Tag: Issue 04-09-2013
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Ditching Rape Culture for Good
Usually when I’m angry about something, my first instinct is to write. And while I’m furious about what happened to that 16-year-old girl in Ohio, I’m hesitant to lend more ink to the topic, because every additional word adds to the explosive media gossip-fest this has become. But if we’re going to stop having more…
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Brooklyn Is Burning
This morning I woke up in a curfew O God, I was a prisoner, too, yeah! Could not recognize the faces standing over me They were all dressed in uniforms of brutality. . . . [T]hats why we gonna’ be burnin’ and a-lootin’ tonight —Bob Marley, “Burnin’ and Lootin’” Can protestors be patriots? Can looters…
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Inequality Is Hurting Us All
Inequality hurts us all. Imagine if you could go back 45 years to 1968. That year, after three decades of creative policy from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal through President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society, the United States was one of the world’s most equal nations. Now imagine that instead of falling into the…
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Now the Work of Movements Begins
Since the November election much attention has been paid by the pundit class to the mechanics of the campaigns, to the techniques of microtargeting potential voters, the effectiveness of get-out-the-vote efforts. The media analysts will fill the hours on the cable news networks, proffering post-election chestnuts about the accuracy of polls, or about either candidate’s…
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Our Lunch Counter Moment
Dark and cold we may be, but this Is no winter now. The frozen misery Of centuries breaks, cracks, begins to move; The thunder is the thunder of the floes, The thaw, the flood, the upstart Spring. Thank God our time is now when wrong Comes up to face us everywhere, Never to leave us…
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So Long, Mr. Mayor
I met Tom Menino not long after he had become mayor of Boston, during my days as editor of Spare Change News. He probably doesn’t remember it now, and I remember that he didn’t put on any airs like most politicians do. He wasn’t self-important. He just seemed like the type of person you could…