Posts

Showing posts from February 28, 2010

Slipping into holes intended for someone else

When the day is long and the night, the night is yours alone,when you're sure you've had enough of this life, well hang on. Don't let yourself go, everybody cries and everybody hurts sometimes. Sometimes everything is wrong. Now it's time to sing along.When your day is night alone, (hold on, hold on)if you feel like letting go, (hold on)when you think you've had too much of this life, well hang on. Everybody hurts. Take comfort in your friends.Everybody hurts. Don't throw your hand. Oh, no. Don't throw your hand.If you feel like you're alone, no, no, no, you are not alone. If you're on your own in this life, the days and nights are long,when you think you've had too much of this life to hang on. Well, everybody hurts sometimes, everybody cries. And everybody hurts sometimes.And everybody hurts sometimes. So, hold on, hold on.Hold on, hold on. Hold on, hold on. Hold on, hold on. (repeat & fade)(Everybody hurts. You are not alone. ( R.E.M. Lyr

(Part I) Killing me softlyThe slow death of the black community

If there were independent media actually available to the masses of Black Atlanta, it would be possible to run candidates for office in black constituencies who placed at the center of their campaigns frank opposition to mass incarceration. Such candidates might find it relatively easy to popularize and win support for subsidized family visits for prisoners, an end to privatization of inmate health care, mandatory minimum sentences, to the prosecution and incarceration of juveniles as adults. Candidates who promise to try to roll back the wholesale and piecemeal privatization of corrections, to cease the onerous fees levied by private contractors on families and friends who call or send money to their loved ones behind bars would quickly find themselves at the head of a broad, trans-generational black civic movement the like of which has not been seen since the 1960s. The possibilities for coalitions, alliances and partnerships would abound, as churches all sizes and denominations, you