Category Archives: Inspiring Moments in Resistance

An Occupy Wall Street Novel

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Rebel cover

My new novel, A Rebel Comes of Age, is scheduled for release (as a $3.99 ebook) on December 21, 2013.

It’s a sequel to my first young adult novel, The Battle for Tomorrow. In the first book, sixteen-year-old Angela Jones is arrested and sent to juvenile hall for participating in a blockade and occupation of the US Capitol. The sequel takes place a year later, when she and four homeless teenagers occupy an empty commercial building owned by Bank of America. Their goal: to transform it into a teen homeless shelter.

Over the next five months, they work through all the typical problems of inner city teenagers – including raging hormones, the temptation of drugs and alcohol, racial tensions, and pregnancy – as they struggle to win community acceptance. When Bank of America obtains a court order evicting them, the adventure turns deadly serious as they realize lives are on the line. When the other residents decide to use automatic weapons to keep the police SWAT team out, Ange experiences a major personal crisis and is forced to re-examine her attitudes towards guns and violence.

The Lost Generation – Life After Work

A Rebel Comes of Age explores the question of life after work. In the five years since the 2008 economic meltdown, 25-40% of 18-30 year olds still find themselves permanently excluded from the workforce. What we are looking at, in essence, is an entire generation sidelined to the fringes of society. Despite all the government and media hype, the capitalist economic system is incapable of creating jobs for them.

We are all conditioned to believe that life without full time work is unlivable. I seriously question the validity of this viewpoint. As a species, human beings occupied the planet quite happily for 250,000 years without selling their labor to a wealthy elite. Two centuries ago, the concept of waged work was virtually unknown, and most of the world’s current seven billion inhabitants are officially classified as “unemployed.”

With more equitable distribution of economic resources, freeing people from the drudgery of work opens up infinite possibilities for more creative and socially productive activities. Some analysts attribute the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street to unemployed youth taking up social and political activism as an alternative to work.

A Rebel Comes of Age provides a brief snapshot of a group of homeless, unemployed teenagers who find themselves building a movement, without quite realizing this is what they are doing.

My next post will feature an excerpt from Chapter 1.

***

A Rebel Comes of Age can be pre-ordered from the following links:

  • Kindle edition available after Dec 15

 

Cover photo credit: sand_and_sky via photopin cc

 

The Citizen Science Movement

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Interview with Sean Bonner, citizen scientist and founder of Safecast, a lay nuclear radiation monitoring group founded a week after the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Fukushima.

Bonner started Safecast when the Japanese government failed to disseminate adequate information about radiation levels following the Fukushima diasaster. Using mobile radiation detectors mounted to vehicles, Bonner and his volunteers produced complete radiation maps of northern Japan that forced the government to release data they were trying to cover up and alter they evacuation zones.Since then, volunteers have joined from all over the world are are helping to map radiation levels on the West Coast.

All the information on Bonner’s website (http://blog.safecast.org/), which includes detailed instructions on building radiation detectors, is totally Open Source. In the age of corruption and cover-up, Bonner feels it’s absolutely essential that citizens develop the ability to produce their own science – instead of relying on government and academic experts.

Bonner also comments on the related topic of Internet freedom and the danger of political movements relying on private companies, such as Facebook, for information sharing.

photo credit: pasukaru76 via photopin cc

I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered

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The Prisoner – starring Patrick McGoohan as Number 6

The Prisoner is a prophetic Owellian series from 1967 about dissident and whistleblowing spies who are punished by being sent to a remote village from which they can never escape. The late creator, producer, and star Patrick McGoohan shows astonishing insight into the coming New World Order, indoctrination and mind control, and the sociopathic intelligence industrial complex.

The Village was modeled after a real place in Scotland where dissident British spies were sent during World War II. The 17 episodes are still under copyright but can be purchased for $1.99 each from iTunes

At the time, we called this surrealism. Oh, to be young and naive again.

The following clip refers to a “perfect blueprint for world order”:

photo credit: marsmet545 via photopin cc

Originally published in Veterans Today

Teen Pregnancy: Do Your Part

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pregnant teen

Skyrocketing population growth is one of the most serious threats to the fragile biosphere that supports human existence. Fertility rates in most of the industrialized world have slowed dramatically over the last decade. Except for the US. Thanks to high rates of teen pregnancy (the highest in the developed world), US fertility rates remain higher than many other countries.*

 In July, under a US District Court order, the FDA authorized pharmacies to sell Plan B One Step tablets over-the-counter (without prescription) without age restriction.** Plan B One-Step, also known as the “morning after pill,” is designed for women who, for a variety of reasons, engage in unprotected intercourse. Thanks to the new rules, all women of reproductive age should be be able to find the tablets on the shelf of their local drug store, like any other product. Unfortunately many pharmacies still aren’t compliant with FDA regulations and either keep Plan B tablets behind the counter or in locked cabinets. As evidenced in the following video:

As part of a national pressure campaign, The Reproductive Justice Reporting Project of the Media Consortium is asking members of the public to help by completing the “Where’s Your Plan B?” survey.

The next time you visit your local pharmacy, please complete the form provided at Where’s Your Plan B?

If you have a smartphone, you can fill the form out while you are still at the drug store. If not, print the form out, fill it out at the store, and transfer the details to the online form when you get home.***

*Fertility rates by country (World Bank)

  • US – 1.89 children per woman
  • China – 1.58 children per woman
  • Italy – 1.41 children per woman
  • Japan – 1.39 children per woman
  • Germany – 1.36 children per woman
  • Spain – 1.36 children per woman

**Studies show that difficulty accessing birth control (such as Plan B One Step) is the primary reason why American teenagers experience the highest rate of unplanned pregnancies in the industrialized world.

***You don’t have to be a woman of reproductive age to complete the form. Overpopulation isn’t a woman’s issue – it affects all of us.

photo credit: cobalt123 via photopin cc

Books to Prisoners

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The Political Importance of Literacy

books

Books to Prisoners is a Seattle-based, all-volunteer non-profit organization founded in 1973 under the sponsorship of Left Bank Books. BTP ships books to prisoners – at their request. Prisoners send them 1,200 – 1,300 book requests per month. BTP believes that books are important tools for learning and self-improvement. Moreover, as Brazilian educator and activist Paulo Freire taught, literacy and reading opens peoples’ minds to new ideas and possibilities.

In the US, which spends vastly more on the prison industrial complex than schools, prison is the primary anti-poverty program. American prisons house nearly 25% of the world’s prisoners – more than 2.2 million. The vast majority are from disadvantaged communities and are either African American or Hispanic. Most have been incarcerated for victimless drug crimes. Prison rehabilitation is a myth, especially as prison privatization and state cutbacks have greatly curtailed prisoners’ access educational and training opportunities.

BTP prefers monetary donations. However they do welcome books from the following categories provided they are in paperback (most prisons prohibit hard back books) – and preferably accompanied with a $35-70 donation to cover the cost of shipping them to prisons.

  • Dictionaries
  • Antiquarian books (these can be sold to cover postage)
  • Spanish books
  •   Legal self-help
  • Almanacs
  • Books on chess
  • Books on drawing
  • Vocational education
  • How-to Books
  • Textbooks
  • GED preparation books
  • African-American history
  • True crime
  • Paperback fiction: thrillers, mysteries, sci-fi, Westerns, fantasy, horror

Books (and donations) can be mailed to:

Books to Prisoners, c/o Left Bank Books, 92 Pike St. Box A, Seattle WA 98101

People can also donate via the BTP website: http://www.bookstoprisoners.net/donate/

The following video illustrates the profound effect this forty-year program has had on prisoners’ lives:

I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading opened to me. I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke in me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive – Malcolm X

photo credit: » Zitona « via photopin cc

Originally posted at Veterans Today