Progressive Wednesday

Clergyman Charlie: On protecting the Great Lakes

Major efforts were made last year by the Sierra Club, Residents for Responsible Government, the Niagara County Legislature, and many other groups to protect the Great Lakes from toxic pollution. A bill was passed unanimously in the State Senate and with only one negative vote in the State Assembly that stated that no permits could be granted for commercial toxic landfills that had the potential to leak into the Great Lakes. Newspapers all across the state, including the Albany Times Union and Buffalo News, endorsed the law. The Niagara County Farm Bureau and Business First supported it. But to our dismay, Governor Pataki vetoed it.

Efforts to get the veto overridden were not successful. Legislators were busy campaigning and not interested enough in returning to Albany for this purpose. So our next hope was to get the bill reintroduced quickly in the next session.

Assemblywoman Francine DelMonte did as she promised, reintroducing the same bill quickly in the Assembly. It has already passed through committee and is headed toward a vote.

State Senator Maziarz, however, to our surprise, introduced an entirely different bill. Unlike the U.S. Congress, if two different bills pass in New York State in the Assembly and Senate, there is no joint committee to work out a compromise wording for a second vote. The effort simply fails.

The Sierra Club attorney, Richard Lippes, who is also the attorney for Riverkeeper and for Residents for Responsible Government, has analyzed the bill submitted by Senator Maziarz and has concluded that it is not as strong a bill as the one presented last year. It is much longer and vaguer. Senator Maziarz and his aide, Sue Senecah, say that they are open to amendments to it at this stage. However, we continue to feel that the original bill needs to be presented in the Senate as he promised.

The Niagara Group and the Atlantic Chapter have both called upon the Senator to do so. Riverkeeper is urging him to withdraw his new bill and push again for the original bill.

This effort is important for the whole state, not just for his constituency in western New York. The Great Lakes contain 20% of the liquid fresh water of the globe. It is absurd to allow them to become polluted.

Citizens need to band together and insist that this great asset to our world, our area, and all people is protected.

How to Search Progressively, Part III

Editor’s note: A few weeks ago we started our four-part series on how to search the Internet more progressively. And yes, there are four better ways to search the Internet than just relying on Google, Microsoft Live Search, Yahoo, or Ask.com. Click this sentence to read what we wrote the first week about the problems with searching the WWW, and ways you can chat with librarians online. Click this sentence to read Part II, where we discussed GoodSearch.com.

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Scroogle.org

Okay, there's oodles of controversy about Google and their cookies and plenty of their et cetera, and there's about a tenth of the controversy about Scroogle, a Google scraper, which essentially allows you to search using that mother of all search engines without the heebie-jeebies of cookies, search term records, or access logs. Plus, it functions sans ads.

To be honest, we don't really feel like getting into the controversy. The way we figure it, if you want to use Google and are concerned about the stuff that concerns people, but you still want the power of their engine, use the scraper.

Click this sentence for the Google scraper.

If you'd like to read more about Scroogle, we'd go here and here and here. To read the opposite side of the argument, go here.

If you want a Firefox toolbar for Scroogle, which we use when we're not using GoodSearch.com, you can go here or here or here. Take your pick (for the record, we use the Mycroft add-on).

Let’s say GoodSearch.com doesn’t help you find what you’re after, here's our argument in favor of Scroogle over Google:

1. If there's any potential problem with privacy, and there's a way to avoid it, why wouldn't you?
2. If you can avoid Google's off-topic ads when you do a search, why wouldn't you?

Google, like television, isn't a free service as some might have us believe: we pay for it with our time, and our mind, in the form of advertisements. So Scroogle until your heart's content.

National Poetry Month: “Won’t You Celebrate With Me”

I came to know the poetry of Lucille Clifton when I first started writing during high school. I came to truly appreciate the poetry of Lucille Clifton only recently.

Why? I don’t know for sure, but I think Clifton’s work benefits from a reader who has a better understanding of suffering, which is also to say, a reader who has a better understanding of joy. When I was in high school, I thought suffering was not getting to play street hockey, and I thought joy was, well, was getting to play street hockey.

Then, I thought, Why doesn’t she capitalize? And now I like to think of Clifton’s poems as little mirrors reflecting our own complex lives and, at the same time, as little windows into the congruent lives of others. And now I realize Clifton’s gift: she manages to teach without preaching; she illuminates.

And if it’s a resume you want, well, a resume she’s got: umpteen books of poetry and nonfiction, as well as 16 books for children; two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships; two Pulitzer Prize nominations; and (get this) an Emmy.

But these accolades don’t do justice to Clifton’s work, work grounded so deeply in real experience that we can’t help but nod as we let her words whirl around in our heads.

Enjoy.

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WON’T YOU CELEBRATE WITH ME

.

won’t you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.

Monday Morning Motherhood: The Shadow We Must Shake

My mother spent her teenage and college years (also known as the 1960s) in South Carolina during the civil rights movement. She lived there when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, and she witnessed social intolerance that most of us today can't imagine: separate drinking fountains and restaurants, blatant slurs thrown at people on the street, and city-wide arguments over integrating schools and busing.

While now typically more subtle, intolerance based on race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, family structure, and nationality stills comes in far too many forms. Despite advances in the past couple of decades, intolerance is still there like a shadow we can’t shake. We need to do more. So how do we start? As parents, we start with our children. They're the ones who will live in the legacy we leave them. They deserve to live and raise their kids in a peaceful place.

Teaching children tolerance, while seemingly difficult, is actually fairly easy. There are many ways to broaden your children's view of the world, and they're really not that difficult.

1. Expand your child's group of friends. By visiting a playground or joining a play group with a more diverse group of children, you can expand their definition of “normal.” Your child can become friends with people of different races, religions, nationalities, and socioeconomic backgrounds.
2. Integrate diversity into your home. Read your kids books with characters of different backgrounds, other religions, familial structures, and races. Listen to music from other cultures. Introduce games, dolls, and toys that are culturally diverse. Bring to your dinner table foods from different cultures.
3. Talk to your children. Words have infinite power to change. Don't tell your children that “We're all the same.– We're not. Explain that people are different, and that not only is that okay, it's good. All cultures, races, and religions are different, and they all have a positive impact on society. Keep an open dialogue with your kids, and answer any questions they have about diversity or tolerance.
4. Teach them. Teach your children to be proud of their background, to be proud of who they are. At the same time though, show them that putting down people of a different background, in order to show pride in your own background, is unacceptable. Pride in your culture doesn't lessen the importance of other cultures.
5. Model the behavior you want them to follow. This is the Big Kahuna. Our children depend on us to not only tell them what behavior is appropriate, but to actually portray it. “Do as I say, not as I do– just doesn't cut it. We're their role models. How we treat others, and our tolerance of all types of people, is what they see, and in turn, is what they practice. Action is the first step to a more progressive and tolerant society.

Intolerance is, simply put, unacceptable. By using the simple steps above, maybe we can make a world of “shiny happy people holding hands.– Well, okay, that REM tune probably won’t quite become incarnate. But hopefully we can help our children eventually live in a world where, more often than not, acceptance, and not narrow-mindedness, is the rule.

Update: Re-treeing western New York

Over the past few months you've read about the destruction of nearly a third of the trees in Erie County due to the early October snow storm. And you read about the efforts of many small organizations such as Re-tree WNY and individuals to repopulate the Buffalo area. If you need a quick refresher, click here or here. To this point most of that effort has been raising money to pay for the massive conservation effort. But to celebrate Earth Day, yesterday, the boots were on the ground.

For the first time this year the temperature broke 70 degrees and, as reported by WGRZ.com, hundreds of volunteers showed up at Delaware Park in Buffalo and planted more than 400 new trees. It's a small step. But that's what we're all about here at Progressive Wednesday. You have to plant the first tree before you can plant the 10,000^th.

But the fundraising efforts aren’t over. Please consider making a small contribution to Re-tree WNY if you haven’t already. And if you have, thank you on behalf of all the residents of planet Earth.

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WGRZ.com is also offering a free oak or sycamore tree valued at $100 to 20 groups or individuals. So if you have had a tree damaged during the storm, write them an email telling your story. They'll be giving out one tree every day from April 26th through May 23rd, making it easier for you to make “treeish– progress. Bravo, WGRZ. Bravo

Clergyman Charlie: On Adam and Eve

People sometimes ask “Who did Adam's sons marry?– Often a minister replies, “Ha, ha, that's a good one!– as he shakes their hand and ushers them out the door. I think some clergy are a little afraid to shock people by telling them what they know about that story. Would you be shocked if I say that the story of Adam and Eve is not historical, but it is true? It is myth, not fact.

But understand a myth is a non historical story that teaches an absolute truth. If you read the story carefully, there are more problems that who the first children married. After Cain killed his brother Abel, he was expelled from the community. Cain said that if he was a fugitive, whoever met him might kill him! But God said he would protect him.

Who was out there to kill him? Good question if the story was “true.–

But if you realize that this ancient story, handed down over campfires for generations before it was written down, was meant to convey profound truths. People before the scientific era didn't think as we do, wanting everything measured, tested, proven. They could enjoy a story without our questions. Maybe that's better. At least it is the way to read these Biblical stories.

The word “Adam– in Hebrew means “man.– Adam's story is the story of you and me. We depart from God's way for us and that brings' destruction and dismay. Our children give in to jealousy and violence, and these impulses lead to disaster, broken relationships, heartbreak. Isn't that true? We know it is!

By the way, the fact that God protects a murderer from death may be an early comment against capital punishment.

Meditate on the stories in the first chapters of Genesis. Let them speak to you. They are full of truth we need to hear. And if we do that, the question of who Adam's sons married becomes irrelevant. There wasn't an Adam; there is just you!

Cement-imentality

Strolling around NYC one winter with my Brooklyn born-and-bred bud, Jay, I looked up at the skyscrapers surrounding us like they were monuments to the gods. From my vantage point, that of someone who grew up in a town where a three-story building was considered excessive, these buildings boggled my imagination.

“Man, those are beautiful,” I said. “I can’t believe we made these.”

To that, Jay, making every effort to dismantle my sentimentality for his city, said: “I wish cement had never been invented.”

Maybe we both had a point. And maybe Jay, an avid reader of Progressive Wednesday, will smile a bit over what Time magazine has just plopped into my mind, which I will now plop into his and yours: cement can help save the planet.

Read for yourself:

As head of research and development for Italcementi, Enrico Borgarello knows cement isn’t considered the most high-tech–or environmentally friendly–of products. But under his direction, the Bergamo-based Italian company has developed a substance that could turn an ordinary building into a weapon against air pollution.

It’s called TX Active, and it’s an additive for cement that literally eats surrounding smog.

According to Mr. Borgarello, when the sun hits TX Active, the substance “neutralizes surrounding pollutants like nitrous oxide and sulfur dioxide.” TX has the potential to cut local air pollutants from 20-70%.

The Italcementi company paints an even clearer picture:

In a large city such as Milan, researchers have calculated – “ on the basis of test results – “ that covering 15% of visible urban surfaces with products containing TX Active® would enable a reduction in pollution of approximately 50%.

Testing continues because similar catalytic agents like TX can lose steam over the long haul. But considering the building boom going on in some underdeveloped but industrializing countries, TX could make minuscule and monstrous buildings alike more eco-friendly and life more sustainable.
If so, Jay and I might see the world a little more similarly, and call me selfish for ignoring the environment for a split-moment, but I’d kinda dig that, too.