reported in the mainstream media) the officers say, “this is why our use of force shouldn’t be questioned.” I started caring today because the police are a tool used to serve and protect the country’s elites. They work to take away speech, freedoms, and liberty at every turn.
They represent a Police State where jackbooted badge-wearing thugs have attacked innocent people without cause or concern for Constitutional rights. They are the killers of Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Akai Gurley and thousands more all rolled into one long propaganda video showing them buying gifts for kids or changing an old lady’s tire. I started caring today as no one wants to live in fear, and we demand answers, ethics, restraint, and accountability when an officer encounters a citizen of any color.
If an officer is caught driving drunk, speeding, abusing his or her spouse, or beating civilians, it is swept under the rug or called an “isolated event.” If they do their jobs properly, safely take a criminal into custody, hold a corrupt officer accountable, or otherwise show the restraint required of a civil safety service, they expect to be loudly rewarded for doing their job properly.
I started caring today because multiple videos from across the country, from the NYPD to small suburban police departments, show officers screwing up and forgetting their oath of honor, thus sparking a worldwide demand for accountability even though 99% of police officers just want the media to stop talking about it and focus on all those thugs smoking weed. They are militarized because they wear body armor and kevlar helmets when water bottles and their own tear gas canisters are thrown at them and carry semi-automatic rifles even though everyone in the crowd is armed with little more than a megaphone and a passion for a fair and equitable society.
I started caring today because the culture of today’s instantly connected society allows us to see the realities of abusive police in real time, when they refuse to accept responsibility for their actions, and blame everyone else instead of themselves. They look for reasons to declare a protest unlawful instead of asking the citizens “what can I do for you?”
To idolize gangsters, thugs, abusive behavior, and violence over peaceful protest, dedication, and achievement. To argue that firing a weapon at a petty thief should be a right, yet wearing body cameras or de-escalating a confrontation is a hassle. To intimidate versus serve. To hate versus help. Yes, I started caring today. And tomorrow, I will put my mask back on and I will march again.
For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been posting quite often about the non-indictment of Darren Wilson and the related protests in Ferguson. Tamir Rice, the 12 year old quickly gunned down by Cleveland Police off-roading through a park because of an airsoft gun, has made some appearances as well. Throughout these social media discussions, there have been some common threads of resistance to the resistance that seem to be permeating the overall culture, and it’s high time we discuss some of them.
First, it needs to be clarified that I’m a white guy. If you want to know the truth, the pain, the goals, and the motivations behind the Ferguson resistance, I’ll redirect you to people of color who have been on the ground in the neighborhood, such as DeRay McKesson and Johnetta Elzie, who’ve been organizing, and Bassem Masri, who has been reporting as a citizen journalist between getting his phone stolen and being locked up as the police attempt to suppress his message. I stand in solidarity, but this movement belongs to them. Today, I simply hope to kill some of the overdone and invalid talking points that have been used to stall the movement.
“Tearing apart your community isn’t going to help anything at all”
Let’s start with a list:
Now that you’re thoroughly wrong, I’ll add a few more coals to the fire. First, there have been several instances of white folks tearing their communities apart and they weren’t even protesting a hardship. Nobody came down so hard on these guys, or these ones, or these ones, or these ones, or these ones…
“Martin Luther King would be so ashamed of what is happening”
You’re damn straight he’d be ashamed at the treatment of blacks in Ferguson at the hands of the police, but that’s not the asinine point you’re trying to make. You’re still on the offensive against riots and civil disobedience. How painful it must be to realize that not only is MLK explicitly well-known for acts of civil disobedience, he also had a deep understanding of property damage as an attack on the system:
“This bloodlust interpretation ignores one of the most striking features of the city riots. Violent they certainly were. But the violence, to a startling degree, was focused against property rather than against people. There were very few cases of injury to persons, and the vast majority of the rioters were not involved at all in attacking people…
I am aware that there are many who wince at a distinction between property and persons—who hold both sacrosanct. My views are not so rigid. A life is sacred. Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect, it has no personal being. It is part of the earth man walks on; it is not man…
Why were they so violent with property then? Because property represents the white power structure, which they were attacking and trying to destroy.”
If you need a TL;DR, here’s one last MLK quote: “A riot is the language of the unheard.”
“Michael Brown was a thug. Tamir Rice was a thug. Everyone I don’t like is a thug!”
Please tell me more about the crimes they committed which warranted the death penalty without a trial, or how the firing of a gun was the only option at the disposal of the officers involved.
And once you have that figured out, do the same for Eric Garner and Akai Gurley.
I have hundreds more when you finish those, but you won’t. You’re using the word “thug” because you learned to stop using the N-word in public. Stop it.
“This one time, a white guy got shot by police and nobody protests that.”
Then do it. Here you go, I’ll even give you an anchor case. Just be aware, though, that many of the demands of those protesting (uniform cameras, citizen councils, better training, more accountability) would help white victims as well as black victims, so really, you could just support the movement that is already nationwide.
“What we really need to talk about is black on black crime.”
You know the difference between a crime committed by a black man and a crime committed by a police officer? The black man goes to jail and the police officer gets a paid vacation. And the police officer’s actions were sanctioned by the state that gave him a badge and a weapon. And white police officers kill black men twenty-one times as often as white men. Let that sink in for a moment.
And by the way? Black on black crime has been dropping sharply for the last twenty-plus years.
“Walking around yelling and holding signs doesn’t accomplish anything.”
Yeah, you have a great point. Caged and neutered protests do not shock the system. They are controlled; they are out of sight and out of mind. That’s why we need to disrupt, the way protests always were before we became so complacent. If you haven’t noticed, we’re not just staying on the sidewalk anymore.
“Blocking traffic is obnoxious and interferes with people who have jobs.”
MLK. Rosa Parks. Harriet Tubman. Eugene V. Debs. Susan B. Anthony, etc.
I mean, come on… the Boston Tea Party? The end of the Vietnam War debacle?
This country has a rich history of civil disobedience, and that disruption is your call to action. We disrupt because if we don’t, the system ignores us. Blocking streets, staging sit-ins at government offices and places of business, strikes (general and targeted), and other nonviolent protests are specifically designed to interfere. It is nonviolent, does not damage property, and yet still allows us to shock the system and make demands.
If you don’t want riots, and you know caged protests don’t work, it’s time to stop complaining about the middle option. We have a sign for you if you’d like to join us. The sooner we have justice, the sooner the roads are clear.
“Well, maybe you have a point, but you need to stop making it about race.”
On the one hand, I strongly believe anyone who says this knows, deep down, that they’re full of shit. It would take an exceptionally thick skull in this country to not understand the effects of privilege, even if it makes some folks uncomfortable. So let me unequivocally say yes, it is absolutely about race.
On the other hand, a society that applies social justice equally across all races is good for everyone. A society in which the police view black men as equal human beings is one in which we can all have the opportunity to thrive on a level playing field. So, instead of screaming how it’s not about race, how about you fight alongside us for social justice for black men at the hands of police and when we get there, we can talk about your cause. You’d be surprised how many friends you can make when you focus on solidarity first.
Credit to Elyria Pride. Click image to visit page.
It has been quite some time since I updated Rage and Love and it’s time to take a different direction. I started this blog to have an outlet for both my political views and my personal goings on that allowed me to express myself in a longer form than is customary on Facebook. Both took a backseat to a rather time-consuming job for the last year and a half, but that’s a topic for another time. The gist is that I’m back and my focus has shifted toward local politics, an area where an individual can still make a difference, and I’ll be using this platform to explore some of the differences from which the city of Elyria could benefit.
The headline on today’s print edition of the Chronicle details Bendix and their relocation potential. Bendix employs 450 and provides a decent chunk of change to the city via income tax revenue. They have also been a good corporate citizen recently, donating to the return of city fireworks earlier in 2014. In a time when most industry has moved on from the Rust Belt, it comes as no surprise that the city wants to incentivize Bendix to keep and expand their world headquarters in the city.
Bendix, however, doesn’t seem too concerned with incentives. According to Mayor Holly Brinda, “Their major concern is they have solved their recruitment problem, but they are concerned about retaining this talent. They want a building that can attract and retain millennials.”
Millennials, of course, are today’s young adults, a generation that has gone beyond the typical cultural shift between generations to an outright rejection of their parents’ standard aspirations. Buying homes, new cars, seeking stable employment, and putting career first have fallen out of favor, and while there are any number of theories about why that may be, the important thing is that attracting and retaining talent from this generation requires a truly fresh perspective and a willingness to let go of tradition in favor of progress. Where could Elyria — a city which saw a large population drop in adults under 45 between 2000 and 2010 — adapt and invest in ways that could help attract Millennials?
Millennial mistrust of large corporations is well-documented. Chains are out, shopping local is in. Midway Mall will never again be the bustling center of commerce that it once was, but the authenticity and friendliness of small, specialized downtown storefronts can attract a generation looking for something real. Farmer’s markets, butchers, food trucks, vintage shops, wine bars, and coffee shops are the domain of this generation. If that sounds like a pricier alternative to the discount mega-retailers preferred by boomers, that’s because it is… but Millennials are happy to pay the price for authenticity over a packaged, focus-grouped plastic experience.
Tax revenues and grant money should be directed into not only repairing (or replacing) some of the crumbling buildings along and around Broad Street, but also subsidizing the opening of new shops for first-time entrepreneurs. Giving an economic incentive to a young person with a dream may not massively expand your tax base, but it creates the kind of inspiration that transforms the culture of a city and attracts consumer dollars… and the type of talent Bendix and others seek. Remember, all those storefronts used to be quite popular.
As mentioned, young people simply aren’t buying new cars anymore. In many cities — even moderately sized ones — public transit has matured and become the method of choice for young people seeking mobility in the United States. Gone are the days where the middle class in this country shunned public transit as a hotbed of undesirables. As a matter of fact, the next generation is more aggressive toward achieving social justice than any before, and the entire idea of “undesirables” is somewhat foreign to them.
Funding for Lorain County Transit is consistently rejected at the polls, including May and November this year alone, both times by the same wide 4500 vote margin. If the city wants to attract new residents under the age of 35, massive expansion of public transit is non-negotiable. Folks from anywhere in the city should be able to get to work at Bendix, to classes at LCCC, and to those new shops downtown, in a timely manner and without a car of their own. If ninety percent of the population of Elyria can’t catch a bus within eight blocks of their house by 2018, we’re not trying hard enough.
A consistent complaint around the editorials and message boards and barstools consists of suggesting that Elyrians stop “spending all their money in Westlake and Lakewood and Ohio City and Tremont when they should spend it here.” After all, we do have businesses downtown, right?
On October 10th, the Chronicle ran a story about food trucks offering diversity downtown. On October 11th, the Chronicle ran a story about food trucks potentially hurting business downtown. The reversal was strong enough to cause whiplash. The problem here is that nobody seems to know about the wide variety of downtown food establishments that cater to diverse tastes… because they don’t exist. There are a couple of options, of course, and no disrespect is meant to them. However, to think that the downtown restaurant market is so saturated that it can’t tolerate any more competition is ridiculous, and it’s a case study in failure and bad policy.
So we want to attract Millennials, right? Here’s where the above paragraph becomes an even bigger problem: Millennials love food trucks. They also like their meals locally grown and sourced. Don’t forget wine bars and craft beer and locally roasted coffee and socially conscious menus and a dozen other things that our city does not offer. Example: In Elyria, you can get a pitcher of Bud Light anywhere, but where can you enjoy a tall brew from Franklin Brewing, a craft brewer that is actually right here in Elyria? Unfortunately, to the best of my knowledge, the closest is North Olmsted.
We have some work ahead of us if we want to make Elyria more welcoming to the generation sought by Bendix and other forward-thinking employers, but it’s not an insurmountable task. The most difficult part of the process is to shatter our old way of thinking. Elyria does suffer from a certain amount of stubbornness, with the food truck debacle highlighting the damage that can be done. If we can break down the wall we’ve built to slow down progress, we can not only help Bendix expand, but attract other brands looking to set up shop in a growing and progressive city with reasonable property costs. It all starts with us.
It’s been a while, right? Other than one post on the Rage section, I haven’t posted to this blog in over half a year. I blame a lot of factors: Continue reading
I’ve long supported the social justice that would result from a large increase in the minimum wage. The Fight for 15 campaign, for example, has set a lofty but completely historically rational goal of a fifteen dollar minimum hourly wage. The neoliberal talking points against this are all pretty obvious and tired by now, so I won’t recap, but there is one that I hear every time and I’ve never had the time or patience to fully address it. So let’s do that, shall we?
The argument goes like this:
When you artificially drive wages higher, business owners will instead invest in more automation to avoid the increased labor costs. The automation will result in massive layoffs and this will hurt the workers because they need to earn a paycheck to survive.
The logic regarding investment in automation to avoid labor costs is sound. (Well, mostly. Let’s not ignore the reality that if this automation technology were already available, business owners wouldn’t be waiting on a minimum wage increase to utilize it.) Increases in efficiency are always exploited by business owners, and rightfully so in most cases. Doing more with less is the name of the game when the ultimate goal is financial success.
Any capitalistic armchair economist will claim (accurately) that efficiency decreases the need for labor and contributes to less work. At issue is whether this is a good or a bad thing for the working class. The corporate media will spin “increased unemployment” as a sign of a weak economy instead of a surge in innovation. The conservative movement will decry the increasing number of people “on the dole” instead of acknowledging that this newfound efficiency has the power to give back time to the workers. The liberal movement will suggest “creating more jobs” instead of celebrating the obsolescence of the forty hour week. Nearly everyone seems to view these developments from a work fetish point of view.
What does it mean to fetishize work? To fetishize something is to have an irrational commitment to that thing. A century ago, the media spoke of how workers “won” the forty hour week in hard-fought labor battles. Nobody in the media panicked that the reduced working hours provided by the Adamson Act in 1916 would increase poverty and unemployment. It was a victory because it gave workers some of their lives back. Today, we’re led to believe that workers are losing out to automation instead of winning more freedom because we’re culturally stuck on the idea of “working for a living.”
If we streamline, computerize, automate, and innovate fifty percent of all work that is performed by labor in the United States over the next five years, our current culture would decry the half of the country that is being “lazy” and not “contributing.” We truly believe that trading forty hours of labor for your paycheck every week is an untouchable cornerstone of American society. It’s a backwards and mind-numbing flaw in our society and it needs to be killed off.
It’s pretty simple: If we eliminate fifty percent of the labor demand through innovation, these gains should benefit everyone in society. The factory workers put in twenty hours a week instead of forty but output and profit for the factory remain the same, so the pay for the workers would logically remain the same as well. And check the math… their annual income would remain the same, but it would basically double their hourly wage… which would put those minimum wage workers at nearly fifteen dollars an hour.
And you know what it does to corporate profits?
Nothing. Because, as mentioned several times, their output and profit would remain consistent… it just wouldn’t take as much work.
And yet there are some reading this blog who are still, even after taking it all into consideration, a little aggravated that I’m suggesting that being lazy and not working forty hours a week is an acceptable lifestyle. That’s what it means to fetishize work, but when (not if, but when) labor becomes obsolete, they will have no choice but to accept that there can be more to life than work.
Leave your thoughts in the comments.
It is impossible to understate how important this case is, how far-reaching the implications could be, yet almost nobody is aware of the case or the story behind it. Currently, in a New York courtroom, vulture capitalists are engaged in a massive court case against the entire nation of Argentina, a country which had the misfortune of capturing the attention of the United States and being “liberated” into poverty.
Here’s a primer to get you up to speed.
A Country Focuses on Itself
Argentina had spent the first half of the twentieth century in economic turmoil. Foreign interests freely exploited resources and people in the nation, the wealth gap grew, and poverty was the norm in much of the country. However, a plan was set in place by Juan Perón, returning from years of political exile to become president, to kick out the foreign interests, nationalize banks, improve wages and living conditions, and rebuild the country’s economy by focusing on those who struggled.
The results spoke for themselves. Inflation slowed to 12%, real wages grew 20%, the GDP doubled, and the country had a plan to pay back all of its $8 billion in debt obligations to the United States, thus ending the business arrangement, within four years. What happened next is a lesson right out of Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine.
Reasserting Dominance Through Shock Therapy
The 1973 Oil Crisis, in which Arab oil exporters within OPEC placed an embargo on certain oil exports, threw Perón’s plan into chaos. The immediate instability resulted in an uptick in inflation, violence, and right-wing extremism. Within two years, a military junta placed the country in the hands of Jorge Videla and his Minister of the Economy, José Alfredo Martínez de Hoz. A member of the aristocracy before Perón, Martínez de Hoz was itching to get back to the way things used to be.
Several U.S. backed neoliberals, trained in the Chicago School way of thinking, were appointed throughout the government. The government’s first economic acts were to ban all employee striking and to make all employment at-will. As would be expected, deregulation, privatization, and an infusion of oppressive loans from American capitalists soon followed. The country even went so far as to take out ads in an American business publication seeking private investment and renouncing “statism,” to bring in more multinational corporations.
Turning back to neoliberalism resulted as history would suggest. Wages lost 40% of their value, unemployment skyrocketed, poor villages became riddled with disease from lack of health care or safe water. The old social order was back in power and they held a grudge. People were “disappeared” by the military government, sometimes covertly, but just as often killed in plain sight for disagreeing with the new standard. While thousands died at the hands of the dictatorship, Henry Kissinger praised the new ally, promising to meet with him and get some funding in his hands. The money came in, of course, but not without some strings attached.
Buried Under Debt, A Country Cannot Rise Up
Since the cash infusion from investors in the mid 1970s, Argentina has been held back by neoliberal policies, massive debts owed to the same investors, and other internal conflicts over the years. The junta has long since been eliminated, but the debt did not disappear with it. The country went into default over a decade ago to the tune of $100 billion, the largest sovereign default in history. Debts were restructured and venture capitalists bought up these debts at much-reduced prices, not to work with Argentina, but to invest in their struggle and reclaim the value of the funds at a later date. Such acts are popularly referred to as “vulture capitalism,” feasting on the struggles of another, picking at the carcass.
The capitalists, who purchased the funds at “distressed” rates, have been suing Argentina since soon after the investment to claim their funds. They have attempted to take ownership of satellites and military vehicles belonging to Argentina but stationed in other countries. Their goal is not to recoup the distressed investments, but rather to recoup the full, pre-forgiveness value of the debts plus eleven+ years of interest.
The Virtue of Paying Your Debts
Some argue that Argentina should pay their debts, but “they” did not incur the debts. The U.S. backed junta created the debt and, once the junta was out of power, the debt transfered to the democratic leadership in the country. This wasn’t just an example of electing a new president — the country literally dissolved the old government and recreated a democratically-elected leadership that should have inherited none of the wastefulness and corruption of the previous dictatorship.
Some argue that Argentina can now afford to pay its debts due to a relatively high standard of living. Notwithstanding the above point, this is exactly how the vulture capitalists work: They bail out a country in desperation, wait for the rebound, then take a payout once the country is stabilized. The collection of that debt is often enough to spark another disaster, and the cycle continues. Allowing the capitalists to collect legitimizes this neverending cycle of poverty and unethical exploitation.
Now you have your background. For more information, you can read The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein (PDF), which begins telling the in-depth story of Argentina’s shock therapy and the resulting exploitation on page 87. To follow the case, I recommendRussia Today or al Jazeera, two outlets that are very likely to continue full coverage of this important case.
Those of you who read my blog regularly know that I have mostly been focusing on my personal life lately, especially surrounding finding this new job and adjusting to the new routine. I’m getting a bit settled in again, so I wanted to let you know about a couple of projects (one statewide, one local) in which I’ll soon be participating, and to invite you to take part as well. I’ve mentioned these causes briefly in social media, but you’ll be hearing more about them in the coming weeks and months.
Giving patients safe access to medical cannabis has been a passion of mine for a few years, and Ohio is definitely closer than ever in 2013. I’ve long decried the immaturity and animosity among various marijuana activist camps, and it is with great pleasure that I note how much has changed in the past two years. I recently met the president of the Ohio Rights Group, John Pardee, and I was very impressed with the tone and the professionalism of the organization. I’ve seen folks from disparate circles coming together to support and promote the ballot initiative which is their current focus. In the near future, I will be helping this organization, and I’d like to invite all Ohioans to visit their website andlike them on Facebook to see how you can help as well.
I’m not sure what I’ll be doing with the group just yet. I would love to help their web team with a site overhaul and add a dose of Twitter to their social media activity, but I’ll be awaiting instructions from John. In the meantime, don’t be surprised to see this topic making a resurgence on my own social accounts while we progress toward making Ohio the 20th medical cannabis state.
The other group is more local and I’m still learning the ropes, but again, it’s something near and dear to me. Invest Elyria is “a non-profit, non-partisan, grassroots group of good people with an intense desire to promote the entire Elyria community as a great place to live, to work and to raise a family.” I’ve seen the group’s Facebook page promoting local restaurants and parks, participating in beautification projects, and generally singing the praises of our very underrated city. In addition to correcting the misinformed views about Elyria, the group advocates for projects that could create a positive impact on the community.
Again, I’m not sure how I’ll be helping… but as the dust settles on my own challenges, I plan to spend some time helping my adopted hometown grow, and I invite all locals to come along for the ride. It can be as easy as skipping the next lunch in Avon in favor of one of the many fine downtown eateries or joining the team on the next park cleanup. I’m hoping to use the power of the pen (or keyboard) to help IE advocate via social media, their blog, newspaper editorials, and wherever else I can be used. Keep an eye out for more information on my Facebook page.
Later this week, I hope to address the Manning verdict and the latest round of fast food strikes, so be sure to subscribe or follow me on Twitter or Facebook, all of which can be found on the homepage in the “About.Me” section by clicking here.
Today is a day in which all of us who have stood on the right side of history should feel great pride. It is also a day for those who have not supported equality to witness great positive change and realize that it is never too late to be a part of the future.
– Jack Antonoff, guitarist from fun. Continue reading