This Time, It's About the Music.

Tomorrow, Monday, November 15, is the Prometheus Radio Project's National Call-in Day to pass the Local Community Radio Act.

For ten years, the radio pirates of Philadelphia and their cohorts all over the country have fought to pass this law, which would give the completely stale form of FM radio a total reset. This bill, two Senators away from passing, would create thousands of non-profit, community radio stations from Hawaii to Maine. We could even have little low-power radio stations here in Philadelphia! Just think. Ogontz FM. Forgotten Bottom Radio. The Voice of Bridesburg.

If you've ever driven across any part of this beautiful country, and turned off your damn Ipod, and tried to find something on the dial that really made you jump, and wondered where all the music had gone - well, then please come by tomorrow to the basement of Calvary Church at 48th and Baltimore, for an hour, to make calls, 10 to 4 pm.

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PROMETHEUS RADIO CALL IN DAY - NOV 15 - 10 - 4

We need your help! Last chance this year to pass the Local Community Radio Act!

ALL HANDS ON DECK! This is our last big chance to pass the Local Community Radio Act this year and open up the airwaves for thousands of new community radio stations across the country. With your help, we could win this by the end of the year. We are so close!!

Please come by the Prometheus office for an hour to eat some pizza and make some calls to ...our supporters and friends around the country to ask them to call their senators.

When: Monday, Nov. 15 from 10am - 4pm (one hour shifts if you can)

Where: Prometheus Headquarters at the Calvary Church on 48th and Baltimore ave (ring the doorbell on the side door on the 48th st. side)

Why: This is it! We are down to the wire, it is do or die, the last big chance this year to pass the Local Community Radio Act.

Click here to sign up for a shift!
http://www.helpersignup.com/viewsheet.php?type=2&sheet=5855152fbdac3dec426a3a1eac8e32e0

How to restart your life, or: H2O

Want to hear something spooky?

Time is working differently for me, these days.

My sense of time and what it is and what it represents has changed remarkably in the last five months, since I left DC and decided to shake off all that rattles. Time does not move ahead ploddingly forward like it always has, or fly by. Time seems to have slowed down significantly. I savor it now. And sometimes – and this is really cool, it doesn’t happen very often… when things are really humming, it seems sometimes like time were moving backward.

As if I were getting younger. Which I actually think I am. After getting really old really fast, it now seems like I am living my life in reverse.

I used to be in the habit of getting through unpleasant episodes by saying to myself, just hang on Hannah, this will all be over soon. But I stopped. How could I wish away a part of my own life? It’s like wishing yourself a step closer to death. It doesn’t matter what is happening to you, it doesn’t matter if you just lost someone or if you are miserable or angry or frustrated, it doesn’t matter where the pain comes from or how it hits you, it is your one own beautiful glorious stupid life.

About four months ago, I realized that I had been terribly mistaken about the value of this hamster wheel ladder of success bullshit that had taken me to DC in the first place. I wish I had figured this out earlier, and not wasted ages 30 to 34 trying to prove I-don’t-know-what for I-don’t-remember-what-reason. But hey, I’m lucky, it could be a lot worse. Some people spend their whole life panting with their little rodent haunches on the wheel.

I quit my job, got rid of my apartment, and then one weekend began to give away my stuff. I started very causally with the VHS tapes, then it started really gaining steam, and just started dumping appliances out on the sidewalk.

The world I had chosen to enter was just awful. A whole city of political unprofessionals, waiting to speak in the meetings in their assigned order – it made monsters of normal, soft human beings who should have been playing the timbal somewhere.

Watching the progressives was extra depressing – these people sharing the same ideals, pushing each other aside, breathlessly claiming credit, lining up in the great factory production line of hackneyed sayings and stale ideas, a giant writhing mass of bodies all trying to manipulate each other. The only possible reaction I could have to all of this was, naturally, to want to move to the opposite side of the country, hide somewhere in the redwoods, write a book, get a medical marijuana prescription, and learn how to convert cool old diesel Volkswagens to run on honey and wisteria.

How do you restart your own life? How do you shake it all off like it’s a bad dream? And how, especially, do you do this when a large part of what you want to shake off is your nasty, annoying, immature, selfish needy weirdo younger self? And how, especially especially, are you supposed to do that when you had to make all of your beginning mistakes in public?

My family moved around a lot when I was young, in search of happiness in anonymity. It’s the frontier mentality: the crazy people who leave the small town because they are tired of being talked about. It is much harder to recreate your own life in the same place as your old one, while hanging out in the same place, and doing the same work.

It is my new mission in life: to be in politics, and do it right, and not accumulate the barnacles on my personality. The nastiness, the control, the anger, the spite.

POWER! Power power power! You just don’t know where it’s going to come from, and you never know what it’s going to do – or what it’s going to do to you. It comes out of the ground, I think. Often this force that blows through you does you damage – wears you out, throws all sorts of shadows on you, warps your personality. Fighting all the time, fear, anxiety, it’s a plague.

I am trying to be as simple as a conduit as I can be, from now on. There is no choice, really. I think I will be the river channel I have always wanted to be.

I have a lovely sense of inevitability about it. I have a lovely sense of inevitability about everything, actually. Very few people get to start their life over again anew, which is what I am doing now. Completely different. No more bubble gum. No more disrespect. No more NOTHING that does not make the soles of my feet feel good. Everyone should follow these rules. All the time.

I’m even listening to early rock and roll, that’s how young I am becoming again. I am listening to Chuck Berry and early Beatles and the Beach Boys. It is like those opiates at the base of your spine but, instead, you can dance.

So yeah. I have to find a new place to live. I have to find a job past November. I have to replace some of those appliances. I have to buy a really good stereo with really good speakers. Hardwood floors with really thick rugs.

I don’t really know what’s going to happen, although I do know one thing: the next segment of my life is going to be so much better than the last segment that there will be no comparison whatsoever.

Right now I am organizing a statewide conference on Saturday, Oct. 16 in Harrisburg for the Marcellus Shale grassroots movement across the state. That’s a five-year campaign to protect our incredibly beautiful state from being poisoned by the most powerful corporations on the planet, the multinational oil companies. I don’t know whether I get to work on that fulltime, but it's my kind of fight, and it's definitely the most incredibly complicated multilevel puzzle I have ever seen, the kind of thing that will keep me challenged for years. After Congress, the PA state legislature seems adorable.

And I tell you, this one’s going to be a doozy. It's going to have all sorts of far-reaching long-term effects that I can't even begin to predict now. Party registration. Campaign finance. Zoning law. Pretty much the Philly casino fight times one million.

And it's visceral. It's going to be the people of Pennsylvania standing in front of their homes holding shotguns and growling ‘get your asses off our land’; and when I say I have a sense of inevitability, I will say now, this one feels like when you are inside, and there’s a great windstorm rattling the windows, shaking them so bad you think they are going to break, and you know that all you have to do is reach up and unhook a tiny little rusty metal latch and the wind is so powerful it will knock open all the the windows with a roar.

That's how I feel about this one.

And so I guess this is why I learned to campaign, after all. Thank god there turned out to be a reason for all of that.

It should be fun. Now GO PHILLIES!

Look What We Have Done

This is the ocean on fire.

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I have been given my writing prompt, finally, in the serendipitous manner in which real writing prompts are given - by the great Chance Williams, my co-worker and dear, dear friend. "You should explain how truth happens," he says to me. Just like that. 

Truth is happening to me, now, without me having anything to do with it other than simply asking it to show up. I am leaving a lot of things behind - my job, my assumptions, most of my belongings, which I am blissfully selling or giving away at an astonishing rate. I have finally grown up - that is, realized very deeply that I am going to die someday, and that to waste any further time than is necessary on the unending battle over resources would be to show the gift of my own life the most intolerable disrespect. 

So, wow. What an assignment.

To explain how truth happens.

Reply comments

Stream of Consciousness Blog Entry

One of the best ways of learning about what's going on with yourself - I mean, what's REALLY going on with yourself, meaning the things that you don't even know about yourself that are percolating in your own mind - is to sit down and write about something completely different. Usually, interesting stuff just floats up from your own unconscious like so many chunks of ice.

The older I get, the more comfortable my own brain gets with the idea of communicating the real Hannah to the (and I say this with all hilarity and affection) busy-bee bullshit rule-following hamster-running-on-a-wheel boring-as-hell ambitious business-card-flinging Girl-Scout-civics-lesson penitent guilt-ridden half-a-calorie-counting serious-as-a-heart-attack Metro-Stations-of-the-Cross work-ethic conscious mind that has made my life a living hell since adolescence, but I haven't got back to the garden yet, so until that day comes, I will have to work at it to nudge the doors of perception a little opener.

CONSCIOUS MIND: But, but..? Are you sure that's a word, Hannah? "Opener"?

UNCONSCIOUS MIND:

SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP!

OF COURSE IT'S A F____G WORD!

HOW THE HELL ELSE

ARE YOU SUPPOSED TO GET SOUP

OUT OF A CAN?

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I was always really impressed by Burning Man. I never went, but wow! It's not just the sheer logistical nightmare and wonderment of it. It's not just that I love art that is created only to be destroyed. It's not just the barter-only economy. It's not just the lovely tank top I have with their lovely slogan "Joy Is a Form of Protest," brought back as a gift from my lovely ex who probably went to look at drugged naked women spray-painted in tiger stripes.

The real thing that blows my mind about Burning Man and the whole culture is that it's really a gigantic pagan ritual that has sprung up as a result of and commentary on the carbon combustion age. We are all Burning Men. It's a ritualistic and cultural expression of the fossil fuel economy.

I wish I were more familiar with it so I could draw out this argument in depth, but the only other think I can think of in the same category is that town in India where they ceremonially burn Santa Claus. Which is not all that different, really, and perhaps more meaningful since cremation is kind of the industry standard there.

I find it almost unfathomably creepy and horrible that our civilization is entirely powered by burning the remains of beings that died millions of years ago. We're literally burning our ancestors. We are powering these millions of cars and all those blinking little appliances in our homes and apartments on fossilized dead bodies.

It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that the implications of this practice are massively destructive, from the degradations imposed by the extraction industries, through the pollution caused by refining and shipping, and then the release of carbon dioxide in combustion, which has already started the greatest man-made environmental disaster in human history.

They should have known from the beginning that there was going to be some kind of devil's bargain with petroleum. It's far too powerful. Human beings aren't supposed to be whizzing in and out of cities in giant tanks of steel at 70 mph for their daily commute. Human beings actually really shouldn't ever go 70 mph an hour in their life. (Except on a train, IMHO).

There is very little of our daily life that corresponds to the way that human beings have lived for millennia; at least in the United States, most of the country's physical landscape has been completely reordered around this. Not to mention the mountains that we are currently being leveled, or the fracking pumps injecting radioactive water 8,000 feet into the ground to crack open bedrock so gas can escape. That's just baaaaad voodoo.



Links:

Award-winning new documentary on fracking and the oil and gas industry, which is coming to mess with PA very soon: Gasland (screening in Philly on April 10).

CAN YOU DO THIS WITH YOUR TAP WATER? from JOSHFOX on Vimeo.

Democratic candidate Joe Hoeffel is the only candidate in the Pennsylvania Governor's race to call for a moratorium on gas drilling/fracking wells. (New York already has, considering it far too dangerous.) His position is here.

The Oil and Gas Accountability Project at Earthworks.

And of course, love to Greenpeace, the organization that made me a liberal by canvassing my house when I was 12 or 13. The canvasser showed me photos of dead elephants and burning rainforests, and I got very upset, gave her all my allowance, and the next day canceled my subscription to the National Review. Never let anyone tell you that going door to door doesn't work.

Joe Hoeffel for Governor of Pennsylvania

"Of course I'm endorsing Joe. He's the only one who can take the heat." - Democratic Committeeman, Bucks County. It is often said that 'politics is the art of the possible.' But in my experience, I have found that there are huge differences of opinion as to what, exactly, is possible - how high are our goals and ideals, and how hard we should to fight to achieve them. There are some leaders whose definition of the word 'possible' are truly expansive, and truly visionary. And luckily for us, one of them is running for Governor this year: former Congressman Joe Hoeffel, from the township of Abington, Montgomery County, PA... and with your help and strong support, he can be Pennsylvania's next Governor. County Commissioner Joe Hoeffel is a pro-labor, feminist, pro-environment progressive who has been running against Republicans in Republican-majority Montgomery County for 32 years, beating them, and then working constructively together to forge consensus. In this, he is very rare. During his three terms in the U.S. Congress, four terms in the PA legislature, and three terms as Montgomery County Commissioner, Joe maintained a voting record that earned him a 100 percent approval rating from the Sierra Club, 97 percent from the AFL-CIO, and 100 percent from Planned Parenthood. The first bill he passed, in 1978 at age 27, instituted campaign finance reform in Pennsylvania. Joe is a principled, ethical, passionate leader who has been tireless about standing up for what is right, and because of his popularity in the Philadelphia suburbs - the 'swing area' in most statewide elections - he has by far the strongest chance to beat the Republican machine in November. Donate and volunteer today. Even donations like $20 or $50 add up - donate today. Joe needs your help gathering signatures as well to get him on the ballot... to tell your friends, to hold house parties. Early support matters the most! Joe wants to return to Harrisburg to enact policies that would fix our ongoing budget crises and imbalances in order to make our economy stronger and produce jobs, protect our forests and waterways from the ravages of gas drilling, and stop the Stupak-style erosion of womens' rights to reproductive health. Joe's policy proposals and endorsements are posted here. Please call the campaign office to help Joe or if you have any questions: 215-302-2010. Thank you! Hannah Miller

Monday, Feb. 15 in Philly: The Bills Are Too High

The Bills are Too High:
Community education and support on rising costs of gas, electric, cable and internet - our basic utility needs.
Monday, February 15th from 6pm - 8pm
Tuttleman Learning Center room 105 at the intersection of 13th and Montgomery
Philadelphia, PA
www.mediamobilizingproject.org

The Bills are Too High is a community educational event and support on the increases in the costs of basic utilities that are affecting our city and state. In a city where unemployment has climbed over 10% and nearly one and four live in poverty, paying the bills is a struggle for many of us. From electricity, to cable, gas, and internet, federal and state actions are making it harder every day for Philadelphians to meet our basic needs.

The beginning of this year marked increases as high as 40% in the electric bills throughout Central PA. Jan 2011 will see more increases for all those in the Philadelphia area served by PECO/ Excelon because of deregulation.

With Internet and Cable major companies like Verizon and AT&T are pushing federal law makers to allow discrimination of content on the internet, a move that would make the internet more expensive for everyone.

Along with this Comcast is looking to buy NBC/Universal. From past experiences of deals like this such a move means less channels for viewers and higher monthly bills.

And many people going through the winter without heat were almost kept in the cold because of a lack of funds for the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP). More funds were distributed but the program is under extra stress because of the economic down-turn.

Through out the evening there will be support to sign up for LIHEAP and other utility benefits, take action to make cable and internet affordable, and a listening booth to share your own story.

The Bills are Too High will take place at Temple University Main Campus, Tuttleman Learning Center room 105 at the intersection of 13th and Montgomery, on Monday, February 15th from 6pm - 8pm.

For more information, email bmercer@gmail.com.