vinay

Yours is a voice for the world not just the neighborhood of Duarte Park. Injustice, unfairness, and the strangle hold of greed which has beset humanity in our times must be answered with a resounding, “No!” You are that answer. I write this to you not many miles away from the houses of the poor in my country. It pains me despite all the progress we have made. You see, the heartbeat of what you are asking for—that those who have too much must wake up to the cries of their brothers and sisters who have so little—beats in me and all South Africans who believe in justice.

A Message Of Solidarity From Archbishop Desmond Tutu | OccupyWallSt.org

via Boing Boing.

Cronkite’s belief in “human rights for everyone” hadn’t been willfully circumscribed to exclude gay people, it was just something he hadn’t previously considered due to the luxury that privilege affords of not having to think about how such abstract commitments apply to others outside of our own limited sphere. An encounter with a new friend revealed a new context in which to test that belief. Does “human rights for everyone” apply to GLBT people too? Cronkite doesn’t seem to have thought much about that before, but once he was led to do so, he concluded that of course it does. And that made him a bridge and a friend and an ally.

slacktivist » Walter Cronkite and a familiar story

A year and a half ago, then-California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger complained that California was spending nearly 11 percent of its budget on prisons and only 7.5 percent on the university system. He noted, “Thirty years ago, 10 percent of the general fund went to higher education and 3 percent went to prisons.” The spike in penitentiary spending is artificial, and does not reflect crime trends. Since the early 1990s, crime in the state has fallen, whereas the prison population has skyrocketed.

Truthdig – How Students Landed on the Front Lines of Class War