Sara walks into the neighborhood clinic where I am volunteering in rural Venezuela, in a municipality of less than 15,000 people situated in the Andes mountains. Besides tourism, agriculture fuels the local economy, which is dependent on small farms. Sara visited today for her checkup. She's 35 and has lived here all her life. "Before this clinic was here, I never went to the doctor," she explains.
In the hours following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center firefighters, police, and emergency medical technicians performed acts of enormous courage. Many of them died or were exposed to health-threatening substances while performing these heroic deeds. Unfortunately, while bureaucrats were unctuously praising these heroes, irresponsible and deceptive post-attack actions by some officials paved the way for more illnesses and deaths among workers and residents in Lower Manhattan.
There is a touch of the 19th century scramble to divide Africa among European colonial powers in Russia's decision to drop a capsule containing a Russian flag on the Arctic sea floor not far from the North Pole on August 2nd. In preparation for the 1885 Berlin Conference which was to draw the boundaries of the African colonies, there was a mad rush to place national flags on all the commercial outposts so that France, England, Germany, Spain, Belgium and Portugal could claim prior possession of the area.
Gabriela Krista Dalena sits on a painter's stool, narrating a harrowing incident from a night in April 2003. A ray of late morning sunlight comes through the parted doors of the verandah across her. It illuminates the corners of oil paintings hanging on the room's high walls and the delicate features of terracotta sculptures sitting on the tops of wooden cabinet and tables and lining the wooden floor. Dalena, an independent filmmaker, recalls how 20 men, armed and masked, abducted five of her colleagues, including her ex-boyfriend, a cameraman. Woman in Black
The day after I marched in the January 27th mass demonstration against the war in DC, I attended the Holocaust museum for the first time. Though I had but a fraction of the time one needs to take-in the gut-wrenching history of the museum's multiple levels, the experience haunted me.
Most progressives already know that the nation's media is in the hands of the few, the rich, the white, and the male. We know that local control of the airwaves and newspapers is as rare as a "fair and balanced" Fox news report, and as tenuous as Cheney's stuttering heart. We know that to create any lasting and systemic social change - out with the old, in with the bold - we must take back the media that we've lost.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019