THIS DAY IN HISTORY April 26, 1937: The Bombing of Guernica

Guernica painting by Pablo Picasso.

A reproduction of the painting hangs in the United Nations Security Council in New York.  When U.S. leaders were announcing the war on Iraq, they shrouded the Guernica with a blue curtain rather than allow the realities of war be in full view. Learn more in the Democracy Now! broadcast “Amy Goodman in Spain on the 75th Anniversary of Guernica Bombing, Portrayed by Picasso Painting.”

READ, SHARE, DISCUSS, LEARN more here- https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/bombing-of-guernica/

 

On Farming and Failing

The problem with writing publicly about all of your ventures in farming is that, sometimes, you have to write about the failures. Animals die, plants die, things break and this often opens the door to comments and suggestions from well-intentioned friends who may be a bit uninformed. I know, for example, that if I buy a dozen chicks, the odds are that one or two won’t make it. They are shipped to the farm stores when they are only one or two days old, so they are pretty fragile for such a journey. Additionally, commercial poultry companies aren’t exactly breeding for strong, healthy birds, they’re breeding for quantity. But when I share with non-farming friends, they kind of look at me like, “geez, didn’t one of your chicks die last week too?” Or when a row of plants get eaten by a mystery bug, “have you tried…”  I’m not complaining at all. I’m constantly amazed by the interest and support my friends show towards my many ventures. However, sharing our struggles can be tough. On the one hand, I know that the only way to become old and wise is to try and fail again and again, but on the other hand, I wonder if people are thinking, “do they even know what they are doing?”

Recently, I discovered the History Channel show, The American Farm. This show follows five families all farming for a living. Each family story is different:

READ, SHARE, DISCUSS, LEARN MORE HERE – https://misterjournalism.wordpress.com/2019/04/26/on-farming-and-failing/

Considering School Closures as Philadelphia’s Empty Germantown High School Faces Sheriff’s Sale

janresseger

In her profound and provocative book about the community impact of Chicago’s closure of 50 so-called “underutilized” public schools at the end of the 2013 school year, Eve Ewing considers the effect of school closures on the neighborhoods they once anchored.  Ewing’s book, Ghosts in the Schoolyard, is about Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood and a set of school closures in Chicago in which 88 percent of the affected students were African American, and 71 percent of the closed schools had majority-African American teachers. (Ghosts in the Schoolyard, p. 5)

Ewing writes: “Understanding these tropes of death and mourning as they pertain not to the people we love, but to the places where we loved them, has a particular gravity during a time when the deaths of black people at the hands of the state—through such mechanisms as police violence and mass incarceration—are receiving renewed attention. As the people…

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