End Childhood Hunger

13 million children go to bed hungry every night in the United States.

NO MORE!

Visit Share Our Strength or join us at End Childhood Hunger

We can make the elimination of hunger in the United States a reality. We can see to it that today's children will grow up as part of the first US generation not to experience the pain that hunger brings.

Join us.

Back From The Edge

It's been a long, painful couple of years on many levels. "Muzzled" by fate is an understatement.

That ended semi-officially on Wednesday, November 5, 2008 at 1:22 p.m. More on that later.

"Mixing" It Up

I had to share a great email from addicted2crowes, a Black Crowes fanatic.

First, some background. Here in South Florida, City Link, formerly XS Magazine, a great news, arts & entertainment weekly for 16 years, has been systematically gutted over the last few years by it low-rent, low-class corporate bosses, (Forum Publishing Group), who have aggressively attempted to replace their seasoned journalistic staff members with minimum-wage, untrained and mostly clueless newbie’s who can't string two sentences together.

Several weeks ago, City Link's online site, which was operated on a shoestring but managed to post all of the features that made the paper worth reading, was killed off and replaced by "Metromix," a generic entertainment site that seems to be mostly all wire service celebrity gossip coupled with hideously bad restaurant, bar and club reviews.

I got a copy of a2c's comments on the new site that is hilarious. Check it out:

What, no Vanilla Ice?

After numerous attempts to reach City Link online, I am finally presented with "Metromix," portending to be my new "home" for music, nightlife, restaurants, clubs and more.

In case you were too busy slaving over 14 pages of celebrity Britney, Paris et al, to notice that the housing market sucks, let me update you. People aren't buying homes, and I'm not buying this glossy fluff piece.

Hey, I know you're beta, and most of the content is so generic that I can get it anywhere, but even the feeble attempt to provide local info leaves me asking where is all the City Link material that draws me on to the web in the first place? They have in-depth and unique event listings with stuff that even New Times doesn't bother to find; Timeline, which is drop-dead amazing, and the best music and film writers anywhere. I mean please, Beth Feinstein-Bartel on local music? She is, I am sure, a very nice lady, but she's got to be at least 60 -- she was writing for the Sun-Sentinel 20 years ago when I was in high school. Not that it matters when all you get from her is recycled press releases. Where is Dan Sweeney?

Look, it's a nice try, very pretty and flashy and well organized. It's just bad that without pros who know the local scene writing for you, and depending on "content producers" and "special correspondents," Metromix comes off as just another pathetic, all-fluff, all-the-time, attempt by big media to reach out and connect with the information-age, high-spending, pop-culture superficial trendoids who advertisers covet.

All flash and no soul. I'll be back when you give me a reason to invest my time.

a2c

Diamonds in the Rough - Quotations from Papa Smurf

Who needs fancy platitudes? Here's the first in an on-going series of life observations by my whack friend Rusty Diamond, or, as we who faced Class VI whitewater with him and survived call him - Papa Smurf.

"At any given moment, an Eagle is seizing a fish."

Solid.

Channeling Chåvez

While researching hunger issues in the Rio Grandé valley, where I did volunteer work in the migrant camps, or "Colonias" (a Spanish term for neighborhood or community) several years ago, I came across a writing by César Chåvez, which I found empowering. I hesitate to adopt his description of this as a "Prayer" because it speaks more universally when not taken in a religious context, so let's just call it an "inspired" piece of prose:

Show me the suffering of the most miserable;
So that I will know my people's plight.

Help me take responsibility for my own life;
So that I can be free at last.

Grant me courage to serve others;
For in service there is true life.

Give me honesty and patience;
So that I can work with other workers

Bring forth song and celebration;
So that we will never tire of the struggle.

Let us remember those who have died for justice;
For they have given us life.

Help us love even those who hate us;
So we can change the world.

Into the fire - Ending Childhood Hunger

So I'm back in the fight, having survived personal tragedies and challenges over the past 18 months that I could have never imagined. Now it's time to sell myself, and my cause. All the usual career-speak applies: I'm passionate, committed, sport a wildly varied resume that includes a law degree as well as undergraduate degrees in economics & marketing and multiple leadership positions on the boards of over a dozen not-for-profit organizations. I choose to use that background to try and made the world a better place.

But who am I?
I am the first-born son of an upper-middle class, loving midwestern family.
I am left-handed.
I was an editor of my high school paper.
I was expelled for three days for breaking their dress code by being the first student to wear bell-bottoms.
During a summer spent studying French in Europe, I once left the audience and danced naked on stage in the Paris production of Hair. And I still can’t speak French.
I live in a nice house in the suburbs with a pool, a big Doberman and three Abyssinian cats.
I have an amazing and inspiring wife and partner.

But wait, there’s more.
I have never fought in a war.
I have never suffered from a mental illness.
I have never gone hungry.
I have never been homeless.
I have never lost faith.
I have never lived without love in my life.

I’ve got it pretty good.

I'm a merely a foot soldier, not a general, in a battle that seems overwhelming at times. Whatever I have accomplished in the past to make the world a better place is not enough. I will do whatever is in my power for the rest of my days to insure that every child brought screaming and frightened into our world will never know the pain and suffering that hunger brings.

Want to help? check out . Hell, you can even donate if you want.

Networking for Social Change

OK, I'm hooked.

I've never been a fan of those "update your contact information" programs, but I am totally taken with LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is an online network of more than 14 million people from around the world, representing 150 industries. When you join, you create a profile that summarizes your professional accomplishments. Your profile helps you find and be found by former colleagues, clients, and partners. You can add more connections by inviting trusted contacts to join LinkedIn and connect to you. Your network consists of your connections, your connections’ connections, and the people they know, linking you to thousands of people.

As I ramp up my Florida not-for-profit, I am reaching out to hundreds of friends through LinkedIn that I would have been unable to connect with. Sweet.

Killing Time

2006 will go down in my personal history book as a year of death, destruction, betrayal, disillusionment, emotional wreckage, soul-scarring of great depth and life-altering experiences that have changed me forever. And there were some bad times, too.

But I'm facing 2007 with my family battered, but intact, my circle of friends holding tight and the promise of a bit of calm, having surfed and survived a year of negatives waves of epic proportions.

Peace out.

New Orleans: City Out of Sight, Out of Mind, But Not Out of Hope

Crossing the bridge and descending into the 9th Ward on October 20, 2006 for me was akin to landing on the dark side of the Moon. Or dropping into a Dante's Inferno-inspired version of Hell on Earth. After 14 months, it appeared as if the storm had struck only the week before.

There are far too many words that come to mind to describe the devastation and destruction, the loss and sense of abandonment that envelops you like the clouds of dust, and mold, and grit that hang in the air as one by one, homes that were once filled with life are swept clear by bulldozers and backhoes and rendered barren, sterile and soulless.

In this vocabulary of loss two words in particular haunt me:

The first is "criminal". It is criminal that after 14 months, mile after mile of Lakeview and the 9th Ward neighborhoods are untouched by power, or sewage, or water service. It is criminal that no health care safety net of any type exists for the lower-middle class and poor. It is criminal that families still living in Houston, or Chicago, or Baton Rouge as evacuees are at risk of losing their property because they are not in New Orleans to protect and preserve it. And it is criminal that the task of reinventing one of America's great cities has been relegated to the back pages of our newspapers and taken off the agendas of the talking heads who instead fill our airwaves with smoke and clutter.

The second word is "determination." I saw it in the face of every New Orleanian I came in contact with during my work with Share Our Strength's Conference of Leaders; heard it in the words of every bellman and cab driver and average citizen who is fighting to reclaim their city; cried when told of the teachers at Martin Luther King School who have to spend their own money to make copies of textbooks to teach their students; bore witness to it in the actions of Mardelle Early and Pastor Charles Johnson and found hope in the thousands of volunteers with Common Ground and City Year and Share Our Strength and the hundreds of other organizations who have stepped in where governmental leadership has failed.

I'm going back in December.

I don't want to. I have to.