A few links:

• Angela shared this NYT Q & A with helpful tips from travel photographer Robert Caplin. (I am trying not to think too hard about the fact that Robert Caplin and I are the same age.) Among other things, he shares some fun suggestions for making the most of your point-and-shoot digital camera’s flash or your iPhone camera.

• And yesterday Flickr announced that they’ve added a “Who’s in this photo?” tag feature. This could = hours of amusement, going through old images to tag my Flickr friends.

• Scott shared today’s Boston.com Big Picture, which features some really disturbing images related to the 2009 UN World Drug report. In particular, he said “WTF?!” to number 16:

Caption: Sarab village resident and opium addict Islam Beg offers his opium pipe to his grandson in the Badakhshan province of Afghanistan on July 13, 2009. (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson)

If you have five seconds…

Please sign this petition and tell the South African government that, particularly as the World Cup approaches, you’ll be watching – and that, soccer or no soccer, the displacement of poor communities and murders of innocent people are unacceptable.

If you have five minutes…

I recently attended the screening of a documentary-in-progress titled Dear Mandela, to be released in Fall 2010.

Trailer here: http://vimeo.com/6648949

The filmmakers are seizing the 2010 World Cup as an opportunity to call out the South African government for enforcing “a new apartheid.” They say that the government is prioritizing its national image for the television cameras while continuing to deny basic rights to its poorest citizens. The film highlights the Shack Dwellers’ Movement, or Abahlali baseMjondolo, a group of activists and organizers from Durban that formed in 2005.

Author, researcher and professor Raj Patel has worked with Abahlali for years and wrote this week:

The movement’s key demand is for ‘Land & Housing in the City’ but it has also successfully politicised and fought for an end to forced removals and for access to education and the provision of water, electricity, sanitation, health care and refuse removal as well as bottom up popular democracy. In some settlements the movement has also successfully set up projects like crèches, gardens, sewing collectives, support for people living with and orphaned by AIDS and so on. It has also organised a 16 team football league and quarterly all night multi genre music competitions.

Gardens and sewing collectives: not so threatening.

But provision of water, electricity, sanitation? Apparently there’s only so much of each of those resources to spread around – especially when sports arenas need building and a “15 years post-democracy in the Rainbow Nation” world image needs upholding.

It seems that in the government’s view, one way to prepare for the big event is to silence these rabble-rousers (read: poor people of color who, as they are displaced, are forced to commute ever-longer distances into the cities, where if they’re lucky they can earn meager wages building stadiums even though they likely won’t be able to afford tickets to any games. Which is wrenching in itself, but that’s another post).

Yesterday Reclaiming Spaces wrote:

In one of the poorest shack settlements in Durban, South Africa, armed thugs have been reported to have killed settlement residents and destroyed their home in a coordinated and racially motivated attack. Local police appear to be entirely complicit in these attacks, as do local members of the African National Congress.

Today Abahlali blogged:

The ANC has invaded Kennedy Road…Our message to the movements, the academics, the churches and the human rights groups is this:

We are calling for close and careful scrutiny into the nature of democracy in South Africa.

Scrutinize away: learn more at the Dear Mandela Facebook page or straight from the source at Abahlali.org.

*Quick kudos: At the screening, two Abahlali organizers were present to discuss the film and their work, and the filmmakers stayed fairly quiet. This is my favorite way to see a documentary: to have the chance to hear from the “subjects” about what isn’t included in the film, and how they would like the viewers to take subsequent action if we feel so inspired.

Inspiration:

• NPR aired a high school student-produced story about the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Ike and its impact on Galveston, TX.
• Also via NPR: The Journey cover sampled in this story makes me want to drop everything and watch Glee.

Infuriation:

• At RaceWire (the ColorLines blog) and Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, thoughts on Glenn Beck’s latest target, Yosi Sergant at the National Endowment for the Arts. Jeff Chang of Can’t Stop Won’t Stop writes:

Beck is not just trying to make progressives who are young and/or of color absolutely dispensable to the establishment. He is trying to take away their platform as well. To Beck, this is a fight not just over the individuals, but to block the ways change is actually made.

Via Jared, who is awesome himself.

Today is rare in that it’s totally unstructured: I have a pile of literature from a recent Idealist grad school fair to sort through; a to-do list that involves bettering my home and supporting friends; and a whole lot of stuff to read. The dreary weather and the knowledge that everyone around me has had a determined “life goes on” attitude this past week makes me feel very motivated to do good things with my Saturday, September 12.

As I sorted through links and tweets from the past few days, I happened to sign onto WordPress. I expected my stats for this blog to be nonexistent, since my blog motivation in recent months has been…well, you know. But! Surprise – a lot of people came to visit, and it’s all thanks to none other than Your Girlfriend and Mine, Ellen DeGeneres.

Last October I wrote a quick post called Letter to Ellen: Oppose Prop 8! Since then, “Ellen Degeneres” and “Elissa Bassist” have been the two search terms that have most consistently led WordPress browsers to find this blog. I’m happy to report, in case you’ve been living under a rock, that they both seem to be doing very well: Ellen will soon be a co-host on American Idol, and our occasional contributor Elissa is on a crusade to prove women are funny over at The Rumpus.

(Hey. Do you know Ellen? Because I know Elissa. We should arrange for Elissa to go on Ellen’s show and they can make jokes about funny women!)

As my teacher roommate sets off to show her middle school students an excellent year in the classroom, I’m thinking about a back-to-blog commitment to show STT readers an excellent year on WordPress. Even if you are just stumbling here looking for gossip about Ellen.

Back to my morning reading. I was just in the middle of an article called How 9/11 Should Be Remembered and wanted to share this bit:

Not long ago I talked to Roberto Sifuentes, a Chicano performance artist who was then living in New York. Like many New Yorkers, he still marvels at that brief, almost utopian moment of opening in the midst of tragedy, when everyone wanted to talk about meaning, about foreign policy, about history, and did so in public with strangers. It was a moment of passionate engagement with the biggest questions and with one another.

It could all have been different. It’s too late now, but not too late, never too late, to change how we remember and commemorate this event and that other great landmark of the Bush era, Hurricane Katrina, and so prepare for disasters to come.

(Speaking of Hurricane Katrina, I also want to share an article I read recently: Strained by Katrina, a Hospital Faced Deadly Choices. Sheri Fink invested two and a half years in writing this piece for the NYT Magazine, and I invested several subway rides to and from work in reading it because it’s so long and sad.  There were a few moments when I could feel fellow passengers noticing how anguished my face looked, but I just couldn’t slap on the usual unfazed New Yorker mask; the story of Memorial Hospital and the questions it raises about moral and ethical issues faced by doctors during emergencies is heartbreaking.)

September is National Preparedness Month. I’m not always one for “months” and “weeks” and “days,” but I think in this case it’s a helpful reminder, because “sitting down with my roommates to talk about what happens in a disaster situation” seems to be one of those items that is perpetually moved to the bottom of the Life List. Eight years after September 11, 2001 and four years after Hurricane Katrina, maybe one way to “remember and commemorate” is to start at home by planning for emergencies. Ready.gov is one place to start. NACCHO is another.

It’s been a crazy, vegetableful week. My girlfriend and I joined the Sunnyside CSA—just one of about a hundred neighborhood-based community-supported agriculture distribution centers around New York City. This week’s box (our first!) held strawberries, arugula, green-leaf lettuce, red-leaf lettuce, baby bok choy, radishes, turnips, beets, and rhubarb.

It has been a week of highs and lows. Mostly highs, topped by rhubarb cobbler. I barely knew what rhubarb was a week ago, and now I’m a rhubarb enthusiast—evangelist, even. And all the organic, local, oh-so-fresh beets, turnips, bok choy, and strawberries from the box of surprises made me jump with healthy joy!

But today we hit the low: those “southern style” turnip greens I cooked up today will be sitting in a tupperware in the fridge (along with way too much unused lettuce) until one of us reluctantly chews them or tosses them.

While I’m simultaneously nervous and excited for our next batch of veggies, I’m definitely looking forward to meeting our neighbor who we met through the listserv and agreed to split the share with. Sharing these surprise boxes of vegetables does seem like it would forge some kind of unbreakable bond.

Viva7 just sent me the link to a new blog called Hope for Choice, which includes “a message to those that believe that murder is a way of enforcing a political agenda”:

WE’RE NOT SCARED OF YOU.
WE WILL CONTINUE TO FIGHT FOR CHOICE AND HELP WOMEN WHO FIND THEMSELVES IN THE POSITION TO CHOOSE.
WE WILL EAT UP YOUR HATE LIKE IT IS LOVE, AND USE IT TO FORTIFY OUR STRENGTH.
WE WILL NEVER CONDONE OR USE VIOLENCE AS A MEANS OF ENFORCING A POLITICAL AGENDA.
WE STAND FOR EQUALITY. WE STAND FOR TRUSTING WOMEN.

HOWEVER, WE WILL NOT STAND FOR THIS BULLSHIT.

If you’re reeling from the news about Dr. Tiller’s murder:

• Visit Hope for Choice to make a donation to Dr. Tiller’s clinic.
• Check Feministing’s list of vigils and other suggestions.
• If you’re on Twitter, use the #Tiller hashtag and please leave suggestions in the comments box for who to follow. Right now I’m learning from @veronicaeye, @nerdette, and @JillMZ, among others.

Mr. Pope,

Seriously, was this really necessary? Going to Cameroon and saying condoms are not the answer to the fight against HIV and AIDS?

You know what that does? It takes me back to my days in South Africa, where I got to volunteer with Treatment Action Campaign. (TAC has been called “the world’s most effective AIDS group” by the New York Times. At TAC, they are all about condoms.) I even marched in a parade wearing one of the trademark “HIV Positive” shirts.

Like this! (World Bank Photo Collection)

And THAT just makes me nostalgic, so I go to the TAC website. Oh! And look! They are so with it. Anyone on Facebook can make a donation through Causes. So I just did that.

And since we’ve all heard by now that 3% of the residents of our nation’s capital (yup, that nation’s capital, the one where residents are disenfranchised) are infected, I just made a donation to the Whitman-Walker Clinic, too.

Thank you sincerely for kicking my (condom-loving) self into gear. I’m busting out the t-shirt this weekend.

Peace,

Julia

1. I just watched this video on Jen Lemen’s blog.

School in Arusha + Twitter fiends in Austin = Glory-ous heart-shaped shamrock.

Do I know any of these people personally? Nope.

Do I feel tech’ed out sometimes and do my eyes hurt from staring at a computer screen all day? Yes.

But it’s really cool to work and live in a universe where one can collect similar examples of this interconnectedness / innovation / idealism / howmanybuzzwordsstartwithi? are everywhere.

Which brings me to:

2. I have a job. At an organization full of lovely, creative, musical, service-minded, funny people.

3. Once upon a time, I met some people and we talked about starting a writing center. (Our secret: we never once talked like it wouldn’t come to life.) And now I live far away but—thanks to the magic of the internet and sometimes even a friendly mainstream media nod—I get to follow along as they pull off a hair- and money-raising spectacle too delightful and ridiculous to NOT be true.

4. Remember library cards? I just got one of those.

And speaking of awesome Elissas being published around the web…

Our own Elissa Bassist has been having a rollicking good time over at TheRumpus.net, “an online magazine focused on culture with some politics.”

In her interview with Michael Showalter, the brilliant Bassist poses such questions as “How do you feel about grammar?” and “You co-wrote Wet Hot American Summer with David Wain. Is writing like sex in that it’s better with another person?”

And in A Baker’s Dozen of My Feelings About David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, our heroine overcomes her feeling that “I’m not a person who is a good enough person to write about David Foster Wallace.” And does a darn good job of doing just that.

“The United States is embarrassingly the only democracy in the world that denies the citizens of its capital city from representation in the national legislative body.”

So writes my friend Elissa Froman in A Voice for Every Voter, a piece for the Religious Action Center blog.

Elissa describes the powerful coming-of-age moment that many U.S. citizens take for granted: the day she cast her first ballot, just weeks after her 18th birthday:

…I thought about my four grandparents, not one of whom was able to vote at the age of 18 – disenfranchised by Hitler’s laws and by the citizenship laws of Poland that forbade Jewish participation. I pushed the stylus through the ballot and with great pride, I voted with the knowledge that my vote, meant that I had a voice – that because I voted, I counted.

She goes on to describe her shock when she moved to the District for college, only to find that

Washington, DC has 600,000 residents, making its population approximately the same size as seven states, each with a voting representative and two senators…Yet their representation in Congress is limited to a single non-voting delegate in the House of Representatives.

Read Elissa’s entire post here, or visit DC Vote: Working to End Taxation Without Representation to learn more and urge your elected reps to pass the DC Voting Rights Act.

By Sapphireblue (via Flickr)