Innermost Parts

Tidbit of wisdom - “In politics, peer presssure works”

offf to rally to welcome howard dean.

Everything really is bigger in Texas.

The conference center here is cavernous and echoing. Even the free totebags are stuffed full.

What a weird place. Everywhere I go I see people, some well-dressed, some in T-shirts and jeans, 
are sitting in  hallways plugged to the wall, typing away.

Seeing as how Democracy for America paid my way here, I’m chilling at the DFA caucus. The deputy training director for DFA is teaching people how to organize events.

What have we learned so far? We’ve gone through a case study of organizing a student global warming confernence that DFA did in DC.

The takeaway idea so far seems to be this: Set a goal, set sub-goals for discrete chunks of time, and measure your success accordingly. So if you want 500 students to show up at an event in 5 months, try to invite 100 people per month. If you’re not making your benchmarks, maybe its time to re-evaluate.

I’m typing this on my XO laptop (aka one laptop per child). Have you seen me carrying this around on campus? It is small and green and cost 400 dollars.By 400 dollars I mean you pay 400 dollars to “give one get one”  so that you pay for the cost of producing two, get one, and the second one goes to a child in Mongolia, or Nepal or wherever. Check it out.

I’ve packed my bags, said my goodbyes, and took off. That’s right, I’m sitting in an atlanta airport right now,on my way to Austin, Texas, and the Netroots Nation convention. Woot.

So if you see anything on the agenda you’d like me to check out, or have a qestion you want to ask me, or whatever, feel free to drop me a line / leave a comment.

Check this website for the next few days as I relatemy adventuresto oyu, the Brandeis community, using the magical powers of the world-wide-series-of-tubes

Some bad news and some good news from the good folks at Blue Mass Group.

Bad news: Apparently the Massachusetts ballot initiative banning greyhound/dog racing was challenged in court by the owner of one the racetracks here in MA.

Good news: The Mass. State Supreme Court threw out his legal objections to the initiative, so it can go forward on the ballot.

David at BMG summarizes:

All in all, a big win for the proponents of banning dog racing. The question will appear on the ballot. If it passes, the most that could happen is that Carney & Co. win a regulatory takings case, pursuant to which they would recover from the state the diminution in the value of their property caused by the law. And, especially in light of the SJC’s language emphasizing that dog racing “is a heavily regulated industry that only exists by virtue of legislatively created narrow exceptions to common-law and statutory bans,” there is no guarantee that they would win that case.

Huh? To further simplify: the racetrack owner sued, in part, claiming that getting rid of racing licenses was like getting rid of his private property, so he’s entitled to compensation. The Court slapped him down. And then they let the initiative to go ballot.

To conclude: Yay!

Got some crucial info in the mail. The Mass. State Senate is about to vote on bills regarding Election Day Registration and the National Popular Vote. This is pretty exciting.

Election Day Registration is pretty much what it sounds like. You get to register to vote on Election Day. This is a good idea for several reasons.It’s great for students. I could have voted in the 2007 elections if only we had Election Day Registration (EDR from now on), for one thing. Overall, EDR helps counteract people’s confusion over where they’re registered, where to vote from, etc.

In any case, it’s silly to have an arbitrary cut-off date for when people can register to vote for the next election.

The National Popular Vote initiative says that MA will award it’s electors to the winner of the general election popular vote - but only if 270 electoral votes worth of states agree to do so as well. So it’s a way to have the winner of the popular vote win the election, but without a constitutional amendment. You can read more about the merits of the NPV by reading Hendrik Hertzberg on the matter. In fact, people in general would be served by reading Hendrik Hertzberg.

So call your/our Senator, you know the drill.
For Brandeis’ State Senator:

STATE SENATOR SUSAN C. FARGO

State House
Room 504
Boston, MA 02133
Telephone: (617) 722-1572
Party Affiliation - DEMOCRAT
State House E-Mail Address: Susan.Fargo@state.ma.us

Call! Call now! (Well, at the time of writing it’s 11:20 PM. In which case I mean “Call during a reasonable time!”)
Read the rest…

I know this is a bit different than what I normally write about, but this is my blog, and I get to do what I want! I wrote this on Sunday, by the way.

I just finished talking to my good friend Sahar Oz. Sahar is the former teen coordinator of the Jewish Federation of Rochester (since then he’s gone on to bigger and better things. We miss him!). He’s also of that elite class of people known as “people Sahar Massachi looks up to”.

Calling him a role model is but a banal and crude trivialization of the place he holds in my constellation of personal mentors and heroes.

His dad also died the other day.

Lights off in my apartment, cell phone clutched to my ear, I restlessly paced my apartment today, hearing his anguished voice spill out stories of his father. His father who, despite being the very picture of health, the sort of person who takes 20 mile bike rides, hikes, and so forth, passing away due to a minor heart attack.

Shocking. Painful. And there was nothing I could do but listen.

Naturally, I have to start thinking of my own father. I am jealous of Sahar’s relationship with his dad. It seemed to be such a close, loving one. Don’t get me wrong, I love my dad and he loves me. But it’s for us t0 be emotionally intimate. I don’t know why. We both want to be closer.

I think a lot of it is the language barrier. More and more, either his English is getting worse or I can tolerate it less. Maybe both.

He’s also getting a bit deafer, so he can’t hear me well and often I don’t speak loudly enough for him.

I think neither I nor he nor anyone else realizes how much this little thing affects me to the core.

People build mythologies of their parents as superheroes, and are inevitably disappointed when they turn out to be merely human. Yet, my parents are super. I can’t believe how well a job they’ve done. When they talk about unconditional love, *they mean it*.

So my conception of my parents as heroes may have faded, but it’s still there. They really are quite amazing. Which is why physical weakness on my dad’s part is so scary.

Fuck, I barely know my dad at all, ok? He never talks about his past. He’s home less than my mother is - as he has to, you know, work - so by the time he got home, I’d always be doing my homework.

Hell, how much do I know about my mother?

I’ve always thought this: I really wish I knew how to spend more time with my parents in a non-awkward, fun way.

Maybe I should start thinking this: Let me start cooking up those fun ways, rather than wait for them to fall out of the sky.

You know, I really got to know Sahar Oz (Soz, as I call him) through a trip to Poland. Turns out that during that trip, he made sure to call his father and discuss all that he’d seen. Every night. Despite a nightly allotment of 6 hours of sleep a day.

Maybe that’s what family ties are all about? Reaching towards your kin in times of need, rather than internalizing your problems, or going to friends you met 6 months ago when you first got to campus.

I never once cried in Poland. Surrounded by desolation, echoes of hate and death, a legacy of ashes. Never cried once. When I talked to Soz about it, he said not to worry. “One day in the future, maybe a week, maybe a month,” he said, “it’ll all come rushing back to you. On that day, you’ll finally let it all out.”

That day still hasn’t come. I think I’ve cried just once since then. Just once, and then once again today. Once again today, for as I heard Soz’s voice break up over and over again, in his determined recital of anecdotes, mementos, symbols, trivia and metaphors that constitute the memories of his father, he doesn’t know it, but I was crying with him.

You’ll notice from our site revamp that our new mission statement includes this nugget -

It is our intention to both explore the meaning of social justice and hold both students and faculty to their commitment to that set of values.

With that in mind - what does Social Justice mean to you?

Hey all. We’re doing some behind-the-scenes tweaks to the site, and in that process we’ve also revamped the About us page.

We’ve also changed our mission statement and so forth.

Check it out.

photo by Kamarin Lee

So apparently this happened a while ago, but we missed out on reporting it. Students Crossing Boundaries, the group that took on Jimmy Carter’s challenge and traveled (pretty much exclusively) to the Palestinian Territories, released their report.

You can read it here.

This is an emotionally charged issue. For me especially.

Despite that, I encourage everyone to read the report. You don’t have to agree with it. However, I think it’s incumbent on all of us to give props to the self-organizing, intrepid group of Brandeis students who set up this journey and who took the time to write their honest, heartfelt, and sometimes painful accounts.

Welcome to another edition of “Brandeis people in the news.”

On the same week that Brandeis Professor Peniel Joseph is on PBS Newshour, talking about historic role of the vice-presidency (and pointing out that Al Gore was the best VP ever) , we have Brandeis rising sophomore Nathan J. Robinson writing in the Huffington Post: “What it’s like to watch FOX News for 24 Straight Hours”.

Just out of his freshman year of college, and already writing for the HuffPost? Kudos. Kudos to both.

My favorite bits?

As I slowly rouse myself, the first words I hear are of a Blonde FOX Lady saying this:

“It’s hard to talk about climate change without talking about compact fluorescent lightbulbs, soon to be forced on you by the government. But could they KILL you?”

It was not shaping up to be a good day.

…

The worst thing about FOX is not its bias, but the “panic mode” that it seems to live in. Everything is a catastrophe. Immigrants will get you. Lightbulbs will get you. Wildfires will get you. Jesse Jackson will cut your nuts off.

Hahaha.

Update -

Congrats to David Pepose on writing an article that made it to the front page of the New York Sun.