Gratuity: 1. A favor or gift, usually in the form of money, given in return for service. 2. What Americans get showing up early Black Friday.
Nongratuity: 1. What American Latinos and the rest of the 99% get every day from the 1%. 2. A word I made up.
[Some] Occupy updates – [some] gratitude
I at least feel grateful for protestors across the world who created and have sustained all the Occupy's. It's provided real hope during another round of elections that provided little, at least to me. Some of our elected officials have escalated their anti-Occupy actions to the level of Nazi Germany book burnings, while sparing us the expense of the matches.
From an intro to a Rebecca Solnit article comes this: "On November 15th when the NYPD entered the encampment at Zuccotti Park, a weaponless and peaceable spot filled with sleeping activists and the homeless, they used pepper spray, ripped and tore down everything, and tossed all 4,000 books from the OWS “library” into a dumpster, damaging or mangling most of them. Books couldn’t escape the state’s violence, nor could the library’s tent, bookshelves, chairs, computers, periodicals, and archives. Even librarians were arrested.
"Novelist Salman Rushdie tweeted a perfectly reasonable response to the police action: “Please explain the difference between burning books and throwing thousands in the trash and destroying them.
"It put the Constitution in the dumpster."
Update on Marcela Landres questions – the gratuity
In return for the service of your readership and sending us a question, La Bloga is offering the nonmonetary gratuity of having a Latina professional answer your burning question about publishing your work. See last week's post for details.This is from Marcela herself concerning that offer: "I just shared the link with my followers on Twitter, etc. and am very much looking forward to seeing the questions. Please forward all the questions after the deadline and I'll do my best to get answers to you in early December."
So far, La Bloga readers want to know, among other things, the size of Hispanic readership for literary novels; about editing for lit mags/journals; whether Latino writers should write about non-Latinos; and the market for Latino characters "dealing with extraordinary circumstances."
Some questions promise to make Marcela's task maybe not as simple as at least I thought they'd be. Keep them coming; our Nov. 30 deadline approaches.
Fracking is a 4-letter word - the nongratuity
Today's nongratuity for the 99% sounds so boringly commercial and technical, but Colorado and other parts of the country will get what Texanos have enjoyed for decades: breathing, drinking and becoming debilitated by energy companies fracking Aztlán and beyond for profit. Colorado had unnaturally frequent earthquakes 50 years ago, until the federal gov't stopped "nuclear fracking" at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal and elsewhere that caused the shifting.People probably have ignored the news, but we'll soon join the rest of the 99% who've suffered it for many years. Living in a major urban area will not necessarily spare you. Depending on your elected officials or gov't will not keep you or your descendants safe. Jumping on a jobs-above-everything-else bandwagon may land you on the road to I-could've-helped-stop-it.
Don't take my word for it.Learn what fracking is and is already costing us, the 99%. Here or here.
Read how the 1% lobbies away our safety and environment.
Read about the earthquake in your future.
Learn the chemicals soon to homestead your family's bloodstream.
Read how your elected officials won't come to the rescue, neither here nor there.
But also read what the 99% is doing about it in Colorado, in Ohio, New York, Ireland or Wyoming and Los Angeles.
I'm sure there's more going on out there. Just not enough yet. I'll have to do more than add earthquake insurance to my policy; my home is downwind of the fracking madness. Though actually, none of the 99%'s homes may be upwind, nor on the lee side of coming quakes.
Es todo hoy,
RudyG
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