Yesterday, in an act of protest, students living in Chicago‘s Gardens neighborhood who attend Fenger High (the high school that slain teenager Darrion Alberts atteneded) stayed home from school. With the support of their parents, the teenagers are protesting conditions by staying home and boycotting the violence they have to face to get an education. More after the jump.
The homie Toki Wright hits the web with a powerful new video entitled “Devil’s Advocate. The song is from his current Rhymesayers’ release a Different Mirror. Minneapolis stand up!!! This organizer/MC is fosho using his art for a purpose.
My art is a medicine for the community. You can’t heal the land until you heal the minds of the people.
-Tyree Guyton
Despite classifications of Detroit as an ‘urban wasteland’, I can’t help but disagree.
Maybe it’s blindness, optimism or stupidity but the concept of a city becoming a wasteland while people live there confounds me.
Nevertheless, countless articles refer to Detroit as a shadow of it’s former self. A dead zone. This past week, over 9,000 properties were auctioned off by the city – with many not even being picked up.
However, a wasteland is dead. Detroit is not. Against the odds, there remains an energy in the city. The picture above is from The Heidelberg Project: a street filled with vacant houses that were decorated into a large art project by those in the neighborhood. Tyree Guyton and his family, seeing the city ravaged by the Detroit riots in 1986, Guyton transformed the ravaged street into a giant art installation: one that is just as important almost 25 years later.
Check it below:
Tyree Guyton and The Heidelberg Project remain an incredible inspiration for our hard hit times. By transforming the landscape, Guyton has pushed the greater public to get involved and invest their time and effort in neighborhoods that are the hardest hit. But I can let the folks at the Heidelberg Project tell you about that in their own words:
“The Heidelberg Project offers a forum for ideas, a seed of hope, and a bright vision for the future. It’s about taking a stand to save forgotten neighborhoods. It’s about helping people think outside the box and it’s about offering solutions. It’s about healing communities through art – and it’s working!”
I just jacked this blog from Sura Faraj’s Facebook page. It’s a pretty provocative list.
How do you pick ten things when there are so many to choose from? It’s pretty tough, so I thought I’d just start my own list (in no particular order) and ask you all to add one or two or ten more things. We can whittle it down from there. Or make it into a zine.
1. Stop drinking coffee (after all, it’s shipped from a long way away)
2. Take public transit and ride your bike.
3. Take local vacations. Visit the places in your city that visitors love, but you’ve never or rarely seen, b/c you take them for granted.
4. Insulate your houses, put plastic on the windows, put on sweaters and long johns and turn your heat down.
5. Buy food from local growers (within 100 miles), or grow your own food. Most of the food we eat is shipped in from an average of 1500 miles away. (Think of all the things we eat that come from far away — bananas, mangoes, rice, potatoes from Idaho, apples from New Zealand. I just heard that most garlic is from China. wtf?)
6. Question your consumerism. Do you really need more stuff?
7. Stop having children. Not only is overpopulation one of our biggest problems, you’re going to have to watch your children suffer through what we are dishing out to them.
8. Work to end corporate charters. Corporations are forcing our govt to its knees on the economy, peak oil, climate change, war, giant agribusiness, water rights, surveillance, the prison industrial complex, and the list goes on ad nauseum.
9. Hang with friends. More bodies keep you warmer, give you hope, generate ideas, bond you tightly. When the proverbial shit hits the fan, it’s organized groups (think fundamentalists and gangs) who will fill power vacuums. We need to counter that with our own organized and bonded selves.
10. Barter. It builds relationships, saves money and keeps the exchange local.
11. Repurpose everything. Reduce your garbage and your recycling.
Well, that’s 11. Feel free to add to this list.
Speaking of, check out this video by LYVEF: Shut Up, Windmill!
Five teenagers were charged with aggravated battery last week for SETTING ANOTHER TEENAGER (15-YR-OLD MICHAEL BREWER) ON FIRE! Yes, three teens poured rubbing alcohol over the teenage victim and set him on fire! Reason: because he stopped someone from stealing his father’s bicycle (dang…tisk), authorities said! And the sad thing, Michael had been avoiding school since the bicycle incident; these kids found him at an apartment complex, far away from school property!
The young burn victim is now hospitalized with burns on more than three-quarters of his body. He is expected to remain in the hospital for the next five months. The Broward County sheriff’s office in Florida, said in a news release that 15-year-olds Matthew Bent, Denver Jarvis, Steven Shelton and Jesus Mendez and 13-year-old Jeremy Jarvis were charged with aggravated battery for the event. Mendez, because he lit the flame, has been charged with second degree murder.
So, it is to be said, noticed, marked that the violence is increasing…?! I do believe so! And the types of demoralizing acts OUR children are engaging in are alarming deeds! What will the cultural consequences of these violent acts look like!? Will the next generation be even more violent? The piper will have to be paid for these collective actions. Slipping……How do we grab this beast…..?
Here is the original post by Ebony Joy at:
5 TEENAGERS CHARGED W/ SETTING FELLOW TEEN ON FIRE!
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