San Diego Free Press

Grassroots News & Progressive Views

August Elections: Organized Labor Wins Big in Missouri | Women Win Big Everywhere

by

There were primary elections in Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, and Washington on Tuesday. And a special election in Ohio for a traditionally Republican House seat.

It was a big night for labor and an even bigger night for women running for office.

While I wouldn’t bet the farm on the long-term significance of elections held mid-summer, on balance it was a good night for those of us rooting for Democrats come November. Team Blue had a lot of wins and a few close losses. What encourages me is the hard work of the campaigns and the resulting voter turnout.   [Read more…]

Lived Experiences, Microaggressions, and Good Deeds in the Classroom | Readers Write

by

By Vanessa Torres

As a college student, I now have about a decade’s-plus worth of experience with the benevolence of well-intentioned teachers. I say this as a student that grew up in low-income school districts and a high school in San Diego where the majority of students were minorities and the teachers were not.

Overcrowded classrooms and sharing a dilapidated textbook with your classmate was not out of the norm. The school year was initiated with the teacher’s usual disgruntled disclaimer that there would not be enough books to go around for the school year in yet another overcrowded class.

Teaching in and of itself is a tremendous responsibility a person undertakes as their professional career. Few other professions carry the weight that teaching does. A teacher has the ability to mold and inculcate a young person’s mind which ultimately adds to the prosperity of our community.

Some teachers take the seriousness of their profession and the resulting responsibility to heart; it’s not like they are doing it for the money. But I have to wonder about the others: As the incentive of a high paying salary is nonexistent, what is their reason for choosing such a significant profession? Were they looking for life-fulfillment? Or did they choose this profession as a way of escaping their inherent guilt?   [Read more…]

The American Sequel to Nazi Germany is Coming Along Just Fine | Dear Ohio, Part 8

by

Dear Ohio,

Things are starting to fall into place. Not in the way many of us hoped, but in a way that looks more and more like pre-World War II Germany.

Since the dawn of Hollywood movies, we Americans have been pretty good at re-creating any era we choose, dressing our sets, painting our backdrops, sewing our costumes. When the movie is finished, viewers can immerse themselves in a new reality, traveling back in time, or forward into the future, then exiting after things are resolved. How many times, for example, have moviegoers felt the terror of the Nazi regime, easing it with popcorn, soda, and a quiet walk to the parking lot while checking our phones?   [Read more…]

Some Street Scenes of Europe | A Photographic Look

by

The month of August means vacation all across Europe. Most of the EU nations have legal provisions allowing workers up to four weeks of vaycay yearly, and many workers traditionally take it during August.

Of course, that’s ironic for Americans who don’t know better and go on their summer vacations to Europe in August. I was one of them on my first trip there. Before I learned about “shoulder seasons”.

While many of these images weren’t made during August, here’s a glimpse of what you might find walking the streets of any of these places on any day if you were to do a whirlwind European tour this month. I’ve arranged them roughly north to south; west to east.   [Read more…]

Azalea Park Murals offer a Mini-Survey of Gloria ‘Glow’ Muriel’s Work, Part I

by

By George Howell

Artist Gloria “Glow” Muriel is touching up the large eyes of the “Mystery Lady,” whose wavy hair flows along the wall of El General Market in Azalea Park. Someone has “tagged” her, subtly adding brown paint to her eyes.

Muriel notes the graceful way the eyes were tagged and then squeezes a burst of spray paint.

“I’m improving their work,” she laughs. “I’m helping them.”

I first saw Muriel’s work in Tijuana’s Pasaje Rodriguez, the creative marketplace off Avenida Revolución known for its terrific assortment of murals. Muriel, born in Mexico City and raised in Mexicali, studied graphic design at the Universidad Ibero-Americano in Playas de Tijuana and came to San Diego in 2002 because of a medical crisis in her family. Although she continued to sketch during the illness, she put her art career on hold for several years, and then developed a unique style, a catalogue of female characters with exaggerated eyes and abstracted expressions who range from the childlike to the mature to the mystical.   [Read more…]

Richard Nixon resigns – August 8, 1974 | Video Worth Watching

by

On this day in 1974, Richard M. Nixon delivered his resignation speech. How times have changed. For some insightful reflection on how and why, check out Will Bunch’s column in The Inquirer. Well, we can dream (and still fight back!) (h/t to AGD)   [Read more…]

GOP Ghouls Ready to Go After Green Card Holders, Legal Immigrants Looking for Citizenship

by

According to NBC News, the Trump administration is in the late stages of developing policies aimed at keeping as many as 20 million legal immigrants from gaining green cards or applying for citizenship.

Using the same rationale employed during the 1930s to block Jewish refugees from settling in the U.S., persons deemed as potential, past, or current “public charges,” will be deemed ineligible for permanent residency. The slight of hand needed to make this happen involves labeling virtually all government programs as ‘welfare.’

The NBC report profiles a 55-year-old Haitian man who has been in the country since 1989, works eighty hours a week at two jobs, and is a homeowner. Because he required government assistance to care for his US-born daughter’s severe disabilities, his quest for citizenship–already in trouble due to another policy reversal–is likely to end in failure.      [Read more…]

“Earth Will Be Annihilated”: On 73rd Anniversary of Hiroshima Bombing, a Warning Against Nuclear War | Video Worth Watching

by

From the Democracy Now! YouTube page:

[Monday marked] the 73rd anniversary of the United States’ atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, which killed 140,000 people and seriously injured another 100,000. In remembrance, we turn to the words of a Hiroshima survivor, or hibakusha. Koji Hosokawa was 17 years old when the U.S. dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. His 13-year-old sister Yoko died in the bombing. He gave us a tour of the city when Democracy Now! was in Japan in 2014. He spoke to us near the A-Bomb Dome in Hiroshima, one of the few structures in the city that survived the atomic blast.

  [Read more…]

San Diego’s Deplorables: Jerry Sanders & Carl DeMaio Want to Sell ‘Son of B’ to Voters

by

Not all deplorables are running for office. Today’s politicos covered in this column are not on the ballot this fall, but their influence has shaped local politics over the past decade. They’re really excited about an upcoming opportunity to sell the public on a rehashed version of what they call pension reform.

Faced with the prospect of burning, looting, and potholes, San Diego voters overwhelming approved Proposition B in 2012. This flavor of ‘pension reform’ was sold as the only possible solution to the city’s budget crisis. It was ‘vote for this, or your city will fail.’

The measure switched all new city hires, except police, from pensions to 401(k)-style individual investment plans. It hasn’t been a financial solution for the city’s money problems as much as it has changed the employee-employer relationship.   [Read more…]

Can We White People Be ‘Woke’ to Our Privilege? If So, How and Why Should We?

by

It starts with realizing everything you have been taught was skewed from the perspective of white males – the educators, the faith leaders, the doctors, the historians and the politicians. Everything I had been taught was controlled by a white patriarchal society.  

My journey began a few years ago when I met DeRay McKesson, a co-founder of the Black Lives Matter civil rights movement. He explained the concept of white privilege to me. This is the concept that just because my skin is white, life has been immeasurably easier for me than for people of color.  

This fluke of nature automatically raised my social status above those born to parents with different skin pigment. It has nothing to do with how hard I may have worked. It has to do with understanding that my accomplishments were easier to achieve because I’m white.  On the flip side, my failures were not as significant because as a white person, my safety net was bigger and stronger.   [Read more…]

Summer Chronicles 2018 #8: “Already Dead”: A Lunch Poem for Golden Hill

by

On the back cover of Frank O’Hara’s classic City Lights Books collection, Lunch Poems, he defines his efforts succinctly:

Often this poet, strolling through the noisy splintered glare of a Manhattan noontide, has paused at a sample Olivetti to type up thirty or forty lines of ruminations, or pondering more deeply has withdrawn to a darkened ware- or firehouse to limn his computed misunderstandings of the eternal questions of life, coexistence, and depth, while never forgetting to eat lunch his favorite meal…. 

While I have always loved O’Hara’s work and sought in my own writing to emulate his temporal discipline and culinary wisdom, what I find most useful about the form he invents is how it can present the most ordinary of moments in a way that captures the extraordinary.     [Read more…]

Don’t Shoot: Thoughts on AB 931

by

I was just about to write down my thoughts on a meeting I attended a little while back, but I thought I’d check my email first so I could really settle in with what I wanted to say.

One particular email in my inbox got my attention right away: news the San Diego City Council hadn’t taken a step that was necessary in the process of readying an amendment regarding the creation of a Commission on Police Practices for placement on the November ballot.

They just let it drop. And although that’s shocking to me, I’m not the least bit surprised because, and I can only speak for the years I’ve been in San Diego since 1962, our City Councils, on the whole, have never been about much of anything beyond empty “America’s Finest City” kind of platitudes.   [Read more…]

©2010-2017 SanDiegoFreePress.org

Code is Poetry