Outside the glass windows of the office, the incessant clatter and clashing of the Eureka Recycling‘s Materials Recycling Facility (MRF) continues nonstop. Inside, I extract the protective plugs from my ears, and sit down to talk to José Hernandez about his work at Eureka Recycling. Continue reading
For José Hernandez, recycling is more than a job
Filed under environment, St. Paul Notes
Three of this week’s biggest underreported stories
While I can’t claim that I see every story, I do read a lot of news, and I’m struck by how often really important stories get less reporting and fewer readers than more sensational stuff. Three of this week’s biggest underreported stories: the Obama administration staged raids to capture and deport mothers and children back to the deadly violent Central American countries they fled ; Flint, Michigan’s cheaper water poisoned thousands of children; an on-going methane leak in California may have a bigger impact than the BP oil spill. Continue reading
Filed under environment, immigration, race, Uncategorized
Eight to eighty?
Look at the photo above. This is a bus stop. In St. Paul, a city committed to “creating safe, pleasant, lively streets and public spaces that work for everyone from eight to eighty.” If you are eight years old, will you be secure climbing over the snow to the bus? If you are eighty, will you be secure walking a block over the unplowed, unshoveled side of the street to get to the bus? Continue reading
Filed under St. Paul Notes
New Year, news re-runs
Downton Abbey is new. NCIS is new. Sherlock is new (not very good, IMHO, but new.) So why is the news in reruns? We have, once again, a stupid, mean-spirited deportation move against Central American families and children. Ultra-right-wing, anti-government, white supremacist grandstanding — take over a bird sanctuary? Really? And a re-run of old gun control rhetoric, with minimalist but highly choreographed executive action substituting for actual gun control. Continue reading
Filed under immigration, news
Deporting refugees is not the American dream
Ana Lizet Mejia’s brother was killed by gangs in Honduras, and she fled with her son to the United States. Hers was one of a wave of Central American families seeking refuge in the United States in 2014. Now she is in detention, targeted by Obama administration’s new raid-and-deport policy, which started over New Year’s weekend with initial reports of 121 mothers and children seized. Continue reading
Filed under immigration
Plans, not resolutions: Walking, reading, writing ahead
I plan to walk more in January, despite icy sidewalks. I plan to read more and have a stack of poetry and novels and nonfiction to tackle. I plan to write more, too — on a variety of topics, personal and political, local and global. That includes recycling contracts in St. Paul, Glendale public housing in Minneapolis, solar greenhouses and winter gardens across Minnesota, and bad bus stops in my neighborhood. Continue reading
Filed under Uncategorized
Tamir Rice: When facts don’t matter
Today a grand jury refused to indict the police officer who shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland. Back in October, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote, “It should be increasingly clear that the police officer who killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice will not be tried; and should he be tried, he will not be convicted.” Today, he tweeted: “Yeah. Knew this was coming. For me the saddest in the recent parade. City should be ashamed of itself.”
So should we all. Continue reading
Filed under human rights, race
Holy Innocents and refugee children
Flight Into Egypt, by Henry Ossawa Tanner, 1923. Metropolitan Museum of Art, online collection (accession number 2001.402a)
December 28 is the saints’ day of the Holy Innocents, an appropriate day to think about refugees today. The Gospel of Matthew tells the story: wicked King Herod wants to kill the baby Jesus. Herod tries to trick the wise men into leading him to the baby, but these foreigners escape from his surveillance and return to their own country. An angel comes to Joseph in a dream, warning of the danger to Jesus. Joseph and Mary and the baby flee the country by night, going to Egypt and staying there until Herod dies. In a rage, Herod turns to murder, killing all of the male children under the age of two in Bethlehem and the surrounding area.
Today, Central American refugee children flee gang violence, every bit as deadly as Herod’s rage. Continue reading
Filed under children, immigration, Uncategorized
Stories while we wait
“I am waiting,” Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote more than half a century ago, “for a rebirth of wonder.” In this in-between week, waiting for the new year, waiting for normal time to return, I am looking for stories that offer a rebirth of wonder and hope, that could light the dark nights and point to the possibility of a better future. I offer not YouTube cats, but Silent Night at the Fourth Precinct, heroism on a Kenyan bus, a connection between teacher and student. And, if you will, click over to read Ferlinghetti’s poem in full. Continue reading
Filed under news, Uncategorized
Why I keep writing about Black Lives Matter
Sometimes it seems like I’m talking – and writing – about Black Lives Matter all the time. Let me explain why.
Back in 1903, W.E.B. DuBois wrote The Souls of Black Folk. He began the book with these lines:
“HEREIN lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the Twentieth Century. This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.”
Today, despite all of the organizing, all of the marching, all of the blood shed and people martyred in the civil rights movement of the 20th century, the problem of the color line is still the problem of our time, the problem of the 21st century, in the United States and around the world. And today, Black Lives Matter embodies the challenge of the new civil rights movement. Continue reading
Mary Turck
