Seize The Time

"You know the world. The depressed peoples of the world are very shortly going to grow tired of being wooed and lulled into passivity and quiet endurance by chromium and neon lights. The soft music from the many well-placed public-address loudspeakers and car radios will no longer serve as balm to the thwarted hopes, defeated aims, and brutal suppression of needed change. They'll come out of their coma with a bloodlust and justified indignation for social injustice that will sweep the asphalt right from under the empire builders. This is the only reason I hang on. I want to be in the vanguard."

From Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson, 1970

Hands Up, Don't Shoot

Justice For Mike Brown!

Workers Unite For A Fair Workplace!

"We work at Guitar Center and we are organizing across the country to improve wages and working conditions for all Guitar Center employees.

We love our jobs and our passion is helping our customers achieve their musical dreams. But we often have trouble making ends meet, thanks to the low wages and fluctuating hours we receive. We are asked to do many non-selling tasks which hurt our commissions, sales workers do not receive sick days, health benefits are expensive and part timers are not even offered them.

It’s been an exciting year for the Guitar Center campaign: workers in New York, Chicago and Las Vegas have successfully organized a union at their workplaces, over 100 bands and artists have endorse the campaign, and tens of thousands of people have signed petitions supporting us.

However, the company has responded by refusing to give us a fair contract and has launched an aggressive campaign to bust the union. The company's last offer is even less than what non-union stores have and is meant to punish us for standing up for ourselves. Our union has been forced to file charges detailing the company’s bad faith negotiating and union busting.

We now say: enough is enough! We are asking the public to support us as we enter the final stages of negotiations! Sign the petition to help us get a fair contract."

Het Achterhuis

"Not being able to go outside upsets me more than I can say, and I'm terrified our hiding place will be discovered and that we'll be shot. That, of course, is a fairly dismal prospect."

Seventy years ago today was the beginning of the end for a young girl who just wanted to live and express herself through her writing, with aspirations of being a journalist; a girl who somehow saw beauty in the world despite the unrelenting ugliness just outside her window ("In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart." "How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world"). Anne Frank was captured and arrested by the Nazis on the morning of August 4th, 1944 and sent to Huis Van Bewaring, then on to Auschwitz, and finally to Bergen-Belsen where she died at age 15.