Category Archives: Holidays

What We Learned Our First Year

Image By Andrikkos (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Image By Andrikkos (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

We envisioned this post to be a year recapped in pictures from our posts. Sometimes we are led in different directions without the ability to explain why – and this is a prime example of what that looks like.

On December 31, 2013, I sat at my computer desk and scanned a preview of the website one last time before pushing the “Launch” button. Ready or not, here we go.

One year later, we review the insights and activity logs, the posts that were read the most, the comments that have been made, countries you are from and what you liked the most. Continue reading

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Peace to All

Image from http://www.lynnegolodner.com/the-world-around-me/truth-peace-middle-east/

Image from http://www.lynnegolodner.com/the-world-around-me/truth-peace-middle-east/

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Lights That Share, Lives That Care

Driving around to look at lights over the holiday season has been a tradition across America since we started stringing the outdoor ornaments in the 1930s.

The first electric Christmas lights were invented by Thomas Edison in 1880, when he hung strings outside his laboratory. Edward Johnson, a close friend of Edison, rigged up lights on his Christmas tree in 1882. In 1884, the New York Times covered his lights in a feature story, and Americans became fascinated with all that twinkles and shines. Continue reading

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Low-Wage Workers Retake National Stage in ‘Fight for 15’

Published on Thursday, December 04, 2014 by Common Dreams
Kansas City. Photo by SEIU via Twitter

Kansas City. Photo by SEIU via Twitter

Thousands of workers in several different low-pay industries—including fast food, airlines, and health care—staged protests throughout the country on Thursday to demand a $15 an hour minimum wage, improved benefits, and collective bargaining rights, marking the two-year anniversary of the movement that has come to be known as the Fight for 15.

Protests and walkouts began early Thursday morning as McDonald’s employees in Chicago walked off their jobs, followed shortly by workers in New York; Washington, D.C.; Knoxville, Tennessee; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Indianapolis, Indiana; Rockford, Illinois; and elsewhere. Overall, more than 160 cities took part in the demonstrations.

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OWW Black Friday Gift Giving Guide

Quite frankly, we’re tired of the commercialization of the holiday season. While Americans experience more materialism over their lifetimes than any other culture, this time of year means the madness to possess goes on overdrive.

What should you give someone that seems to have everything (other than penicillin…)? We’ve put together a list of suggestions that should interest almost everyone you are pondering over, with the thought that instead of presenting them with the customary trinket that they may or may not like, take that same amount of money you would have spent and make a donation in their name to something bigger than them. Continue reading

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Thanksgiving as a Day of Atonement

Published on Thursday, November 24, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

The founding myth of Thanksgiving is the fateful meal shared by the indigenous peoples of Massachusetts with the starving English Pilgrims. The Pilgrims “gave thanks” at that meal for the generosity of their hosts, and thus was born the tradition of a November Thanksgiving feast.

To my way of thinking, Thanksgiving should actually be a day of atonement marked by fasting, in the spirit of Yom Kippur, Lent or Ramadan.

thanksgiving We Euramericans should be reflecting and repenting on this day for the way our ancestors turned on their Native hosts, once the time of starvation was past.

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A Much Better Name

1492Today is the 78th time that Columbus Day has been celebrated as a federal holiday. Over the years, we’ve seen it go from a memorial to New World colonization and exploitation whitewashed to make it seem as it were divine will to one of those floating holidays that employers like to dangle in front of their workers and stores love to have sales on. And, while the exploitation of the worker and consumer class that’s the holiday today is actually a fairly good summary of what Columbus brought to the New World, it’s nothing to celebrate by any means.

The old reasons to celebrate Columbus have fallen by the wayside. We know now that Columbus didn’t discover America, nor was he the first white European to do so.  And, while we admit that colonization made this country possible, the exploitation and/or genocide of the native populations and cultures in doing so isn’t a thing for anybody to be proud of.

Not all places in the U.S. celebrate Columbus Day. Hawaii celebrates Discoverers’ Day the same day, and doesn’t consider it or Columbus Day a legal holiday. South Dakota celebrates Native American Day. Oregon and Alaska don’t celebrate it at all, and Iowa and Nevada don’t celebrate it as an official holiday, but their governors are “authorized and requested” by statute to proclaim the day each year. Various tribal governments in Oklahoma either designate the day Native American Day, or they name the day after their tribe.

In 1992, Berkeley, California was the first city to call the holiday Indigenous People’s Day. This idea has spread to various locations across the country including Sebastopol and Santa Cruz, California, Dane County, Wisconsin (the Madison area), Seattle and Minneapolis.

This is the first year that Minneapolis has celebrated Indigenous People’s Day instead of Columbus Day. In declaring it, the Minneapolis City Council said it was an attempt to recognize the history and contributions of American Indians in and around the city. Events will be held at the Minneapolis Indian Center, and include speeches by Senator Al Franken, Congressman Keith Ellison, Minneapolis mayor Betsy Hodges, and a keynote address by activist and former vice presidential candidate Winona LaDuke.

Occupy World Writes congratulates Minneapolis for making this day be about our Native population and their culture instead of celebrating colonialism, exploitation and genocide. We encourage the rest of the nation to follow suit.

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Post Labor Day

By Gretschman for Occupy World Writes

Violence in Chicago escalated when federal troops came to break the 1894 Pullman factory strike, as illustrated in this drawing from Harper's Weekly. More than one thousand rail cars were destroyed, and 13 people were killed. (Photo courtesy Chicago Historical Society) via WikiMediaCommons.

Violence in Chicago escalated when federal troops came to break the 1894 Pullman factory strike, as illustrated in this drawing from Harper’s Weekly. More than one thousand rail cars were destroyed, and 13 people were killed. (Photo courtesy Chicago Historical Society) via WikiMediaCommons.

As we read about yesterday, the Right -to -Work (for less) folks don’t believe in honoring “Labor Day” since the holiday has the connotation of honoring organized labor.

Yesterday marked the 120th anniversary of the United States holiday known as “Labor Day”.

in 1894 President Grover Cleveland asked Congress to declare a holiday celebrating “labor” on the first Monday in September. The reasons behind his request were as convoluted as the Freedom Foundation”s decision to work on Labor Day- if you go to their website, you will find out that they took the Friday before Labor Day as a holiday. (yes we boycott the national holiday, but we WILL take a day off anyway) NO hypocrisy there, correct?

Labor unrest had been so prevalent in 1894 that President Cleveland had called out the National Guard to try to quell the national railroad strike.  The Guard was ineffective at getting the striking workers back to work, and the leader of the American Railway Union, Eugene Debs, was imprisoned for 18 months for contempt of court for not calling off the strike when ordered to. A Federal Judge actually halted the strike by placing an injunction against the strike on the grounds that  the strike interfered with the delivery of the US Mail, most of the which was delivered by train in 1894.

Why did President Cleveland ask for the date to be in September? Because May 1 had already become an international day to celebrate “Labor”. Cleveland did not want the celebration in the United States to become “radicalized” by celebrating at the same time as other labor celebrations around the world.

Labor Day offered a day for organized labor to celebrate its’ achievements of a less than twelve hour workday and the 5 day work week. In the last 120 years, Labor Day ‘s significance has been a mirror to what is going on in the labor movement in the United States. Today the struggles with blatant hostility against unions shown by the Koch Brothers, the Tea Party, Walmart and other corporate “citizens” show us that ‘Labor Day’ is still a day hard fought for. (I think Walmart ran a “Labor Day Sale” promotion- although those workers did NOT get the day off.) The flip side of that fight is the fact that fast food workers and day care workers are seeing that union representation is part of the key to a better life.

Only time will tell if the United States will still have a Labor Day holiday 120 years from now. if so, what will be the reasons it is celebrated? If not, what will be the catalyst for it to no longer be significant?

LIVE BETTER, WORK UNION. We at Occupy World Writes hope you enjoyed your labor day for all the right reasons.

 

 

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The Freedom To Do Dumb Things

 

Labor Day parade in New York city 1882. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Labor Day parade in New York city 1882. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Today is Labor Day. It’s traditionally seen as the end of summer and a day of outdoor picnics and family gatherings, as well as being the second busiest shopping day of the year. However, it was (and is) first and foremost, a day to celebrate the social and economic achievements of workers; a well deserved day off.

However, to the Freedom Foundation  – a conservative think tank based in Olympia, Washington – Labor Day is the proof of the power of unions, which to them equals the decline of America. So, instead of taking the day off, they plan to work all day instead.

Freedom Foundation CEO Tom McCabe, when announcing the “work-in”, said: “I can’t think of a problem in society that can’t be traced in some way back to the abuses of organized labor, so it would be hypocritical of us to take a day off on its behalf,”

One of the joys of living here in America is that people have the freedom to say and/or do idiotic things if they so desire, and the Freedom Foundation’s exercising that freedom today. Occupy World Writes hopes that they have a fun day at work. As for us, we’ll be celebrating the contributions that unions have made to our country.

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It Won’t Fix Itself

Speaker of the House John Boehner (public domain) via Wikimedia Commons

Speaker of the House John Boehner (public domain) via Wikimedia Commons

We at Occupy World Writes try to stay apolitical as far as what we write goes. While we’re unabashedly liberal, we recognize that neither party truly represents we the people; that they’ve both been corrupted by special interest groups and the corporate lobbyists. That being said, I personally tend to bash our conservative brethren more. With their stated views and policies on a wide range of subjects as diverse as education, women, LGBT issues, immigration, etc., they represent views and policies that I personally find discriminatory, short-sighted, racist and misogynistic. But, that’s just me…

You also have their record as legislators on the federal level over the last few years. This Congress has passed the fewest laws of any Congress ever, and the second least productive Congress was the one proceeding this one; mostly due in both cases to a deeply divided House majority, with a small but significant group being willing to derail any legislation that has bipartisan support. And, if a bill passes the House, it usually won’t go anywhere in the Senate.

This week’s antics in the House of Representatives are prime examples of what I’m talking about. On Wednesday, the House passed a bill authorizing a lawsuit against the President for using executive orders to effect changes in an existing law (the Affordable Care Act), which is a law that they’ve tried to repeal over fifty times.

Ever since the GOP took control of the House in 2010, they’ve been pushing for a delay in the individual mandate, especially when it comes to small businesses providing plans for their employees. So, when the President signs an executive order doing exactly that, they sue him for doing so. Does this make sense to you?

Yesterday, the House tried to pass a border security bill. Inspired by the humanitarian crisis of Central American refugees coming to the US as undocumented immigrants, this bill was for a fraction of what the President originally wanted ($700 million vs $3,7 billion), and was considered a must pass. At the last minute, Speaker of the House John Boehner pulled the bill, as it wouldn’t pass. Mind you, this was their own bill.

The Speaker then postponed the House recess (yes- they’ll be gone for all of August) to come up with a bill they could pass before leaving. He then suggested that there were steps that the President could take without Congress to ease the border crisis. Yes – the day after approving a lawsuit against the President for using executive orders, he proposes that the President use executive orders because Congress is too dysfunctional to do its job.

Now, mind you, I’m not saying that the Democrats or the President are angels- far from it. The President has endorsed and continued a lot of the same Bush era policies that got us into the mess that we’re in, and the Democrats for the most part are spineless ideologues; they talk a good platform but cave in when faced with any real opposition.

So, we have a broken government. How do we fix it? Get out and vote in November. Start holding your Congressthings accountable; let them know where you stand on the issues. Remind them that they work for you, and not for special interest groups and the corporate lobbies. Get involved!

It won’t fix itself; we need to do our part…

 

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