Beka > Recent Status Updates

"The Midwest, with its wide-open spaces and muscular farm women, spawned homegrown lesbian landscapes that have endured against all odds."

"Festival culture, which began in the early 1970s as a venue for radical feminist musicians operating outside of the mainstream recording industry, offered a rural alternative to the bars, coffeehouses, + protest marches that were more readily available to East + West Coast urbanites."
-regarding Michigan Womyn's Music Festival

Placing fear of crime in a broader societal context, 3.

"...the 2nd is a lack of community spirit or community satisfaction."

It's hard to experience personal satisfaction, much less community satisfaction, when businesses discriminate against your or move out of the area with the good-paying jobs; when cost of living is not tended to by the only nearby methods of earning money. Structures created.

Placing fear of crime in a broader societal context, 2.

"At least 3 broad aspects of the social environment can be identified as contributing to fear of crime (relatively independent of the experience of victimization.)

The first is environmental incivility, in the form of abandoned buildings, vandalism, + graffiti..."

Makes me think of corporate landlord-owned neighborhood buildings left like shitty dumps.

Placing fear of crime in a broader societal context, 1.

"Geographers + their specially minded colleagues have understood for some time that the physical + social environments interact to produce certain perceptions of crime or safety.
'A growing number of signs of disorder + incivility...that indicate that the social order of the neighborhood is eroding...'"

"In the 1930s + 40s, going to lesbian bars also made a difference in lesbain consciousness. Butches who regularly frequented bars understood the value of proclaiming themselves + had definite opinions about those who did not...
Arden reminisces about many women she knew in her bowling leagues in the 1950s: 'I never saw such a bunch of gay girls who would not admit it.'"

"The process of knowing oneself, admitting one's difference, generated the desire to find others like oneself. This was difficult because lesbian bars were typically both hidden + short-lived.

The search for other lesbians required initiative + persistence, not to mention courage."

"(In the 1960s, regarding the lesbian + gay abr scenes) Nancy Achilles shows that bars provide a place of socialization, a means of maintaining social cohesion, a context for each individual to confirm gay identity, + a setting for the formation of alliances against the police."

Just finished chapter 10, Creating a culture of collaboration. Loved it. The value placed on helping people cultivate strengths and skills and weaknesses, asking for feedback and ideas, etc.

"(Through xyz activity), gradually show kids that we all have similarities which connect us, and differences that help our relationship grow."

"Tending to that which is in our care can remind us of the miracle that is being alive. It reminds us how lucky we are to be in relationship with others: to have a sense of belonging + place; to have a life so full, so rich, that material things get demolished because we + the people around us are sucking the marrow out of the bones of every day we are given."

"After years of wanting certainty, I now realize I shouldn't presume to be certain about much when it comes to God. Rather, I want to be fascinated. And so I want my theology and mythology to be complex, layered, and complicated."

"Gratitude for all that the land has given us lends us courage: to turn + face the windigo that stalks us; to refuse to participate in an economy that destroys the beloved Earth to line the pockets of the greedy; to demand an economy that is aligned with life, not stacked against it.

It's easy to write that, but harder to do."

"In this vision of The Economy of the Commons, resources fundamental to our wellbeing (like water, land, + forests) are shared rather than commercialized. These contemporary economic alternatives strongly echo the Indigenous worldview in which the Earth exists not as private property for personal gain but as a Commons to be tended with respect + reciprocity for the benefit of all."

"The market system artificially creates scarcity by blocking the flow between the source + the consumer. For example, grain may rot in the warehouse while people starve because they cannot pay for it. The result is famine for some + wealth for others. The very Earth that sustains us is being destroyed to fuel injustice."