Feb 5, 2005

A new opportunity to end the occupation / Gov’t workers under attack

OPINION

At the annual School of the Americas (SOA) protest and vigil at Ft. Benning, Ga., Nov. 21, 2004, the author and 14 others, including two minors, crossed the line onto SOA property to oppose the U.S. military training of Latin American assassination and torture squads that takes place there.

OPINION

After reading a column in her local paper, the Albuquerque Journal, calling Bush’s Social Security privatization plan “a step in the right direction,” PWW reader Rose Shaw didn’t just get mad – she wrote a response! It was published on the Journal’s op ed page Jan. 5. Her piece is reprinted below. We hope other readers will follow her lead.

OPINION

Education. The path to profits, prestige and power. Whether the path includes a skilled trades apprenticeship program or formal education, learning provides lifelong access to better jobs and better wages and better benefits.

OPINION

“As the first bullets ripped into the guitars of Spain, when blood instead of music gushed out of them, my poetry stopped dead like a ghost in the streets of human anguish and a rush of roots and blood surged up through it. From then on, my road meets everyman’s road. And suddenly I see that from the south of solitude I have moved north, which is the people, the people whose sword, whose handkerchief my humble poetry wants to be, to dry the sweat of its vast sorrows and give it a weapon in its struggle.”

— Pablo Neruda, “Memoirs”

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Six years ago, Chris Rock joked that the Academy Awards looked like the “million white man march” for its traditional under-representation of Blacks.

This time, with Rock taking his maiden voyage as host of Hollywood’s biggest party, he will preside over a record Oscar night for Black actors, who earned five of the 20 nominations.

Review

“Mighty Times: The Children’s March,” co-produced by the Southern Poverty Law Center and Home Box Office, has received an Academy Award nomination in the Best Documentary Short Subject category.

Coming to PBS on Feb. 9 and Feb 16 from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. is the four-part series “Slavery and the Making of America.”

Movie Review

Nicole Kassel’s “The Woodsman,” starring Kevin Bacon, is a quiet and subtle exploration into the world of pedophilia and incest. And while we might want to put that as far away from us as possible, the movie makes us look at it with uncomfortable closeness. It suggests that how we view our children — as our breathing property or as little beings — makes all the difference.