So, was it good for you?

Below, you’ll find the first in our series of National Poetry Month poems. This one, “Selecting a Reader,” comes to us from Ted Kooser, who spent most of his adult life in Nebraska as an insurance representative and writing poems “on the side.” And for two years (2004-2006) he was the United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. He has also won a Pulitzer Prize. (We thought we’d start off with a big-wig, well, as big a big-wig as a poet can get.) You can buy his most recent book, Flying at Night, by clicking this sentence.

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SELECTING A READER

First, I would have her be beautiful,

and walking carefully up on my poetry

at the loneliest moment of an afternoon,

her hair still damp at the neck

from washing it. She should be wearing

a raincoat, an old one, dirty

from not having money enough for the cleaners.

She will take out her glasses, and there

in the bookstore, she will thumb

over my poems, then put the book back

up on its shelf. She will say to herself,

“For that kind of money, I can get

my raincoat cleaned.” And she will.

Why?

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Why?

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Why?

http://flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=326195615&size=t

Photo by this questioning fellow.

The U.S. Senate recently passed a war-spending bill to further fund the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Regardless of how you feel about the war, none of us want to see our troops going without food, shelter, or protective equipment, and we all want them back as soon as possible. Not to sound fatalistic, but see, with politicians, there’s always a hitch.

This nugget of pyrite comes to us c/o the Washington D.C. Examiner:

Like their counterparts in the House, the Senate has larded its version of an “emergency” war spending bill with nearly $20 billion in pork-barrel outlays, including $100 million for the two major political parties’ 2008 presidential conventions.

The $100 million for the political party conventions — $50 million for the Democratic convention in Denver and $50 million for the Republican convention in St. Paul, Minn. — is included in a section described as “Katrina recovery, veterans’ care and for other purposes.”

“Other purposes” — nice.

But this is supposed to okey and also dokey because: “The Senate Appropriations Committee noted that the committee provided roughly $50 million to help defray the costs of policing the 2004 conventions.”

So, let me get this straight — the two parties with a stranglehold on our political system are throwing parties for themselves, and we’re helping to foot the bill. Maybe someone needs sit the Senate Appropriations Committee down like a four-year-old and explain that just because you did something naughty before and didn’t get caught that it doesn’t make it okay to do it again.

Before my vitriol percolates so much that the coffee of my logic makes no sense (see, it’s already happening!), let’s put $100 million into perspective. With that money, we could build 500-1000 new homes in post-Katrina New Orleans. And according to the World Food Programme, 19 cents will feed a school child in a developing country for one day. With $100 million we could feed 1,441,961 completely impoverished children for a year.

To quote our pal Jeff Tweedy, ax-slinger and lead-singer of Wilco: “Republicans, Democrats — [they] can’t give you the facts.” Well, we do. We always will.

In his famous, infamous, and heavily footnoted poem “The Wasteland,” which is as dense as anyone a fame-whore who “stars” on The Real World, T.S. Eliot wrote:

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

When you live in Western New York, while you probably love snow (as opposed to corn) as high as a elephant’s eye, you also, you know, get a bit stir crazy, and pine for Spring like an undergrad on spring-break pines for a fifth of tequila. So to us, April is one of the finest months.

April is also National Poetry Month, and as a poet, I like to share the best of the best of the best with others. So, in the spirit of the month, in the spirit of art that breeds progress, in the spirit of temperatures cracking 50 degrees, we’ll be sharing a reader-friendly poem for each of the next five Mondays.

Why Monday? Because it’s the cruelest day.

Dear Tried-and-True PW Readers:

We recently received a new shipment of bumper stickers from the adhesive folks at Sticker Guy, and now we’ve got oodles to give away. We’d like and love to ship one or twelve or thirty-seven off to you to slap on your cars, trucks, semis, hearses, and tractors. You can give them to your friends. You can give them to your enemies. You can give them to your enemies’ friends.

All ya gotta do is send us an e-mail through our Contact page, and include your name, address, and e-mail address, and we’ll gladly mail some to you for free, baby. Just let us know how many you think you can use.

You’ll be helping us out a lot, and we really appreciate all the support you’ve given us already.

Thrive,

Eric and Matt

Strolling around NYC one winter with my Brooklyn born-and-bred bud, Jay, I looked up at the skyscrapers surrounding us like they were monuments to the gods. From my vantage point, that of someone who grew up in a town where a three-story building was considered excessive, these buildings boggled my imagination.

“Man, those are beautiful,” I said. “I can’t believe we made these.”

To that, Jay, making every effort to dismantle my sentimentality for his city, said: “I wish cement had never been invented.”

Maybe we both had a point. And maybe Jay, an avid reader of Progressive Wednesday, will smile a bit over what Time magazine has just plopped into my mind, which I will now plop into his and yours: cement can help save the planet.

Read for yourself:

As head of research and development for Italcementi, Enrico Borgarello knows cement isn’t considered the most high-tech–or environmentally friendly–of products. But under his direction, the Bergamo-based Italian company has developed a substance that could turn an ordinary building into a weapon against air pollution.

It’s called TX Active, and it’s an additive for cement that literally eats surrounding smog.

According to Mr. Borgarello, when the sun hits TX Active, the substance “neutralizes surrounding pollutants like nitrous oxide and sulfur dioxide.” TX has the potential to cut local air pollutants from 20-70%.

The Italcementi company paints an even clearer picture:

In a large city such as Milan, researchers have calculated – on the basis of test results – that covering 15% of visible urban surfaces with products containing TX Active® would enable a reduction in pollution of approximately 50%.

Testing continues because similar catalytic agents like TX can lose steam over the long haul. But considering the building boom going on in some underdeveloped but industrializing countries, TX could make minuscule and monstrous buildings alike more eco-friendly and life more sustainable.
If so, Jay and I might see the world a little more similarly, and call me selfish for ignoring the environment for a split-moment, but I’d kinda dig that, too. (Of course, this is only because I want him to show me around the Biggest Apple again. Hint, hint.)

I’m not what you’d call “Fan Numero Uno of le Buy de Best.” Why? Because no other fool but me would mix English, Spanish, and French into such an awful language melting pot of goop. (By the way, I call this new amalgam language Spenglench.)

But seriously, Best Buy, while treating some right, has treated me a little wrong. If you’ll humor me, allow me share a little tale.

My VCR broke down about a year ago, and, you know, I’ve got a closet full of video tapes (and not that kind of video tapes, you perv). So, I’m checking out and, as Circuit City as my witness, the clerk said: “Why the hell are you buying this? Don’t you watch DVDs?” I finished my purchase, but my rage lingered around like a rash on one’s unspeakables. So, the next day, I returned the sucker.

But (and this is an elephant-sized one), Best Buy might be changing my mind. They’ve developed a new work program called Rowe (results-only work environment), which was highlighted in a recent issue of Business 2.0. And this ain’t your old man’s flextime program. Rowe works (no pun intended) like this:

The boss has no say in scheduling and can judge employees only on tasks successfully completed — even if none were done in the office.

And under this system, currently used by Best Buy for 60% of the folks working in the corporate headquarters “employee productivity has increased an average of 35 percent in departments covered by the program.”

And they’ve got plans to use Rowe in their stores as well. Makes sense to me. I’ve had at least four jobs where I spent a good part of my day creating the illusion of work, or simply taking so many bathroom breaks that, even though I was pretending, I started to wonder if I had a potty problem.

I could see a bit of trouble brewing — the tasks could simply rise and rise some more, demanding more and not an equal amount of work from employees. Still, it’s an intriguing bit of work policy, one that could truly benefit workers and employers.

So let’s keep our fingers and VHS tapes crossed, mon good amigos.

Photo by this work-a-holic.

I don’t even know where to begin writing about Hal Taussig. Okay, I do. It goes like this: Taussig could appear on a episode of MTV’s Cribs if he wanted to, but instead he dolls out his millions to the poor in the form of low-interest loans.

He considers the wealth he could be amassing “an embarrassment.” He doesn’t own a car. He owns one suit. He works three jobs. Oh, and he’s 82.

After a trip during which he drove a car all around Europe, he decided to start a travel agency, Untours. Through Untours, travelers get to live in a country instead of just visiting it, by shacking up for two weeks in an apartment, farmhouse, villa, or cottage. Plus, by using this agency, travelers can know that their hard- or not-so-hard-earned ¢ha-¢hing goes to an amazing cause and not someone’s bloated coffers.

According to an article by Art Carey in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

In the early ’80s, Taussig was making more money from the tour operation than he needed or wanted. He decided to accept about $20,000 a year for his basic expenses.

First, Taussig gave the excess profits back to his customers. The next year, he split the profits among his employees. Finally, he decided to channel them into a foundation.

The motto of the Untours Foundation is “a hand up, not a handout.” It provides low-interest loans, here and abroad, to create jobs, build low-income housing, and support fair-trade products: goods such as coffee that are sold at a price that guarantees producers and workers a fair wage and decent livelihood.

He’s work with the foundation he started calls to mind both Kiva (the non-profit micro-loan organization we’ve already mentioned on our pages) and the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh. The founder of the latter, Muhammad Yunus, snagged the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for advancing the theory and practice of micro-loans, and has said: “Poverty in the world is an artificial creation; it does not belong to human civilization. We can change it. Poor people are not asking for charity; charity is not a solution for poverty.”

Says Taussig: “This is my way of finding meaning. This is how I get joy out of life. The widening gap between the rich and poor is not sustainable. I fear there will be a violent revolution if we don’t find a solution to poverty in the world.”

Meaning, joy, hope, peace, equality. Yes, more of this. Yes, please.

A few months back, I read an interview in Esquire of Bryan Anderson, a 25-year-old triple-amputee who served in the War in Iraq. He’s one of the 24,518 who’ve been wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan.

One of the quotations from the piece appears now and again on our sidebar “One Progressive Thought,” and it goes like this: “If you’re not falling, you’re not trying.” Bryan, of course, meant in terms of his physical therapy, but he also says that it’s become his motto.

The interview is extensive, funny, inspirational, smart, and dark, and it paints a picture of war that you can’t wipe clean from your mind, even if you wanted to.

Guys and gals like Bryan need our help, and we’ve set up a fund through Homes for Our Troops to do just that. Homes for Our Troops needs your help, and we’re hoping to raise $250, a modest sum, for this fine and unfortunately necessary organization. (Bryan has been helped by a similar organization called the Wounded Heroes Foundation. You can donate by clicking this sentence.)

We thought we’d share more of Bryan’s story in his own words, so here are some other quotations from the article (you can read the entire piece by clicking here):

Editor’s note: the following contains some graphic language and descriptions.

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“I think the only time I would agree with war is if there’s a childish country that wants to do something really, really stupid and won’t listen to anybody. Then it might be worth it.”

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“At any moment, anything could happen. We were lucky for ten months. We knew we would get hit. It was always a question of how bad it would be. I never thought it would be this bad.”

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“[After the explosion], I was lying there. Before I said anything, I wiped my face because I felt blood and the flies were all over, and the first thing I was was my finger gone. Okay, not so bad. Then I turned my hand over, and the whole thing looked like ground beef. But it still looked all right, kind of. I could see bone. Anyway, while I’m looking at this, I went to wipe my face with my left hand and there was nothing there. Oh, fuck. After that I looked down at my legs, and right as I saw what had happened, my friend grabbed my forehead and pushed it down, hoping that I hadn’t seen. But I did. I knew they were gone.”

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“I want to be a stuntman. I’m an adrenaline junkie. I like going fast and all that stuff. And now that I’m like this, and I have an identical twin brother who’s just as crazy as I am. I’m hoping we can make something happen of it.”

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“For the most part, I dream that I’m full-bodied.”

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“I’ve been getting tats since I was eighteen. I had nine tattoos. After the explosion, I had six and a half. On my left inner forearm I have the Chinese symbol for life. Go figure.”

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“I don’t regret anything.”

I subscribe to more magazines than my eyes, noggin, and free time can handle, but subscribe to them I do. Often, this leads to a lot of skimming, looking for articles about topics I’m hungry to learn more about, looking for articles that might be pertinent to Progressive Wednesday.

A recent piece in the January/February 2007 issue of Business 2.0 couldn’t be ignored. According to an article by Carleen Hawn, close to a billion people in the world live hungry. And then I read this:

Malnutrition kills more people annually than AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined, [and] the United Nations says a child dies from the complications of malnutrition every five seconds.

The average person reads 250-350 words per minute, which means that by the time you read the end of this post, approximately 30 children will have died from a lack of food.

All hope ain’t lost, though. There are many fantastic organizations out there battling this exact problem: World Food Programme, Unicef, America’s Second Harvest, Meds & Food For Kids, and Oxfam, amongst several others (all of which would graciously accept your donations).

But, once again, there’s a way to make money and make the lives of those suffering better. Nutriset, a French business that describes itself as a “company fully dedicated to humanitarian and social programs,” has developed a new product called “Plumpy’nut” (I gotta say, I would have come up with a less, I don’t know, goofy name). They doled out 500,000 of these über-nutritious bars last year. Each bar contains 500 calories, ground peanuts, whey protein, vitamins, and minerals. One of the most important features of this product is that it isn’t perishable.

Plumpy’nut succeeds where powdered milk fails because it doesn’t require clean drinking water. In Darfur alone, this product has cut malnutrition in half. And according a piece in the N.Y. Times, Plumpy’nut can even be fed to babies to help jump-start growth.

Here’s the amazing part for the company: they sold $25 million last year alone by saving people’s lives, and they reinvest 80 percent of their profits into research and development.

So here’s a business with a heart the size of a home, making money while helping to end malnutrition. I believe this drives home the point (without making a quick pit stop at 7-Eleven for a Big Gulp) we’re always trying to make at Progressive Wednesday: Baby, the end of big problems starts with small solutions.

More and more we’re seeing colleges and universities step up to the progressive plate offering up degrees that will help companies and governments in terms of sustainability. A new program at Arizona State University blends together study in “environment, economics, and social challenges.”

According to a piece in April 2007 issue of Fast Company, this new graduate degree will help teach students “how to make best use of limited natural resources while providing for continued growth.” This is particularly an issue in the Grand Canyon State, where the population has grown by 25% since 1990 (the same has happened in New Mexico), and in Nevada where the population has more than doubled in the same time.

These graduate students (and future Jeopardy contestants) will learn “to identify and provide solutions…[regarding] rapid urban growth, sustainable energy and material use, and water management.” The latter being a serious concern in arid areas such as the Southwest (casually calling it “just a dry heat” is like calling Charles Manson “a bad dude”).

Researchers are looking for ways to tackle heat islands, develop inventive fuels, and create new construction materials. Big business is taking note and several, such as Wal-Mart and Starbucks, are lending a hand to the ASU program. According to the School of Sustainability itself, the program addresses all of the following:

• Adaptive Solutions to an Urbanizing World
• Sustainable Energy, Materials, and Technology
• Water Quality and Scarcity
• Social and Economic Transformations
• Biodiversity and Habitat Transformations
• Governance and Policy

Much like the new movement toward organic farming programs we wrote about earlier, this is another example of the ways economics, ethics, and education come together to help out communities and capitalism

There is money to be made to help deal with shortages of water, land, petroleum, and other necessary resources, and to do so we need people entering the work force with a 21st century kind of awareness of the American landscape, a landscape that’s changing faster than a cow’s cud into milk.

(Feel free to chew on that last metaphor for a while, along with this ugly pun. My apologies. I couldn’t help myself.)

Hilarity-maker extraordinaire, Mel Brooks, somewhat famously said: “I cut my finger. That’s tragedy. A man walks into an open sewer and dies. That’s comedy.” But a new scientific study might turn that idea on its tail, if just a bit:

A good laugh may not only lift your mood, but can make you more cooperative and altruistic towards strangers.

Laughter, a universal human behavior, has been shown in previous studies to act as a “social lubricant” and promote group cohesiveness. In this new study, researchers tested whether this sense of closeness would promote altruistic behavior.

You can read the details of the study by clicking on this sentence. But in a nutshell (what kind of nutshell I’m not really sure, I mean, seriously, you really can’t fit much in a nutshell but a nut) the study involved an “investment game.” Participants were broken into small groups and each individual could either invest their “money” in either “a private fund or a group fund — they would get back whatever they put in the private fund, while whatever was contributed to the group fund would be doubled and split evenly among group members, regardless of how much each person put in.” The groups were shown either serious films or ridiculous films before the investing. What the researchers discovered was that giggles lead to lending to the group fund, demonstrating an increase in altruism and a decrease in selfishness.

So, in the spirit of that, here are three video clips we hope will make you chuckle, guffaw, and maybe even, as the kids say, “ROFL.” After each video is a link to a charity we give “big ups.” Maybe a little laughter will be good medicine for these organizations.

Mel Brooks first film, a short, titled “The Critic.”

Anne Bancroft, Mel Brooks’ wife, died of uterine cancer. Please consider donating to the Gynecological Cancer Foundation.

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Here’s a clip of one of our fave stand-ups at Progressive Wednesday, Kathleen Madigan, doing a bit from her DVD and CD In Other Words.

A charity we deeply admire is Operation Smile, an organization that helps provide surgery to children around the world born with facial deformities. Maybe give a small gift today.

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In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, a few days late, here’s a clip from the Simpsons.

A good friend of Progressive Wednesday works for Big Brothers Big Sisters. A little green goes a long way with this organization.

Here’s video of Commander Richard Jadick on The Daily Show talking about his new book On Call In Hell, which details his experience as a marine doctor during the War in Iraq. It’s easy to forget that, among all the other soldiers redefining courage every day, there are doctors saving life after life after life. It takes a different kind of strength, I’d imagine, to heal when surrounded by destruction, to be faced with injuries no med school can prepare you for handling.

One of the major values in medical ethics is “First, do no harm.” These doctors, very literally, undo harm. We owe them, just as we owe our soldiers, more than we can repay them. So check out this video. Learn a bit. Appreciate. Admire. Applaud.

Editor’s note: We’ve been having a wee bit o’ trouble with this video player. Our advice is to click the play button, then pause the sucker. Wait a minute. Think about how much you love us. Then hit play again. If that doesn’t do the trick, click this sentence to go to the website where the video is hosted. Thank ya. Oh, and the video contains some graphic language and descriptions. Consider yourself “warned.”

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According to a recent article posted on the website for Channel 11 out of Atlanta, there might be some very strong hope for the future of an AIDS vaccine:

The world could have a new vaccine designed to kill the AIDS virus in as little as three to four years according to an Atlanta-based group working on the vaccine.

It is a scientific advance that could save tens of millions of lives, and it is being developed on the campus of Emory University.

I’m a bit confused about how this vaccine works, but you need to bear in mind that I really have no idea how a smoke detector, my microwave, or aspirin works. I don’t even know how the next tissue pops up out of a box of Klennex when you grab one to blow your nose.

But apparently, the vaccine employs a “decoy virus” which contains minuscule amounts of HIV, amounts so small no one would actually get AIDS from the injection. This sets up “memory cells,” which would attack the actual virus should you become exposed. In a scientific nutshell:

The vaccine works using a one-two pharmaceutical punch to prime the body then kill the virus.

“It raises both antibodies that can block the virus and it raises white blood cells called t cells that can kill the virus infected cells,” said [Dr. Harriet Robinson, Ph. D., of the Emory Vaccine Center].

I hate to build up false hope, but steps like this on a small level (according to the article the lab where this powerful work is getting done is smaller than my garage), where progress, at times surprisingly, seems to be made.

How important could this next step in defending and treating AIDS be? Well,  according to ADVERT, an international AIDS charity, “estimates from the UNAIDS/WHO AIDS Epidemic Update around 37.2 million adults and 2.3 million children were living with HIV at the end of 2006.” Combined that would be like every single person in California having HIV. Or everyone in Canada and New Zeland put together. Or all of Spain.

Let’s hope, and pray, and hope some more that there’s an end in sight.

To keep yourself informed about HIV and AIDS, just click the red ribbon. Remember, friends, knowledge is progress.

Let’s say you or I gave 1.7 million bucks to, I don’t know, say a major terrorist organization or two in Columbia. I’m taking any and all bets that we’d find ourselves getting the water-board treatment in Guantanamo. And likely we wouldn’t be heard from again any time soon.

Now let’s say you’re a major corporation cultivating and selling bananas. In our Patriot Act times, you’d think your company would get more than a tiny slap-on-the-wrist fine. You’d, unfortunately, be capital-W Wrong. According to the Associated Press, the not-so news-ilicious news goes like this:

Banana company Chiquita Brands International said Wednesday it has agreed to a $25 million fine after admitting it paid a Colombian terrorist group for protection in a volatile farming region.

In court documents filed Wednesday, federal prosecutors said several unnamed high-ranking corporate officers at the Cincinnati-based company paid about $1.7 million between 1997 and 2004 to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, known as AUC for its Spanish initials.

So, what’s the United Self-Defense Forces of Columbia all about? Massacres of Colombians. Cocaine exportation.

As you might suspect, I write with a sigh of resignation, there’s more:

The company also made similar payments to the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, according to prosecutors.

And what’s the deal with FARC? Well, let’s see:

FARC is Colombia’s largest and best-equipped rebel group, with around 12,000-18,000 members — it is also one of the world’s richest and most powerful guerrilla armies. FARC is responsible for most of the ransom kidnappings in Colombia.

Oh, and by the way, FARC’s responsible for the following and more:

• the November 2005 kidnapping of sixty people, who are currently being held hostage by FARC, until the government decided to release hundreds of their comrades serving prison sentences. Former presidential candidate, Ingrid Betancourt—who was kidnapped in 2002—is among the hostages;
• the February 2002 hijacking of a domestic commercial flight and kidnapping of a Colombian senator on board;
• the February 2002 kidnapping of a presidential candidate, Ingrid Betancourt, who was traveling in guerrilla territory;
• the October 2001 kidnapping and assassination of a former Colombian minister of culture; and
• the March 1999 murder of three American missionaries working in Colombia, which resulted in a U.S. indictment of FARC and six of its members in April 2002.

And where does FARC get the cha-ching necessary for, you know, amping up the terror? Half from hocking drugs, and the rest from kidnappings, extortion, ransom, and of course, now from the only sorta, kinda good folks at Chiquita bananas.

So, since it’s pretty unlikely that we’re going to convince the feds to put some of the head honchos at Chiquita in the slammer, we’re going to have to do what we can: boycott these bananas. Boycott. Boycott. And more boycott.

Chiquita doesn’t sell the only bananas in the U.S., and more and more there are options to snag fair trade or organic bananas. Please, don’t reward this company for funding terrorists. This is one of the cases where the so-called “war on terror” (I’m going to be convinced that we can fight fear with fear) is something we’re going to need to take care of.

Apparently, an apple a day keeps the terrorists away.