Entries Tagged 'activism' ↓

Laura and I were invited to read at Read to Rebuild, a reading benefit for Haiti put on by Reading Local and Mercy Corps, and hosted by my friend Mel Favara.

Reading Local’s astute interviewer Karen Munro interviewed both Laura Moulton and myself here. They were great questions.

Tom Spanbauer, Ariel Gore, Kevin Sampsell and Margaret Malone will also be reading. Sponsors include Dark Horse Comics and Hawthorne books and it will be held at the Writer’s Dojo (March 16th @ 6:30pm). Needless to say,  it’s going to be a rad night.

Get all the  details at Reading Local’s page on Read to Rebuild: A Haiti Benefit Reading

Researching a novel is tremendous good fun. A lot of the time I have no idea where I’m going to end up. Today’s adventure led me, among other places, to this post on neighborhood secession by Matthew Mullenix.

It’s a quick read and not very in-depth, but has some sound ideas. Essentially that by focussing your consumption, trade and energy in your own neighborhood, you can largely opt-out of the system. And if a whole neighborhood does it, it can be a quiet sort of secession. I was particularly moved by his April 1st follow-up comment:

Who will regulate the safety of the food and our health? I think that’s an interesting question and prompts us to ask if regulation of food safety is the same thing as ensuring food safety? It also begs the question: From what does federal regulation protect us?

Today’s case of pastacio contamination, much like the recent peanut scare, offers an important role for federal regulation; but it only becomes so important because our food system is based on interstate commerce and the industrial-scale blending of basic ingredients (like nuts, or corn) into thousands of other food products that will be sold around the world.

Such a system entails tremendous risk, chief among them the fact that once a contaminant is found to have sickened one person, hundreds of thousands have been exposed. It is a huge corporate system that requires a huge layer of government oversight, both at odds against each other and neither capable of managing the inherent risks.

Compare this to a local food system, the smallest being the production line that extends from my garden to my kitchen. That supply chain is short and secure. The producer (me) and consumers (my family and friends) are a limited group who know each other well. We insure food quality by tending personally to its production and preparation, and we share whatever risks that entails. Worst case scenario (a soft tomato?) is that only a few will ever suffer from a system failure.

Thus, my garden is in the best interests of national security. Albeit, the nation that is our family.

Update: The Oregonian wrote about Coen

Among Saturday’s more poignant images was a tiny 4-year-old boy who held a sign that said, “This war’s older than me.”

Link to article: Five years of duty, dissent and war

Go Coen!

—

And thus the sign we made him, This War is Older than Me! He also thought ‘Poop on the war’ would be a good one.

I shipped my family off to the protest in downtown Portland today (still editing), and was awfully proud watching them go.

It’s very depressing to think that he has never known a time where we aren’t at war. Since we listen to a fair bit of radio, he has often inquired about such-and-such market bombing, and we’ve taken care with the language and have begun to censor the radio a little. At any rate, at just over four, he’s well aware of the war going on on the other side of the world and how we feel about it – and of course he’s also quite familiar with Adel Hamad/Project Hamad and thus Guantanamo. Not that each age doesn’t have its craziness, but these are strange times to grow up in.

At any rate, just for fun we did a search on Flickr tonight to see if he turned up anywhere, as Laura said quite a few people took his photo.

What do you know, he’s here:
http://flickr.com/photos/36254855@N00/2336481760/

and here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tomlechner/2336714908/

side note: I’m sort of mixed about posting photos of Coen – I probably won’t do this a lot. There are various opinions from other blogs I respect – Tim Bray’s ongoing makes a point of not naming children’s names or posting photos, and the Granades are very open about this sort of thing. I like the idea of being open about it, but I’m naturally secretive and again I think this is a strange time to be growing up. But since this seems like an exceptional case and many others took his photo, and, I admit, I’m proud to think of him carrying a protest sign, I’m going for it.