How to tell people they sound racist.

65 years ago today

At 8:13 a.m., the first of two atomic bombs fell on Japan.  A quarter of a million people died within four months, half on the first days of the bombing.

65 years later, 26,000 nuclear warheads stand ready to annihilate the world.

Today, monks and nuns from the Leverett Peace Pagoda and other fellow human beings will arrive in Springfield, MA to promote peace.  In particular, they have hoped that Springfield's Mayor Sarno would join Mayors for Peace, an international association of more than 4,069 cities calling for an end to nuclear weapons by 2020.  For the second year in a row, calls to the mayor's office for a meeting have gone unreturned.  Nineteen Massachusetts cities and towns have already signed on, including West Springfield and Chicopee.  Not Springfield, not yet.  But at around 3:30 today, they will gather on the steps of City Hall to pray for peace, and at 5:30, they will join other community members at Arise for Social Justice, 467 State St. for a short program and a potluck supper.

You are welcome to join us.

Photo of a lotus from the Peace Pagoda from NeilinBoston's photostream at Flickr.
 

My granddaughter's poem

It's so incredibly satisfying to me to have another poet in the family....my granddaughter is getting married at the end of the month and here's one snapshot of her thinking...

No, but really, I'm sorry if this insults you.

I'm sorry to insult you,

But I will not be a Mrs. Anything, but Chapin.

And we will not be Mr. and Mrs. Man and Wife You May Now Kiss The Bride 'Till Death Do You Part, Under God.

Missus Belongs-To-Owner, what was your maiden name?

I'm sorry to insult you,

But I have a legacy myself.

I'm not an adopted dog, name changed by new master.

I've got my story, not history.

I'd like to live and be remembered, not by my husband's given name

But mine, the one my mama gave me.

See, I grew to love myself first

And I learned myself by calling myself Chapin,

Melody Chapin.

So, sorry to insult you, but I can't let a man replace what I love about me

With what I love about him.

Northern Lights: a chance for tonight

Plasma is headed our way!  The Boston Globe is reporting this morning that the sun seems to have ended its quiet period (yeah, like the sun really doesn't do much) and, after a Sunday eruption,  a billion tons of plasma is headed our way at a million miles an hour.  Result?  Northern lights may be visible in New England tonight and tomorrow night.

I've only seen the northern nights once in my life, in Maine, when it seemed that a beautiful city drenched in green and yellow lay just behind the mountain.  Maybe tonight will be the second time?

Photo from Studiolit's photostream at Flickr.

Two from Found

FOUND by Freddie in Portland, Oregon

I found this on a line #75 bus seat on the TriMet Bus. Made me chuckle.

 

FOUND by Mary Hoover in Rochester, New York

Found the Death Guest Check at a local Lilac Festival swirlling in the puddles from the rain. Found the details of a funeral on the USO paper a short time later after a parade.

  

From Found.com, an endlessly fascinating look at found objects.

 

Gov. Patrick, shame on you! Clothe our children!

When I was on welfare, I remember how much I looked forward to September.  That was the month that Massachusetts issued a $150 per child clothing allowance to help parents get kids ready for the school year.  No matter the bills still unpaid, I'd take that $150, pull out all my shopping skills, and dress my daughter as best I could.

That $150 allowance hasn't gone up in twenty-plus years, and of course it doesn't go as far as it once did-- even a secondhand pair of pants costs over five bucks at Goodwill-- but for families on public assistance, it lightens the load.

Last night I heard that Massachusetts' Governor Patrick plans to not pay the clothing allowance this year.

Yeah, I know, times are tight, just about everything (except health care) is being cut, but cutting from the bottom brings the whole weight of this economic disaster down on the poorest people's heads.  Local merchants should be unhappy about this, too.

The way I figure it, an additional 66,000 children in Massachusetts will be wearing last year's, now ill-fitting winter jacket, or shoes too small, or unmatched gloves.  I say additional because sixteen years of welfare reform has reduced the welfare caseload but not the number of kids living in poverty whose families don't receive TAFDC benefits..

I'm hoping that maybe, just maybe, if we flood the Governor's office with phone calls, we can get him to reverse his decision. 

Starting Monday, start calling!
Governor Patrick's office:
Phone: 617.725.4005 or  888.870.7770 (in state)

Tell him NOT to make life any harder for Massachusetts' poorest kids.

Seed paper tutorial

OK, this is really lovely-- simple instructions on how to make your own paper embedded with seeds.  Plant the paper, and a garden will grow!  From Gracious Rain.

I do not cry in front of this family

I do not cry in front of this family
homeless with a baby
sitting in my office
waiting for a phone call which may never come
to save them

Instead when I step out back
for the brief sanity of trees and traffic
I see the pigeon that I've seen all day
and realize it has a broken wing.
I'm sorry for your injury,
I say to the pigeon,
I'll get you some water,
You are dead but you don't know it,
won't make it till winter
but today I can offer you
crumbs.

Leonard Nimoy captures Martin Espada

I don't usually get to the Arts section of the New York Times in the morning, but today a photo exhibit by Leonard Nimoy caught my eye: he has an exhibit at Mass MoCA in North Adams titles "Secret Selves," and as I scrolled through the photos, there was my favorite living poet, Martin Espada, and his son Clemente!

Martin says that when he was a kid, he wanted to be a gangster when he grew up.  I can't say that was an ambition of mine, but I and my cousins certainly played "Gangsters" a lot as a kid, and my gangster name was Sadie.

Check out the exhibit and also check out Katherine Gilbert-Espada's art page.  What a household!

Photo from Dreamsjung's photostream at Flickr.

CORI reform: is this the year?

Can't even tell you how often people stop into Arise trying to figure out how to get a job and housing when they have a  past criminal record. 

And CORI's don't just cover convictions.  Ever been arrested and then had the charges dropped, or gone to court and been found not guilty?  It'll be on your record for future employers to see.  (Actually, that part-- removing arrests that don't lead to convictions-- isn't even part of the reform effort.)

Associated Industries of Massachusetts, which represents employers, objects to the part of the proposed changes which would prohibit  a check-off boxes about CORIs on a job application.  But what's the big deal?  Nothing prevents the employer from asking about a past criminal record during an interview.  Under the current system, many applicants don't even get that far.

Time for change!

Rockerfeller study tells us what 20% of us already know

Today at Arise a woman we know stopped in with her two kids.  She wanted to know if we knew of any project in the city where she could take her children's school uniforms, outgrown but still in good shape, and trade them for other uniforms that fit?

"If there isn't, there certainly should be," I said.

"Check with the Parent Information Center at Milton Bradley School," Liz said.

Our friend is living on $1,000 a month, which includes some widow's benefits-- that's 50% below the federal poverty level.  She does not receive welfare benefits.  She's looking for work-- and looking, and looking.

A guy came in.  He was looking for a studio apartment, and looking for a job, also.  But he was having trouble finding either, because he had a fairly recent assault and battery charge on his record.

"I didn't do it, but my mom was dying in a nursing home and I didn't want to risk being in jail when she passed away so I pled guilty," he said.  "Do you know any landlords who will give a guy a chance?"  I didn't have a lot of ideas for him.  (In fact, if anybody in the Greater Springfield area has any tips, let me know.)

Recently I find myself describing poverty's affect on people in terms of weather disasters -- dust bowls and tornados -- but there's an older image that came to my mind several "recoveries" ago.  Every time an economic depression washes like a hurricane across this country, there are more and more of us are left swept away, stranded, possibly never to recover.

Today I saw my belief turned into hard proof when Bob Herbert, New York Times, wrote about a rigorous study done by the Rockerfeller Foundation.  First the study created an economic security index to measure the number of people whose income went down by 25% or more in a single year.  Then the study looked at the numbers of economically insecure people after three recessions.

1985:  7.2% unemployment: 12% economically insecure.
2002:  5.8% unemployment: 17% economically insecure.
2009: 9.5% unemployment:  20% economically insecure.

Your house keeps burning down, and there's less to salvage each time.

Lobsters not allowed at meeting

Atlantic lobsters may be at the tipping point, but there will be no five year ban on lobstering after all-- The American Lobster Management Board will consider three options-- a 75% reduction, a 50% reduction, or no change-- and report back at their November meeting.  Boston Globe.

I've ordered lobster once in my life, and found that dismembering an animal that was alive only minutes before to be quite a disgusting experience.  To each his own, I guess.



Photo from Lee Nachtigal's photostream at Flickr.

Seven days or seven million years?

Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals.  Yes, no, or not sure?

National Geographic.

Damn civilians! They're undermining the war effort!

No, I'm not talking about the civilians from WikiLeaks, responsible for the 90,000 Afghan War documents the New York Times  published this morning, I'm talking about the 52 women, children and men who dared to get themselves killed on Friday when a NATO rocket smashed into the house where they were cowering, trying to get away from fighting between NATO Forces and Taliban fighters.  Didn't those civilians know they'd make us look bad, might make even more people question what the hell we're accomplishing in Afghanistan?

In mid-year a report issued this month by the Afghanistan Rights Monitor, every day for the last six months, six civilians are killed and eight are wounded, for a total of 1,074 civilians  killed and over 1,500 injured in armed violence from January 1st to June 30th.   We all have six family members and eight friends.   Is it easier to get our minds around the smaller figures?  Since this war began (and these are conservative figures) there have been between : 13,372 - 32,969 direct and indirect deaths (indirect meaning you're not an "impact death," you die later) and 18,000 - 44,000 people injured.  The population of Afghanistan is about 29,000,000, so that's a little more than one person in a thousand killed.  In my city of Springfield, that would be about 150 people killed and 180 injured.  What a crime wave!

Now NATO forces are only responsible for 40% of those casualties-- but I think we can say the war is responsible for all of them, as well as responsible for the nearly 2,000 Coalition deaths and 1,207 U.S. military deaths in Afghanistan since the war began.

I suppose Obama will feel he's got to muddle through at least until his planned withdrawal begins in July, 2011, or he'll sound like a quitter-- although, does this sound like withdrawal to you?

"We didn't say we'd be switching off the lights and closing the door behind us," he said at the White House, a day after naming Gen David Petraeus as his new Afghan commander.
"We said we'd begin a transition phase that would allow the Afghan government to take more and more responsibility."

You can hear the words out of his own mouth at the BBC.

Climate change legislation dead for now

 Three of the four lead editorials in the New York Times this morning bemoan the death of climate change legislation in Congress for this year.  I've been somewhat torn between the position of "Pass the bill, it's better than nothing" and "The bill is lousy, why institutionalize bad policy?"

Lee Wasserman's editorial comes the closest to explaining why the bill died.  His fourth point is the one that hit most home to me-- ma7ybe because it's the one point activists can do something to change:

Thread No. 4: The public sits it out. American history has few examples of presidents or Congresses upending entrenched interests without public pressure forcing their hand. Teddy Roosevelt is on Mount Rushmore for a reason.
Citizens wouldn’t support an approach they couldn’t understand to solve a problem our leaders refused to acknowledge. Even the earth’s flagging ability to support life as we know it couldn’t stir a public outcry. The loudest voices insisted that leaders in Washington do nothing.
They obliged.

We need an analysis that can place such apparently disparate pieces of our lives as the cost of good food, the prevalence of McDonald's and Burger King, lack of jobs and public transportation, winter heating costs, the upsurge in asthma and the BP oil spill into a single picture.  We've got work to do.

Photo from Squiffy's House of Fun.

Hamster prefers organic

From The Cook's Den.

By the way, it does seem as if the BBC has continued its preoccupation with hamsters.  I blogged about it here.
Go to BBC News and search for hamster; you'll see what I mean.