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Monday, 31 January 05
products of note.
i want one of these. why? cause i'm a geek and have been thrilled with firefox since i first installed it on my gateway desktop computer.
also. a food of note. i've become obsessed with laughing cow cheese. so good in those little wedges. perfect for getting up in the morning. a nice hit of protein, and so creamy at that! its topped tofu pate in my favourite foods.
Posted by brooke at 08:57 PM
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what should i be doing?
i should be calling the dentist right now. why? because a significant portion of a filling fell out over the weekend. no, it doesn't hurt, but i could do more damage to the tooth if i don't get it fixed. but. the dentist is likely to want to put a crown on it. and guess what? i don't have the $ for a crown right now. no, no i don't. plus when i go in i'm going to get a big lecture about needing a cleaning. yes, yes, i know. i need a cleaning. but i don't have the $$ right now. read: i don't have dental insurance. and i don't have a job. and there are really no jobs in eugene to be found. lots of people i know are struggling for work in this place.
so, i'm not calling the dentist. though mom says that she had a similiar situation and she told the dentist she didn't have the $$ and they were able to work something out for her poor tooth. different dentist, cross country, maybe they'll do something else for the tooth. i can only hope.
oh, and have i mentioned i'm going into the computer training / freelance web design business? i can do both. i'm okay at both. i'm cheap too. mom is going to help me pay for an ad in the paper. no, i don't want to work for myself, its awfully lonely *and* work never ends.. but in a place with no jobs, its really the only thing to do.
*sigh*
Posted by brooke at 01:05 PM
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Friday, 28 January 05
things that make me angry these days.
the election in iraq. yes, it makes me angry. why? because its a farce. the idea of an election when there is an occupying army still there just isn't right.. further the idea of an election taking place with the threats of violence that are happening isn't right either. the fact that the international observers are going to be watching from jordan is laughingly ridiculous. the fact that, and the fact that.. ferfucksake. how stupid is the world? well, apparently over half of america is even more stupid than george bush. and the world.. well, i think the world has a lot on the average american.
the conversations about how bad it could be if the democrats are seen as the anti-war party. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE, someone tell me why it is bad to be seen as anti-war. if everyone says we go to war for peace, WHY IS IT BAD TO BE ANTI-WAR? because if we just skip the war crap, don't we have peace??? to hear democrats belittle the anti-war movement is stomach curdling. to hear it on air america radio makes me want to rip my stomach out. WHAT IS SO WRONG WITH BEING A PACIFIST???? lets go to iraq, lets ask some of those innocents about how fun it is to live in a war riddled zone. ask them if they want peace, ask them if they want it to stop. goddess knows if i were living in a war rattled country i'd want peace.
listening to county commissioner anna morrison speak about how we need to reach out and care about people at the tsunami beneft. this is a woman who wants to cut county human services, and health care benefits for county employees. how can she stand up there and speak at a benefit for people, how can she stand there and talk about caring about people half a world away, when she doesn't give a shit about people in her own back yard? that woman needs to become disabled, she needs to go bankrupt, she needs to know what it is like to struggle each day.
and lastly... an amusing, to me, conversation.
brooke's friend b: did you know that laura bush smokes, a lot, like chain smoke??
brooke: goddess knows i'd be a chain smoker if every time my husband got up and spoke he either lied through is teeth, made an idiot out of himself, or did both at the same time.
Posted by brooke at 08:55 PM
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Wednesday, 26 January 05
its been awhile
i'm not writing here much these days. thats okay.
i've thought about joanie a lot over the last week. its hard to believe that what happened to her did. its hard to believe that she's gone, that she will never bring her laughter to eugene ever again. i wonder what joanie was thinking, her loss of faith in the cause, her loss of belief that she too could be among the many that she worked so hard to save. i wish we could have saved her.
what else? life is moving on, not like i'd like it too.. but it moves.
Posted by brooke at 10:10 PM
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Thursday, 20 January 05
rip joanie mcgowan
i just found out about it, in the slant of the eugene weekly.. joanie mcgowan is gone.
who was she? someone who came to eugene and made me laugh on 2 different occasions. she was an activist who lived in ashland. she printed up t-shirts and bumper stickers that say 'its never to late to SAVE THE WORLD.'
its such a shame that someone who made so many many people laugh committed suicide. her death is a loss for the activist community in oregon.
goddess bless you joanie. i hope that the peace you couldn't find on this side, you've found over there. peace be with your soul.
here's a great blog entry on her life and death.
Posted by brooke at 02:05 PM
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Wednesday, 19 January 05
fuck patriarchy
i have several shirts i could wear tommorrow. subjects include hate, peace, feminism, civil liberties, spirituality, the rural organizing project: advancing democracy in rural oregon.. but really only one expresses my true feelings, my anger at the whole system (thanks to my friends c and l i have it to wear)..
yes, fuck patriarchy.
part of me doens't care if i offend anyone.. part of me does. but this whole thing, this whole day tommorrow is offensive. it is a gross party that is taking place, the upper echalon throwing a 40 million dollar party for themselves while people in this country die because of lack of health care, housing, food. a 40 million dollar party while people around the world die because of our policies, because we spend a gross amount on military. it is simply disgusting.. i have been reluctant to embrace any kind of nazi references, because we have simply not done that.. but as this administration moves along in each day, i am more relcutant to dismiss it. yes, the privilaged get a party tommorrow, while the not privilaged live fucked lives. it doesn't seem very democratic at all.
Posted by brooke at 10:05 PM
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maybe there is a point?
a day before the inaguration, and i need some hope. i talked to a friend yesterday, she gave me some.. to add to that i found this today.
What’s the Point of Protest?
After two years of massive public demonstrations, the war’s still on and Bush will be inaugurated again.
by Karen Loew
Disheartened liberals dreading the upcoming presidential inauguration after an extraordinary period of progressive activism that still failed to defeat George W. Bush can probably be forgiven for any lack of enthusiasm about the planned die-ins, congo blocs, punk rock balls, white ribbons, hacktivism, postering, and mock secessions and funerals that comprise their side’s “counter-inaugural” on Inauguration Day, this Thursday. In the face of the brawny, insatiable, all-business Republican machine, there is cause to wonder: what’s the point?
“All this activity – what’s it for? Whose attention are you trying to get, and what behavior are you trying to change?” a man blurted out toward the end of a rambling planning session held in a New York City church earlier this month for those planning to join inauguration protests in Washington on January 20, or “J20” in lefty activist parlance.
Activists have asked themselves those questions in the build-up to summer’s outpouring against the Republican National Convention in Manhattan and since, as autumn brought preparations for this week’s celebration-cum-funeral a few hours south in D.C. The thousands “turning their backs on Bush” in a coordinated effort as the presidential motorcade slinks down Pennsylvania Avenue will mark a finish line of sorts, the end of more than two years of high-stakes showdowns against the administration that began in October 2002 with a simmering series of anti-war demonstrations around the country. Then came February 15, 2003, when millions of people on five continents demonstrated passionate opposition to the U.S. initiating war in Iraq in an unprecedented worldwide outcry that Bush called, breathtakingly, a “focus group.” In April 2004 more than 1 million people, according to organizers, massed in Washington for the pro-choice March for Women’s Lives, likely the biggest-ever gathering on the Mall. Four months later were five days of RNC protests, with an estimated 500,000 in the largest single event, the march past Madison Square Garden on Aug. 29.
Yet the war began. Bush was nominated, then re-elected. And now he will be inaugurated.
It would be reasonable to observe this glaring lack of effect and conclude there’s no use, one might as well stay home. (Mass mobilizations, after all, are not a part of right-wingers’ routine, and look where they are today.) But activists don’t view the fact that these things happened despite their exhortations otherwise as a mark of failure. They say the goal of protest is not only to prevent something from beginning, or to stop what has already started, but to focus attention on the problem at hand, rather like the historic procedural hiccup caused by Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones and Sen. Barbara Boxer when they held up the certification of electoral votes (on the same day as the J20 meeting in Judson Memorial Church). “A lot of our work is actually preventing things from getting worse,” says city activist Max Uhlenbeck.
Not that it wouldn’t be nice to throw a Kiev-style protest, achieving a momentous goal in the moment – although American police wouldn’t brook such a large, spontaneous, un-permitted, multi-day uprising. Counter-inaugural demonstrators are even planning to display the signature bright orange of vindicated Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko in Washington. Ultimate victory aside, the demonstrators in Kiev still thrust themselves into the chronicle of that election: they threw a plot twist into a familiar anti-democratic storyline.
One major thing protestors can do is shape the public narrative. That’s exactly what happened with the RNC, says city journalist and activist Bilal El-Amine. In a post-mortem published in the magazine he edits, Left Turn, El-Amine cites as one of the counter-convention’s top achievements the fact that the massive Aug. 29 protest dominated NYC media coverage on the convention’s opening day, Aug. 30. “Even the screeching tabloids had to publish dazzling bird’s eye pictures of the march on their covers on the very day that the RNC opened up,” El-Amine wrote. “More importantly, Bush could not even get near the site of the 9/11 attacks … and instead met with a bunch of firemen in a social club way out in Queens.”
Anti-RNC activists provided a more exciting story for city media outlets before (and arguably during) the convention, hogged most of the spotlight during the event’s four days, and made it impossible for Bush to claim the city’s terrorism-scarred terrain as his own – the very goal many speculated was Bush’s reason for choosing New York for his nomination in the first place. Rather than functioning as backdrop for rousing Republican speeches, Ground Zero was the site of a participatory handbell performance memorializing the attacks and was ringed by pro-peace, anti-Bush posters in windows of buildings around it.
Claiming ownership is a primary motivation, and primary accomplishment, behind the collective with a mission as basic as its website name: rncnotwelcome.org. (Using the “C” for Convention, Republican National Convention protesters also took ownership of the initials usually reserved for the Republican National Committee.) About a year ago, Sean Flagherty, Shawn Ewald, and Jamie Moran, all in their 20’s and 30’s, came together to express resentment that they would try to come and take over our town. The friends explained their duty to stand up for the vision of a New York that treats its everyday working citizens at least as well as its visiting political elites.
“It’s more of a process, like taking responsibility and accountability for where you live, how you run your life, and getting out into the streets and taking back what has been taken away from you,” is how Flagherty explained the point of protest. “The people of New York have dealt with a tremendous amount of crap lately,” said Ewald, citing everything from transit cuts to firehouse closings to Muslim immigrants’ detentions. “What we hope is that the people who are coming together, all these diverse groups coming together to protest the RNC, will make connections through the process of organizing together and from that point on we can fight those individual battles.”
The community fostered among protestors creates a unique opportunity to model the egalitarian, democratic and anarchic approaches sought in the wider world. Brooke Lehman, who facilitated many of the noRNC Clearinghouse planning meetings that served as central hub for all protestors and groups, concluded at an RNC evaluation discussion held at NYU in October that the city protest community came out of the counter-convention more cohesive than before, rather then more dysfunctional and fractured as usual. “It wasn’t an accident,” says Lehman, also co-director of the Bluestockings political bookstore, who noted that organizers took part in a pre-RNC pro-communication retreat in New Paltz.
From the non-hierarchichal format of the Clearinghouse meetings to the “safe and supportive atmosphere” for would-be protestors, participants were able to “be the change they want to see” – tolerant, respectful, cooperative. The anarchic bicyclists of Times Up!, the satirical actors of Billionaires for Bush, the saintly public-interest counsels of the National Lawyer’s Guild, the patriotic revelers of Greene Dragon, the poor people’s representatives from the Kensington Welfare Rights Union and many more all kept their eyes on the big prize rather than bickering over differences: a successful practice for future times they may want to do the same thing again.
Protesting with others rather than disapproving all by oneself also provides solidarity and solace, fellowship and inspiration. When a dark Jan. 6 day begins with watching live television coverage, alone, of an attorney general nominee justifying his previous justification for torture and a U.S. Representative from Ohio blocking the certification of Presidential electoral votes because she has cause for thinking the vote was fraudulent, but ends among comrades planning resistance against those in power, the day indubitably has gotten brighter. Sarah Long, 24, who facilitated the J20 planning meeting at Judson Church, says she was a depressed liberal “for a day after the election.” That same day, she and two friends founded the Ladies of Liberty, a group that now lobbies in suffragists’ period clothing for the rights women still lack. They’ll be at the counter-inauguration in force. Evan Giller, who attended the meeting, also protested Bush’s first inauguration four years ago. “I’m the only person I know who felt good that day,” Giller said. This time around, he’s encouraging everyone he knows to do the same, writing in an email to his friends: “Don't stay at home just feeling victimized. Take a public stand. Show the world that not every American supports this administration.”
People around the world – and at home – won’t know the diversity of American opinion unless Americans show them. Voicing dissent is vital for shifting the course of public discussion and changing both the government’s and the world community’s perception of the philosophical makeup of the governed. Those with a budding or dormant sympathy for the cause may be pricked to join it. Marches are “how people meet the movement,” in the words of one participant in the RNC evaluation at NYU this fall. Angela Coppola, a major activist in anti-RNC activities, said such group expressions “change the public dialogue to where it’s acceptable to speak about certain things. … Protesting gives me the courage and bravery to stand up and know it’s not just me standing up.” She and others noted the Israelis who demonstrate against the Palestinian/Jewish dividing wall in Israel; as with Bush’s Iraq war, Sharon’s wall doesn’t just offend “the usual suspects,” and some Israeli citizens are making their opposition known.
Voicing dissent is crucial for history too, and activists hold their historical precedents dear, citing examples of American resistance from colonial days through the 60’s. “Germany would look different” to us today if we knew of more resistance to Hitler’s rise, Coppola said. “I wanted to go to the Bush inauguration [in 2001] so I could tell my kids I went to the Bush inauguration.” This year, history should record that in addition to the thousands protesting the president’s re-installment in Washington, there were related film screenings in Shepherdstown, W. Va., a funeral procession to mourn the death of “democracy, peace tolerance, civil liberties, and the thousands of people who have died due to the policies of the Bush administration” in San Antonio, and a drum-beating march leading to a re-kindling of a giant Statue of Liberty in Santa Cruz, among other commemorations around the country.
These are the main ways progressive activists have answered the question “what’s the point of protest?” in light of the fact that their side doesn’t seem to be doing so well. They believe protest – whether mass marches or more individualized, potentially disruptive acts of civil disobedience called “direct actions” – has significant worth and power despite the powerful forces arrayed against it. Those forces include police who react with violence against generally peaceful demonstrators, authorities who constrain protesters’ movement so as to deny their dignity and practically remove them from the sphere of influence, dominant media organs that routinely ignore or trivialize authentic political expression, an administration determined to disregard its opponents no matter how wise or numerous, and a public that lets too many of these injustices slide by.
The writer Rebecca Solnit helps the nearsighted to look up from the domestic well of sorrows and see the many recent achievements of democracy and justice movements abroad. She writes that South America experienced protest’s fruit when Argentinian President Nestor Kirchner defied the International Monetary Fund, when Uruguayans voted against water privatization, when populist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez won a referendum that our government would have preferred he lose. Fifteen years ago the Berlin Wall fell and Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia all leapt toward freedom; ten years ago a post-apartheid South Africa elected Nelson Mandela president; and just five years ago in America, the then-indomitable World Trade Organization was forced by anti-globalists to halt its ministerial meeting in Seattle.
“If you act, you may or may not have the impact you intend, but you know what the consequences of passivity are,” Solnit writes. “Don’t do the Administration the favor of conquering yourself.”
Native New Yorker and habitual protester Bob Carpenter, 64, couldn’t grant that favor if he tried. He attended the J20 planning meeting. Then he protested militarism and war with Daniel Berrigan and dozens more on Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday, by marching from the military recruiting booth at Times Square to the aircraft carrier Intrepid docked on the Hudson River. He’s been at it since the Vietnam War, which he thinks the anti-war movement helped bring to an end.
“Do I think that protest is valid? Does it serve a purpose? Obviously I do. Do I get depressed? Obviously I do, too,” Carpenter said.
“Even though the times seem tough, I can’t stop. I’m driven in some ways. It would be easier for me to stay home and do nothing,” he said, though it wouldn’t really be easier, because it would be impossible.
Karen Loew (krloew@aol.com) is a freelance journalist that has been published in The New Yorker and the New York Times and is a former staff writer at The Tennessean and other daily newspapers.
© 2005 Karen Loew
Posted by brooke at 10:40 AM
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Monday, 17 January 05
we're still fucked.
i've realized that i'm still bummed out from the election. from the presidential election, that is. my hope has gone out the window, my fears for the next 4 years just lie underneath a shell of fatigue and hopelessness about the state of the world.
i go to meetings of the various organizations i participate in and i openly wonder what the purpose of our meeting is. i wonder why we encourage people to continue to call their senators, their house members. i wonder why we continue to send letters to the editor, follow the news, hold rallies. i wonder why we continue to do the same thing, because, really.. we are up against a rock hard wall, and no matter what dynamite we throw at it, we won't get anywhere.
i don't believe that we can change the current state of things. i don't believe that our protests will get us anywhere, i know that our president and the current congress will not listen to us. they don't care about the poor people, they don't care about those discriminated against, they don't care that killing innocent people in poorer countries than our own won't get us anywhere. we live in a country where those that rule really don't give a flying fuck about anyone but their ownselves, even though we pay them to care about all of us. we live in a country where the struggle against the government is like yelling at someone who is profoundly deaf and blind.. our government won't hear us, our government is blind to our suffering.
on today, the day we celebrate martin luther king, jr. i realize i have no hope. i stood in a school gymnasium full of people singing 'we shall overcome' and i did not feel anything. i sung along with them and my loudest thought was 'whats the point, no matter what we do, we don't overcome.'
Posted by brooke at 06:38 PM
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Saturday, 15 January 05
dear cats,
you know, you are supposed to be independent and loners... thats great that you aren't, but it certainly would be nice if you weren't the complete opposite. yeah, all 4 of you don't have to follow me around at all times.. it'd be kind of nice to have space all to my own. after all, you are cats, not children.
Posted by brooke at 08:26 PM
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Thursday, 13 January 05
yes, its scary
this prostate cancer thing of my dad's.. his not-good numbers are high.. i didn't know that till last night.
i shouldn't worry? thats crap. its a cancer that doesn't cause immediate death? i don't care. its something that people live with for a really long time? promise me my dad will.
i didn't cry like this over the death of my grandparents.. this cry that comes up at strange times.. all of a sudden there i am crying.. over an illness that isn't killing him, but certainly could threaten his life.
*my* dad is supposed to be invincible. okay, i know thats crap, but this is about my dad. goddess, he's my dad. and the killer thing is that i like him a lot. if only i hated him, this would be a hell of a lot easier!! thats what i've said.. jokingly, really. cause us being close and loving and all makes it easier for all of us.
*sigh* its my dad, and he's got this scary form of prostate cancer. the tears will shed for awhile now. each time i go to read something about this, tears will shed. yes, it will be good to be home, alone, where i don't have to worry about anyone's reaction to my tears. where i can just cry like i need too.
Posted by brooke at 06:42 PM
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Wednesday, 12 January 05
i can't wait to get back to eugene. i've been pleasant and not sleeping well and driving a car that is way to big for me for 10 days now. i'm grumpy, tired of sitting around talking about how great it is to start all over after 2.5 years on disability. *sigh* i should be sad to leave my family, but, in fact, i need my own space. *sigh* i've been fighting grumpiness for a number of days now. i want MY bed, MY cats, and my life. its bad enough living on the sidelines of everyone's lives in eugene, but at least there i have my own home.. living on the sidelines of everyone's life here just sucks even worse.
yes. this is what is going on in my head these days. grumpiness to the nth degree. i can only fake it for so much longer.
Posted by brooke at 05:57 PM
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Tuesday, 11 January 05
that bites.
my dad has been diagonsed with prostate cancer. that just sucks. but no imminent threat of death, *and* he's treating it pretty heartily with both western and eastern medicines.. really, some of the best in the country in both arenas.
Posted by brooke at 06:58 PM
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really.
non profits should never ever ever be allowed near front page. goddess. no one shoule ever be allowed near front page.
TOOL OF THE DEVIL. simple stated. TOOL OF THE DEVIL.
Posted by brooke at 10:20 AM
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Monday, 10 January 05
this new thing in virginia
yes, if you haven't heard about it now, you get to hear about it here..
a virginia republican is proposing criminalizing miscarriage..
do what???
exactly. do what. huh. what the fuck.
a virginia republican would like every woman who has a miscarriage to report it to law enforcement.
i'm tired, i'm not angry, so there's going to be no fire and brimestone type rant here.. mustang sally, she's got a great one. but my thought is that this is just another beginning, more sliding down the slope of roe v wade. this state wants to do it, and frankly, i don't give a flying fuck that its in the bible belt. yes, pay attention folks in blue states, pay attention my fellow oregonians, it will come to your state next (just like all those anti-gay marriage amendments). those fuckers on the really-christian-right have made their agenda and they are slowly but surely getting through and successfully completing that agenda. we are now talking on their terms, not ours. this is just one little symptom in the disease.
got friends and family in virginia? TELL THEM TO CALL THEIR REP. CONYERS, TELL THEM TO CALL THEIR STATE REPRESENTATIVE. fuck email. calls. hell, i like the idea of sending used tampons to the honorable representative.
UPDATE
The bill has been withdrawn.
Posted by brooke at 08:17 AM
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Sunday, 9 January 05
hard leaving
yes, even the thought of my nephew right now brings tears to the eyes. wish i didn't have to leave him so soon. i just love him. just love him. and that smile, made me laugh out loud several times. just his smile.
*sigh*
at least i'm lucky enough to be his aunt, eh?
Posted by brooke at 01:13 PM
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Saturday, 8 January 05
on vacation
thats where i am, on vacation. making the best of it. really. no blow ups at anyone. amazing. we'll see, its not over yet. yes, i'm home.
doing my best to make everyone happy. i'm in north carolina right now, off to south carolina in the morning. *sigh* then back to appalachia then home to eugene. really. *cross my fingers, no blow ups.*
but i'm tired. i need my time alone and i'm not getting it. but i wanna see everyone. *sigh* and mom has been spoiling me (so far: a throw quilt and pillows to match, a new hair cut, 2 shirts, one sweater, and a pair of pants. whoo hooo! and she's going to pay for 6 months on match.com for me, because, as i know all too well-- i'm sick of being single. time to find that father of my yet-to-be-conceived-or-adopted-child (gotta love sb for that moniker) ).
need to call rd on monday about stuff for the uu newsletter.
okey dokey.
thats where i am. on vacation, trying to get to see everyone that matters in this little corner of this coast. still people further south that matter, but that won't happen this time. hopefully sometime soon.
Posted by brooke at 06:38 PM
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Friday, 7 January 05
i'm blank!
nothing is here. i've not disappeared, just off taking care of some personal business.
Posted by brooke at 06:24 PM
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