By Fran Finley
Warriors Of Change
Oh young brave souls
Let your music out
Sing your songs of sorrow
As you weave for yourself
Cloaks of change
Paint your innocent faces
With the color of blood
And sky and earth
Lay your hand over
Your wounded heart
And pledge allegiance
To end the violence
Spreading upon this land [Read more…]
By Dave Patterson, San Diego Veterans for Peace
How can we talk with our school children about the irrationality of violence when we happily take them to gun shows, military air shows and military museums where indiscriminate killing is portrayed as a fun activity for all?
Since the last school shooting, our educators are racing to prevent more violence by implementing depression screenings and Rachel’s Challenge non-violence program, while at the same time we promote our violent American culture. Now some are talking about banning sales of guns to those younger than 21, so wouldn’t it be logical to assign an NC-17 rating to the institutions that promote violence?
At the core of all this violence is the way we promote it in American culture. Selling someone an assault weapon that’s designed for killing people is clearly the promotion of violence against other people. In San Diego, we bus our school kids to the USS Midway where the ship was used to bomb Vietnam and helped kill 2 to 3 million people there. Yet everyone gets a thrill looking at the cool planes that deliver bombs on whomever. [Read more…]
Suzanne Sanders / Women’s Museum of California
According to the common understanding, a liminal state is supposed to be one we use to pass from one phase to the next. It’s a threshold, so to speak. But what happens when that liminal state is a permanent residence?
Gloria Anzaldua, the noted Chicana, tejana-originating, lesbian-feminist poet and fiction writer (who also spent a great deal of her life in California), explores this state in her seminal 1987 cultural criticism Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza.
Although Anzaldua passed away in 2004, her ideas may be even more relevant today. As an American-born Chicana, Anzaldua explores the contradictions and challenges of being considered neither one nor the other. She notes often in her writing that this Otherness is socially and culturally – and sometimes – infrastructurally constructed. She writes in Borderlands, “The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta [an open wound] where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms, it haemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country—a border culture” (25). We must question, then, the effects on this third country, this border culture, when President Trump’s physical wall becomes a reality. [Read more…]
The ACLU of San Diego and Imperial Counties and Think Dignity filed an amicus brief in the case of a man cited for allegedly living in his truck. The man’s defense attorney, Think Dignity and the ACLU say the law he is accused of violating is vague, discriminatory and unconstitutional.
“This law doesn’t adequately define what constitutes the criminal act of ‘living in a vehicle’,” said Coleen Cusack, an attorney defending Tony Diaz. “The law is overbroad and may encompass innocent activities that many of us do every day in our vehicles, such as eating, reading or resting.”
[Read more…]
Ellison Langford / Women’s Museum of California
Any time you see a little girl or woman dressed in a blue shirt and red polka-dotted bandana, you know instantly who she’s imitating– Rosie the Riveter.
It’s one of the most iconic outfits in popular culture. But for an era of haute Hollywood glamour, it’s interesting that one of the decade’s most iconic images is clad in a plain work shirt and bandana. Why? Because those clothes were safe.
Although half of the women who worked during World War II had been working before the attack on Pearl Harbor, many of them had never worked in industrial environments. Each position came with its own risks. Welding was a fire hazard, lathes involved sharp blades, and certain machines could snatch loose hair. [Read more…]
By Parisa Ijadi-Maghsoodi / UrbDeZine
Articles and studies from newspapers to academic journals warn the public against the havoc and devastation caused by rent control ordinances. However, it is not tenants and community-based organizations that are funding these articles and studies, it is real estate investors, developers, and corporate apartment owner associations. For decades, tenants and community-based organizations across California have worked tirelessly to enact rent control ordinances to decrease displacement and protect the rights and dignity of working families, the elderly, and long-term tenants. Tenant advocates continue to direct their limited resources to local initiatives and ballot measures, not to fund studies, articles, and lawsuits. [Read more…]
Ana Reynoso / Environmental Health Coalition
San Diego, often celebrated as a green city, is home to neighborhoods overburdened with toxic pollution, disproportionately high rates of asthma, limited affordable housing, and a failing transit system. In October 2017, with the leadership of Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, San Diego moved closer to rectifying these injustices.
I first experienced urban inequities and environmental injustice growing up in a low-income household in upstate New York. My hometown, Albany, is a historically disinvested city. The transportation of fracked oil exposes communities along its path to major risks of derailment, oil spills, and explosions. My single mother worked long hours to feed my brother and I. For years, we depended on donations of unhealthy food from church pantries. Back then, I did not have the language to describe that my city’s food desert and crumbling infrastructure restricted our access to healthy food and an effective and affordable transportation. As I got older, I learned policy and organizing could change these circumstances. [Read more…]
By Peter Brownell / Medium
A year ago today, my grandfather, Chuck Johnstone, passed away after spending most of his 93 years in Alaska. He was quintessentially Alaskan, doing the hard jobs that needed doing: he dropped out of high school to work in a gold mine. He served in the Navy during WWII. He served as dogcatcher, police chief, and deputy US Marshal. He worked as a logger and in a pulp mill. He worked in construction. He was the captain of a pilot boat.
He (and my grandmother Alice) also made it their lives’ work to protect some of Alaska’s most beautiful and ecologically significant places. They lived in Sitka, a small coastal fishing town nestled in the heart of the Tongass National Forest, a 17 million acre tract of public land that is home to ancient spruce, cedar, and hemlock trees, brown bears, humpback whales, bald eagles, and all five species of Pacific wild salmon.
Although it was not always a popular position to take in a small town where the pulp mill was the largest employer, my grandparents were founding members of the Sitka Conservation Society (SCS). Together with friends and neighbors, they persuaded Congress to designate the West Chichagof-Yakobi Wilderness Area within the Tongass National Forest, protecting that area of the region’s unique temperate rainforest from logging, and preserving spawning streams that serve as nurseries for the wild salmon that are the basis of Alaska’s multi-billion dollar commercial and sport fishing industries. In 2010, my grandparents accepted the US Forest Service’s Bob Marshall Award for Champions of Wilderness on behalf of SCS. [Read more…]
By San Diego Veterans for Peace
Fifty years ago, American boys, most under 20 years of age, committed unspeakable acts against a civilian hamlet in Vietnam. Over 500 women, children (yes! there were babies!) and old men were slaughtered by American soldiers. Civilian “collateral damage” is a tragic cost of any war; the My Lai massacre only exemplified it at a highly public level.
The San Diego Chapter of Veterans For Peace is named after Hugh C. Thompson, the courageous US Army helicopter pilot who landed his chopper and, along with fellow crewmen, intervened against fellow American troops to end the carnage at My Lai. Thompson reported the “incident” up the chain of command but was met with indifference and ridicule by authorities.
Fifty years removed from My Lai, today we see American troops in more than 120 countries, with US bases in more than 80. We are embroiled in multiple wars and conflicts, and the “Doomsday Clock” has just been advanced 30 seconds closer to midnight, due to escalating tensions over possible nuclear war. Drone warfare is commonplace with mounting civilian casualties, as American warriors in Nevada routinely target and kill in places around the globe. [Read more…]
By Karin Brennan
Some of my earliest recollections are of my mother smoking. At home, in the car, in restaurants…everywhere. My brother and I hated it, because we were always waving away smoke and avoiding overflowing ashtrays. In those days, it seemed like everyone smoked.
And why not? Our parents grew up watching movies where all the glamorous stars smoked on screen, and all the “manly men” in commercials did too. My generation also remembers being stuck on international flights in the last row before the “smoking section” started. How ridiculous does that seem today? The concept that my rights as a non-smoker could be usurped by someone else who chooses to do something that undeniably creates a risk to MY life? Risk YOUR life if you must, but your rights end where mine begin. [Read more…]
by Joaquin Antique
January was a month of medical marijuana madness for me and many others. I made my first purchase of recreational cannabis on January 4, just a few days after it became legal in our fine state. It was a glorious day.
I had been waiting for legalization for 50 years and it finally came! Although I’ve had a physician’s recommendation to use medical marijuana for several years, it was cool to experience being a recreational buyer even if it limited some of my choices of cannabis products and was a little more expensive than what a medical patient pays. I wrote about my first dispensary visit under the new laws a few weeks ago in the OB Rag. [Read more…]
By Michael Steinberg /Black Rain Press
Diablo Canyon. The last of California’s nuclear power plants is on its way out.
The year began with a bang in Cali. Pretty much all the state’s major media outlets, as well as others across the nation, carried it as their lead story.
My personal favorite was this headline from the January 11, San Diego Union-Tribune: “Nuclear Power receives its death sentence in California: regulators vote to shut down Diablo Canyon.” This from a publication that once promoted itself as “the eyes and ears of the CIA!” [Read more…]
