RIP Joe Frank

One of the great radio voices is gone. This is from Time- Old from a collection of Hearing Voices on PRX.

If billions of years preceded our existence on Earth, billions of years will surely follow after our existence as well. So that our life here is like one flash of a strobe light. The wink of an eye. And if your life is merely a microscopic blip in the vast dimension of time, is its importance to you just an illusion?

Also worth a listen: Dreamers on Unfictional

Link

OWS at two months

Today marks the two month anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street protests in NYC. I’ll be joining the rally at Foley Square, 5pm to celebrate. Here are a couple links I recommend to get a sense of what’s been happening:

  • Occupy in October, a documentary radio piece from KCRW’s Unfictional covering the period leading up to the rally in Times Square
  • Beyond Liberty Plaza, a summary of articles by Khujeci Tomai (whose blog has been a great resource) describing more recent events and an appeal for growing beyond the occupation of a single park

We need to be reflective, celebratory, practical, forward-looking, and inspiring — all at once. So let us start on a macro and micro, holistic and granular level. Find a project, an affinity group, an alternative art space, a progressive organizing space, a classroom, an immigrant rights group, a trade union; anything, everything, somewhere in your neighborhood, in your city. Start building something specific, tangible– linked to the larger Occupy project of economic justice and resisting corporate control over democracy. All in preparation for spring, when people will start coming out in large numbers again. Don’t be afraid to go against some of the fetish of horizontalism; the movement needs some leaders as well. Time to move to the second phase.