Progressive Wednesday

Feminists, We’re Calling You: Tell

Tell:

We do our damnedest to use Progressive Wednesday as a platform to share information that might fly under the radar or be misunderstood by the “regressives” in our culture (and you know who they are). So allow us to arm your brain with some more info to help fight against the powers that be.

We think it's impossible to write about women's rights without addressing Planned Parenthood. This organization is misrepresented in the media as a medical provider dealing exclusively with abortions. That is one incredibly small part of their services.

All of the following are offered through Planned Parenthood:

• Birth control
• Prenatal care
• Assistance with adoption
• STD testing
• Teaching materials
• Sexual health services for women, men, and teens

And in their own words:

Planned Parenthood is the nation’s leading sexual and reproductive health care advocate and provider. With more than 860 health centers nationwide, nearly five million women, men, and teens turn to us each year for essential services — services we provide regardless of income, marital status, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, national origin, or residence.

And if you dig on numbers, check these out:

1. Number of women, men, and adolescents worldwide provided with sexual and reproductive health care and education by Planned Parenthood each year: 5,000,000
2. Percentage of Planned Parenthood health care clients over the age of 19: 75
3. Percentage of Planned Parenthood health care clients with incomes at or below 150 percent of the federal poverty level: 72
4. Estimated number of abortions averted by Planned Parenthood contraceptive services each year: 300,000
5. Percentage of all Planned Parenthood health services that are abortion services: 3
6. Number of people served by Planned Parenthood affiliate educational programs: 1,300,000

All we're asking you to do is this: try to remember some this information, and be prepared to share it when the time is right with folks who spread the wrong message about this vital organization.

Hi-Tech Parks = Confused Poachers = Happy Nature

The problem of poachers is a constant, particularly in national parks located in the Republic of Congo, Costa Rica, The Galapagos Islands, and the Shavia Wildlife Refuge in Russia’s Altai Republic. So, those hired to protect the wildlife in those areas are going hi-tech.

According to a recent article The Economist, the Nouabale-Ndoki National Park in the Congo is 4,200 square kilometers and has 14 park rangers. In the past year, they’ve caught no poachers. This isn’t because there’s no poaching. For example:

Last year poachers are estimated to have killed more than 23,000 African elephants. According to a study by the University of Washington, that is about one in 17 of the continent’s total.

So the good folks running the park are going to place special metal detectors and smoke detectors (poachers often smoke the meat) along trails and in trees. When a poacher trips a detector, a signal goes right to the rangers with exact coordinates. Many people in the Congo believe, quite strongly, in magic, and “local people will receive no explanation for the rangers’ new powers.” The hope is that this will both stop poachers in their tracks (or rather, the apes’, jaguars’ and elephants’ tracks) and discourage poaching in the first place.

So what can you do from the comfort of your computer? We’ll give you three:

1. Sign the pledge from Wild Aid and the Active Conservation Awareness Program, urging world leaders to do their part in putting an end to poaching. The ACAP is hoping to get 25 million signatures by 2008. Let’s be part of this effort.
2. Consider donating a measly five smackers to Wild Aid. All you’ve got to do is click this sentence. Just so you know they’re as legit as it gets, you can click right here to go to a National Geographic article on the organization. And you can listen to the executive director of Wild Aid on NPR by clicking here.
3. Tell a pal about Wild Aid. You can do this by clicking this sentence, or by clicking the “Share This” button at the bottom-left of this post. This is a very important action because Wild Aid “guarantee[s] that 100% of donations from the public go straight to the field,” so free marketing is the best marketing.
   

Picture clicked by this friend of pachyderms.

A Book Does a Body Good

Problem:

You need to read to your little ones, and you need to find some books that they can read to you. You know all children's books, especially those designed for the younger sets, have morals, sometimes explicitly stated, sometimes not. You want to find books that espouse a world view that doesn't conflict with yours, and may even help encourage your wee ones to believe what you believe, baby.

Or maybe you don't have any tikes of your own, or, you know, maybe yours are a bit older and can be found flipping through the pages of the latest Danielle Steel offering, The Bible, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Supercharged Kama Sutra, and Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild, which changed and inspired the lives of a few of the folks at Progressive Wednesday.

Regardless, odds are you believe in the important relationship between children and books. And here's the other problem: plenty of children don't own any books, and many others don't even have access to books outside of school. And as progressives, we owe it to children, all children, to let them have as close to the same youth as we'd want for our own. We owe them this because we want to protect innocence. And we owe them this because want a caring, intelligent, articulate, and creative generation to come. We want a better world, so we want a world with more books.

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Make Progress:

To take some action this Wednesday is simple, really. It's simple as A, B, C, D, one, two, three, four– ¦.

• Buy (or Borrow) & Read
• Find & Tell
• Recycle
• Give

Photo thanks to this picture-clicker.

A Book Does a Body Good: Find & Tell

Find & Tell:

If you'd like a method for discovering additional famous and not-so-famous progressive easy-readers, you can ask librarians online 24/7. Allow us to point you to Read This Now, a service provided by the public libraries in Ohio. To increase the odds you get a like-minded librarian assisting you online, we recommend entering the zip codes for either Columbus (43210) or Cleveland (44101), two of the more progressive cities in the Buckeye State.

When you find other suggestions, we'd dig hearing them — just contact us and we'll pass them along to our readers. Also, you can start a List or a Guide of recommended children's books on Amazon.com. Here's the thing, just label it “Great Children's Books– or something like that. There's no need to label them as progressive. They're just great books, so call them that.

Doing Work for Hard-Working Families

Problem:

Eric and I have held oodles of very different jobs. Here's a list: bookseller, McDonald’s cashier, factory worker, shop foreman for a construction company, maintenance worker at a state park, newspaper reporter, office assistant, courier, audio/visual equipment operator, audio/visual specialist, college professor, substitute teacher, children's writing instructor, home theatre sales associate, customer service associate in a bank, residence life assistant at a college, and phone surveyor. Most of these jobs are the kind that could best be most kindly described as “learning experiences.–

Partly because of these variegated occupations and partly because of where we've been lucky enough to end up in our careers, we have intense sympathy for hard-working families. We know first-hand how hard it can be to sweat all day and feel depressed by the lack of digits in our paychecks, to watch the walls of a cubicle, to live below the poverty line and live payday to payday, to run up credit card debt to make ends meet, to lack health care and have to struggle through illness because we couldn't afford a doctor's visit. Now that we're in better financial positions, we want to do more to help the kind of people we used to call co-workers, the kind of people we still think of as friends.

Work is something Americans think of as the most identifying quality of a person after their name, and yet we tend to treat our hardest working Americans as lesser citizens, as if their low-paying jobs are their own fault. It's a myth that working harder will necessarily make you more money: we know folks who've slaved away at 60-hour-per-week jobs with no advancement. It's a myth that a higher education means a better paying gig: we know PhDs who work in bookstores. There's a myth in America that we live in a meritocracy. We don't.

The American Dream shouldn't be work. The American Dream shouldn't be to make ends meet. The American Dream should be pleasure in all its permutations like spending time with your friends and family, doing things that strengthen, stimulate, and lift our bodies, minds and spirits.

We owe it to one another to care more about how we all make a living. It's that last word, “living,– that we seem to forget.

Photo thanks to this hard worker.

- – - – -

Make Progress:

The Declaration of Independence reaffirms that we all have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But it's hard to pursue happiness when you lack health care, when you run up ridiculous dept to survive, when you can barely pay for meals, when you can't see an end in sight for a desk job that you despise. It's hard to pursue happiness when you bring work home with you, literally and mentally. Work is hard for all of us, nurses to farmers, temp workers to truck drivers, pastors and cops and folks who man the factory belts.

Dear readers, work is one of the few things that unites us all as people and states. It's about time we made some 9-to-5 progress.

• Listen
• Tell
• Change
• Print
• Vote

Doing Work for Hard-Working Families: Tell

Tell:

Studs Terkel is a fan-favorite of ours. He's best known as the oral historian behind the phenomenal and revelatory book Working. In Working, Terkel interviews folks from all walks of not so much life but work, then removes his questions, and moves the answers around until he's successfully created an accurate first-person narrative using only the words of the interviewee.

As with many peel-your-eyelids-back books, he's inspired us to do the same, or rather, similar. Below you'll find eleven questions. If you're feeling so inclined, we'd love it if you'd answer some or all of them as thoroughly as possible. We'll “edit– your responses slightly, and then publish them on our site so that folks can learn more about their fellow readers, and at the same time, learn more about what it means to work in America. The more we know, the more we can empathize.

There's one small other thing we ought to mention. We'll do everything we can (in addition to whatever you'd like to do) to keep these as anonymous as possible (so that there's no potential repercussions at all for you at work.) We're itching to read your stories (we mean “itching– metaphorically; we don't actually have any rashes to speak of – ¦knock on wood).

- – - – -

• What's your current job?
• How did you start in this field and how long have you held this job?
• Tell us one (or two or three– ¦) true stories that typify working where you do.
• Do you enjoy your work? Why or why not?
• Did you think you'd end up doing this job? Why or why not?
• What are the hazards (physical, intellectual, emotion) of your job?
• What are the perks of your job?
• What's the best thing that's ever happened at work?
• What's the worst thing that's ever happened at work?
• If you could change three things about your job, what would they be? Why?
• What previous jobs have you held?