civil disobedience blog | civil disobedience blog
Oct.27.2011
The year was 1968, the place, Berkeley, Telegraph Avenue. The activists in Berkeley, including me, had petitioned the city of Berkeley to allow the closing of Telegraph Avenue between Bancroft and Dwight Way, an area of about five or six blocks.
I was fifty years old, and my son was eleven...
|
Oct.27.2011
I recently had a chance to wander through the Occupy Boston site. Being of the generation weaned on Martin Luther King and Kent State, I of course treated this with a degree of skepticism. It was like when my father would come home from work and tell me to get out of his favorite chair. I...
|
Oct.27.2011
Sadly, my father was absent from much of my youth, save as a disciplinarian. Being a retired marine drill instructor, he was quite a disciplinarian, too. My mother did most of the raising and teaching, but a couple of lessons my father passed onto me have stayed with me all my life. One was, “All...
|
Oct.27.2011
I've been watching the news, reading wall posts on Facebook and now I'm feeling cranky. Why? It's all the Wall Street stuff. I came of age during the Vietnam protests. I know about protesting something that's unfair and certainly that was a war we shouldn't have been in but, ironically, after the U...
|
Oct.27.2011
I looked at him with his short haircut and his particular stance. His iphone was trained on my face. Undercover someone was taking my picture. "Hello, police" I mouthed and when he looked at me, I knew it was true. That's not a good feeling.
I'm like most people. I want a calm, quiet life. I want...
|
Oct.27.2011
I first read Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience when I was a junior in high school. It electrified me. I remember writing in my journal “After reading Thoreau, I realize I don’t have to listen to my mom or society to know what’s right. I have to listen to my heart.” Those two simple sentences were my own...
|
Oct.27.2011
Today the New York Times reports that over 80 percent of New York City residents are in favor of Occupy Wall Street and that New Yorkers actively support the effort by a margin of 2 to 1.
One of the many reasons for this acceptance is the authenticity of the movement. The protestors simply repeat...
|
Oct.27.2011
I was sitting in the hammock, tossing back a brew the day the snail rebellion began.
The slow fellas were almost to my trailer stairs before I noticed them. Gastropods of all kinds: anthropophilic land snails, marine snails, even a few slugs, all carrying little...
|
Oct.27.2011
In 1976, I lived in New York City and studied painting and drawing from a modern old master at the Art Student League of New York. Our teacher encouraged us to visit the museums and galleries and put our noses on the excellent examples of old masters especially of Dutch, Italian, and Flemish...
|
Oct.26.2011
-What Truths Does Occupy Wall Street Reveal?
Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and its kindred protestors express the view that the top one per cent of the population is living at the expense of the remaining 99 per cent. While protests over economic disparity appear to have sprung...
|