Month: September 2018

In Defense of Passionate Intensity.

Or why we need to pay attention to what is happening with the Brett Kavanaugh nomination to the Supreme Court.

We all know the lines from the Second Coming by WB Yeats:

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;”

Indeed the centre is falling apart.  I recall Rose and I watching from our 15th floor Jersey condo as the flames destroyed the Twin Towers on 911.  I was on the phone to my brother in Ohio, telling him that one tower had just gone down, while Rose was frantically trying to get my attention and pointing out the window.  I looked.  There were NO towers.  Only an unending plume of smoke that hovered for days.

Continue reading “In Defense of Passionate Intensity.”

“The Gentrification Juggernaut rolls on.”

No to the Machine.

On the morning of July 3, 2018, two crews showed up without warning at a wooded lot on North Halifax Avenue in Daytona Beach.  Brandishing chainsaws and other implements of destruction, they set about hacking down underbrush, small trees, and 29-inch, 32-inch and 38-inch Live Oaks of a size as to be deemed “historic.”  Destroyed along with the site and buried in mulch were the archaeological remains (human and otherwise) of a Native American village that had occupied that beautiful land some 2,000 years ago.

Also destroyed, by the way, were the homes of about 50 homeless people who had been living there, along with the few shards of their belongings.

Continue reading ““The Gentrification Juggernaut rolls on.””

Green Power 2018

(l. to r.)  GPFL Co-Chair Samson LeBeau Kpadenou for Florida State Representative District 87;  Elijah Manley for Broward County School Board at-large District 8;.  GPFL Co-Chair Robin Harris for Orange County Commission Distrct 6;  Francisco Pierre-Louis for Hillsburough County Soil & Water Board District 3.

This has been a very different election year.  We all know how 3rd party candidates are dismissed as merely “protest votes,” or “symbolic,” or “marginal,” etc.  Worst yet, they are excoriated as “spoilers”!  But to the Democratic Party professionals, they are generally brushed off as a nuisance.  They have been rightly defended by Greens for “raising important issues,” and indeed they do.  But typical was Henry Lawrence’s 2014 run for Florida House District 6, where his courageous but underfunded campaign got 3%, which translated into 1,606 people who voted “None of the Above.”

Continue reading “Green Power 2018”