Author Nevins defends human rights for immigrants

Watch this video on Democracy now:
Joseph Nevins on “Dying to Live: A Story of US Immigration in an Age of Global Apartheid”

Street Comments

The ladies love street harassment!

Sound like a funny title, right? Well it's a blog entry on Broadsheet written by Judy Berman which tries to take a critical look at catcalls. apparently some women like them and feel like they must not be attractive if no men yell out to them from therir cars or on the sides of sidewalks.
Well, it makes sense that us women can enjoy these stupid comments, seeing that our identities as women is fundamentally tied to being beautiful and on being look at. I'll be honest- of course a comment like that has occasionally made me feel a little better about my appearance (II've been socialized well after all).

Although the author is quick to point out that there are different kinds of catcalls. A calm hey Sweetie may be welcome, but there are some hostile and dangerous situations where a comment can turn into a threat. I, for instance, just yesterday was walking in my neighborhood yesterday alone as it was getting a little dark, when a two men who had been looking me up and down said te van a robar (someone's going to kidnap you). The implication being that a young woman should not be alone on the streets or she is inviting violence. And a couple of weeks ago as I was walking home from the train, a man stopped his car and invited me into it and got mad when I politley told him I was not interested, accusing me of racism (because he's african-american and I'm not, I guess). Couldn't he figure out that it was just a creepy proposition that I wanted nothing to do with?

The truth is that the streets can be a dangerous place for women, which means that we have to be careful about our coming as goings, which is an issue that has bothered me for years. I have one of 2 options- either succumb to the latent and overt sexism and just stay at home so I'll never be scared, or try to live my life as the free person that I want to be, knowing that it is a dangerous thing to do. It's just another contradiction that modern-day women have to face and there are no easy answers.

Well, it something that I have to think about increasingly, seeing that these kind of situations only get more pronounced in the spring and summer when everyone is out.

Herbivore's Dilemma

Ha! Really quickly before I go out of town, I wanted to post about this article I read on Slate.com called Meatless Like Me: I may be a vegetarian, but I still love the smell of bacon by Taylor Clark.
I loved that Clark talks about the vegetarian experiences; how people:

• expect you to be self-righteous against them for eating meat. It's ok, we can sit next to you while you're eating meat and not be grossed out, make holier-than-thou comments or try to convert you (just don't try to conver us either!)
• express concern over you being unhealthy or malnourished, while they are eating cheetos and coke for breakfast of course.

Bottom line, we vegetarians are just like you omnivores, except we don't eat meat.

Wright is right

Ok, I didn't want to do thism but I’m jumping into this whole Jeremiah Wright/Barack Obama discussion.

The mainstream press has been rashly accusing Wright of being unpatriotic and insisting that Obama renounce him. The sad thing is that Obama took the bait and has thus officially sold out.
He has turned his back on his past in order to move forward in his political career. I am disappointed in him (and I didn’t even expect that much from him in the first place!) but of course, it’s the press that deserves most of the blame. They are trying to white-wash Obama because even as white-friendly as his persona already is, he’s still too Black for them. He must be made to completely divorce himself from his Black roots, and he must do it in a public way, as if he were washing his sins away in front of ‘America’.

The really good article I’ve seen on this whole controversy is The Wright Question on theroot.com. In it, Jimi Izrael defends Wright’s freedom of speech. More importantly, the right of historically oppressed communities to speak their truth is upheld. Here’s a small excerpt from that article:

… where can we go to speak our mind without having to answer to The Man? There is this very colonial motif of having to filter black free voices through a
sieve of white ignorance and paranoia. What you say—and what other black people in your vicinity say!—has to be state-sanctioned and approved by people who have no idea what you are talking about, and you'd be a fool to explain it to them.
"Negro Tour-Guide" is an under-paid position with lots of work, but no benefits.

Exactly my thoughts. As the above article says, we need a place where “[aren’t] any white folks around needing an interpretation or demanding an explanation”. In fact, I think they have some explaining to do to us.

Of course, the best part of the article is being introduced to the term “Negro Tour-Guide”. I know I’ve been there before, having to explain to Whites the history, culture, cuisine, or anything else that intrigues them about my ethnicity. Anybody else been there and have any exmaples to share? Or any thoughts on the Wright/Obama controversy?

What do you think of Wright's thoughts?
Was Obama right in speaking out against him?
What is more problematic here- the ignorant White media or Obama's bowing down to them?
Have you ever felt yourself an [insert-ethnicity-here]Tour -Guide?

Another good blog from root.com here.

Spanish or English?

I read an article today from yesterday's Redeye newspaper entitled Conversing no simple matter for bilinguals. It was buried all the way on page 14, but I was still surprised to see it included in this mainly dumbed-down and condensed version of the Chicago Tribune. (Sorry, I can't link to the article, since the Redeye insists on charging to read the articles online- how medieval). (Also, you should know that I think this article is originally from the LA Times, but I could not find it there either...)

The article points to the question that all bilingual Latinos deal with on a day to day basis- during what situations and with what people do you use English and/or Spanish? It sounds like a straightforward question, and sometimes it is an easy matter, but when its not...
Things can go wrong both ways.

The problems are:

If you speak to someone in Spanish:

• they may not know Spanish, and you'll feel like a jerk for assuming that they are of Latino origin or Spanish-speaking.

• They may even know Spanish, but feel insulted or condescended to because of their own prejudices and hang-ups.

If you speak to them in English:

• they may not know English, or worse-

• they may think that you are a sell-out, snobby wanna-be-white person who's embarrassed of your culture.

It sucks either way, and believe me, I've been on both sides.

Of course its hard. As the article deftly points out, you usually only get a couple of seconds at most to make that decision, and you have to base it on both ephemeral and concrete things like "age, clothing, and apparent social status- along with skin, eye and hair color."

But of course those are cues that we can't really depend on. Us Latinos are a very diverse group of people and those racial and class-based judgments are exactly what can and does steer us the wrong way and end up making us look either stupid or elitist.

So what to do? I, for one still try to speak Spanish as much as possible because it does make me a feel a certain kinship with other Latinos out there. I'm sure I'll make some mistakes, but so do mono-lingual white people. How many more times will I be asked 'where are you from' (answer: um, Chicago) or 'what does your name mean?' (answer: nothing really) before I die? To the latter question (as if every exotic-to-them-name has to mean something), I have taken to answering something over the top, like 'my name means flying seabird of the west' so that they can get off my back and I can laugh at them ;)
Sadly, some of them really believe that my name means that, but a few actually realize the stupidity of their question.

Dennis and 16 tons of UFOs

So, I'm little stuck on Dennis Kucinich today. So, here are some interesting videos and articles that I have come upon lately.
No, I don't vote. I simply do not believe in the electoral process, but if I did, I would support Kucinich.
He's our very own Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (Former leftist mayor of Mexico City. Won the 2006 Presidential Race in Mexico, but through blatant election fraud, was not allowed to take office, which sparked mass protests for many months)
The point is, he may very well be amazing and that's exactly why he's not going to be allowed to win.

First up- the article that started my mini-obsession: Salon's "Stop lying to yourself. You love Dennis Kucinich"

And today, on the beloved Democracy Now, he speaks up about the movement to impeach Cheney and Bush, the need to defend workers right internationally, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and coming soon Iran, and the fact that the real ownership of the airwaves lies in the public, not corporations.
Oh, and he explains his UFO connection too.

What UFO connection, you ask?
In this clip, during a Democratic Candidate Debate, Tim Russert asks Kucinich if he has indeed ever seen a UFO:

I don't know, I feel like that was an unfair question to ask, but at least Kucinich was honest!

One last video. Here he sings an old mining song, which the Youtube user who posted it seems to think it makes him look like an "ass." I disagree- it makes him more endearing and more brave in my eyes.


Ok, hopefully I got all of this Kucinich stuff out of my system by now.

Rainy Day Comeback

Hi everyone- sorry I took such a long time coming back. I have been kinda busy- here are some of the things that I have done since I last posted:

• I saw Ozomatli play in Millenium Park with my family. It was so cold, but the music was awesome, and we warmed up by dancing and drinking some red red wine.
  
• I had a barbecue, complete with some vegetarian hotdogs that didn't go down so well. One of my guests that I didn't know very well shot me a dirty look and told me she wasn't a vegetarian, which really bothers me for some reason... Does not being a vegetarian mean not having an imagination or an open mind? Does it mean that you can't eat vegetables?
  
• I visited my father's grave in memory of his birthday. He would have turned 60 this month. It was an odyssey getting there and by the time I did get there, it was closing in half an hour! We spent some time walking around looking at other gravestones with some being pretty substantial. My little niece pointed to a crucified Christ and asked me why he was hanging that way. Being an avowed atheist, I don't believe in propagating Christian beliefs, but she is not my child so I didn't know what to say. it was kind of funny. I ended up telling her that she needed to ask her mom (my sister) or her grandmother (my mother).
  
• I completed and submitted my application to my dream job. Cross your fingers. Countless hours of wishing and studying and working and stressing- hopefully will come to something.
  
• I read the following six books

• Rules of Survival by Nancy Werlin- A novel about a 14 year old boy that has to not only survive, but protect himself and his younger siblings from his abusive mother. It was hard to read because the violence and the anxiety it produced were so real. The main point was that there were plenty of adults that knew what was going on and did nothing to help. It really reminded me that very one of us has the responsibility to help one another when we see abuse occur. Its so easy to turn the other way, or make excuses (i.e., that's not my business, it's just discipline, etc), but it really is a serious problem. And it doesn't have a clear answer. I mean, DCFS isn't always a better alternative.
  
• Un Lun Dun by China Mieville- an urban fantasy set in London (get it- Un-London). The idea is that every major city in the world has an alternative/parallel world attached to it where everything that is discarded in this world goes to. It was very much like Alice in Wonderland and The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, with a young heroine who finds herself in a very strange world with crazy characters and has to save it's people from the evil ones. I didn't really enjoy it because I felt that most of the descriptions were too long and not intriguing in any real way. But I'll end on a positive note, the author also added some drawings within the text that were truly creative in their grotesque way.
  
• An Abundance of Katherines by John Green- I loved this book. First of all, it is set on the North side of Chicago, which meant that I recognized a lot of the places and street names in the story. Its about Colin, who has just graduated high school and gotten dumped by his girlfriend Katherine. The problem is- that he has had 19 girlfriends, all named Katherine, and each one has dumped him. So he feels depressed and puzzled about this and decides to go on a roadtrip with his friend Hassan. It was really funny and easy to read.
  
• Dreamhunter by Elizabeth Knox
  
• Dreamquake by Elizabeth Knox- These are two fantasy novels that are part of a 'duet.' Knox very skillfully creates a whole world where dreams are caught by professional dreamhunters and sold to the public. But, there is a sinister government force that is using these dreams to exploit and control people for its own financial and political gain. I can say no more- just go out and read them if you like the fantasy genre mixed with some negative utopia, plus some great female roles.
  
• The Atheist's Bible: An Illustrious Collection of Irreverent Thoughts This is the only book in this list that is not YA (young adult). It consists of atheist quotes which I love. I think quote books are a corny thing, but I just love how quotes can condense whole philosophies on life into 1 or 2 sentences.

So, that's what I've been up to.

I will be posting again soon...

*Muah* to all my readers (that means you sis ^_^)

Soon..

Sorry I haven't posted lately, I've been reading and preparing for book discussions. I moderate 4 in 2 weeks!
I will soon write my thoughts on the books that I have been reading.

Chola against consumerism

I was looking at this blog- Ask a Chola which I find simultaneously hilarious, irritating, a little reactionary and yet right-on target culturally. Well, I guess I'm still trying to figure it out... I gotta say that I love the title of her blog.

So, I came upon this video which seems to perfectly combine the things I've been riffing on lately-

Beat poetry
Latino culture
anti-consumerism
humor

So check it out and maybe you'll laugh too:

Keep your overhead low

I just read a Slate article called On the Road Again where friends and scholars talk about Jack Kerouac's contribution to the literary world and American culture.

2 quotes jumped out at me:

• "Keep your overhead low"

I like this because it seems to speak against the conspicuous consumerism of our current culture (really, is there a time-warp? did we go back to the 80's somehow?).
But it can also be interpreted in a broad, almost spiritual way. Keep yourself and your needs simple. Don't over-extend yourself. Its the only way to really be free.

• "You realize that a man can take a train and never reach his destination, that a
  man has no destination at the end of the road, but that he merely has a starting
  point on the road—which is Home."

Again- a thought that expresses an outward and inward reality.
I would add to this that the destination point is also Home. No matter where you go, what you study, who you meet, it always leads back to you. You can only know yourself through others, and through experiences.

At this point I should admit that I never finished On the Road. My older sister loved the book and so I tried to read it, but I think I was too young to understand it. I was probably like 12 when I attempted it and I had a short attention span for what I considered rambling stories.

I think I could appreciate it now, so I will pick up a copy and read it- finally. I know, its really late...

When I read it I will blog my thoughts on it. The way I see it, either I will either be completely disappointed by it after having anticipated it for more than a decade, or I will adore it and berate myself for not having read and re-read it earlier. My main goal is to begin and complete it.

These chickens want books

cheesy joke but since I love libraries and animals alike, I though I'd share...

A pair of chickens walk up to the circulation desk at a public library and say, 'Buk Buk BUK.' The librarian decides that the chickens desire three books, and gives it to them...and the chickens leave shortly thereafter.

Around midday, the two chickens return to the circulation desk quite vexed and say,' Buk Buk BuKKOOK!' The librarian decides that the chickens desire another three books and gives it to them. The chickens leave as before.

The two chickens return to the library in the early afternoon, approach the librarian, looking very annoyed and say, 'Buk Buk Buk Buk Bukkooook!' The librarian is now a little suspicious of these chickens. She gives them what they request, and decides to follow them.

She followed them out of the library, out of the town, and to a park. At this point, she hid behind a tree, not wanting to be seen. She saw the two chickens throwing the books at a frog in a pond, to which the frog was saying, "Rrredit Rrredit Rrredit..."

I like how the librarian is so helpful!

My Country, Tears of Thee...

Yesterday, on Labor Day, Lawrence Ferlinghetti was on DemocracyNow to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the publication of 'On the Road' by Jack Kerouac, and its significance to the Beat Generation.
He read a beautiful poem that hasn't been published yet because he just wrote it.

Pity the nation whose people are sheep, and whose
shepherds mislead them.

Pity the nation whose leaders are liars, whose sages
are silenced, and whose bigots haunt the airwaves.

Pity the nation that raises not its voice, except to praise conquerors and acclaim the bully as hero, and aims to rule the world with force and by torture.

Pity the nation that knows no other language but its
own and no other culture but its own.

Pity the nation whose breath is money and sleeps the
sleep of the too well-fed.

Pity the nation -- oh, pity the people who allow their
rights to erode and their freedoms to be washed away.

My country, tears of thee, sweet land of liberty.

Of course I love the political sentiment, but it is also just beautiful art in that it is timeless and placeless yet completely rooted in its time and place of our modern U.S.:

Also- He's 88 years old and still creating art that expresses his radical
ideals!
Which goes to show that one does not have to grow conservative with age, as all of us young(ish) lefties have been told numerous times. Don't believe it- keep fighting against injustice!

Six Sucias

I've been reading Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez's blog a lot lately and she's been talking about casting for the movie version of her novel the Dirty Girls Social Club (if you haven't read it- go and borrow or buy it already! It's only one of the best books ever!).

In the novel there are 6 Latina sucias and this is how I would cast them:

Lauren- Jessica Alba

Sara- Alexis Bledel or Cameron Diaz

Elizabeth- Rosario Dawson

Rebecca- Eva Longoria


Amber- Julieta Venegas/Catalina Sandino Moreno


Usnavys- Eva Mendes (with some extra weight)

Alberto Gonzalez: FTP

(if you don't know what FTP is means, watch this George Lopez video)

QUE TE VAYA BIEN

QUE TE MACHUCE UN TREN

Y QUE TE REMUELA BIEN

Just look at him staring lovingly at Bush!!! --------------------->>>>

If this picture doesn't define coconut, then I don't know what does.

So on August 27, Alberto Gonzalez FINALLY announced that he will be resigning as U.S. attorney general on Sept 17, 2007.

Break out the glasses and the tequila bottle!

I just realized that he is exiting the day after Mexican Independence Day. I'm sure that wasn't on purpose, yet on the day of celebration, please join me in celebrating our independence from this idiot who unfortunately is of Mexican descent (or as Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez would call him a "Texican").

Let's all spill a little tequila on the ground for this fallen homie.

But even within my happiness at this turn of events, I must still express my disappointment. Ground-breaking and essential Latino civil rights organizations like League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) and the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) did NOT come out and publicly and officially condemn him, even after he made it clear that he has no respect for human rights and upholds torture as a legitimate tactic in this phony and deadly war against the world. We Latinos that struggle for human rights cannot let our movement devolve into one of tokenism, where we get behind anyone with brown skin or a Spanish last name. Capitalists, dictators, and oppressors come in all colors and speak all languages.

So what will Senor Gonzalez be doing now that he's out of a job?
One suggestion I've heard is that he use his extra time to actually read the U.S. Constitution which would be a great idea, although a little on the late side, don't you think?

I'm also thinking he should hook up with another bush-loving, self-hater like Linda Chavez or Rosana Pulido and have little coconut babies and live in coconut heaven (and far far away from me).



You may also want to read:
Latinos Must Speak Out on Gonzales

Parallel Logan Square

The August 10th issue of the Chicago Reader was all about Logan Square and as expected it was mostly focused on the White/yuppie experience of the neighborhood. I took it as it is, since I don't have expectations for this paper which mostly talks about bars, boutiques, TIFS, to talk about issues that are relevant to a working-class Latina like myself.

But I was very happy to see that someone, Jesse Mumm (a person I have met and seen at different events), wrote a letter expressing his disappointment that the Reader had glossed over, ignored, or made kitsch, the Latino presence in Logan Square. Here is his letter in its entirety:

August 24, 2007

A Piñata Can’t Speak for the Community

I was delighted to see the Reader take on Logan Square in the August 10 issue. I grew up in Logan, attended Darwin School, and have lived, worked, and done research on the near northwest side most of my adult life. There are a million details I wish had been included, but journalists deserve their chance to offer their take on a neighborhood that no one should expect to be summarized in a few articles. I have a lot of personal respect for both Harold Henderson and Ben Joravsky, and all three articles do a good job with other angles on Logan, including the architecture, recent elections, and the early settlement history. But a very crucial piece of the present was treated with cavalier disregard, and its implications are disturbing given the threat gentrification presents to the area.

Logan Square is a Latino community. When I lived on Sawyer and then Washtenaw in the 70s and 80s I was often the only Irish-American kid on the block. My school pictures from Darwin include a few other white kids, mostly Polish, a few black kids, one or two Middle Easterners, among a majority of Latinos. That majority is declining due to gentrification, but only by a few percentage points, as recent immigration is bringing new Latinos to Logan Square at the same time. In the Henderson piece [“It Started With a Farm”], the last three generations of a majority Latin-American neighborhood deserve more than an addendum at the end of a list of immigrant groups here: “now Latinos.” In fact nowhere in the opening blurb or subsequent three articles does the phrase “Puerto Rican” ever appear, although at its inception this Latino community was majority Puerto Rican, and adjacent to the historic heart of Puerto Rican Chicago in Humboldt Park. The funny-looking piñata on the cover represents the Mexican community here as kitsch, and very little in the articles lets them speak as people. Why a single Cuban former resident now in Miami got the only extensive interview about the current Latino community and its history boggles my mind in a neighborhood with so many outspoken Latino leaders and residents still there. Relying on this expatriate meant mistakes as well: Los 4 Caminos was not there in 1972, and the “Cubans on the east” of Kimball were a fraction of the Puerto Rican and Mexican presence. Joravsky [“End of an Era”] does not actually explain much promised in his subtitle about “how Logan Square got out from under powerful alderman Richard Mell.” There is a much more interesting story behind all this, of long-standing battles between the emergent progressive Puerto Rican leadership and Mell’s decreasing ability to buy off Latinos, who forced him in the late 90s to negotiate. Instead white “independents” become the protagonists of the community in his narrative, rather than a privileged minority largely arguing over issues that revolve mostly around low-income Latinos.

What was missed in all this? Not only has Logan Square been majority Latino for many generations, but it is the only neighborhood in Chicago that has been a strong port of entry for all of its major Latino groups, including Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Cubans, and Central Americans. I had close friends and neighbors from all those places. The future of this country has a lot to do with whether Latinos over time decide to form a cultural and political whole, and Chicago provides a fascinating window into this experiment in action in Logan Square. Unfortunately that gets missed when we are looking more for amenities and curiosities than people. Part of the new backlash against people who are angry and frustrated about the displacement of longtime residents is contained in the gloss of “diversity” that strategically wipes Latinos from the picture. Often newcomers find the preceding white European immigrants and the new eclectic eating spots more interesting than the legacies of families, events, moments, and organizations that Latinos represent in Logan—let alone their present reality. Many well-intentioned white progressives never find their way into Latino social circles here and largely live in a “parallel Logan,” shopping at different stores, finding other white hipsters in cafes, and sampling Latino culture mostly as late-night tacos. The articles got many things right, but they mostly missed the Latino community, who remain 65 percent of the people of Logan Square. That omission would be pretty unconscionable in Chinatown or Devon or Paseo Boricua, but gets a pass here because the real-estate boosters have done their work and sold us an image in which most of the neighbors cannot find themselves—except as backdrop. We are reading an imbalanced landscape, through the eyes of gentrification. The real one is much more interesting.

Jesse Mumm

Anthropologist

So finally a little bit of truth and funny too. I think I'll start using the term "parallel Logan" myself.
But of course, in the next issue, there had to be a right-winger using a very hackneyed argument. Here's his letter:

Speaking of Displaced Communities

The first thing I noticed about Jesse Mumm’s extensive letter to the Reader [“A Piñata Can’t Speak for the Community,” August 24] about the lack of coverage of the resident Latino community in Logan Square [The Logan Square Issue, August 10] was that his signature contains the title “anthropologist.” I find it humorous that Mr. Mumm states indignation about the frustration of longtime Latino residents being displaced in the name of gentrification disguised as diversity. I always thought anthropologists that were worth their weight looked at the entire historical record. Had Mr. Mumm did that, he would have found that the Latinos actually displaced an established core of Scandinavian and eastern European families in the late 1960s and early 1970s. So the term longtime Latino residents somehow hits a sour note with me.

In addition, the Cuban influence in Logan Square in the early 70s was perhaps more significant than that of any other Latino group. Cubans represented a large cross section of hardworking people in blue- and white-collar jobs and many who owned their own businesses early in that transformation. There were even some notorious incidents. That there were halfway houses in Logan Square for Marielito boat people taken in by the benevolent President Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s is an established fact. Back in the 1950s, Polish Constitution Day was a huge event in Humboldt Park drawing thousands of Polish locals. Flash cut to the 1970s and it became a Cinco de Mayo celebration. That Logan Square has gone full circle in over just a handful of generations seems lost on the anthropologist named Jesse Mumm.

Mike Koskiewicz

Portage Park

I want to write a letter to this Mike, but his uninspired arguments make me just want to give up!

Wait- did this idiot just call Reagan "benevolent" ?!?! WTF?!
FTP

Against Love?

Against Love A Polemic by Laura Kipnis is a funny, true, and kind of depressing book I just read. Its one of those books that after you've read it, changes your philosophy on life forever, whether you wanted to change it or not.

I found this book randomly at my local library while searching for anything to read. You see, while I've always been an avid reader, this summer has turned me into a book-junkie. I need to be reading something at every moment or I panic that boredom or ignorance will set it.

Kipnis pretty much broke down any idealized notions I had left of romantic relationships ( and I had managed to hold on to a few). She uses many different schools of thought to discuss love; my favorite being a pseudo-Marxist one in which she describes how in our capitalistic culture, even our closest relationships are ruled by the work ethic. If your relationship is doing well, you aren't working hard enough! But how can you work towards something that's supposed to be fluid, authentic, and just lived, not worked at?

She also suggests that marriage (or long-term, committed monogamous relationships) is unrealistic, unfulfilling and ultimately a bankrupt venture. Well, she's not the first person to think or say so, but the way she says it is compelling in is deep cynicism and clarity. She goes on to say that those that cheat on spouses are actually subversives because they are railing against a system that is oppressive and doesn't work. I had never heard that before, and although I don't completely agree, again, the humor and passion that she brings to her arguments make them more novel and interesting.

This book's value is that it questions institutions and relations that we all take for granted. In this day and age, everything is questioned except for the model of coupledom. Its hard to look through sentimentality to face serious questions like how can we design our lives and homes in ways that are at once realistic and based in respect for everyone invloved?

Sacco and Vanzetti must not die

80 years ago (on August 22nd), Sacco and Vanzetti were executed. Their names reside in the very reaches of my memory of politicization. The Allen Ginsburg line (in the poem America) "Sacco and Vanzetti must not die" so plaintively yet so tragically recited, became part of me before I truly new what revolution meant.

Now many years later, I got to hear this Democracy Now broadcast that explains who these two men were, why they remain important figures today, and what they say about the era they lived in.

I was pleasantly surprised to hear Amy Goodman (the host) and Bruce Watson, the writer of Sacco and Vanzetti he Men, the Murders, and the Judgment of Mankind give an immigrant and working-class context to these radical activists. They were hard-working immigrants that like many of us and our ancestors, came full of hope for a better future and instead faced racism, urban ghettos, unequal schooling, subsistence wages, and xenophobic scapegoating from the 'native born.' As Vanzetti said while in prison, immigrants and working-class people lived “not in America, but under America.”

Although the trial that they received was unjust (the judge was obviously racist and anti-leftist as he hated Italian immigrants and anarchists), it was the first time that an international movement united to fight against the death penalty and judicial injustice and still serves as a model today. In the end, Sacco and Vanzetti were put in electric chairs and killed by the state.

Unfortunately, we still have the cruel and unjust system of state murder. As I write this, I do not know if Kenneth Foster, who the state of Texas acknowledges did not kill anyone or assist in any way (he was in the vicinity of a murder, which makes him a criminal under the 'Law of Parties'), has been killed. His death sentence is today.

80 years ago and not much has changed. The barbarity of the death penalty still exists and is used as a state tool to kill Blacks, Latinos, the poor, and those who fight against the system.
And immigrants are still used as scapegoats, only now the enemy is Mexicans, not Italians.

In this poverty and blatant disregard for our basic human rights- it is time for a new militancy to grow among us, the people that know what its like to work and receive oppression as our pay.