Summer! Biking! Organizing!
So it’s June, and it’s nice to be outside again. I just got a new bike, which is lovely, and I’ve been riding everywhere I can. 5 miles to work, 10 miles to school, 9 miles to a friend’s, whatever. I’ll eat it up. With the usually high gas prices, it’s a good investment, and I feel a ten times healthier already.
Anyways, my training at work is coming along reasonably well. The shop seems fairly promising, but it’s going to take a good amount of agitation to get any progress. I feel a little overwhelmed by the prospect to be honest. At school, SDS got recognized as an official club, and I’m currently sitting in class in this very lame, very boring software applications class. I’m thinking about dropping it, getting a refund, and taking a Credit By Examination (CBE) if I can get away with it. I could probably teach the class, considering I’ve been on computers for as long as I could spell. That would make my summer a whole lot easier!
We’re having our first Hartford SDS meeting in a couple weeks’ time, which I’m probably most excited about right now, and the SDS Action Camps are shaping up really well. I won’t be making the national convention, because, well, Rage Against the Machine is doing a reunion. I know, it’s cliche, but they were my favorite band growing up and they’re probably the reason I’m even an activist. But, I felt guilty about missing the convention, so I pulled some strings and managed to get a free literature table for SDS at the show. Really stoked.
This past weekend, we had a statewide student activist camping retreat, organized by an excellent new organizer named Jason Ortiz out at UConn. It’s not specifically SDS, and that’s fine. The point is to build a movement first, an organization second. Or something like that. Anyways, the most exciting prospects that came out of it were the ideas that (1) the Uconn Free Press, a solid weekly/biweekly radical paper will be expanding to a statewide student newspaper (which Capital BADLY needs) and (2) we all thought organizing a statewide student union was a fantastic idea. The main idea would be to fight for lower tuition, greater freedom of expression, a greater voice in curriculum and academic policies, and other bread and butter issues. There was also the more controversial idea that the union could also be a venue for the discussion of broader issues, such as the war. My belief is that there’s nothing wrong with bringing up political issues for debate and arguing for action on the part of the union (something good workers unions do regularly) whereas others felt that it would be inappropriate.
Aside from that, we intend to do a banner making/affinity group workshop in the near future to kickstart our new alliance and spread the buzz about what we’re doing and what we wanna do. It was a very direct action-oriented gathering, and I think we all agree that it was a crucial first step in the right direction. Rock, rock, rock on.
I know I’ve rarely updated this thing (though for me, it’s actually a decent accomplishment) so I’m going to try to keep at it more often. Even if nobody reads it (except Richard), it’s good for me to put my thoughts on paper.