Progressive Wednesday

It is…

…the day of rest and we’re taking one.

Never fear, we’ll be back tomorrow!

Progressively yours,

Matt & Eric

Some grief sweeps us away.

Every year, when this day comes around, I’m at a loss for words, something I pride myself on rarely being. So, I’ll rely on one of my mentors, David Citino. This poem comes from his masterful book Broken Symmetry.

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CLOWN FISH

When the female dies,
the father of her offspring
changes sex and mates
with the nearest male.

Some grief sweeps us away.
We struggle back into
a strange new ocean,
magic with what we’ve lost.

This Wednesday: Demanding Net Neutrality

Problem:

Right now, we have a free and open Internet. Sure, it can cost you a pretty penny to access the Web, but it’s an open sourced environment in many, many ways, and no one website is inherently faster than another. Sure some load faster because of the demands of Flash, or HTML5, or videos, but that’s about it.

However, there’s a major push being made by the country’s biggest and ugliest cable and telephone companies – Verizon, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, AT & T – you know, the ones that we have to fork it over to in order to find our favorite recipes, poems, news, social networking sites, chat, email…. (Wait… you’re on the Internet right now, so I can probably stop listing everything that’s on the Internet. That is, unless, you’re my 89-year-old grandmother—who makes a mean meatloaf—and I’ve finally convinced you to hop on the WWW with promises of my verbal acumen. Hi, Nonna! )  Anyway, they want to be “gatekeepers,” deciding which sites go fast, slow, or not at all. Read that last clause again: not at all. That’s the kind of control they literally want to have. Why? To stifle competition. To sell speedier connections to the highest bidders. To control content.  The result? An end to the most significant information revolution that has ever happened.

Anyway, Net Neutrality is the issue this week. What is it, exactly? Net Neutrality essentially means that WWW service providers cannot discriminate between different kinds of content and applications online. In other words, all websites and Internet tech all will continue to exist on a level playing field.

Net Neutrality drives technological innovation, free speech, economic growth, and a democratic sharing of information. Net Neutrality prevents service providers from interfering with our Internet experiences.  In the words of The Free Press Action Fund, “With Net Neutrality, the network’s only job is to move data — not to choose which data to privilege with higher quality service.”

Where do we come in? We need to fight back against the aforementioned behemoths that are spending hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying the FCC and Congress. And because there are many more of us than there are of them, and because we hold the power of our votes, and because tens of thousands of small and large businesses want Net Neutrality, too, we have a real chance to retain a freedom we’ve come to expect. And that’s a key thing about America: we can’t ever assume we’ll retain a freedom just because it exists now.

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Make Progress:

• Sign
• Donate
• Watch
• Share

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Sign:

This doesn’t get much easier people.

Click the logo to the right. Sign your name to a petition put together by the aforementioned Free Press Action Fund. Join over 1.9 million Americans who are openly speaking to Congress, insisting that they act according to the freedoms we deserve.

Net Neutrality is the most important First Amendment issue facing this country.

It follows that staying silent on Net Neutrality is a demonstration that you don’t care about the freedom that you’d be choosing not to exercise. Wait. That sentence is a little confusing. Just sign the sucker, okay? You’ll thank us in ten years.

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Donate:

Five bucks. Half of a trip to see a lousy movie starring Ashton Kutcher (I realize this is redundant). A super-sized sack of crap from a fast-food “restaurant.” Hell, you can re-wear some socks and underwear and go another week without doing laundry.

The point is that you might not think that five bucks is much, but when enough people care enough to give five bucks, you’d be amazed at how quickly it adds up. Let’s go back to the movies for a second: a trip to a flick will set you back about ten bucks; just think of the insane totals that movies rake in every weekend. Those small amounts of money, collected together, make the news every single Monday!

Worried the Free Press Action Fund won’t use your money wisely? Worry not, my progressive grasshopper. 87 cents of every dollar donated supports their core campaign and movement building work to make the U.S. media system more democratic, diverse, and accountable.

Just click this sentence to help keep your voice in the ears of those who control what happens next.

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Watch:

Okay, so this video is a little dated (but barely), and yes, sure, it’s even a little goofy (I mean, there are cartoon alien spacecraft zapping the Internet with lasers), but I’ll be damned if it doesn’t explain what I’ve tried to explain in ways that cannot be misunderstood. So if you’re at all confused, please, please, please watch this video. (If nothing else, my favorite REM song off my favorite REM album makes a guest appearance.)

Net Neutrality is about power and who will have it: us or them. And yes, this is an either-or situation.

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Share:

Right now, as the Internet exists, consumers –you and me—have the control. We choose content, applications, and services available anywhere, regardless of who we use to log on. If we lose Net Neutrality, we’ll be faced with an Internet that lacks the freedoms we’ve come to expect, and it will look much more like cable TV. Websites, content, applications will be like channels, and we’ll be forced to pay to choose what we want to see (if we can see what we want at all, that is).

Right now, the Internet is a place of freedom, and it bucks the tradition of previous forms of media in that any site (including Progressive Wednesday) has the possibility of having the popularity, scope, and reach of a TV station. We value freedom of expression so much that it appears at the beginning of our list of rights. Rights we lacked and we can lack again. This isn’t a scare tactic on our part. This is the reality we face from big businesses right now, today, and tomorrow, until they give up or get their ugly way.

So this action is the simplest of all. See that “Share” button on the left-hand side of this post? It’s about an inch and change below this sentence. Click it and share this Wednesday with your friends. You can send it along on your social network of choice through that button or you can even email it.

The choices we make now, the actions we chose to take, will determine if Net Neutrality continues to exist or if decisions about content are decided in boardrooms. I think you know which one is more progressive.

Send Us Your Photos!

Every day, we update our Photos page with one photo of our beautiful world. The idea is that it’s nice to have a reminder that we live in a place that deserves our very best, a place that demands to become part of a more progressive world. We’ve been featuring photos by several different photographers, and many of the shots have come to us from our photo editor James Robinson. And all of the photos are ridiculously gorgeous. If you haven’t already, do check them out.

Today we thought we’d share one that was emailed to us from a faithful reader.

Editor’s Note: No cats were harmed in the taking of this photo. I mean, the thing is sound asleep. After seeing this, I almost want to put a tiara on my head if it’ll mean I’ll get some better shuteye.

Got some killer photos to share? Please do. Just click this sentence to be taken to our Contact page. If you shoot us a line saying you’ve got some pixels the world needs to see, we’ll get back to you pronto. (We don’t have our email address directly available to help avoid spam.)

Thanks in advance.

Progressively yours,

Matt & Eric

Students Sustaining Oregon One City at a Time

Undergraduate service learning isn’t a new notion for colleges and universities. And most law schools offer clinics which combine students with people who can’t afford traditional legal services. But the University of Oregon has taken altruism and learning to another level altogether. U of O’s Sustainable Cities Initiative is “a cross-disciplinary organization … that seeks to promote education, service, public outreach and research on the design and development of sustainable cities.” Every year, the SCI picks one city in the Beaver State and many courses from various disciplines work with the city on sustainability projects and goals.

Last year, SCI chose Gresham, Oregon, the fourth largest city in the state, and 350 students in 19 courses worked on nine projects, including:

a redevelopment and design plan for the Rockwood neighborhood, programming and potential designs for a new city hall, mixed-use transit-oriented development adjacent to a light rail station, sustainable development recommendations for the Springwater area and city-wide projects related to commercial design standards, housing prices & walkability and climate preparedness.

For this academic year, the program has selected Salem, the third largest city in the state. 500 students (a fortieth of the school’s total enrollment) in over 25 courses will donate over 80,000 hours and will be tackling 14 projects, including:

redevelopment schemes for areas north and south of downtown, restoration efforts on Minto Island, a city-wide civic engagement strategic plan, an integrated plan for safe bicycle and pedestrian access to downtown parks and paths, potential design schemes for city departments and a new police station, strategies for industrial by-product re-use and economic development plans.

The ultimate goal is to make Salem more economically, socially, and environmentally sustainable.

At Progressive Wednesday, sure, we believe in books (I mean, my job kind of demands it), but this is taking education to levels that simply make sense in a culture that is sliding apart in so many ways, and this is a kind of learning that cannot be recreated in a classroom. And, maybe most of all, this is the kind of activism we believe in, the kind, with clear goals, that encourages people to continue doing it over time.

Photo clicked by this fantastic photographer.

How to Help Progressive Wednesday

Problem:

We’re back after a long, long hiatus, and friends, you could really help out our people-powered progressive cause. Otherwise, we might resort to more alliteration, and really, who wants that?

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Make Progress:

Six’s as good a number as any, so here goes:

1. Since you’ve got brains and heart-felt brawn, we’d like to tap into that (the kegs that you are?). So, please do send us ideas, links, topics, and tips. Big ups and thanks in advance.
2. Is it swag you want? Well, it’s swag you get, baby. You can snag yourself t-shirts, bumper stickers, mugs, garb for your favorite canine, and the 2010-2011 Progressive Wednesday calendar, a compilation of gorgeous images snapped by our photo editor, Bris Robinson. All of our stuff for sale is at cost. We’re just interested in any help spreading the word. We’ve also got bumper stickers that we’re happy to send your way for free. Just shoot us a line through our Contact page with your address and how many you’d dig. (Thanks to all of you who already are sporting one on your vehicle of choice!)
3. You really don’t need Yahoo! or Google or CNN as the first thing you see when you fire up your Internet browser. That’s so 2002. Why not set ProgressiveWednesday.com as your homepage?
4. If you’re a blogger, you could lend a binary hand and Google bomb with us. Every time you write the words “progressive,” “Wednesday,” “action,” “activism,” and “progress,” you could set a hyperlink to ProgressiveWednesday.com. Our goal is to shock and awe and knock that insurance company, which will remain nameless, from the top spot when folks search for “progressive.” That seems like a word that the insurance bastards companies shouldn’t own.
5. Every Wednesday we send out reminders to folks that today’s the big day. You can sign up for email reminders by shooting us a line through our contact page. We promise not to give out this information to any individual, advertiser, organization, or company. With your permission, we’ll also send you monthly e-newsletters with updates, links, and other ways you can make progress happen in this here country of ours. You can also connect to our Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr networks from the right-hand sidebar.
6. Obviously, we’ve got permalinks on our pages, so you can link to those from your blog or your blog of choice. You can also pass those links along to your pals through Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.

Photo by this helpful photographer.

Twelve Empire State Buildings

In the news from Thursday, this: a California bill failed to gain a majority vote in that state’s Senate which would have banned the use of plastic bags by grocery stores, convenience stores and drugstores.

Before I go any further, let me admit something: I use plastic bags. (Gasp!) Second, after reading about plastic bags, I think I’m going to plop down a wee bit of cash and buy a reusable grocery bag or three. Why? The statistics are disturbing.

According to a recent report on CNN.com, the EPA estimates that 3.96 million tons of plastic bags, sacks and wraps were generated in 2008 in the United States. In the same year, 1.17 million tons of trash were created by tossing out paper bags. Of all of that, only a combined total of 830,000 tons of plastic and paper bags was recycled in 2008, while a combined total of 4.3 million tons was discarded, including 90% of plastic bags. For point of reference, this is the equivalent, speaking in terms of weight, of nearly twelve Empire State Buildings.

Sure, we live in a fairly plastic world. And we’re constantly adding more plastic to it. But that doesn’t mean we can’t reverse the trend. And that doesn’t mean we’re doomed to continue on a course that we’ve previously accepted as the norm. If we were fatalists, then Progressive Wednesday wouldn’t exist.

So, why is all this using and dumping without reusing so problematic? In typical circumstances (for example in landfills), a polyethylene bag will take more than 1,000 years to degrade.

While some Californian politicians had good intentions, a ban on plastic really isn’t a solution. This would likely turn people toward paper and compostable bags, both of which carry with them serious environmental impacts of their own during the manufacturing process.

I’m sure I’ll still use paper and plastic bags. I’m sure some of those will hit the trash. But I’m going to make a conscious effort to change my ways.

Join me, friends. We’ll do this together. For information about finding a recycling center near you, just click this sentence. For information about buying reusable products, just click this sentence.