Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon at APSU

By Debbie Boen | March 27, 2008 |

“Everybody gets several opportunities in life to risk everything they have to become what they can be.”

– Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon

Dr. Jill Eichhorn of Women’s Studies, APSU, told me that she didn’t know exactly what Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon would do for us, but guaranteed that whatever she brought to us would be “great.” Since Jill knows well my interest in civil liberties, and since CO author Terry McMoore had published a story about Dr. Reagon coming here on March 19, I knew I had to see this.

Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon is Professor Emeritus of History at American University. She recently retired after 30 years from performing with Sweet Honey in the Rock, a cappella ensemble she founded in 1973.

APSU President Tim Hall said he knew how music has the capacity to make us listen. It arrests and challenges us. Growing up in a family whose father led singing in the car after church, Hall couldn’t think about war without hearing the song in his head, Where have all the flowers gone by Peter, Paul, and Mary. When civil rights issues surface his mind visits the song, We shall overcome. So it was that he welcomed with utmost respect the civil rights leader, speaker, singer and composer, Bernice Johnson Reagon, to speak. «Read the rest of this article»

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NAACP Opposes Nursing Home bill as an injustice to seniors

By Jimmie Garland, Sr. | March 27, 2008 |

Legislation Unfairly Limits Victims’ Rights; Punishes Elderly At Their Weakest

Jackson, TN - The Tennessee State Conference NAACP today voiced its strong opposition to HB4053/SB4075, proposed legislation that strips nursing home residents of their rights to seek justice against abuse and neglect. The legislation comes at a time when the quality of care in Tennessee nursing homes is at a record low and the profits of nursing home operators continue to soar.

Gloria Sweet-Love, NAACP State President, said the organization is urging state legislators to reject the legislation, which is being backed by the billion-dollar nursing home industry in an attempt to protect its profits. NAACP members are contacting members of the General Assembly to inform them of the gross injustice this legislation imposes on nursing home residents who are often poor, infirm and have no one to defend them.

The NAACP joins several other statewide groups, including AARP, Tennessee Association for Justice, Tennessee Citizen Action, and Centers for Independent Living, in opposition to HB4053/SB4075. “This legislation is a slap in the face to some of the weakest members of our society, and the NAACP is bitterly opposed to it,” said Sweet-Love. “Our parents and grandparents stood up for our rights and now we must stand up for theirs. The nursing home industry is demonstrating how far it will go to protect itself, even if it means stomping on the dignity of the people it should be helping.” «Read the rest of this article»

Sections: News, Politics | 1 Comment »

Gas prices: Consumers driving the pain

By James Butler | March 26, 2008 |

As of March 24 2008 the cheapest listed price of gasoline available in Clarksville was $3.08 per gallon for regular grade unleaded (courtesy of TennesseeGasPrices.com) with the indication that, for at least the moment, prices can be expected to remain stable. With the price of oil estimated at approximately $101 per barrel at the current moment, one gallon of gasoline costs approximately $2.61 to produce (figures courtesy of Bloomberg MarketData), meaning that there is a 15.26% profit margin being split amongst the relevant parties (and here we thought they were out to get us with unfair profit margins). Unfortunately for the rest of us, prices are likely to continue to increase for the foreseeable future for a variety of reasons which producers are largely powerless to stop. «Read the rest of this article»

Sections: Business, Issues | No Comments

Quiet vigil honors 4000 fallen soldiers

By Debbie Boen | March 25, 2008 |

A group of eleven gathered on Monday at Public Square to light candles, view the statistics of war, read poetry, hear a song, sing a song, and acknowledge the 4,000 US military dead in Iraq.

We who gathered this time are all disconnected from the war, in the way that we are not relatives of anyone enlisted. But we know co-workers, students, clients, neighbors and acquaintances who are connected with the military. We are surrounded by military.

David and I read Christine Piesyk’s recently published poem, Songs, written for vigil we held 1,000 soldier fatalities ago. The pain of picking up all the pieces of war from Vietnam to Iraq, is potent angst; something that you never want to have to do again. It is unfair for wars to take our best, chop them up and dump them back on our society, often as shells of their former selves, haunted by the war they waged in the name of duty. We who oppose the war have good reason to do so.

There is no good bomb. There is no good war, said my Grandmother, who survived WWI as a child in Germany. We who gather are in between, in between the “nothing is going on” stance of the media, and the overwhelming way the war rages on. In attendance this time were all middle class white Americans with one veteran. Three of our group were under 18. On this occasion, all of us except the vet, are Unitarian Universalists (UU’s). «Read the rest of this article»

Sections: Issues, News, Opinion | 3 Comments

New York City: Like visiting a new friend

By David W. Shelton | March 25, 2008 |

When I told a friend of mine last week that I was going to visit New York City, he poked at me a bit: “Oh, there’s nothing there but socialists and liberals.”

I smiled and said, “then it’ll be a refreshing change.”

All kidding aside, there’s plenty to say about visiting our country’s most populated city. Its history is replete with everything that makes for great movies, including making movies. It was Hollywood before Hollywood. The country’s comic book industry began there. It’s the first place in the world where “going up” meant REALLY going up. Skyscrapers became the norm as early as the 1920s. They hit their heyday in the early 1930s when the Chrysler Building and the legendary Empire State Building was built.

Sure, I knew all this before we arrived in Manhattan. No matter how much about New York I thought I knew, I could never have been fully prepared for the staggering reality that the Big Apple would present. «Read the rest of this article»

Sections: Arts and Leisure | 3 Comments

Watershed signs: more government waste?

By Scott Beasley | March 24, 2008 |

TDOT and the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation are placing watershed signs along roadways across the state. Perhaps you’ve seen them on the way to Nashville alongside I-24. The purpose of the signs is to increase public awareness about the importance of watersheds and to encourage good stewardship of the state’s rivers, streams, wetlands, lakes, and ground water.

What is a “watershed” some ask? A watershed is the entire land area that drains into a lake, river, or other water body. Watersheds can be small, like the area that drains into a creek, or large areas that drain into a major river. So why the need for public awareness? To educate and raise awareness for their protection, they claim. I suppose its just fine to litter where there are no signs, sarcastically speaking. I see little value in this expenditure.

«Read the rest of this article»

Sections: Issues, Opinion | 3 Comments

And the war goes on…and the soldiers die

By Christine Anne Piesyk | March 24, 2008 |

FreeThinkers for Peace and Civil Liberties will sponsor a candlelight vigil tonight at 7 p.m. at Public Square.  The event will include prayers, readings and a vigil.

Another landmark has passed in the Iraq War: 4000 American soldiers killed. The price tag that is these lives doesn’t show up in the surge numbers or the war planning budget - there is no way it can — other than the price of body bags and the cost of the flight back home. Whatever “victim” benefits may be assigned to their survivors.

I sit here today, submerged in a sadness of deja vu, having done all of this before — nearly 40 years ago — in another time and place, another military town with another military base, when thousands of other soldiers who had a one way trip to war.

It is ironic that this number came on one of the holiest days of the Christian community, and that it has been treated with more silence and resignation than any other numerical landmark of the Iraq conflict. I am an activist opposed to the war, but that does not mean I do not support our troops. Our troops are great; they and their families deserve much more than the shoddy treatment they receive via multiple deployments, and post deployment care (or lack thereof).

This is not a war the American people want; it is (or has devolved into) an administrative war waged by a national leadership — the Bush regime — that is in total disconnect with the people. This is a war for which we are spending not billions but trillions of dollars with little to show for those dollars but bodies — our troops, “enemy” troops, and tens of thousands of civilians caught in the crossfire. This a war riddled with underestimations, bad planning, corruption, and disinformation. To say nothing of the erosion of our own civil liberties. «Read the rest of this article»

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Community builder, activist Alice Coles to speak APSU Library

By Terry McMoore | March 24, 2008 |

Alice Coles of Bayview Virginia will be the guest speaker at the Austin Peay State University’s Library Athenaeum located on the third floor of the APSU Felix G. Woodward Library. This event will take place on March 26, 2008 starting at 1:00 p.m.A film screening of the documentary Black Soul will be shown followed by a question and answer session. Black Soul documents the rebirth of the rural town of Bayview, VA, and how Alice Coles led her community to change. Coles, 53, is now the director of the Citizens of Bayview for Social Justice the nonprofit organization which was formed by the Bayview residents.

Alice Coles is a community builder and activist who’s hard work and dedication to the rural town of Baywiew helped give positive redevelopment to a town that had not changed very much since African Americans began to settle there after the Civil War.

Until 2003, most of the 114 residents of Bayviewlived in the kind of abject poverty that is difficult to grasp: two- and three-room shacks with no running water and no heat, and the constant threat of fires from faulty electrical wiring. In the last year, most of those people have moved into modern housing, thanks largely to the efforts of Alice Coles. «Read the rest of this article»

Sections: Arts and Leisure, Events | No Comments