some ranting and a few links

Hello. In English class we are reading the book First They Killed My Father. It is an incredibly sobering book about the massacres that occurred under Pol Pot. The protagonist is a little girl and it makes the whole story all that more painful as you see the girl put through so much. What really struck me though was how this story is much like the stories you hear coming from Africa, whether it be the children soldiers in Sierra Lione (as shown in the magnificent movie blood diamonds which you can see the trailer for at the bottom of this post.) or in Darfur.
It is horrible how people are willing to send soldiers to Iraq and Afghanistan to protect oil but we aren’t willing to send soldiers to places to protect the world’s most valuable non-renewable resource, Human lives. The idea that our country is so apathetic and oblivious to our fellow humans plight is really worrying to me. It also seems that no matter what course people pursue to change this doesn’t work.
For example, our democracy that is supposed to be an inspiration to the rest of the world is failing. People have demanded that the US intervene in Sudan but our government has refused to do anything. The examples of the peoples voices not being heard are many, Most people want an end to the war, Most people want universal health care, and most people believe in decriminalization of certain drugs. I think that it is time for our country to come up for the review Thomas Jefferson almost wrote into the constitution. We have the right to hold a peoples vote of no confidence and really start running our country.
On a similar note I have heard more about rising tide in Ithaca and it is very possible that it will happen. As for a student part of it I think it would be a really cool idea but I am not sure if we would be able to get enough students involved.
Yesterday I mentioned that I was looking at videos of tree sits. During my searching I found the website Insurgent Photos which has lots of artsy cool pictures of, believe it or not, protests and leftist things.
Enough with my not so informed general disgust ranting. Today was a normal day for me. I had a Loomis quiz which I used a quiz card when I didn’t really need to. I continued reverse engineering my pencil sharpener in DDP and had a lunch where I attempted to be a mediator but ended up telling someone they were retarded.
After school I went to my psychologist and talked about feelings and various things like that. He mentioned that if I ever wrote anything about how I felt when I feel crappy I should show him. I suddenly was hit by the urge to write at some point an emo poem about depression. The only problem with this is that when I am depressed I don’t feel much like writing. It makes me really admire the works of poets who spent their lives bitching about there life. Being emo can be hard I guess.
This evening I felt really weird. I think it was a strange combination of heat stroke, caffeine withdrawal and tiredness. In the end I felt disoriented and disassociate. Who needs drugs when they have a brain like mine?
Finally if you have read this far there is a high chance you read this blog earlier (Yes I am talking to you Jeremy Aaron and JT) . You then will have noticed that I have been slightly fiddling with small blog stuff. It is my plan to make my blog look a lot nicer (with help from everyone’s favorite graphic artist, JT) and maybe even get it hosted.
Everyone should be sure to check out the guest editor on YouTube because he is my friend Trevor.
As promised, The trailer for Blood Diamonds:



Goodnight and good luck!

A typical friday

Today im not feeling as militantly environmental but I will try to keep the militant feeling around. My day went by in a haze like all Fridays. I was inviting my friends to a “social gathering of responsible peers and Trevor in celebration of the 15th anniversary of my birth” for tomorrow but I worry that I invited to many people (like 15 off the top of my head and that is relying on the fact that no one invites anyone else). I can kind of imagine a bunch of cars showing up tomorrow and ending up having everyone in Ithaca and the surrounding area arrive. The book a good forest to die in was initially really exciting but as far as I can tell it became slightly overly historical and explaining the situations leading up to the Protestor getting killed (although there isn’t anything wrong with this). Right now im kind of pissed off at my mom (a regular occurrence) because when I told her that I invited a bunch of people she flipped out and immediately asked me if I had invited a certain kid. This kid in question I didn’t invite but he is a nice kid even if he walks the line in regards to the law and is always getting in trouble for drugs. I think she is a massive hypocrite because when she was younger she obviously did drugs and unless I am very much mistaken inviting her to a party wouldn’t have been the worst thing that could happen. My English teacher was really annoying today. He has very good intentions and does cool stuff with us (like take us to the falls or invite Rising tide to come visit our class) but he still manages to do some really annoying things. Today he started the class reading from this book about Cambodian history because we are about to read a book about the Cambodian genocide. In it the book defiantly said something along the lines of “Cambodia is so fucked up because westerners can’t see the difference between Cambodia and other countries”. But near the end of the class my teacher mentioned how a character in the book showed the Confucian value of filial piety. To me this seemed like comparing Celtic ideas to Christianity because they are both in the same relative area. If you have read this far you get a gold star. Also if you have read this far you may be wondering why I have no form at all of formatting. This is because I have completely given up on trying to format my ramblings. I am hoping that my writing will improve just by me writing a page a day.
My dad has is kindof amusing today. He has bought me the Gimme! Barista guide for my birthday (or something from gimme!) and has been really sneaky about it. This would have worked except I heard the people at gimme talking about and he got it from them infront of me.
Just as I have been writing I have been hit by a wave of tiredness. I point this on “coming down” from my mini caffeine buzz from the mocha loving supreme I got at gimme today. I think I spend about 30 dollars there a week and its kindof depressing when I think about it.
This morning I meet Christa before school at College town bagels and then we walked to school, which was very nice. There is this one guy at CTB who seems really talkative and always jokes with me. I cant decide whether it is creepy or nice.
My mom is insisting that I get a job this summer. This bothers me because I would like to do something but I would like it to be meaningful. In the perfect world I would have a hippie socialist social action protest group I could join and work with this summer but unfortunately we don’t have that even in Ithaca (actually it wouldn’t be a perfect world if there were groups trying to solve problems). This summer I will probably just end up playing wow and hanging out with friends but im sure that it will beat school. Goodbye until tomorrow.

Environment ramblings

Hello, my name is Sam. I am writing this blog for a multitude of seemingly unconnected reasons. First of all I feel a need to get good at writing. This is one of the several career ideas I am thinking about (along with Ethno botany , Ecological Preservation stuff, and psycochemistry type stuff). It is also related somehow to the fact that I want to become an environmental activist and I figured through some astounding leap of logic that having a blog would help this. Yet another reason is because I figure writing a page a day cant hurt anybody. I am writing this for myself and don’t expect to have any readers. Im not sure whether readers would be awesome or really creepy.
You (being nobody) may be wondering why I have such an interest in the environment and saving it. My reasons are generic hippie reasons. I love nature and love this world and cant stand watching it get destroyed. I live in Ithaca that is a crazy environmental, intellectual hippie college town. I really got my start in activism in 7th grade where I was involved in a tree sit to save a 14-acre forest from becoming a parking lot. All I did was sit around and think about how cool all these college students who were they’re doing it were. But anyways, it gave me an opportunity to meet some people and to really hear people actively trying to save the environment.
At this tree sit were several hardcore earth first types and they were really inspiring even though they might not have been as intellectual as the college students there. One of them (whose forest name was muddy) had been doing treesits for years and had taken part in the treesits in the redwoods where a logger had killed an activist. This whole experience was amazing and even though it eventually failed (police arrested all the protesters at 1 in the morning, typical pussy move) it opened my eyes and showed me that there were ways of resisting that were more effective than writing a letter or sending a yearly check to some organization that spends more money on fundraising than it does on actual saving of the environment.
For the next few years I stayed politically interested attending the occasional protest and following the news (both mainstream and not). I attended grassroots and really enjoyed myself when I was around hippies. In the fall of this year I watched fight club which had a strong nihilistic anti-materialistic message. That movie inspired me to try to reduce my impact on the world but like all attempts it was short-lived (hopefully this attempt wont be). The only truly solid thing that came of it was a decision to only buy clothes at the Salvation Army but that didn’t go perfectly although I still try to shop only there.
This all brings me to yesterday when a group called rising tide came and visited our class. One of the members was from redbud woods and they all were pretty seasoned activists. The goal of their group was to confront the root causes of climate chaos (aka global warming or whatever other happy euphemisms we have). Their visit awakened the dormant activist in me and was really inspiring. I am hoping to start a student chapter of Rising Tide. Ideally this would be a STUDENT run group that would meet without a faculty advisor to hinder us. I talked to Evan Greer who was one of the members of rising tide who came and visited us and he mentioned that someone was as inspired as I was, was starting a chapter in Ithaca. Hopefully I will be able to contact this person and get that started over the summer and into next year. I have been playing around with the idea of a group of students who got together and were actively activists and I believe that this provides the best format. Anyways, that is a short piece about how I am interested in the environment and what I am doing now. Right now I am reading A Good Forest to Die In that is about the Activist who got killed by the logger who I mentioned earlier and I am also rereading The Botany of Desire. (okay you caught me I am really only reading the cannabis section) So long for now and peace and love and all that good stuff.