I own a T-shirt that is almost 40-years old. I’ve kept it as a symbol of my feminism, of an idea that resists patriarchy and powerful old men, pandering to so-called, moral, constituencies. The quote on the T-shirt is about a woman’s body, my body; about a woman’s mind, my…
Posts published in “Year: 2016”
Trump, Clinton, Stein and Beyond November 8, 2016 I watched the three presidential debates. Trump’s contempt for women, his anti-choice, anti-Mexican and anti-Muslim immigrant stance, his stereotyping of Black and Latinxs, his proposed tax cuts for the wealthy and the corporations are disgusting. His toxic machismo and not so coded…
I would like to begin with something of a confession. During the beginnings of the #BlackLivesMatter movement I latched onto to the spin-off slogan #AllLivesMatter and even carried an All Lives Matter sign at the first Black Lives Matter protest I participated in. Back then, the battle lines had not…
Danny Gibson Blanchard State Forest is an enormously popular recreation area located south of Bellingham off Chuckanut Drive that is visited by tens of thousands of people every year. Blanchard Mountain features such things as the popular Oyster Dome and bat caves; hiking, horseback riding and mountain biking trails;…
At the southernmost tip of Puget Sound, the direct descendent and grandson of Sitting Bull, Benjamin Sitting Bull, Ogalla Lakota Sioux, spoke to Olympians on Saturday afternoon in downtown Olympia. About 65 people gathered in solidarity with the water protectors blocking the Dakota Access Pipeline route at Standing Rock, North Dakota. A sea lion…
The Chaplin-Thompson trial is scheduled to begin on October 11, 2016, at the Thurston County Courthouse. The Chaplin-Thompson family has requested that the community support them by showing up at court. Seating is limited, but overflow crowds will be accommodated in another room with a live feed. Check the Courthouse…
Lt. Aaron Jelcick of the Olympia Police Department’s Shooting Review Board had four pages of questions for Officer Donald similar to those raised by WIP and the Olympia community. This is a summary of that document, including Jelcick’s hand-written notes of Donald’s responses. The document is in three sections. The…
Much of Officer Donald’s narrative centers around his fear of being assaulted by Bryson Chaplin hitting him with his skateboard. For supporting evidence, Thurston County Prosecutor Jon Tunheim pointed to what he says was similar behavior when Chaplin was at the Safeway on Cooper Point Rd. earlier that night. Stills…
Each member of the SRB was given a sheet that contained the two questions they had been tasked with answering. Despite all five members having had reservations about Donald’s decisions, the Board was unanimous that he followed OPD policy. The following is their complete responses: Question #1: Did the force…
A close look at the internal investigation of OPD Officer Ryan Donald WIP has conducted an extensive review into documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) relating to the Olympia Police Department’s Shooting Review Board internal investigation into Officer Ryan Donald’s shooting of brothers Bryson and André Chaplin-Thompson…
In support of Standing Rock and their efforts to protect the water Hundreds of tribes from the United States and Canada are gathered along the Cannonball River next to the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota. They have come together to stand as one in opposition to the Dakota…
The plight of inmates in the rather newly built Thurston County Corrections facility, which only opened its doors in late 2015, is becoming drastic. The inmate overcrowding is a threatening problem that exceeds the purpose for which the jail was constructed–to accommodate the influx of inmates that the previous jail…
Work 9 to 5, catch bull at four What do I deserve? I’m just the working poor Do I deserve to vote for someone I cannot respect? Or is there an alternative, a third box to check? It’s not a Republican or Democrat And I hate to slander Bernie But…
Ready to vote? General election ballots will start arriving in a few weeks. Be sure to complete your whole ballot and vote YES on Proposition 1, Opportunity for Olympia, by November 8. Higher education has become increasingly out of reach for too many of Olympia’s college-bound kids as public college…
Make your vote count in Washington State I was inspired by Ralph Nader’s Green Party bid in 2000. He talked openly about the two-party “duopoly” and how corporations controlled the policies of both major parties from the top down and, not infrequently, from the bottom up. When I read the…
That vintage illusion called Vari-Vue where you tilt the printed object slightly one way to reveal an image and tilt again to reveal another, that’s how this election season feels to me. The dominant media’s portrayal of a black-and-white binary is far more nuanced; from my vantage point Republican Donald…
Olympia is home to an amazing alternative scene, as Teresa Eckstein pointed out in a February 2016 article for this paper, including over 20 alternative public and private schools, preschool through college. Alternative schools provide students with approaches to learning—project-based, arts-based, individualized, and/or community-oriented—that differ from traditional classroom approaches. Offering…
Freedom of choice. The supermarket shelves are lined with twenty-five different flavors of cereal, some for the health conscious and some for the sweet-lovers, for the gluten obsessed and for the GMO aware, even for the annoyingly picky kid who will eat only the lucky charms and leave the rest.…
On August 31st, 2016 Olympia Port Militarization Resistance (PMR) released the following statement. “As long as the US military is engaged in racist wars, including so-called targeted strikes, we will actively resist military use of the Port of Olympia. We refuse to profit from, or be complicit in, illegal, immoral…
The following emails detail some of our public disclosure findings presented in a September 15 Port Militarization Resistance (PMR) communication. Emails obtained through public disclosure requests made by Robert Gorrill, working with Olympia PMR, confirm the port has been actively seeking military shipments and coordinating with local city and county…
OPD Officer Ryan Donald disciplined previously for going in without backup Candace Mercer Through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, WIP has examined Officer Ryan Donald’s complete Olympia Police Department [OPD] disciplinary records. WIP found Donald was involved in an earlier incident where he did not follow proper procedure…
The responsibility of higher education to work toward alleviating wealth inequality Setting the stage We live in a time of unprecedented economic inequality in this country—unprecedented in severity, not in its existence. Policy changes, like increasing the minimum wage, revising tax codes to make them more equitable, making health care…
The present political reality and the choices for Bernicrats in November and beyond Currently, we arguably live in an oligarchy. It is described by Wikipedia as “a form of power structure in which power effectively rests with a small number of people. These people might be distinguished by royalty, wealth,…
“We need a new paradigm. We need guaranteed jobs. We need a guaranteed income to ensure that the benefits of 60 years of U.S. prosperity go to all Americans.” — Paul Buchheit Americans are feeling the impoverishing effects of the shift from middle-income to low-income jobs. The disappearance—or, more accurately,…
In the August issue of Works in Progress, the editorial collective was gracious. Instead of haranguing me about missing a deadline, they published my poem “Occupy Sonnet” that they had tucked away in their reserves, perhaps in anticipation of my precise indiscretion. With all of the violence in the world…