38 hours
no cigarettes
doing everything i can…
send help.
Why can’t you give her room?
Respect her spatial needs.
I feel you compress her
Into a small space.
With clairvoyance,
She knew what you needed,
And gave it to you.
Now her desires are repressed;
Arrows in the flesh
When she found your love,
Her nature bowed her head;
She surrendered,
She renounced the world for you,
Now she’s poisoned by demands
You cannot answer.
Why this sacrifice?
Now she regrets the whole thing,
A delayed reaction
When she left her craft voluntarily
For your nest, for your love.
Did you understand?
Appreciate,
Build a bridge to her.
Initiate a touch
Before it’s too late,
Say the words to her
That will make her shine.
Tell her that you love her.
Your generosity will show
In the volume of her glow.
“
| — | Sacrifice, Björk |
How We Can Improve Communcation
How We Can Improve Communcation
- Be Curious and Open to Learning: Listen to and be open to hearing all points of view. Maintain a attitude of exploration and learning.
- Balance Advocacy and Inquiry: Seek to learn and understand as much as you might want to persuade. Conversations are as much about listening as it is about talking.
- Show Respect and Suspend Judgment: Setting judgments aside will enable you to learn from others and contribute to others experiencing being respected and appreciated.
- Seek Alignment rather than Agreement: Alignment is shared intention, whereas agreement is having a shared belief or opinion.
- Be Purposeful and to the Point: Notice if what you are conveying is or is not “on purpose” to the question at hand. Notice if you are making the same point more than once. Do your best to make your point quickly with honesty and depth.
- Own and Guide the Conversation or Process: Take responsibility for the quality of your participation and the quality of the work conversations by noticing what’s happening and actively support getting yourself and others back “on purpose” when needed.
- Be Excellent to Each other: Share what’s important to you. Speak authentically; from your personal and heart felt experience. Be considerate to others who are doing the same.
Verizon workers are part of the 99%! Together with Occupy Wall Street, we will march from 140 West Street past Zuccotti Park to shine a spotlight on corporate greed at Verizon and Verizon Wireless.
JOIN US!
4-5 PM before the march Verizon Workers will Picket Verizon HS 140 West Street
book club anyone?
Interested in joining a socialist reading group in NYC?
My friends and are meeting Sun, Sept 25th 6-8pm. (Message me for more details!!)
We’ll be discussing the three readings below. All combined less than 30 pages.
- Feminism at Work - Lynne Williams
- Black Feminism in Everyday Life - Siobhan Brooks
- Back to Class - Martha Gimenez
Dedicated to the Children of Gaza, Uprooted Palestinians
“9/11 was an atrocity that was met with an atrocity. It provided the Bush administration with an opportunity to fortify American hegemony in hopes of changing the global management of neoliberalism. It was the people of Afghanistan and Iraq who defeated Bush’s imperial agenda at a horrible cost, leaving Bush and Obama to declare victory and scramble for ways to get out.
Post-9/11 the United States is in a much weaker place than it was before it. Internationally, U.S. leadership has been severely damaged and its military power was shown that it is not invincible. Domestically, flag-and-ribbon-inspired unity was short-lived, with the country today being more polarized than ever.
With neoliberalism in (terminal?) crisis, the Middle East being transformed by popular movements, and Wisconsin in revolt, once again the ideas of Democrats and Republicans stand discredited. But 9/11 and its aftermath illustrate that rebuilding the left is not a luxury, it is a necessity. Neoliberal imperialism can only be defeated through a project of the left built upon principles and action. Because the left only really exists to the extent that people accept its critique and agenda for change, there needs to be less political rhetoric and more political organizing.”
If we think of capitalism as a purely economic system, it is true that class is constitutive in a way that race is not. Capitalism by definition requires class divisions, but in the abstract is conceivable without racial disparities. However, a notion of the real political economy that ignores historical particularities, cultural trends and intra-class dynamics is of very little use.
Racism is not just a legacy of the past, but also something promoted by the market logic — a reality that our strategies should assimilate. Giving relative autonomy to non-class forms of domination (racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.), while framing our strategy and analysis through the lens of class, is a way of avoiding problems of class-reductionism or identity politics and building broad-based movements that organize around particular experiences.
In terms of race, we need to identify and explain the dialectic between the means of production and the process of racism. Histories need to be revisited, with past injustices bearing on our explanations for a contemporary racism that appears autonomous. Race cannot be subsumed into class, but they cannot be divorced either…
“
| — | Michael A. McCarthy, “Racism and Structural Solutions,” Against the Current. July-Aug 2008 |
Why is it that so many could go on an instant massive shopping spree to buy all the goods you don’t want to be stuck without if your utilities go out and yet it’s taken decades for the powers that be to invest in building the infrastructure that could not only endure more than our current systems but also probably benefit from them. (Imagine how much electricity we could have accumulated from windmills! Or ocean wave energy!)
Oil companies, walmart, home depot (among others) must’ve heard “chaching!” while the rest of the east coast heard “PANIC!”
