In recognition of the energy and movement of Saturday’s marches here are some vibes that hopefully resonate. First, John Legend in Los Angeles performing Preach.
Lin-Manuel Miranda in Washington, D.C. sings the Dear Theodosia lullaby from Hamilton.
And just because I want to hear it: Get Up, Stand Up, Don’t Give Up the Fight! [Read more…]
A request for one more nod to the Summer Solstice as it slips away: Janis Joplin with Big Brother & the Holding Company – Summertime; from a live 1969 performance. (h/t to AGD) [Read more…]
By John Queally / Common Dreams
As the nation mourned yet another senseless mass shooting—this time at a local newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland on Thursday in which five people were murdered—details of the alleged gunman expose yet another perpetrator with a history of misogynistic and threatening behavior towards women.
On Friday it was reported that the man arrested by police at the scene of the massacre inside The Capital Gazette’s offices, Jarrod Warren Ramos—who had a “bitter history” with the newspaper going back years—had been charged by local prosecutors with five counts of first-degree murder. [Read more…]
The flag has been
dropped
stars trampled into bloody stripes
by a bull kicking up dust
Suture the tattered banner
with gold thread
before the colors can be burned
The fabric will be stronger
because of its scars [Read more…]
Susan DuFresne, a pre-school and special education specialist from Seattle, Washi., just published the book History of Institutional Racism in U.S. Public Schools. Dufresne is also a self-taught artist with a heart that screams for justice. She began her project with three 15-feet-long 4-feet-high pieces of canvas and painted images of racial injustice and its effect on schools from the 16th century until today. These illustrations are supported by the notes Susan developed about each issue depicted and hand wrote in the margins.
I met Susan at a march in 2014 at Seattle’s iconic Westgate Park, home of political expression and protest for five decades. For me, it brought back childhood memories of a 1962 trip with my parents and a sister to the Seattle World’s Fair. At Westgate Park, my family boarded the mono-rail for the fairgrounds now called the Seattle Center, still home of the Space Needle and today, home to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
That 2014 teacher’s march was the first public event organized by the Washington State Bats. We were protesting the Gates Foundation. Two motorcycle police went ahead of us closing streets to cross traffic and we happily marched toward the Seattle Center to enthusiastic cheers from locals along the route.
Last year, I met Susan again at the National Public Education (NPE) annual conference in Oakland, California. She displayed her amazing art work in the main conference room. The room was large enough to accommodate more than 1,000 people seated at round tables. Her illustrations covered most of the north wall.
I would be very surprised if Susan could pick me out of a line [Read more…]
I was singing the blues
until I heard the news
that children
being torn from the
arms of their parents
was coming to an end,
if but for a minute,
a breather
from evil being played
out in my face,
beautiful innocent
brown skinned children,
screaming “Mami! Papi!”
as Mami and Papi
are pulled one way,
and they, another way, [Read more…]
In a nod to the recent solstice and the rituals for celebrating and observing it, here’s Spinal Tap’s Stonehenge.
[For the Spinal Tap (the band whose amps go up to 11) uninitiated, here’s something you need to know in order to appreciate the last part of this clip. In an earlier scene, when the sketch of the stage prop that is lowered onto the stage was given to the fabrication team, the dimensions were written by someone who apparently believed that one tick (‘) means an inch and two ticks (“) means a foot. Isn’t that right?] [Read more…]
The bilingual band from L.A., The Mexican Standoff, performs Muro (The Wall). From their YouTube site:
“Muro” is the narrative of one of eight hundred thousand stories. Today´s president is making a lot of noise about building a border wall when there are around 344 miles of wall built already. Politics are out of control, and as musicians and story tellers we want to bring some humor and music to today’s issues. We hope to bring people together in these days where America is divided. We support dreamers. We support immigration. We support equality.
By Ian MacDougall / ProPublica
Amid a bipartisan backlash, President Trump has tried repeatedly to shift blame to Democrats for his own administration’s “zero-tolerance” immigration policy, which has resulted in more than 2,300 migrant children being taken from their families along the U.S.–Mexico border. “The Democrats have to change their law — that’s their law,” Trump told reporters on Friday.
The president didn’t specify which law he was talking about. But the statute at the center of his administration’s policy is the work of Republicans — with origins dating back all the way to World War I — albeit with substantial Democratic support along the way. Known originally as the “Undesirable Aliens Act,” the statute would not exist without support from, respectively, a eugenicist and a white supremacist.
The law in question was the foundation of a memo Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued in early April that laid out the administration’s new, zero-tolerance policy. In the memo, Sessions instructed federal prosecutors in the southwestern United States to file criminal charges against any adults caught entering the country illegally. His order stripped officials of discretion over whether to place migrant families seeking asylum into civil proceedings, which allow families to stay together. (Court rulings limit how long the government can detain migrants in civil proceedings. There’s also no guarantee they’ll return for future hearing dates once they’re let out, a phenomenon that has prompted the president’s complaints about “catch and release.”)
On Monday, ProPublica published audio recorded at a U.S. Customs and Border Protection detention facility in which a Border Patrol agent mocks the [Read more…]
Today
there was no teargas in Syntagma Square
just tears swallowed by the austere protest
of laid off workers
forced to lie all night
outside sleeping churches
No loud speakers
just nails hammered into stone
by the old guards’ shoes
guarding the cenotaph beneath parliament [Read more…]
1968 wasn’t a good year to be a transfer student at Point Loma High School.
A San Diego Police Department bust in early December 1967 (where a tiny amount of marijuana was seized with a street value of two million dollars) prompted lots of paranoia throughout the student body.
The Christian Science Church across from the school provided a great vantage point for the Evening Tribune photographer to document the dopers, and select students made the paper’s front page with black tape covering their eyes.
I wasn’t one of those students, but it didn’t matter. Depending on the point of view of the long-time students, outsiders were either narcs or dangerous drug dealers. [Read more…]
