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Social Justice
America! Look At Your Shame!
Around me, I realized, the bus was thicker and thicker with people, some standing, some packed on the seats, all swaying, pleasant and patient-seeming in the green-and-gold light which filled the bus. Across the aisle were some sailors, sitting, their faces very young and very red, in their very white uniforms.
October 2003
Sunbeams
August 2003An unrectified case of injustice has a terrible way of lingering, restlessly, in the social atmosphere like an unfinished equation.
Going The Distance
Rubin Carter’s Long Journey From Convict To Crusader
When you spend a great deal of time in darkness, in solitary confinement, where everything blends into one, if you’re fortunate, you’ll begin to see things more vividly than you’ve ever seen them before. It may take days, weeks, months, years, but you’ll begin to see things as they really are. You’ll begin to see yourself as you have never seen yourself before. Because when you can’t see outside, you can only look inside.
August 2003
Webs Of Power
Notes From The Global Uprising
We have been blockading all day in a giant spider web: an intersection entirely surrounded by webs of yarn that effectively prevent movement into the street. The intersection is held by a cluster from Asheville, North Carolina, that includes many labor-union members. We are blockading arm in arm with the ecofeminist Teamsters. In front of the police barricade, a group of protesters are “locked down”: sitting in a line with their arms chained together.
March 2003
Sunbeams
January 2003When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: “Whose?”
Fingers To The Bone
Barbara Ehrenreich On The Plight Of The Working Poor
The way they calculate poverty was devised in the early sixties and based on the notion that most people spend a third of their earnings on food — which was not true even then. Nevertheless, the reasoning went that if you calculated how much money people spent on food and multiplied that number by three, you would have the poverty-level wage. And that’s what they’ve been doing ever since. The problem is that food prices have been pretty resistant to inflation, whereas housing and healthcare have shot through the roof. So the poverty level is completely misleading. Yet this nation keeps patting itself on the back, saying, “Look, our poverty level is only 12 percent.”
January 2003American Standard
They pulled off the highway and followed the signs for the Thirteen Stars Motel. Besides proclaiming itself to be “American Owned,” the motel promised that its restaurant served “American Food” and that each room was held to “American Standards.” Alastair was thrilled. He’d never met a racist before, and now he was going to. Already he felt a mixture of fascination and compassion, as if he and his father were about to visit the zoo.
July 2002
Sunbeams
April 2002You may break any written law in America with impunity. There is an unwritten law that you break at your peril. It is: do not attack the profit system.
Telling Stories
How Television Skews Our View Of Society, And Ourselves — An Interview With George Gerbner
The notion that exposure to violence incites violence is itself media-driven. Exposure actually does something much worse than incite violence: it cultivates a sense of insecurity and dependence that makes people submit to indignities no human being should ever have to bear.
August 1998
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