my band, small bathroom fire, is playing at the Logan Square Auditorium, this Tuesday, October 26. We’re opening, playing with headliners Gravy Train, plus Bobby Conn and Stag Party.

Doors are at 8pm and I believe it’s $10.

For more info, and to buy tickets, visit mP Shows.

More than one decent thing in the NY Times today! Huzzah! Coverage of John Stewart’s scathing appearane on Crossfire - which, by the way, you should watch if you haven’t. There’s a blog that has a bunch of version of it posted.

Thank god Craig Kilborn was replaced by John Stewart (who is of course, one of the chosen people). If only I had more time to watch television!

Some quotes…
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There’s a really great op ed on the nytimes right now call ‘A Promise Unkept‘ - (click the first link there to the oped, I can’t get the javascript to make it pop-up in this blog thing). The title refers to the international community’s promise of never again, with reference to genocide, despite the fact that genocide’s happened in the plain sight of the community many times since the holocaust.

Anyway, I’m finding that most of the Darfur coverage is watered-down rhetoric. Words like ‘genocide’, ’suffering’ and ‘Africa’ cause most people to immediately turn the blinders on, because it can be depressing and it’s hard for most people to make the connection between them and this invisible problem. Part of this, is because these sound bites and buzz words are all we get in the news, when what people need to hear are the real stories from the people going through it. This piece is short, pretty balanced and well put together and it will ground all of the rhetoric you’re seeing on TV, news, etc. It reminded me of a documentary I saw about the Rwandan genocide at an Amnesty Int’l regional convention not long after it had taken place. While it was difficult to watch, we all need to hear these stories.

If anything exposing yourself to this will put it in your head, make you think about it, and make you talk about it. I like to think that I’ve learned a few little things through 10 years of activism. One of them is that it’s very very easy to feel like there are all these huge problems that you can’t do anything about, that the real power is wielded by corporations and governments and such, and that the people are powerless. But the only reason Bush and Kerry had to address the issue in the debates is precisely because people are talking about it. The “special interests”, i.e. corporations who fund their campaigns, don’t give a shit about genocide (not because they’re run buy demons, but because the people running them feel like they can’t, it won’t make the corporation money). They addressed the problems because people are voting for them, and they’re polling people have told them that some people are concerned about it — that is, people are talking about it and maybe even writing letters.Which brings me to another thing I learned about activism.

Talking about something to people who normally wouldn’t think about that thing is activism, possibly the most powerful activism you can engage in. Debating with like-minded friends is useful to get your beliefs and assumptions clear. Talking non-likeminded people is sometimes more useful. If they are people who’ve thought about it already a lot, it’s probably not worth the time — you usually can’t change people’s base assumptions. There are a lot of friends of mine who I just don’t bother debating with anymore about a lot of things, because I know their assumptions and I know that I don’t have much chance of changing them. Challenging peoples values is like challenging them - their ’self’ - the collection of values that allows them to distinguish themselves from other people — (I know this is someone else’s philosophy, but I can’t think of who… George Herber Mead maybe?) — it’s actually threatening to them at a very deep level (cf. ‘face’ threats, Brown & Yule, etc…).

Luckily, most people, conservative, democrat, liberal, libertarian, crazy, dumb, ugly, smart, whatever, believe that human rights are a good thing and killing innocent people is generally a bad thing. And luckily, this is all you really need to get stuff done in cases like Darfur. ‘So watch this feature, let it sit in your brain, and then tell some people about it. It’s not okay that the government of Sudan decided that the best option to deal with some political problems was the cheapest option - where the cheapest option was to hire psychotic mercenaries to butcher thousands of little kids, women and men, and to cause thousands of others to be so scared that they left their homes and died of thirst, hunger or heat. It wouldn’t be okay if it happened in the US, and it’s not okay that it’s happening in Africa.

(If people are worried about terrorism, it’s often people living in conditions like this that lose their minds and go become terrorists. But that’s a side point.)