Street Spirit

Santa Monica Students Pepper-Sprayed for Protesting Fee Hikes

News
“It really creates segregation between the haves and the have-nots,” says Board of Trustees member Margaret Quiñones-Perez. “If you can pay, you’ll get your classes. That’s guaranteed if you have money. But if you don’t have money, you may get classes, and you may not. Community colleges were not created for this.”

One Million Students Are Homeless in America

News
For the first time in history, public schools reported more than one million homeless children. The data also shows the troubling depth of America’s housing crisis. “The severe lack of affordable housing for families has yet to be addressed, and over one million children are paying the price,” said Maria Foscarinis.

Challenging Berkeley’s Anti-Sitting Measure

News
Elisa Della-Piana, director of the Neighborhood Justice Clinic in Berkeley decried the anti-sitting measure as punitive. “It will achieve nothing except create division in the community,” she said. “Enforcement of the ordinance would keep people homeless and create criminal records that could prevent them from getting housing or jobs.”

A Man of Spirit: The Long Journey of Kenneth McCoy

Features
Kenneth McCoy, age 64, has been selling Street Spirit since he was diagnosed with colon cancer six years ago and found he had no way to pay for the medicine he needed to survive. Now he has a roof over his head and the income from his Street Spirit sales.

Sharing Food as a Form of Nonviolent Protest

Features
Food Not Bombs stages a daily protest against a system that values profits more than people. It expresses its values in a supremely nonviolent way. Sharing food is an act of nonviolent resistance to the violence of hunger and simultaneously a protest of the corporate state’s military and economic violence.

Berkeley’s Segregation Measure Fails the Test of History

Opinion
In voting to place this discriminatory sitting ban on the November ballot, the Berkeley City Council has betrayed the very concept of equal rights for all. Laws that banish certain groups of people from public spaces — whether based on appearance, economic class, or race — are modern-day segregation decrees, plain and simple.

Prayers and Poems from a Shelter

Poetry
“today at social security i did see/ a man shaking so badly he couldn't stand/ telling everyone he just got out of jail/ and needed a hand/ he had no teeth/ and looking in his eyes/ i could see he was in a place/ few on earth see”

Poets Ask: “Why War?”

Poetry
Poetry reveals the seen and unseen, hidden casualties of U.S. wars at home and overseas. “America zips down prayers/ and buttons up wars/ with battalions of/ impoverished youngsters/ duped into dying for dreams./ America indoctrinates/ then shames us/ for believing her spin./ 'Opportunity,' she sings,/ hiding our dead from view.”

Occupy Poetry

Poetry
Oh they’ve foreclosed the home of the free/ They mortgaged and sold/ for a little Wall Street gold/ this land of equality/ Oh they’ve foreclosed the home of the free/ Now we are the brave/ Occupy and save the country/ that’s home to you and me/ the country that’s our democracy.

The Voices of the Occupy Movement

Poetry
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, according to English poet Percy Shelley. Alameda poet Mary Rudge created profiles in poetry of the Occupy movement’s dedicated young organizers, pepper-sprayed university students, tent dwellers, longtime 1960s-era activists, jobless artists, inconvenienced bus riders, homeless squatters, and passive TV news watchers.

May Poetry of the Streets

Poetry
someone’s dying/ in the gutter somewhere/ with nothing but their souls laid bare/ nothing but their souls laid bare/ homeless child eating/ outta garbage can/ and not one person sees/ not one person sees/ ol’ woman fell on da street/ cuz she'd had nothin to eat

Living in the Dark Ages in Modern America

Features   Uncategorized
There is no excuse for political leaders and for the wealthy people who influence them to allow widespread poverty, hunger and disease. The starvation and disease that continue in many places would not exist if the people who hoard most of the wealth cared about helping their fellow human beings.