Tonight I went to an event put on by a Black Student Union party about black issues on campus. 

Acknowledging internal racism or something:  last time I was in a room where I was the only white person, I felt uncomfortable.  This made me realize how that’s likely what it feels like to be the only black person in a room, especially when talking about race issues. 

I’m making an attempt to do it more often.

Ryan Harvey played a show last night!  It was super awesome.  He has all of his stuff for free to download here: http://riotfolk.org/

Also here is a picture of him posing sexy with a book: http://posingsexywithbooks.tumblr.com/post/14981421540/ryan-harvey-of-riot-folk-was-posing-sexy-with#notes

He does a great job of doing activism+music, mostly with Iraq vets.

Our appeal was turned in today for the Supreme Court ruling, which said that Ignite was disqualified from the past election, but not from the Special Election that they are calling for.  This is unconstitutional in many ways.  We’ll be having a call-in action coming up soon.

Right now I am reading about the fall of communism in Eastern Europe.

In CPE news, we had an awesome full page write up in the FSView this week!

It was also Palestine Week, and we had Hedy Epstein come and speak. That was very moving.  On Friday we skype chatted with a Palestinian American living in Palestine, that was super awesome.

I need to travel bad.

Get excited!! March 1st national day of action for education is on Thursday! We’ve got a social media sit in planned!  We’ll be in the capitol skyping with student activist groups from all over the state.  The house and senate budget represents further cuts to education, and we won’t stand for it! 

Just went to my first occupy meeting in a while, and it was pretty emotional in a lot of ways, both positive and negative.

The topic at hand was whether to pursue renewing our contract with the city for the site that we are occupying.  With so many people financiallytemporallyemotionally invested in this movement, folks had a lot to say. 

Fran, one of the members, said something I will cannot attempt to paraphrase.

She said when she sees that a change is coming-that something old is leaving, and something new is coming- she likes to write a story about it to help her cope.

She told the story of a time when people from all over Tallahassee were full of energy, and started occupying on the weekends.  Then full time.  The happy faces.  The demonstrations. The determination. And then when people decided to stop occupying.  How it was a positive change.  People were happy with what occupy had done so far, and planned to continue to pursue political activism, but knew that the time for occupying had passed.

It took me back to when Occupy first started, which I hadn’t felt for a long time.  Too much had happened that was affecting me. But I remembered how excited I was, how dedicated, how fiercely defensive of the movement I was. How Occupy was my family for a solid three months.  We ate together, fought the system (and each other), occupied a common space.  It’s hard to remember that when I go back to the occupation now.  I don’t know if it’s worth trying to save occupy.

We decided to have a one week trial period, where we made a conscious effort to improve things around the occupation and make ourselves politically self conscious and relevant again.  I’ll be there.

activism has been limited. 

In the meantime! I’m reading a book called environmental inequalities, a history of environmental activsm as it intersects with class and race.  Right now, it’s discussing labor’s history of environmental activism. 

Labor bureaucrats mostly took a soft line approach to fighting for environmental safety in the work place, because they were trying to use a conciliatory approach.  So workers organized! They formed their own environmental groups, and tested levels of toxic substances in their workplaces.

I sense that we will be going in to black environmental organizations.  Get excited.

YEAH OK THIS IS NOT AS EXCITING AS MARCHING. I will get back to that soon enough.

but it’s complicated and we might still win?

More on that later.

I’m taking a step back and thinking about what activism I’d like to focus on if I’m not prez.  Students United for Justice in Palestine is sounding like a good choice.

Today we recorded a ridiculous video for Progress Coalition, which included us all in canoes shouting in unison: Progress Coalition! It’s the only way forward! And then trying to canoe away but crashing in to each other.

Now I’m trying to speed read some articles that I am behind on.  After that, meeting up with Progress folks to study up on some stuff.

Elections are Wednesday!  FSU students! vote at sga.fsu.edu

Phew! Another crayday! 

We took some silly and some serious pictures for the campaign this morning.  Popping out of bushes, peeking from behind trees, and sorority girl poses.  Running for student body prez is SUCH HARD WORK.

Had a bio exam in the afternoon.

Then I met with Mary Coburn, the Vice President of Student Affairs at FSU.  She seems pretty cool.  I learned that she taught CPE classes back in the day, and wrote a paper about it!  More evidence that the free university is an integral part of FSU history.  Also talked to her about the green roof, she thought it was a great idea. 

Then I had my interview to be forwarded for Assistant Director for CPE (although I’ve been doing the job the whole time…I wasn’t ‘official’ or being paid).  I laid out how awesome CPE has been this year.  Mostly I’m proud of starting the Books to Prisoners initiative, and getting several orgs on board with it.  Still gotta make them some boxes to put in their offices, but it’s such a cool thing to get a bunch of folks on board with. They forwarded me!

Then I had a committee meeting for the planning of the new student union, which is  not happening any time soon.  I had my friend Wes Schaffer come out to talk about what a green roof is, what research we need to do, etc.  Also talked about expanding the bike facilities in the union, including bike pumps and tools.

Went for a little bit to the opening ceremonies for Black History Month.  They had an article posted on the wall about Black Student Union consistently demonstrating against a fraternity’s Old South Week from the ’60s that was pretty interesting/awesome.

Went to Student Senate afterward to be confirmed as assistant director.  Watched them give another RSO a hard time about funding.  My confirmation went smoothly. They basically interview me in front of the whole senate.  Someone asked, ‘Why should we NOT forward you?’  I said, ‘If you want to be a mean person, then you should definitely not forward me.’  None of them wanted to be mean to me tonight.

The most interesting part of senate was supposed to be a debate over passing a resolution against the Koch Brothers agreement with the economics department.  The Koch Brothers have given 1.5 million dollars toward creating a program within the department.  They had veto power over hiring, meaning that they could fire someone who’s ideology they didn’t approve of.  They also created a course, something like ‘the ethics of the free market,’ and had influence over the selection of the department chair.  We’ve been campaigning against it for a little over half a year, and we have a question on the student ballot this semester, asking students how they feel about the deal.  The scary thing is, FSU is only one university they are doing this at.  They have similar deals at about 150 universities.  It’s very devious.  Check out the film Are The Koch Brothers Teaching You? for more infuriating info.  But the debate was postponed, whomp whomp.

After Senate, I went with Patrick, last years CPE director, to get some beers.  Ended up talking to some anarchist (?) kids about Progress Coalition and CPE, gave them catalogs, and sent them on their way. 

Politics 4eva!

Love,

Cecelia

I got the idea to start this blog after time and time again being kind of shocked at the number of things I do in a day.  I’d like to record this for myself, as well as for anyone interested in the work that I do.

Today was pretty awesome!  It started out at Radical Rush, a semesterly event where all the progressive and radical organizations on campus come out and table, get to know each other, and get sunburnt. I tabled for the Center for Participant Education (a free university), Progress Coalition, and Food not Bombs. 

I then met briefly with my old History of Mexico professor, a super rad guy, to talk about grad school and politics. Brought him over to Radical Rush and gave him a CPE catalog, with all of our free classes in it.  Been trying to get him to come out for political stuff forever.

Biology class, then a meeting with the Environmental Service Program and Elizabeth Swiman (sustainability coordinator in FSU administration) about the open forum we have coming up.  She also gave me a cool resource- FSU’s results on a national sustainability survey, which has a lot of good research about the University. 

Biology help session, then met with Dave Schneider, who recently got the job of AFL-CIO zone coordinator!  Talked to him about when he ran for SGA at University of Florida, got some tips, had some Pitaria.

Ended the day with a meeting with Progress Coalition about the campaign.  Much to do!