THE GREAT WORK-AROUND by Scott Thompson number of years ago, I took a job working for a company that imported traditional music from Scotland and Ireland. I was interested in the music and I had experience in sales, so the owner of the company made me the marketing manager. “Manager” was strictly a hypothetical title, […]

A FEW THOUGHTS ON OCCUPY FROM ONE LOCAL PARTICIPANT… by Jeff Clark ince its arrival, Occupy has been labeled as being a “disruption” of public spaces and the routines of daily life. Its eventual, large-scale eviction from those spaces, however, has not resulted in banishing what the continuous physical presence is meant to represent: an […]

BUILDING A WORLD THAT WORKS FOR ALL A Speech Given to the Minnesota Alliance of Peacemakers in November 2012 by Scott Thompson he theme of our gathering tonight is “Building a world that works for all.” This phrase is not just a nice thought or a hopeful intention; it’s the whole spirit of Occupy condensed […]

EMMA LAZARUS AND THE POLITICS OF POETRY by James C. Henderson ark Strand and Eavan Boland, in their book, The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms, say that the sonnet is a poetic form that features “one strong opening statement of eight lines” and then poses an “emotional or intellectual question” […]

LET’S TALK ABOUT ANARCHY by Scott Thompson ith three grand jury resisters now in jail for refusing to testify against their friends, even people with no sympathy for the Occupy movement have started to take notice. The police state tactics are finally starting to scare people, or at least a few of them. But even […]

OCCUPY BABY by Athena M. Henderson When I meet people and talk to them about Occupy, many of them have not heard of Occupy. I am shocked by this after all the media coverage Occupy received last fall when Occupy Wall Street took over Zuccotti Park in New York City and other Occupies camped out […]

CULTURAL SUCCESSION by Afterparty Jones from Occupy Vacant Lots of Philadelphia Originally published at Cultural Succession Occupy Vacant Lots Facebook The Movement Grows like the Forests: Cultural Succession ou may have read about – or if yer a seasoned OG (Original Gardener) you may have witnessed – the pattern that emerges over time as forests […]

THE AMERICAN LEGISLATIVE EXCHANGE COUNCIL A Speech Given at the Minnesota Capitol in March 2012 by Scott Thompson ur country right now is in a state of denial. What we say we want and what we’ve actually built for ourselves are two totally different things, and people manage to live with that contradiction by just […]

WHAT HAPPENED TO AMERICA? by James C. Henderson t this point, I thought America would be farther along. I did. I really did. I was born in 1955 and grew up in a time when progress was not just a slogan but was being achieved. All the old mistakes, prejudices, and conceits were being swept […]