Category: General

Carl Weaver has posted a video.

Co-organizer Kevin Ksen wrote a strong piece at Indymedia:

Sixty-seven local businesses and organizations are known to have closed on May 1st in Worcester; there are probably many more that did not get counted. The Worcester Public Schools estimate that 800-900 students stayed home. That was Worcester’s real vote on immigration reform; mom & pop small businesses in Main South, throughout Pleasant, the Valley and Grafton Hill deciding to close. Worcester’s event planners hesitated in supporting and promoting the boycott because they were worried about what might happen to immigrants that supported it. I remember Atty. Randy Feldman at the first meeting, tense and anxious as he compassionately stated, “We’d be responsible if something happened to someone.”

It was exactly that caregiver, protective, social service world compassion to protect immigrants that carried many of the Coalition’s local planners away from even discussing the goals and strategy of the national boycott. The problem is though, that event planners weren’t the ones who would make Worcester’s decision about how to support the boycott. Immigrants from Westboro to Worcester’s west side who live with the threat of losing their jobs, losing their income, becoming separated from their families every single day were the people that would make that decision. It was they not event planners that knew the full costs of joining the boycott. Dishwashers, janitors and factory workers everywhere knew EXACTLY what they risked if they joined the boycott, and the bodegas, restaurants and other local business owners new EXACTLY how much money they were sacrificing by shuttering their stores. They decided the risk and sacrifice was worth the message that they as immigrants wanted to send.

Photo by Kevin Ksen/Indymedia.

I’m back from Los Angeles, where I was in the wedding of frequent P&C contributor Adam Villani.

My favorite we’re-not-in-Worcester-anymore moment was seeing Tilda Swinton while carrying a durian.

Sounds like the May Day demonstrations in Worcester went great. The most optimistic hopes I heard before the event were “maybe 2,000 people will be there.” And the paper reported that 2,000 people were there!

I like many of the things that our bishop, Robert McManus, has done. I don’t think I’ve ever criticized him in this space. And I’m glad that last week he issued a compassionate statement on immigration. So I was disappointed when I heard that he wasn’t at the May Day demonstration, and neither was a representative of the diocese. This strikes me as a big mistake. Already today, I’ve heard people calling him “the stealth bishop.”

Worcester rally pix can be found at Indymedia and Flickr (via Volcanoboy).

In unrelated news, “Darfur Genocide on Trial” airs again on Worcester’s WCCA TV13 May 3 at 11am. You can watch it via the internet.

Update: Cardinal George spoke at the Chicago rally. (Via Whispers.)

April 27, 2006
Statement by Most Rev. Robert J. McManus, STD
Bishop of Worcester
On Immigration Reform
Continue reading “Worcester bishop’s statement on immigration reform”

The Immigrant Day Rally will be May 1, 4-6pm, at Worcester City Hall.

The site was chosen because of the statue of George Frisbie Hoar, a Republican Senator and Worcester resident who fought for the rights of African-Americans, Indians, and women, and opposed American imperialism.

From tonight’s planning meeting, it sounds like the immigrant community is divided about plans for a strike/boycott.

Much more info will be forthcoming at Indymedia.

Also at Pie and Coffee: Oklahoma City Catholic Worker statement on proposed immigration laws.

Written by James K. Baxter, 1958.

When His tears ran down like blood
I was sleeping in my clothes

When they struck Him with a reed
I cracked a very clever joke

When they gave Him a shirt of blood
I praised the colour of her dress

All the way up the hill
We were laughing fit to kill

When they were driving in the nails
I listened to the steel guitar

When they gave Him gall to drink
We were sipping the same glass

When He cried aloud in pain
We were playing Judases

When the ground began to shake
We pulled up the coverlet

Clean confessed and comforted
To the midnight mass I come

You who died in pain alone
Break my heart break my heart
Deus sine termino.

As a member of the Catholic Worker movement, I have had 22 years’ experience sheltering the homeless, many of them veterans. I have also had experience delivering humanitarian aid and working for peace in war-torn Nicaragua, Bosnia, Israel-Palestine, Iraq, and Darfur, Sudan. I have found the Doonesbury portrayal of the Iraq war veterans’ experience especially insightful and sensitive. PSTD is something that everyone who has been in a war zone experiences. Most Americans, especially politicians with no combat experience, like President Bush, have no idea what the reality of war is for soldiers or civilians. Doonesbury has helped to sensitize people without alienating them.

Unfortunately, Sunday’s strip chooses to criticize President Bush for insensitivity toward the troops by protraying him as being kept awake by the cries of stem cells.
Continue reading “A comment on “Doonesbury””

On March 7, the Worcester City Manager’s office released a report that called for a five-year plan to end homelessness.

It doesn’t inspire much confidence.

The report’s second sentence admits that it comes out of the same process that brought us the city’s anti-panhandling plan. Almost none of that plan was implemented. The parts that were implemented were failures.

Should we expect anything different from the anti-homelessness plan?

In any case, five years is far too long. If the city wants to be in the business of ending homelessness, what is needed is a focused one-year plan with clear priorities. The City Manager’s report is scattered, reads like a laundry list of concerns, and avoids making tough choices about what really matters.

It is unfortunate that city government has no credibility and no sense of urgency on homelessness. Homelessness hurts all of us, and we each have a role to play in ending it.
Continue reading “No credibility, no urgency”

Editor’s note: The following was printed as an op-ed in the Worcester Telegram & Gazette. It didn’t appear on their website when originally printed, possibly because they were redesigning the site. It is reprinted here with the author’s permission and is copyright 2006 Ronal Madnick.

In 2000, the City Manager created the Commission on Homelessness with a dual charge to improve services and housing for the homeless and to relocate the PIP Shelter. In August of 2000 the Commission issued its five year plan titled “Housing the Single Adult Homeless: the Worcester Plan. ”

On June 23, 2004 a plan to end chronic homelessness in Worcester developed by the Committee to End Chronic Homelessness in 10 Years was adopted by the City Manager’s Commission on Homelessness.

The Minority Report, developed by the City Manager’s Commission on Homelessness, June 19, 2004 points out that chronically homeless persons must be assisted but also points out that others who also need assistance must be considered. “Individuals who are living with friends or relatives in overcrowded conditions , prisoners who are released to the street, foster children who reach the age of 18 when they are no longer eligible for foster care, the battered spouse who leaves an abusive home, the indivudal who is laid off/fired from employment and can no longer afford housing, the tenant at will who loses housing because the building was sold, the tenant at will whose rent increase forces them to the street” must also be considered.

In 2006 the City Manager announced a goal to end homelessness within five years. The Manager is clearly moving in the right direction but five years is too long. There is no reason why the city cannot carry out a program within a year or two.

Enough studies. Let’s get to work.
Continue reading “Worcester’s Homeless Plan”

Here’s an interesting article in the New Yorker about relative vs. absolute poverty. A number of people, self included, have pointed out that many poor people in America routinely own items once considered luxuries or are in some other ways better off than poor people, or even, to a certain extent, the middle class were a generation ago. The article takes this as a starting point but then makes the argument that relative poverty, not absolute poverty, is what actually counts, and that relative poverty has real effects. In other words, just because poor people are likely to own TVs now doesn’t mean that poverty isn’t still a bad thing. (Another way of looking at that would be to say that owning a TV or a dishwasher doesn’t really matter much when discussing “poverty” as a concept.)

The article doesn’t really go much into what sort of nutrition the poor in America are getting now vs. a generation ago, and it would be worth examining ways in which the poor might be worse off even in absolute terms than in years past.

And of course, we’re speaking of “the poor” as one large group that might include everyone from the absolutely destitute to those who might be better off but not exactly comfortable. Disaggregating the stories could make a more vivid picture of the situation.