Gimme Shelter: (un)affordable housing

The cost of mere shelter is destroying the present of deserving people and the future of our youth, preventing our area from reaping the full benefit of motivated, educated people.
I just came back from a superb meeting on affordable housing at Sacred Heart Community Services, an agency known for practical, street-level work. Then I started talking about the issue with friends. Here are a few jolts that stuck with me:
In Silicon Valley, the greater San Jose area, the list for subsidized housing is around 40,000 names long; it would be longer, but they aren’t taking names any more, so we can’t know the true extent of need.

Aaron Swartz and Other Victims of Government Persecution

That so many are honoring Aaron Swartz, and recognizing his noble aims for a more open society, is a heartening testament that at least some of us still believe there’s more to citizenship than showing up to the train platform at the right time. Yet the question must be asked: What about the victims of government persecution who aren’t so sympathetic?

The Myth of Redemptive Violence

Around the country, people are polarized about whether gun control or widespread ownership of guns would make us safer. I have written earlier about the U.S. culture of violence and the growing economic inequity, which is violent in itself and is linked to increasing violence. Today’s post addresses the violent “myth” that underlies our culture:

Can Forgiveness Play a Role in Criminal Justice? Indeed it can.

Don’t miss this major New York Times Sunday magazine article on a significant story we covered first a year ago in Tikkun in The Day the Jail Walls Cracked: A Restorative Plea Deal by Sujatha Baliga. A 19-year-old man shot and killed his girlfriend, and the young woman’s parents forgave him, motivated by a deep Catholic belief in forgiveness, a sense that both their daughter and Jesus wanted them to forgive, and an understanding that the forgiveness would enable them to survive.

A Lamentation

I do not ask why an all-powerful, all-knowing, ever present God has allowed the tragedy of the mass killings in Newtown Connecticut. I do not ask why 20 children and 8 adults are dead at the intersection of mental illness and semi-automatic assault weapons. God gives human beings free will. So, my cry is a human cry to humanity. The correct question is: why do we allow this?

Take Action Now Against Indefinite Detention

Lawmakers from the Senate and House met in a closed-conference and released the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) Conference Report Tuesday night, whereby conferees reinserted language in the bill that allows for the indefinite detention of Americans without charge or trial. The NDAA is unconstitutional and un-American.

Time to End Indefinite Detention

The idea that our government thinks it can lock an American up based on “suspicion” that he or she somehow “supported” an alleged “terrorist” organization just doesn’t seem very constitutional to me! Yet our current law allows just that. Senator Dianne Feinstein and others in the Senate are trying to do something about indefinite detention and I’m hoping they’ll get enough support from Americans across the political spectrum to remove this affront to freedom from the next Defense Authorization bill. Perhaps they could call it a Korematsu amendment.

Doing the Right Thing: From Tolstoy to Minimum Wage

Recently two seemingly unrelated events came together: I volunteered for Measure D to raise the minimum wage in San Jose to ten dollars an hour, and I watched another episode of the BBC’s excellent production of War and Peace. In the episode I watched, a wealthy family, the Rostovs, is crating up their numerous possessions, china, furniture, dresses, vases, and clocks, to flee Moscow in the face of Napoleon’s oncoming troops. They look out the window: a long line of wounded Russian soldiers is wending its exhausted way through the city – now abandoned by most of the rich. At first, the family watches, curious, as the soldiers drag and are dragged past their front door. Then the daughter, Natasha, a person of great spirit and integrity, asks what it could hurt to let the wounded be brought inside and laid on the floor; the family is leaving the city anyway for their country estate.