San Diego Free Press

Grassroots News & Progressive Views

You are here: Home / Archives for Jim Miller

Notes on the Dog Days of Summer: It’s Already Over for Trump

by

In late July, I was at the American Federation of Teachers convention in Minneapolis, Minnesota watching Hillary Clinton address a hall of thousands of educators as a handful of #Black Lives Matters and assorted other protesters tried, unsuccessfully, to disrupt her speech, which inspired a few angry delegates to start yelling, “Get them out! Arrest them!” until a wiser soul chimed in with, “Aren’t we supposed to be different than Trump?”

For the most part, Clinton’s speech was a laundry list of interest group button-pushing, but I was pleased to see how far the primary seemed to have forced her to adopt Sanders-like positions and rhetoric on things like affordable higher education.

At least in that way, the left wing of the Democratic Party has had an impact on the campaign. But as the Democratic Convention later revealed, those gestures to the left are married to the usual triangulation with the right, complete with a safe, conservative Democratic running mate and homages to the military industrial complex worthy of a Republican affair.   [Read more…]

2016 Summer Chronicle 8: Walking With a Fiery Love

by

For better or worse, I have always favored sacrificing money for owning as much of my time as possible, stealing it from those who would suppose my life was better spent doing their business or serving some purpose that someone has deemed to be more important than my petty little existence. Because of this, I love to walk. Walking is free and fundamentally grounded in the world. When you walk unencumbered you are present and open. With each step you take you are more alive.

Of course this is a Romantic notion with a capital “R,” but as I enter middle age, I find that nursing the part of myself that still knows how to dream is neither impractical nor immature. It is, in fact, crucial to staying alive rather than dying while I’m still breathing.   [Read more…]

2016 Summer Chronicles 7: Outside Spaces, Hacienda del Sol, Cocktails, and Eternity

by

As I noted last week in my reminiscence about my Ocean Beach hideaway, the contemplation of outside space is sometimes intensified when put in sharp contrast with a small inner space. And the quality of immensity that comes with this is, à la Bachelard, a kind of meditation, “Far from the immensities of sea and land, merely through memory, we can recapture, by means of meditation, the resonances of this contemplation of grandeur.”

So if the sea provides local access to immensity on the coast, the Anza Borrego Desert is the home of our immensity of land. Vast, varied, and full of wonder, the largest desert state park in the United States covers 600,000 acres from the Lagunas to the lowest point of the floor below sea level. While lovely during the periods of spring wildflower bloom, one might best experience the solitary heart of the desert during the peak of the scorching summer heat.   [Read more…]

2016 Summer Chronicles 6: Outside Spaces, the Bold Vista of Ocean Beach, and Other Wonders

by

One of the great pleasures of my life to date was having access, for a period of several years, to a dingy little studio by the sea in Ocean Beach. It was so small that when you rolled out the futon, it took up the entire room. The kitchen was too tiny for a dinner table, the hot water frequently didn’t work in the bathroom, and the constant noise and pot smoke from the neighbors streamed through the cracked, paper-thin walls.

It was paradise.   [Read more…]

2016 Summer Chronicle 5: The Spaces We Live In

by

Where we live is who we are. Surely, the country, state, city, and neighborhoods we occupy profoundly shape us, but does not the house craft our being in the most intimate of ways?

Gaston Bachelard observes in The Poetics of Space, “For our house is our corner of the world. As has often been said, it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word.”

Hence, the kind of space we choose to live in has a particularly profound impact on our identity. Bachelard again notes, “Thus the dream house must possess every virtue. However spacious, it must also be a cottage, a dove-cote, a nest, a chrysalis. Intimacy needs the heart of a nest.”   [Read more…]

2016 Summer Chronicles 4: Bush League Nation

by

The Major League Baseball All-Star Game is in San Diego and despite the glaring lack of Padres on the team, many local and visiting fans will be taking in the pricey spectacle in all its corporate glory (confession: I will be there). With a huge Fan Fest, the Home Run Derby and the main event itself, San Diego will be baseball central for the week, at least on paper.

But if you really want to get to the heart of the game, I suggest you go bush league.

Forget the fancy packaging and head down to the minor leagues, the lower the better—and get as far away from the large cities as you can. It’s there on the California League circuit or in a forgotten small town in the Midwest or somewhere else in Lost America that you just might learn to love the game again.   [Read more…]

2016 Summer Chronicles 2: Last Days of the Honeycreepers and Honeyeaters

by

There is something deeply and tragically resonant about extinction in paradise. After returning from a hike on Haleakala where I was lucky enough to have spotted a number of rare birds, I sat on the lanai of my room on the edge of the Maui rainforest and read this from Errol Fuller’s haunting book, Lost Animals: Extinction and the Photographic Record:

There are two groups of birds on the Hawaiian Islands that are notorious for the number of extinct species they contain. Although these birds are not particularly closely related, they have names that are similar and this sometimes causes confusion. The birds of one group are known as honeycreepers, and the others as honeyeaters. Both names derive from the fact that many species feed on nectar, although most also eat other things like blossoms, insects or mollusks.   [Read more…]

2016 Summer Chronicles #1: In the Dark Forest of the Self

by

Summer is here and it’s time to take a break from my usual column and stretch the form a little with some chronicles. As I explained last year, the chronicle is a literary genre born in Brazil…

So on this first day of summer, the day after Father’s Day, I will dedicate some time to what my wife calls “the sublime and heartbreaking art of parenting.”

For the most part, being the father of my only, much beloved son has been a delight. He is a smart, good natured boy who does well in school, gets along with other kids, and likes to hang out with grown-ups. Other than the usual daily struggles of parenthood from sleep deprivation to the multitude of anxieties, humbling failures, and moments of deep self-doubt that go with the territory, it’s been a piece of cake.
  [Read more…]

A Bad Climate?: The State of Social Justice Efforts in the Labor and Environmental Movements

by

Among the stories that you may have missed during the stretch run of the primary season was some significantly bad news out of labor on the national front when several large unions in the building trades came out against a plan by some of the biggest public sector unions to join forces with environmentalist Tom Steyer in order to fund a major anti-Trump get out the vote operation in the fall. The New York Times noted that:

Two of the Democratic Party’s most loyal constituencies, labor and environmentalists, are clashing over an effort to raise tens of millions of dollars for an ambitious voter turnout operation aimed at defeating Donald J. Trump in the November election.

The rift developed after some in the labor movement, whose cash flow has dwindled and whose political clout has been increasingly imperiled, announced a partnership last week with a wealthy environmentalist, Tom Steyer, to help bankroll a new fund dedicated to electing Democrats.

  [Read more…]

Good Things Progressives Can Do Down-Ballot

by

Some Good Things Progressives Can Do Down Ballot

While most of the attention is on the Presidential race this primary season, there are still some important things progressive voters can weigh in on down ballot here in San Diego on June 7th that will do some good.     [Read more…]

Dream Big: Why Voting for Sanders Still Matters, Despite the Electoral Math

by

What struck me the most about the recent Sanders rally in National City was how much the crowd embodied the notion of the beloved community.

As opposed to the corporate media caricature of Sanders’ supporters as a group of mostly angry, white “Bernie bros,” this huge gathering of over ten thousand people was diverse in age, gender, sexuality, race, and class. It was also a kind, gentle crowd that fell silent when Sanders, in a moving gesture, stopped his speech when someone fainted and waited patiently for the EMTs to come to the rescue before he continued and interrupted chants of “Bernie Cares” by saying “no, WE care.”   [Read more…]

On Dark Patches and Redemption

by

Despite all our best efforts, things don’t always go the way we would hope. Sometimes we are stunned by the unexpected bad turn and left groping for answers…
…Sometimes the hard roads that our students travel get the best of them. Such was the case with the brilliant, shy young man who took his life at the very moment he was supposed to be turning in a final for one of my classes. Instead, he sent a group email to his instructors simply saying, “Goodbye.”

He was a smart, respectful young man who was always impeccably polite. In the classroom he was engaged and frequently smiled in the midst of our discussions. An “A” student who came to the office all the time, he never revealed much about himself. Circumspect, thoughtful, but guarded—no one would have suspected him to be in the grip of despair. As of this writing, nobody knows why he did it. But he did.
  [Read more…]

©2010-2017 SanDiegoFreePress.org

Code is Poetry