Ed. Note: Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Defense announced another nine American soldiers died in Iraq yesterday. Here's a short story about one who I hope is still alive.

 

The Hartford Police Department admits that it lacks sufficient officers to patrol city streets ruled by gang violence and teen gun battles.

 

Now, here comes George W. Bush to make things worse by stealing four of our officers to patrol the insurgent streets of Iraq for 18 months.

 

Bush's war of choice has called two Connecticut Army National Guard companies to duty. One of them, the 1048th Medium Truck Company, will escort military convoys across the desert with the 82nd Airborne Division.

 

The 1048th counts Asylum Hill Community Officer Jim Barrett and three other of Hartford's finest among its ranks. The 1048th also contains officers from police departments of surrounding towns, according to Barrett.

 

Governor M. Jodi Rell, for all her bickering with Mayor Eddie Perez about state police support for beleaguered city law enforcement, will send these two Connecticut companies off to hell with a celebration at the state house on June 25.

Link...

Ed. note: Since we're dealing with archives, this makes sense. Two weeks after I wrote the column published online yesterday, I had a change of heart, and published this in response to myself. Kovel's book moved me, but I am not sure that I still would conclude the same, but it's worth a read, particularly Kovel's argument on Bhopal.

 

Yes, I stand corrected, but moreso, inspired to take greater action.

 

Since I wrote two weeks ago that riding my bike and working in a community garden will create the change I want to see, I have learned that pedaling and planting by themselves are inadequate, and must join with a greater struggle to overcome our societal ills.

 

My affinity for veggies and velos are “voluntarism,” according to Joel Kovel, in his 2002 book “The Enemy of Nature.” These actions, “arise from good intention,” he says, and are “taken primarily on moral or aesthetic grounds.” But, “Such actions, lists of which can be found in mass-marketed literature of the ‘xx things you can do to save the planet’ type, stand as much chance of overcoming the ecological crisis as handing out spare change on the subway does of overcoming poverty.”

 

What ecological crisis? The one spurred by capitalism’s never satiated desire for growth. Hartford’s brownfields, high asthma rate and landfills play minor roles in capital’s global tragedy.

 

Kovel argues not only the standard Marxist grounds that capital separates us from our labor, as we see in Hartford’s miserable poverty. But capitalism is the efficient cause of global warming and the destruction of the world.

 

Bluntly, it’s either capitalism or us, Kovel says.

Link...

Ed. note: Sometimes I read these archives and think I'm a little melodramatic. Three years later, Matt Blood no longer lives in Hartford, and the trees we planted in this one have been since ripped up by the Mayor, but the writing here still stands. And this one has a follow-up column I'll post tomorrow.

 

What do you want? Matt Blood asked me recently.

 

“I want to live in a place I am not ashamed of,” I said. My country, as great as it is, makes me sad. We endure lives of automobile-based alienation, maintain suicidal facades of arrogance and ignorance, disregard the people around us who suffer poverty and oppression.

 

I want to live in a pretty city, prospering on its own sense of pride, justice and effort. I want to spend time with people who feed, clothe and educate themselves, who have respect for the planet which sustains all our existences.

 

I feel I can be a part of building my ideal world by doing activities that promote this vision. Matt got me thinking. Gandhi said “Become the change you want to see.” Wherever I can, I want to heed those words. It takes discipline and courage, but I recently saw a quote that exhorted me, whenever I feel weak, to turn to my vision for strength.

Link...

 

Despite my exhaustion last night, I sat awake in bed for some time, pondering the potentially unstable future of American democracy.

 

Two events yesterday combined to push me to such discomfort. First, I took a tour of Waterbury's Rowland Courthouse with about a dozen students from Watertown High School, and two teachers (one of whom is my sister), where a law enforcement officer promised the students the situation in the States would worsen.

 

Then I read "Fascist America, in 10 Easy Steps," an essay in the UK's The Guardian by Naomi Wolf, clearly too hot to publish in any American newspapers.

 

Perhaps I shouldn't have added to my unrest by reading my notebook entries from early January, after I was arrested. But the longtitudinal ripples across the state that resulted when police here put a pacifist like me on a list and threw me in jail for taking photos are too hard to ignore.

 

And I hope this confluence of thoughts about dirty bombs and dictatorships in America is all wrong, that I am jumping to a Y2K conclusion here. But I can't quell the primal doubts about consolidation of executive power.

Link...

 

This Sunday afternoon April 29 at Hartford Public High School, Mayor Eddie Perez will welcome the accreditation examiners from the New England Association of Schools and Colleges, or NEASC.

NEASC placed the country's second oldest public high school on probation back in December 1997, when Perez was making his name at the Learning Corridor, and HPHS now has the chance to clear its historical name.

 

But this is not only a pass-fail exam for the Pub, it's for Mayor Perez, too. The buck has to stop with him, the self-anointed chairman of the board of education and the chairman of the school building committee.

 

After taking a 90-minute tour of HPHS Monday morning April 23, I met wonderful professionals who have dedicated their lives to serving students. But they are also deeply concerned with the present and future status of the edifice.

 

I also saw many, many construction problems that would give me pause if I were an inspector looking to certify the best educational practices at the Forest Street structure.

Link...

 

Luis Cotto, over at La Paloma, shares this anecdote about El Alcalde this morning.

If one were to rely on recent criticisms of the man, one would think that El Alcalde was akin to oil companies in his disregard of the environment. His disregard to the work the Knox Park Foundation put in to the Farmington and Broad Street proposed site for the Pathways to Technology Charter School fueled this criticism. Knox Park planted multiple trees and shrubery on the site and created a much needed green space for that area. Eddie had the site dug up in his tug of war with the state. The site resembles the perfect mud football field now.

 

So it was with much surprise that IonHartford heard of El Alcalde’s participation in Knox Park’s Trees for Hartford’s Neighborhoods program this past Saturday, April 14. It was with added surprise to find out that this was not Eddie’s first foray into this program…he has participated in four other such plantings. Apparently Eddie is quite the arborist.

Link to IONHartford...

 

My attorney Norman Pattis pulls no punches, (and I love it). Even with people on my side, Norm has held up a mirror and said, hey, there's a wart. He pissed off SPJ, and this time, he is swinging at the legislature, in particular, Mike Lawlor and the Judiciary Committee, who has been on top of what happened to me. From Norm's blog:

I just don't get it. The judiciary has all but rolled over and died. Lawmakers are now aching to call the shots on court rulemaking, as though we need more hooplah from the part-timers over in the legislature. Have we not already learned that the legislature is the most dangerous branch of government?

 

Perhaps former Supreme Court Chief Justice William "Taco" Sullivan was right, lawmakers really can't be trusted to use judgment. They are prone to overreact and seek political advantage over trifles.

 

Sullivan's decision to delay publication of a controversial Supreme Court decision is by now the stuff of legend. He wanted to help along the nomination of Associate Justice Peter Zarella. Both Sullivan and Zarella had taken a position in the decision Sullivan thought might offend lawmakers. So he sat on the case for awhile.Then the law of unintended consequences kicked in.

Link to Pattis' Blog...

 

Sunday evening, I needed a bicycle ride after spending a beautiful spring day inside working on law school homework. So I pedaled straight west on Farmington, then buzzed UConn Law School and pointed to the burbs on Fern Street.

 

The goal was to see how far I could get in 30 minutes. Once I crossed Prospect, I noticed it was trash day, and after about 10 minutes, I spotted an oriental rug that looked worth salvaging. I bolted home and grabbed my camera and messenger bag.

 

The trash we discard tells much about our society, and gives us an idea of what small actions we can take to reduce the waste that enters into our trash streams, all of which ends up either back in our air, as electricity or as ash on Mount Trashmore in Hartford's North Meadows.

 

So, in honor of Earth Day, here is a short photo essay on what we throw away.

Link...

 

This was one of those weeks which may be bound by the weight of human history to just be rotten. These past seven days represent the collective anniversaries of Hitler's birthday, the shootings at Columbine (1999), the massacre at Waco (1993), the response at Oklahoma City (1995), and now, the shooting spree at Virginia Tech.

 

That's a lot of bodies, and I haven't even talked about the deadliest week in Iraq in a long time. They had like 20 Virginia Tech's since last Sunday. It's all so numbing.

 

Perhaps its just the media cycle that makes this week seem more brutal than any other of the 52. But now we have another reason to dread its passage.

 

What is it about these last seven days as part of the annual cycle that lend themselves to this bleeding piece of earth? Anthony in Shakespeare's Julius Caeser bids us that we should not be "meek and gentle with these butchers!"

 

This week, I found myself thinking about the dead, from a moment in Oklahoma City I had in the summer of 1997. My dad and sister and I drove cross country, back to Connecticut from San Francisco, and we had an opportunity to visit the spot of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.

Link...

 

I t's too nice out to be in front of the computer. Get outside and live a little. But first, do yourself a favor. Power yourself up a big bowl of super sugar cereal, pull up a chair and dig into this classic Tom & Jerry number.

On the same YouTube page where this is, tons of other Tom & Jerry live, too. But this is among the best.

Link...