Good music you should know about

A couple of nights ago, Elizabeth and I went to go and see one of the most amazing shows that I have ever seen. Many of you who are probably really into music probably have already taken the Pabst Theatre for granted, but its got a beautiful light and Ora about the whole place. It seems that when the music starts, and the effects get going with the music that you could be at the gates of heaven in a celestial bliss.

Although, I have never written or read too much about music and would definitely not consider myself to be a proficient, you should still check these folks out.

We went to go see Jose Gonzalez and Mia Doi Todd on Tuesday. Together, they made one of the best shows ever. If your into very earthy folksy guitar picking music with beautiful ambient vocals this just might be your thing. Jose Gonzalez has always been one of my top picks and despite his name, he is actually from Sweden. With a classical guitar and very well thought out vocals it was definitely an amazing show.

The best kept ssecret of the whole thing however was a not as well known lady by the name of Mia Doi Todd who has been producing albums for about 10 years now. She began the show with this really amazing song called River of Life- the song, which was played with a foot organ, guitar and bongo drum sent my senses through bliss. I don't know if you ever had the feeling of so much emotion emulating from something that your body reacts and your cheeks begin to tingle, but that's what happened. Her new album Gea is amazing and if you get the chance to check her out make sure that you do. Her website is http://www.miadoitodd.com/.


If you really like these artists with a very organic, folksy feel, you may also want to check out these guys to:

Sun Kil Moon: soft and poetic, post industrial sounding-

Alexi Murdoch- my all time favorite

Laura Viers- beautiful- very down to earth

The Wailing Jenny's- women's folk band out of Winnipeg, Manitoba

Happy Music Listening!

Milwaukee's Movement for Social Change

I just thought that I would take some time to reflect on the movement towards social justice in the city of Milwaukee. One thing that is nice about the movement here in this city is because of its size, it is very easy to figure out the movers and shakers relatively quickly.

There are so many things going on that we have to be excited about in this city. Being the optimist that I am the movement has gotten tons of neat stuff going on, from voter registration drives, solid coordination amongst labor unions, rock shows featuring big artists centered around uniting the city for good jobs and opposition to immigrant raids, active student organizations at Marquette that say no to sweatshop labor, challenges to law that don't allow felons to vote, a Paid Sick Leave referendum that will give all workers in Milwaukee Paid sick time, an active sanctuary movement, a momentous presence against the war, a real attempt to bridge divides in racial disparity through free markets by students at UWM, to a hundred different union organizing campaigns, clergy mobilization by MICAH, Interfaith Conference and FCWJ. Things are happening right now and its good to be apart of it all.

Some good organizations that are apart of this that you should know about include some of the following.

9to5-Working Women's Association
Voces de la frontera-Immigrant Worker Rights Center
Students for a Democratic Society- Student anti-war group (UWM)
Progressive Students of Milwaukee-Student anti-war group (UWM)
The United Left- Leftists uniting!
Food Not Bombs- Radical food for the poor group
Milwaukee Free School- offering free classes for community
Arab Anti-discrimination committee- anti discriminatory group
LGBT Center- focused on issues facing the Gay, Lesbian, Bi-sexual and transgender community
Peace Action- City Wide Anti War Group
ACLU- Legal Action
AFT Local 212- Anti War Union
Veterans for Peace- War Veterans United for Peace
WISCOSH- Protecting and enhancing workplace safety standards
Justice 2000-Drivers License justice
Good Jobs Livable Communities- direct action focused around good jobs
New Hope- Program to help to ex-felons
Milwaukee Junior Cycling- Bicycle racing for underprivileged kids
Faith Community for Worker Justice- Workers issues from faith context
Lutheran Human Relations Association- focused around human right issues
Human Rights Coalition-pushing for human rights committee in city
American Jewish Committee-Looking at social justice from a Jewish perspective
Metropolitan Milwaukee Fair Housing Council- Fair housing in the city
US Labor Against the War- Organized labor opposing the war
Milwaukee Area Labor Council- Central Labor Council for Milwaukee
Milwaukee Network for Social Change- Free Vans and Free Market promoting free culture
Peace and Justice Studies at Marquette- educational aspect around peace issues
Marquette Campus Ministry-promoting justice issues from religious stance
Catholics for Peace and Justice- Catholics working for a better world
MICAH- Milwaukee Inner City Congregations involved in making a difference
Interfaith Conference-Uniting people of faith around social justice
S.U.F.U.R-Students for Immigrant Rights
Milwaukee Fair Trade Council: united around Fair Trade issues in Milwaukee
Milwaukee Bicycle Co-op- bicycles for everybody
Milwaukee Housing Trust Fund: Affordable housing for people in poverty
ACORN- Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now
Running Rebels- Inner City High School Students united around change
Urban Underground-United around justice in the streets
Citizen Action, WI- focusing on racial disparities in the city
Campaign Against Violence- working to make the streets of Milwaukee a better place to live
WISPIRG- Wisconsin's Public Interest Research Group
People's Book Co-op- radical educational bookstore
Cream City Collective- radical book store in riverwest
4th Street Forum- educational seminar informing people of Milwaukee about community issues
Urban Ecology Center- raising environmental awareness in the city
Broad Vocabulary-radical feminist bookstore in Bay View
Bicycle Federation of Wisconsin- supporting bicycle advocacy in the state

I apologize if I missed your group, there is so much good stuff going on it is sometimes hard to get it all down at once.

With all of this momentum and amount of organizations here in the city that are working toward positive social change, we all really have the opportunity and the obligation to get involved in our local communities.

Sometimes it seems arduous, I mean with all of these different groups here in the city working for change, it may seem like all of the bases are covered and their is nothing left to do. However, when we look at the state of our community when it comes to poverty, discrimination, environmental issues, and education, what we really see is that we are not winning as the people.

No matter what your political backing is, your beliefs are about the state of Milwaukee, there is something that we offer here that creates a better and brighter future here in the city that is working toward building a better Milwaukee.

Have some pride in your city and get involved! If any of these groups sound like they interest you, feel free to contact me and I'll put you in touch with the right people to get involved.

Together, even though we are fractured around our issues we make up the movement, the movement for change, the movement for optimism, and the movement for a better world! When we all do our part to get involved, we are doing our part "to be the change that we wish to see in the world"

Update on Capital Returns

If you have been following my blog at all, you may have heard about the Capital Returns Campaign that I have discussed relatively intensively.

I just wanted to give you an idea of what is going on. Monday, Jan 28th the United Steelworkers went to Capital Returns with enough signatures to file for voluntary recognition of a union and after the company refused to grant recognition, the Steelworkers went to the National Labor Relations Board to file for elections.

With that said, the workers of Capital Returns will have the chance to ultimately decide if they wish to have a union will be held in the beginning of March. Before that however, the company is going to do everything in their power to make sure that the workers are intimidated and scared enough to vote against the union.

That's where you come in! On Feb 20th, 2008 at 3:00pm at Capital Returns (6101 N 64th St) we will be having a mass rally to show that we all support the struggle of the workers at Capital Returns.

The company will be doing their part to intimidate the workers, do your part to show the workers how much this community supports these workers!

Presidential Nominations

Okay, okay so I admit. The political primary elections have swept me up like a Oklahoma tornado. My once beloved act of watching football, and especially the first week of the playoffs was all of the sudden swished away by the roaring of debates in Iowa and New Hampshire. Instead of watching the Seahawks beat the Redskins last week, I turned my new full attention over to my new favorite 'football' team, Barrack Obama who had an close second place finish in the tight last game in New Hampshire.

So why do I like Obama you may ask? It's pretty easy, Obama is the only real presidential candidate with any sense of winning that has some spunk behind him. His huge following of young people and idealism towards real change makes a young idealist like myself smile a mile wide. Could we really have a potential president that actually started his career doing just what I do? A grassroots organizer? How exciting! A president who knows what its like to be working on the streets trying to empower poor people to stand up for themselves and realize the immense amount of power that they have when they're organized?!

I don't want to do too much political bashing here, but Mrs. Clinton just doesn't have that appeal, her insider Washington persona just doesn't sit well with the people that really want a new kind of government that really listens to the people and not the lobbyist. The establishment, in this election just won't do. Over the past 7 years we have had to put up with politicians that have sold their ideas to the highest bidder and I applaud a personality in politics that says lobbyist determining the agenda are a thing of the past.

With regard to John Edwards, I really really really like him. He's a very youthful guy that really plays up on the importance of the America's working people. He has come out strongly against the possible new CAFTA agreements that would do no good for the Central American workers or American workers. I love that he has that hometown personality and is so in support of labor rights. He too has denounced the power of the lobbyists and stated how important it is for working families to have the largest voice in American politics, the only problem is that with such a low percentage of the vote in the early primaries, his chances of winning seem slim to none. I do however think that he would make an excellent vice president to Barrack Obama should he win the nomination.

Now by reading my blogs and my work as a community organizer, you probably realized by now that I lean pretty hard to the left. And like I said, I don't want to do too much bashing, but here's a little of what I think about the candidates on the right.

John McCain if I had to pick out of the Republicans is probably my top choice, mostly because so many of the others just give me the creeps! I like some of John McCain's ideas, especially on human rights. As a solider in Vietnam and a POW, he really knows first hand what it means to be tortured and how inhumane torture is. I remember a few years ago he proposed a bill in the Senate that would try to protect the civil liberties of incarcerated 'enemy combatants' against interrogations that involved torture. He also, among the republicans seems to have the most logical and sane ideas about immigration, even though he discusses cracking down on undocumented migrants, he took quite a bit of fire for not being tougher on those issues and refused to relent. However, his lack of a plan for universal health care and pro market beliefs make me feel as if he's a no go.

Mitt Romney is a totally different story. I find the guy to be downright scary and quite frankly, just not a very nice guy. His political attack ads that he has pushed on everybody who dares face him has in my mind portrayed him as a mean spirited guy that's willing to beat up anyone that comes in his way. If he were to become president, I would certainly be scared, given the United State's already shaky international relations with Iran especially make me think that if he picked the same fight that he is doing with other republicans we just might have nuclear warfare in Iran. Also his very right wing beliefs about the free market and what comes across as racist remarks regarding undocumented immigrants make him probably what I would consider my very last option.

Mike Huckabee is a guy that really perplexes me, okay... well maybe not. As a former Baptist Minister he makes me think that he might be okay, okay maybe not. The moment that I hear that he is also a Republican make me add 1 and 1 together to equal another Bush. The Christan Right loves this guy, but the Christian right is not Christianity. His hard nose attacks on the immigration issue make me wonder if he actually ever did read the Bible that he supposeably espouses when we read that "the foxes have holes and the birds have a nest, but the son of man has nowhere to lay his head." As a Christan, Mike Huckabee makes me scared that with one more right wing Christian in office that campaigns on his theological superiority may be the death of potential people that might turn to Christianity, but have more compassionate and left leaning principals like love your neighbor as yourself.

Anyway, as the political playoffs continue with football playoffs, good luck Obama and Edwards, your the two top candidates in these books!

Dream of Flying

When will the moment be when we pick up and fly? Like a penguin who has the means, but cannot take wing we sit here still on this earth with the means to take flight and find what we are looking for and yet the glorious burden of what we are supposed to do acts as the hurricane, the rainy day the dreary weight upon our shoulders that keeps us from reaching our fullest potential.

At this place we stand weighted by the rain, and like the penguin we go through our lives looking for that gust of wind that will one day allow us to take to the air. We lust for it, we daydream about the day in which we will have the financial stability, the time away from work, the completion of the mortgage, and yet while we wait, the sun rises and sets smiling at us each and everyday, begging us to come and join in the fun of God's great wonderland. The wealth of this life cannot ever be realized until this mediatative and beautiful journey can take place.

That is why I plan on taking a trans-american bicycle tour upon completion of my year a Cap Corp. If life is meant to be lived, what are we waiting for? I write this blog more as an accountability to myself to actually do this than anything else really to put it forth into the world to say that something so seemingly crazy will be completed.

Through this trip I hope to find meaning, I hope to find a deeper understanding of whether God is really calling me to the ministry of the Church, I hope to find a deeper understanding of what the plan for me and all of God's children here on earth, I will never find the complete answer, but to be in pursuit of it must be to some extent our calling on this journey.

Just wanted to share the lyrics to one of my favorite songs in the whole world and I hope that the meaning that I have found out of this prose maybe also inspiring to you.

Dream of Flying
Alexi Murdoch

"Pale light this morning

Woke me
Slow pain I feel
Will not let me be

So much work to do
I don't know if I can
Trying so hard, so hard, so hard
But I know that I'm just one man

Five years old I climbed up on the wall
My mother warned me but I took no heed
Like all creatures great and small
I took a fall and found out I could bleed

These days I'm afraid of everything
Suppose cause everything will die
Thought it was to love what they will lose
So much easier to lie

Sometimes I fell like I'm drowning
Actually it's more like most of the time
But every now and then when I'm sleeping
I still have a dream that I'm flying

And I wake up crying"

Be a flying penguin!

Jon

Onto 2008

They say that the revolution of the new world will never be televised. These beliefs are founded in mountains of evidence seen on the broken streets of Milwaukee that pass under my bicycle wheels every day on my ride to work. News Release! The corporation, George Bush or the American Idol will not save us from the jobless cities, minimum wage jobs, under-funded schools, violent gang wars, racial segregation lines, and blatantly unequal access to opportunities in the social structure. For it is only by OUR hard work in which the seeds of justice will be sewn.

What have things come to? When the streets of Detroit, Milwaukee and Chicago are divided so staunchly that the only thing we hear about each other comes from the mind draining visual plastic opiates that sit in our living rooms. We are not simply mindless consumers of propaganda and ridiculous garbage that advertisements convince that we need.

We are people and as people, we are members of families, communities, neighborhoods, churches. Yet we have become so isolated! When did we give up on getting to know people that are different than us? Did we ever have this?I know that we have, and amidst the muck we see community built at places like the Catholic Worker, the Lions Club, Town Hall Meetings, neighborhood organizations, the examples of small seedlings bursting and poking out to rear their faces in the desert are too many to number and these seedlings certainly have the potential to grow into flower and fruit. Recently, I've been reading the book of Acts and I am convinced that the community that was formed then around the body of Christ might be one of the great examples that we have of a human world community family, when we give everything up and follow the prophetic word of God, great community has the opportunity to arrive. I don't mean to be preachy here, and I apologize if I come across that way, but instead I wish to point out the optimism and great movement of a committed group of individuals that share a vision of "the way that things should be." This is not to say that the way in which the church has acted recently is any indicator of this, but community is certainly evident in our religious movements, our civic movements and only when we can unify in solidarity can a new world be possible.

This God gives us the power to go into the streets of Milwaukee, Detroit, and Chicago with word and action that says we are not going to put up with this corporate domination and exploitation of this human community for any longer. This God is a God of Peace and God that speaks to us. When our streets look like bombed out Falajuah and Baghdad where is the freedom that George W says were spreading to the world in our own communities? To what do we have freedom to we ask? Freedom to access dingy minimum wage jobs that leave us homeless on streets, that leave our children's mouths at the mercy of food shelters, that put our teenage brothers and sisters with no other choices except for hustling drugs, violence, and eventual incarceration, freedom to house our families in burnt out urban homes? And yet each and every one of us in our human community is valuable. We are valuable to be active participating individuals working in the Kingdom of God's community to enact real social change. Each and every one of us, every welfare mom, every homeless beggar, every drug addicted burnout, every Wal-Mart sales associate trying to get by has human dignity.

This is not about charity, this is not about simply feeling sorry for the least of us, this is about empowerment, this is about realizing the great abilities and talents that each and everyone of us has to be an important, positive member of our community.This empowerment has to be evident! Who are we?! What do we stand for? For if we stand for nothing, we will truly be defeated. We all know that when the current structure of power is not challenged, it will certainly take its stand and bulldoze all the concepts of equality, democracy, comradely and love. At the disposal of this structure of power is the money that was stolen from our brothers and sisters; the profit to coerce and allow members of our community to be paid large sums of money to work against their own families. But we must live in hope; this hope is one of the only things that we can cling to in 2008. Because there are so many voices, so many brothers and sisters that feel the same way as I do about our broken communities. And although it sometimes seems hopeless, this is a battle that we can win!

The power of the corporation is powerful, but the Lord's power of justice that inhabits all of our souls deep down inside is so much stronger. The power of love knows no boundaries and when that power amasses, the constructs of social inequality will collapse on their own fallacies of justice.

So go into this New Year with great love, great hope and compassion knowing that the struggle will be hard, but certainly is doable.

God Bless Everyone!

Jon

P.S. I didn't know where to fit this in, but on a boarded up door of a burnt out door of a once vibrant Detroit business was spray painted "Where are the 200 thousand troops to protect this city?" It had quite an impact on me and I thought I would share it.

*"Surviving Decay" Graphic was drawn by my favorite visual artist ever. Eric Drooker, please check out www. drooker.com to see more art from Eric.

International Human Rights Day-Dec 10th

Why hello computer/cyber world! I hope that the holidays are filling people's lives with love, grace and the values of community.

Things at the Faith Community for Worker Justice are going very well. Robin, my volunteer student from Alverno College has committed to helping out 20 hours a week next semester to advance the mission that the Faith Community for Worker Justice is working on through 2008. With that said, things are looking up!

The Capital Returns Campaign is going much better now thanks to the work that the Faith Community for Worker Justice put into it. Thanks to the protest at the plant and panel discussion that were organized by FCWJ, the United Steelworkers, the labor union that is working within the plan has stepped up their internal organizing at the company and has sent an organizer all the way from Philadelphia to work specifically on this campaign until it is won. Way to go for making sure that we advance human rights for low wage workers at Capital Returns. Hopefully soon we will have a union organized at Capital Returns and the ridiculous health and safety issues that were and have been making the folks who work there choose between their jobs or their health will be alleviated and the workers at Capital Returns can labor with dignity.

Dec 10th is just around the corner and with this date comes International Human Rights Day. A day that Milwaukee will celebrate along with the rest of the world in conjunction with the United Nations. The event in Milwaukee is being organized by me, but not really sponsored by FCWJ in the same way that most events are. The idea around international human rights day this year is to highlight the work that all sorts of area non profits are working on around Milwaukee.

Sponsoring organizations in include:

9to5- the working women's organization
Citizen Action- a direct action community organizing group in Milwaukee
Good Jobs Livable Communities-a community based labor group
Milwaukee Network for Social Change-who organizes the "free market"
WISCOSH-the Wisconsin Committee for Occupational Safety and Health
Running Rebels- an inner city youth empowerment organization
Democracy Matters- a organization committed to spreading democracy through education
Lutheran Human Relations Association-a Lutheran based social justice organization
United Steelworkers- a labor union supporting the workers
Faith Community for Worker Justice-a interfaith religious/labor group
Greater Milwaukee Human Rights Council-dedicated to advancing human rights in Milwaukee

At this event we should also be having Congresswoman Gwen Moore, Mayor Tom Barrett, Senator Spencer Coggs discuss the importance of human rights. Other speakers will include Pastor Tim Berlew from Greenfield Memorial Methodist Church and Rose Daitsman-Greater Milwaukee Human Rights Council who will release the executive summary of human rights in Milwaukee.

Human Rights are important to all of our organizations, each of our organizations works on addressing these different issues that fall under the veil of human rights and yet so much of the time we don't get the chance to recognize that.

International Human Rights Day will address Human Rights as they relate to all of us and our struggles to make sure that people are treating with dignity, love and compassion in the world. This event will highlight the commonalities that we all have in our passions to create a better world.

If you can make it, please join us at the City Hall Rotunda at 3:00 pm on Monday, Dec 10th.

Hopefully everyone has a super happy holiday and enjoys their time spent with friends, family and loved ones.