From The Half-Red House

Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, IWW organizer, gave the world the brave words in the title of this posting. She saw workers dying from unsafe working conditions, military repression of unions, and lynchings by quasi- and non-governmental groups such as the American Legion and the Ku Klux Klan, and she mourned.

In just the same way, all students and workers in this country are mourning the deaths of the students and faculty at Virginia Tech due to a senseless, murderous act. And there’s more… every day we mourn the deaths of young Americans in Iraq and people around the world who die from curable waterborne diseases, police violence and military actions, tribal and sectarian violence.

And we are also mourning the loss of freedoms that we thought had been won once and for all: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to travel, freedom to organize on the job, even freedom from slavery…  and freedom to attend college in an atmosphere of safety and peaceful free inquiry.

How does one disturbed person kill thirty innocent people? With a high-tech gun. How does he get such a gun? Why is it so easy to get hold of such a gun? It’s the policy of a government that is based on systematic violence to encourage the manufacture, importation and sale of these weapons. Predictably, one of the talking heads on the morning news was a woman from Texas who said that if only all the students and faculty at Virginia Tech  had been armed to the teeth, this tragedy could not have happened, that the University needed to drop its gun-free campus rule.The same regime backs wars of aggression, limitation on workers rights, heavy-handed police responses to immigration issues, building more prisons while cutting back on public education, public health and public transportation, usurious interest rates for the poor, outsourcing manufacturing, and the consolidation of media ownership in the hands of a small number of wealthy corporations.

As Mother Jones pointed out, mourning is not enough. There are reasons for these losses of life and freedom, and they can be laid at the doorstep of certain institutions and rich, powerful individuals.

Going beyond mourning is what May Day is all about. All the issues of life and freedom that are before us now are related, and May Day is the day to see how they are related and use the powerful tool of solidarity to unite our struggles and win victories. All over the country, groups are going to be rallying for immigrant rights (for example, in Boston there will be a massive rally), and at UMass Lowell, students in conjuunction with community organizations such as the Coalition for a Better Acre will be holding a “strike” on the South Campus, though the proper name for it is “teach-in”). Housing advocates, workers, students, and immigration rights activists will be making common cause. I tend to think we might add stopping war, gun control, funding for anti-poverty programs and support bloggers and  for small webcasters  to the issues to be addressed.

Random Notes from The New England News Forum Conference

Last Thursday I was reminded by my advisor at U. Mass. Lowell that I was scheduled to help him present our ongoing work on “indicators” at a media conference in Lowell on Saturday. I had completely forgotten, so I scrambled to help him get the Powerpoint presentation in order while also scrambling to  find a substitute to organize the weekly peace vigil in Peterborough. We managed to finish both tasks. My wife was in a panic over a birthday party for her mother that was happening Saturday evening at our house; I tried to help out and promised to be home by 4:00 p.m. On Saturday, I got up early and manged to get to Lowell by the 8:00 am start of the conference.

This conference is one I would have wanted to attend in any case, since it brought together serious reporters and bloggers in a way that fostered lots of discussion and not too much unnecessary structure. A number of other people from our public affairs radio program “Thinking Out Loud” were also there in various roles, publicizing this June’s Grassroots Radio Conference. My ID tag said I represented the “Center for Industrial Competitiveness”, a UML center that was named with political correctness in  mind at a time of increasing conservatism. The people involved are progressive thinkers, and not the beetle-browed free-market champions that the name seems to imply. But I had to explain to people I met that I was also (and mainly) from the community/college radio community.

Our presentation went well, with relatively few technical glitches,and we got questions from small-town journalists and bloggers who were genuinely excited about the possibility of linking up to a trustworthy, interactive source of factual information on their local communities and environments.

The keynote speaker was Jim Douglas, the governor of Vermont, who focused on his plan to make the entire state wi-fi and cell-phone accessible. I was impressed that, although he was a Republican, he seemed ready to talk sensibly and practically about things like alternative energy and citizen journalism. He seemed positively Canadian in outlook (I mean that as a compliment).

The highlight of the day for me was the panel discussion on shield laws for bloggers and journalists, and the highlight of the panel was seeing and hearing from Sarah Olsen, the journalist who interviewed  Iraq War deployment-refuser  Lt. Ehren Watada and had been subpeonaed to testify at his military trial. She had refused on the grounds that “members of the military must be free to speak with journalists without fear of retribution or censure.” Her refusal would probably not have been protected by any existing shield law, beacuse she was standing up for the right of dissenters in the military to air their true views, and not strictly for her own rights as a reporter. When she was not speaking, I was impressed with the way she sat at her iMac, constantly looking around at the audience and panel,  occasionally typing something or reacting mercurially to something she heard one of the panelists say. She reminded me of my childhood impressions of Loren Eiseley … a restless and inquisitive mind that took delight in the constantly-changing  details of her environment. I will be paying attention to whateer she writes next!

The content of the discussion of shield laws was something all of us who are remotely connected to journalism or blogging need to think about. One panelist, Jim Taricani, WJAR-TV in Providence RI talked about his experience of being called on to disclose the identity of a source in a bribery scandal story, which led to his spending a period in house-arrest for contempt. Two other panelists, lawyer Jeff Newman and cable news broadcaster Charlie Kravitz, explained that shield laws exist to define how the law should deal with cases where the First Ammendment protecton of journalist conflicts with the sixth-ammendment requirements for due process of law. They talked about a proposed Massachusetts shield law that would offer strong protections to journalists; they noted that a majority of states have shiled laws of some kind, making liberal Massachusetts a highly-visible standout in not having one. Most panelists argued that strong shield laws are preferable to weak ones or no law at all, but  Bill Ketter, editor-in-chief of the  Lawrence (MA) Eagle Tribune argued that having a shield law may actually weaken the common-law and First Ammendment protections by placing these issues into the hands of legislatures which may quietly narrow their scope. It was emphasized repeatedly that reporters need to be prepared to go to jail if necessary to protect sources and notes, because media owners may not be willing to put up the massive amounts of money needed to fight such cases successfully.

Most of the conference was videotaped and will be available on the web in coming days. I look forward to seeing the videos of the panels I missed. I had to leave early in order to get home for the birthday party (I was late, but so was the “birthday girl”)

Here is the description of the conference from its website. Probably the NENF website will be the place to look for links to the videos once they are posted.

I really don’t want to go overboard praising Governor Douglas, the Republican governor of Vermont. What I liked most about him at yesterday’s conference  was that he was not what Patch Adams calls “puffy” (with George W. Bush and Hugo Chavez being examples of typical puffy male politicians). Outside the conference was a car with a bumpersticker that better expresses my feelings about Republicans and their platform: “Republicans for Voldemort” . In case you haven’t heard of Voldemort, he is the personification of evil in the Harry Potter series, who wants to bring about the end of everything that makes life worth living, if not to do away with life on Earth itself; continuous war and torture being the methods of choice. This is the national Republican platform in a nutshell.

Douglas has opposed the large-scale wind electric generation projects that I think would enhance the future of Vermont and New England, and he has been unnecessarily supportive of the continued operation of the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant. I tend to disagree with him on lots of subjects, but I don’t feel dismissed by him.

I think US politics would be more meaningful and realistic if the two dominant parties were the Democrats and the Greens, with the Republicans having to fight tooth and nail to get on the ballot each election. We the people would still have to struggle to save the planet and get a fair deal for working people, but it might be possible to get some support for these goals at the national level. I’m disgusted with the current deals to keep funding the war and keep it going strong until the next presidential election.

Patch Adams, in the video linked above, also says that if he had a magic wand he’d place women in charge, and that of all the major problems in the world, none are caused by women (I can thiink of a few counterexamples such as Margaret Thatcher and Lynddie England, but for the most part I think he’s right). When I first arrived at the conference yesterday, males were about 80 percent of the people there, and a friend who had been to previous Media Giraffe conferences told me that women tended to predominate there. Later in the day the balance of genders grew better. At the shield-law session, close to half the audience was female, and it included one of my favorite journalists, Arnie Arnesen of New Hampshire.