San Diego Free Press

Grassroots News & Progressive Views

Direct Action Journal: Overcoming Fear

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Another episode with anxiety knocks me to my bedroom floor. Rational thought forsakes me. My body shakes with the strangled sobs of a man ashamed of his tears. Alicia bends over me. Her dark brown eyes – normally calm with the consistent rationality characterizing her personality – are wide with concern and weariness. We’re only several nights removed from the last episode. She must think, “Oh god, not again.”

Alicia seeks to hold me. I find a deep comfort in her touch – and a deep revulsion. It’s not her. The contradiction is born from the lies fear instills in me. Somewhere in the darkness, a voice reminds me that I am unlovable. I crave love but the voice whispers my lack of reasons to be loved. The closer Alicia gets to me, the closer she’ll get, I fear, to hearing those whispers, too. The closer she’ll get to realizing a man who cannot love himself should not be loved by anyone.   [Read more…]

Geo-Poetic Spaces: New State of Being

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The first time
i heard the call to prayer
Nicosia’s Venetian walls
melted into mosaic pigments
colors bleeding into anonymity

The first time
i heard the call to prayer
i was released
from a prison of architectural semantics

Carried
above lilting cities of clouds   [Read more…]

California DMV Takes Important First Steps Toward Improving Voter Registration Services

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Although problems persist, voter registration for 2016 elections will be easier for some

ACLU San Diego

The California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) took the necessary first steps toward improving voter registration services offered online and at its 174 field offices across the state, though it still will need to address some major issues.

Beginning this month, people who are eligible and affirmatively choose to register when applying for or renewing a driver license or identification card at a DMV field office will:   [Read more…]

‘Experts’ Say Newly Registered Bernie Supporters Are Too Lazy or Stupid to Vote in Mayoral Contest

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Weekly Progressive Calendar: Upcoming in San Diego

Despite an average of 5700 new city voters registering weekly during the first quarter of 2016, and a predicted surge in June primary ballots being cast in San Diego, the Union-Tribune’s experts say the local establishment has nothing to fear.

They point to incumbent Mayor Kevin Faulconer’s 10 to 1 advantage in fundraising, a massive TV advertising campaign, and new voters not bothering to look past the Presidential contests.

With Sanders supporters on a local Facebook group sharing a video made by Ted Nugent of Bernie shooting Hillary Clinton, organizing a postcard campaign to tell the world they won’t vote if their candidate doesn’t prevail, and reposting articles from Glenn Beck’s media outlet, it’s not hard to understand why the local plutocracy is sanguine. Of course, they could prove the experts wrong. I hope.
  [Read more…]

Thousands of Tuna Crabs Invade Imperial Beach …

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… New Pedestrian Border Crossing Will Open In July and Chula Vista Mayor Proposes Sales Tax Increase

The Imperial Beach City Hall Facebook page posted pictures of the Tuna Crab invasion on Wednesday, May 11th. They alerted beach goers: “Overnight thousands of reddish-orange tuna crabs are washing ashore in Imperial Beach. This also happened last year in mid-June. Scientists say it may be caused by El Nino and the massive pool of warm water that developed last year in the Pacific. The crustaceans usually wash ashore during the El Nino years. Local birds have begun to eat the crabs. The remaining carcasses will remain on the shore until they decompose or are swept back into the water.” The Union Tribune also posted pictures.   [Read more…]

Is Affordable Housing In the City of San Diego an Oxymoron? Part 4

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Section 8 Rental Assistance is a Cruel Joke

By Katheryn Rhodes and John Lawrence

Approximately 46,000 households in San Diego are on a waiting list to obtain a federal Housing Choice Voucher (Section 8). The average wait time to obtain a housing voucher is 8 to 10 years.

Nobody’s housing needs remain constant over a period of time that long. Many people on the waiting list will have died before they are called for their Section 8 rental assistance voucher. Cruel irony.   [Read more…]

The History of Abortion Is a History of Punishing Women

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There were just as many abortions pre-Roe as there are today. The difference was women died.

Larry Schwartz / Alternet

The issue of abortion is never very from the American consciousness. It once again bubbled to the surface recently when Donald Trump, the frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination, gave voice to the obvious: if you make abortion illegal, as all the Republican candidates, including Trump, profess to want to do, then there must be punishment for having an abortion. Trump opined, “There has to be some form of punishment” for the woman. When everyone pounced, he backtracked, saying maybe only the doctors should be punished.   [Read more…]

Vote ‘Aye’ on San Diego’s Proposition ‘Eye’

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An Analysis of Ballot Measures for the June 2016 Primary

If there one issue symbolic of San Diego politics, it’s the fight for a bump in the local minimum wage. Almost two years after a majority of the city’s elected representatives voted for a measure increasing wages (in baby steps) and allowing for earned paid sick leave, the voters will have a say on the issue.

I won’t mince words here. If you live in the City of San Diego, vote YES on the referendum on Earned Sick Leave and Minimum Wage, which will appear on the June 7th ballot as Proposition I.

I know–if you vote in June–what the outcome will be. A majority of people, including business owners, support what Proposition I will do. The sky will not fall. Nobody’s going to get rich, either. It’s a gesture, an acknowledgment of the reality that things just aren’t right.   [Read more…]

A Mother’s Courage: The Struggle of an Asylum-Seeker in San Diego

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By Jaime Rodriguez-Sosa

The California State Refugee Service Bureau states that since 1975 California has provided refuge to 700,000 people with San Diego County being the most notable recipient of refugees in the whole state.

On average San Diego resettles 2,500 refugees per year, with areas such as City Heights being some of the most prominent areas for resettlement.

These numbers are expected to increase in the coming years with refugees from Syria being accepted to resettle in the United States. Yet numbers are often deceptive because they are abstract and difficult to grasp. As such it becomes necessary to understand individuals on a personal level, taking into account where they come from and the struggles they face in search of a new life.   [Read more…]

A Jazzy San Diego Weekend: Two Worlds Merged Rather Than Collided

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Flute Fusion with Holly Hofmann and Beth Ross-Buckley; Jazz @ the Jacobs with Gregory Porter

A packed house at the Mingei Museum in Balboa Park was treated to a flute duo billed as Flute Fusion featuring Holly Hofmann, inveterate jazz flautist and promoter, along with Beth Ross-Buckley, classical flautist and promoter. Both Holly and Beth have been long time music presenters in San Diego. Holly started at the Horton Grand and had a memorable gig for many years at the San Diego Museum of Art. Beth started a chamber music group called Camarada in 1994. This night they joined forces.   [Read more…]

San Diego’s Roller Skating Nuns at Skateworld

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Sister Donatella Soul / The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, San Diego Chapter

I am certain some of you readers recall watching Armistead Maupin’s TALES OF THE CITY run on PBS in 1994. Do you remember the brief scene with the roller skating “nuns” (a reference to the very beginnings of The San Francisco Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence) and the scene in the roller disco where John and Michael (Mouse) meet?

These scenes and the pre-AIDS epidemic 1970s are the inspiration for an upcoming novice project by Novice Sister Allison Wonderland, a member of The San Diego Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, The Asylum of the Tortured Heart. “What is a novice project?” you may be asking.   [Read more…]

Engaged In Good Causes: Longtime War Criminal Inexplicably, Unconscionably Gets Not Jail Sentence But Award (WTF?)

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By Abby Zimet / CommonDreams

Having blithely orchestrated several genocides and the deaths of millions of brown-skinned innocents in the specious, imperial name of the right to bomb neutral countries in order to save them and maybe us – a right that America, despite our ongoing carnage, still claims – Henry Kissinger, our best and brightest war criminal, on Monday won the Distinguished Public Service Award, the Defense Department’s highest honor for private citizens.

In a stomach-roiling spectacle at the Pentagon wherein one discordantly unfit Nobel Peace Prize winner honors another, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter called the former Secretary of State’s murderous service “unique in the annals of American diplomacy.” Kissinger, Carter said, “demonstrated how serious thinking and perspective can deliver solutions to seemingly intractable problems.”   [Read more…]

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