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swinging through summer |
4/27/2001: Looks like I've been slacking off again. So much stuff, so little time to write about it...
On April 3rd there was the Urbana municipal elections. I was pleased, as just about every candidate I was hoping would win, won. That includes Danielle Chynoweth in Ward 4 and Laura Huth (lives across the street from me) in Ward 5. We now have a 5 to 2 progressive majority on the council, and I hang regularly with 4 of those, so it's time to start pulling some strings, er, graft, er...
On April 6th I took part in a teach-in about the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas at the IMC (as one of three speakers). We had quite a turnout, and some interesting discussions and art followed, including with some of the city council. I later got to be on the radio a coupla times, sometimes live and sometimes just the tape of me that was from the 6th. I realize my voice sounds absolutely horrid.
On April 12th we had Ralph Nader come by to have lunch and speak at the IMC. He sat around and ate bean soup with people, out of our somewhat mix-n-match dishes, and that itself was interesting - I can't imagine Clinton doing the same when he visited. He also spoke for free, which is a bit unusual these days! The room was pretty packed, around 50 or 60 people? Nader was quite the down to earth guy, answering random questions, and talked a bit with Danielle, who shares a lot of views on planning with the green party platform, but who ran as a democrat in the city election. He gets a lot of press from certain democrats as a "spoiler," but in person he was speaking at length about how if there are people in ANY party out there with views you can wholeheartedly support, then go for it - mainstream, whatever "wing" they're from. Throw whatever organization you have out there to get votes for that person. But when there aren't any such people, then you gotta step up and run someone on your own ticket, and given the current system, you need a party office to do it, so either way it's good to have channels set up to support someone, either your own party, or some other party. He was asked about whether the Green party was going to sorta die the way the Reform party has been, as a cult of personality, and he seems to think it's important to get someone else to run, and to get more people to run, locally. That was interesting too, as I've read lots of criticism of his own run as being solely a cult of personality. Apparently he recognizes that and indeed sees it as a problem. All in all it was an interesting lunch. The best part, of course, is that he wasn't afraid to stand up there by himself and take questions from us, who had NOT been screened in any way, completely LIVE. No matter WHAT a guy is saying, that's something I wholeheartedly have respect for. Hiding behind handlers and only taking scripted questions is just, well, wussy, and that's all we've gotten with quite a few visitors of late (worst case example being that travesty of a CNN play they tried to pass off as a "town meeting" after the Columbine shootings in 1999).
On April 21st I took a road trip to New Harmony, Indiana with Belden Fields and some students in the class he teaches at UIUC. We drove on Illinois 130 south to IL 1 and IL 14 and then crossed into Indiana in Posey County over the Wabash. The drive itself was great, passing through lots of places I don't get to all that often, places that I hear about mainly in the severe weather reports. We went through Olney which is famous for white squirrels and when one of my old lab partners was from. New Harmony itself is an old planned community. It started off as a religious community run by a group called the Harmonists. Their deal was they thought Jesus would come back for them in their lifetime, so they worked and made this community out in the middle of nowhere, from nothing, to live religiously while they waited. They became prosperous and eventually moved back east, at which point they sold the entire town to one Richard Owen, an early socialist from Scotland. This was around 1820. They lived communally for a while, and then stopped that but most of them stuck around, and most of them were scientists, so they had quite the thriving scholarly community and surveyed much of the states of Illinois and Indiana. Learning about all this was interesting, but it was also just great being down there in southern Indiana. Their season is a few weeks ahead of ours, so their trees were already in full leaf, lilacs out, and it was wonderful just sitting on a bench in the street looking up through the various shades of grey and greens of the leaves, at the sky and the temperature was just about perfect. Also while there we saw a roofless church which had excellent views of fields and the river, through cutouts in the walls.
I've been listening to the news everyday off of the NHK web page, and making minidiscs of random music...
4/09/2001: Yesterday was summer.