Category: Items

The report of the “Mayor’s Social Service Task Force” is not yet public, but already plenty of folks in Worcester have their hands on it and are discussing it.

Worcester Magazine leaked the guts of the report yesterday.

Let’s look at what they said. I’ll comment in much more detail once the report is no longer confidential.
Continue reading “Social Service Siting Report and other items”

• Today begins the trial of four Catholic Workers from Ithaca, New York who poured blood around the vestibule of a military recruiting office.
  

  They wanted the fresh recruits, the ones they believed had been seduced by video games and government lies, to see the blood and think about those destined to shed it: the Iraqi people and American soldiers. They refused to leave and prayed while they waited to be arrested.
  (New York Times)

  They were tried in a local court, and had a hung jury. Nine of the twelve jurors voted to acquit.

  After that, federal charges were brought against them for the same incident.

  Running Scared has done a good job of blogging the trial. See also: St. Patrick’s Four, the Press & Sun-Bulletin, Binghamton IndyMedia, and WICZ (a Fox affiliate that some on the scene think is doing the best reporting job).

  This is the dark side of our legal system. It’s gone beyond justice to raw, hungry vengeance.

  “Anyone who disagrees with this administration and dares to show it gets the crap beat out of them.”
  (Associated Press)

• All that is good in the world is summed up by the Worcester Tornadoes’ Can-Am League championship! Cheap, independent baseball; good times; and the big win at the end.

  The Tornadoes don’t really have a good nickname. The local paper calls them the ‘Nadoes.

  But how about the ‘Naders?

  Or the ‘Nads?
  

• Vern sums up all that is bad in the world with his review of the 2005 MTV Video Music Awards.

  Quoth Vern:

  The weird thing is, it turns out the ’80s could’ve been worse.

  and

  It was like Caligula without the bestiality.

  and

  So what did we do? Were we fiddling while Rome was burning? Well no, it wasn’t a real fiddle, it was keyboards.

Since Pie and Coffee is on the list of integral blogs, maybe the connections between the “Items” should be made more explicit.

• Today in Worcester, a group of concerned citizens called Real Solutions announced their existence and asked the City to focus on compassionate, effective solutions to problems of poverty.

  The tag line: “Target poverty, not people.”

  The speakers included Baptist minister Walter Tilleman, one of the local clergy who signed a recent statement against the City’s panhandling campaign. (Monsignor Francis Scollen, my parish priest, also signed the statement.)

  Real Solutions called for the City to discontinue the anti-panhandling campaign, and focus these energies elsewhere.

  The group’s next meeting is Tuesday, September 20th at 7pm at Abby’s House Shelter at 52 High Street. The meeting will focus on the Mayor’s Social Service Siting Task Force.

  (Worcester Telegram & Gazette article)

  Speaking of American religious leaders taking an all-too-rare bold stand on controversial issues . . .
  
  

• . . . on August 29 the Leadership Conference of Women Religious declared opposition to the war in Iraq. The LCWR represents about 70,000 women religious (that is, Catholic nuns) in the US.
  

  We call on our government to develop a responsible plan for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq; to support the development of infrastructures for both human and environmental stability in Iraq; to respect religious and cultural diversity within Iraq; and to redirect needed resources to meet human needs at home and in other parts of the world.

  Speaking of the Catholic Church and hot-button issues . . .

• Yesterday, there was a small vigil at Worcester’s Holy Cross college sponsored by alumni and aimed at removing the college’s ROTC program. The vigil is held annually on September 14, the Feast of the Holy Cross.

  Speaking of Holy Cross . . .

• . . . Fr. Daniel Berrigan will be speaking at the Hogan Ballroom there Weds, Sept 28, 7:00 pm.

  Speaking of Catholic priests . . .

• . . . New York Times: Vatican to Check U.S. Seminaries on Gay Presence.

  Many years ago I was at a week-long Boy Scouts of America training program to be a summer camp Aquatics Director. One day a bureaucratic type addressed our class on the BSA’s homosexuality policy, which at that time required us to inform on camp staff who were gay. An old guy from the South raised his hand and said, “I’m not going to do that.” The bureaucrat started to argue with him, which broke the wall of polite silence, and many of the Aquatics Directors-in-training joined in saying, “Yeah, I’m not going to do that, either. Are you crazy?”

  Wonder how often the Vatican will run into the same situation.

  I also wonder how many Vatican memos have used the word “gaydar.”

  Speaking of kinkiness . . .

• . . . once again the Worcester Public Library brings you Rocky Horror Picture Show. As square a venue as the library is, they’ve upped the ante by showing the film at 2 o’clock on Saturday afternoon!

Weekly items, old and new:

• A belated happy Canada Day and Independence Day to all. Pie and Coffee contributor Kaihsu Tai‘s photo of a stop sign in English and Inuktituk is part of Wikipedia’s Nunavut Highways entry. (Kaihsu, like Talking Heads, has been on the Road to Nowhere.)
• Claire Schaeffer-Duffy comments on Worcester’s anti-poor attitude in National Catholic Reporter. “The gist of the debate seems to be we must hide the poor because their presence diminishes the community. My experience at the Catholic Worker has proved quite the opposite.”
• In a letter, Karen House Catholic Worker of St. Louis, Mo., writes:
  

  Our big news, of course, is that in the fall we purchased Karen House and the adjoining Church building from the Archdiocese . . . . Currently, the Church is being rented out, and we are placing the Karen House building into a property trust. So we own our building now!

• Mike True recommends this article about the draft by Frida Berrigan, and Johan Galtung’s testimony from the recently-concluded World Tribunal on Iraq in Istanbul. “Criminal acts have to be planned in secret . . . by small gangs with cojones, in Bush’s words. They do not benefit from the dialogue of open agreements openly arrived at in an open society, also known as a democracy. Democracy’s traitors easily become its fools.”
• The most entertaining essay title I’ve seen in a while is Anthony Mansueto’s Why the New Pope Isn’t Catholic–and Why I Still Am. The gist, as I gather it: the last two popes have been crypto-Protestants. Somehow, I remain sceptical.
• “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” is coming to the Worcester Public Library July 27. Is this the film’s squarest venue ever? (One old Worcesterite tells me that “The last time they showed it at the Palladium, the audience caused $10,000 worth of damage.”)
• Worcester Magazine continues its profiles of local activists with a piece on Cha-cha Connor. Also: Doug Chapel proposes a better use of the city’s promotional budget–fund “dedicated, driven, obsessed creative types to really focus on creating events to draw people to Worcester!”