This week in cowards against progress: Tom Tancredo

As you have heard Mr. "I'm running on a single issue for presidency" Tancredo walked off the MSNBC when confronted about his Vietnam past.

What I find funniest about this is that apparently he was too depressed to go fight in Vietnam, when now he gladly fights to stomp of the dreams of others. Dreams of healthcare reform, dreams of legalization.

Dreams of actually being able to serve in the military to serve the country many Dreamers have grown up in.

It's like he doesn't want anyone else to live their dreams because they might make him look like a coward.

There's someone crying outside

I don't know him/her. But they are sitting on the stairs by my apartment.

It sounds like a break-up cry.

Like a cry that comes from a breaking heart.

And I like giving hugs. I like hugging tightly even when others hug kinda limp.

So I wanna walk down.

And hug them.



Or maybe I need a hug.

Kinda loopy at five in the morning

I read reddit a lot.

And for some reason I woke up two hours ago and can't fall asleep.

One of their entries today said "My wife cooked me a store bought pizza today. It was her first experience with one. "

With this pic:

I couldn't stop laughing.

Why its hard to organize online

A Lesson from 4chan vs AT&T.

So if you have been anywhere near the internet(Digg, Reddit, Twitter, and even some news sites) in the past 24 hours you might have heard that a war has been going on.

As Fox News puts it:

On one side: the mighty corporate colossus AT&T. On the other: the innumerable geeks of 4chan

A quick breakdown of what happened:

Yesterday AT&T blocked it's users from the img.4chan.org domain (which hosts 4chan's most popular board)

(One thing that you must understand about 4chan is that it is completely random and it allows users to post anything while being anonymous. This has created a community which is greatly opposed of internet censorship of any kind.)

Back to what happened. Within hours 4chan users had created an external forum to plan actions against AT&T to get the ban removed.

Many pictures were created to show the true evil of AT&T, code was created so that website owners could ban AT&T users from their sites as retaliation, and personal information of top executives in AT&T was being publicly posted.

By the end of the night 4chan was unblocked (for a full breakdown click here).

So why is internet organizing so hard when 4chan was able to mobilize hundreds (including hackers, photoshop artists and many anons) in mere hours?

It is because of the community being organized is an internet community, and their struggle was strictly online.

When we try and do internet organizing it can fail because our victories will have to be won outside, in the real world. We need to show the real faces of people undergoing the current struggles, we need their voices heard rather than plain text.

We need to personally empower others to take up the fight for (insert campaign here). And no amount of emails, text messages, facebook events will do that for those who are not actively engaged.

The worldwide culture is greatly shifting towards instant worldwide communication for everyone through the internet, and the beginning steps are being taken so that soon everyone's voices will be heard through online organizing.

But until then the face to face conversations cannot stop, we need to continue pushing forward on the campaigns we believe in. And as long as we can push together we will be able to accomplish great things.

Undocumented Workers and Social Security

Most immigration helps Social Security's finances, because new immigrants tend to be of working age and contribute more than they take from the system.

Great read in the New York Times: "Illegal Immigrants Are Bolstering Social Security With Billions"

The article is a few years old (2005) but its information is very relevant to the debates that will start in Congress soon.

Most undocumented workers do backbreaking work yet they receive nothing in return. They do not ask anything in return, the only thing they need is peace of mind. Peace so that they know that each day they walk into their jobs they are not at risk of ICE raiding their workplace; separating them from their families.

Peace so they can work and feed their families. The benefits they are already paying for is not what they are after. Just a better home life.

"I don't pay much attention," Ms. Ortega said. "I know I don't get any benefit."

Life Goal of the Week: Trilingual

Or Quadlingual,or even Pentalingual.

I'm bilingual. I'm fluent in English and Spanish. But I want to learn more.

My girlfriend knows sign language so she's taught me a couple of signs, but it would be really cool if we could have full conversations on really quiet places without talking. So one day I would like to learn it all.

A fourth language would be Tagalog. I'm involved with our service workers union on campus and can speak to pretty much all the workers since I speak Spanish, but if I knew Tagalog I would be able to speak to an even greater number of workers.

And last but not least (drumroll please) Japanese. I like anime. That's it.

If you're going to talk against our DREAM, allow a real dialog to happen

This last quarter I took this immigration class for my Spanish Literature Minor and there was a lot of things that I didn't like about it. I could talk about it for hours but I like keeping my posts short so I will only focus a specific one.

The class only allowed for short anti-Dream Act comments.

The first one came when we had Fernando Suárez talk about his son's unfortunate death in Iraq. It was only a short comment he made, but it was enough to plant a seed of doubt in students, and short enough so that no further discussion on it was allowed.

He said something like: (I'm paraphrasing) "I know some of you are fighting for the DREAM Act, but this law would increase further military recruitment for Latinos"

That's it. Moved on to the next point.

A couple of weeks later there was an article which focused only on the military aspect of the DREAM Act. It was written in the syllabus, but never discussed, so an even discussion in the matter did not exist.

Needless to say, I was angry. The professor gets his views passed across to every student in the class without any discussion making it seem as if his view was undisputed, making it correct by default.

There weren't any more mentions of Dream for the rest of the quarter so I relaxed. Final exams were coming but I didn't study Dream since I know it rather well. I go into the final ready to forget this professor and be done with this class. But then I was surprised.

Out of the five words that we had to write definitions for the Dream act was one of them.

Angry is too soft a word to describe what I felt.

I started intensely writing on that subject for what became a two paged response. I gave it everything I knew. From the full name (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act), to the exact date it was reintroduced in Congress this year. I wrote personal stories of amazingly brilliant students who hold multiple degrees but are now stuck working as janitors.

And lastly, I wrote about how the advocacy for Dream is a strong student movement in which many of the activists working on it, including myself, would work to educate high school students on all the possibilities the DREAM Act offers, heavily focusing on being able to succeed in higher education.

The fears of the military component of the DREAM Act are legitimate fears, but an even ground should be set for a dialog to take place on it.

If you would like to help pass the DREAM Act with us visit www.dreamactivist.org