Newtopia | Issue #15 - Feb/March 2004: "Activism"

Featuring "Activism: Reverie and Revelie", by poet-in-residence Ronnie Pontiac

The World Social Forum was held from January 16-21, 2004 in Mumbai, India (formerly Bombay). It brought together an estimated 125,000 people from all continents, including Newtopia's Jeff Conant, who sent this dispatch on the last day of the forum.

The Avocado Declaration was initiated by Peter Miguel Camejo, the Green Party candidate for Governor of California in the 2002 general elections and in the 2003 recall election. This statement was issued by the Avocado Education Project.

Ed Rosenthal was deputized by the City of Oakland, CA to grow marijuana for the city's medical clinics and co-operatives. The Federal Government arrested him and put him on trial as a drug dealer. Apparently, medical marijuana is a political tipping point.

John McWhorter, professor of linguistics at Berkeley and author of the best-selling and controversial book, Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America, writes eloquently and forcefully for the need to re-evaluate some of the accepted dogmas of today's civil rights leaders.

The life of a social or political activist is often an exhausting and thankless one, and activists tend to be exhauting and thankless themselves. Still, it is one of the last noble professions. Here we meet a group of these unknown soldiers, who chime in on their work and its future in the present order.

In Honour of Mario Van Rooy aka Mr. Devious (1977 - 2003).

An activist is someone who is disquieted by some aspect(s) of present social conditions and seeks to rectify them, to do something about their discontent. Activists come in all shapes, sizes, sexual orientations, classes, races, ethnicities, nationalities, religions, and moral backgrounds. With the onset of globalization, activists can be found everywhere in the world.

History had never seen such an explosion of poetic/musical activism as that which swept the world when rock arrived.

By the time a black student reaches college, there is a strong likelihood he or she has not been exposed to any African American authors, and may not have been taught one single fact of black history ..except for what they may have picked up during Black history month.

America is in the grip of an evangelical movement. This movement is not propagated entirely by the 44% of Americans who make the personal claim of being "Born Again." This evangelism is not even, in any specific sense, dedicated to the "spreading the gospel" of Jesus Christ. Though it has its roots in Christianity, this evangelical movement is purely political in nature.

A discussion of Modern Multicultural Activism.

Rebellion, revolution, and social activism have been a part of the American canon of collective political consciousness at least since the publication of Thomas Paine's Common Sense in January 1776.

The phallus is a symbol for The Nigerian Police, their black truncheons cracking down on an exploited populace.

Homelessness in San Francisco, and the efforts by one group to help.

In twenty years of AIDS a lot has changed. Today, we are still dying yet the fight has seemingly grown quiet; a battle now played out in the White House and in the corporate labs of pharmaceutical companies and banks in which greed mongers hold the power over who to save and how.

We humans recognize patterns everywhere. We see the swirl of galaxies in space and the swirl of dish water down the kitchen drain. The same swirling pattern exists in both places, separated chiefly by orders of magnitude. We see within society many dramas similar to those we see within our own bodies.

Ever since formal combat in Iraq came to a predictably quick end, the anti-war movement has been struggling to come to terms with itself. The movement is in denial. Disingenuousness substitutes for real self-criticism.

The modern world is in a state of flux. Yet, new communication networks such as the Internet have introduced new paths: a huge graph with myriad sub-groups, a potent and useful metaphor for our increasingly intertwined world. So much so, the Information Superhighway is abuzz with superlative technological advances, garnering more glory, with everybody who's anybody joining the fold and hoping that electronic nirvana is just around the corner - through multimedia, electronic publishing et al.

With Mary Magdalene gracing the cover of the December 8th edition of Newsweek, and "The Da Vinci Code" continuing to ride high on the New York Times bestseller list, the cultural historian is awakened to the possibility of important developments in our understanding of gender.

A Look at Independent Media's Krystalline Kraus.

XVII. - HOW HUNGRY?

Activists Converge in New Orleans

A Movement of Movements: Is Another World Really Possible? and We Are Everywhere: The Irresistable Rise of Global Anti-capitalism.

The Celestine Prophecy: 10 Years After. .

An Interview with Sam Green and Bill Siegel, creators of the Oscar-Nominated The Weather Underground.

Elephant and Mystic River

Errol Morris examines Robert McNamara in The Fog of War.

Tim Burton's Big Fish

Loss and Social Meaning in 21 Grams

The Art of Tamra Spivey