I think the title / would be much more effective / if haiku itself
This is a collaborative reflection effort from Betsy
and Joseph

A haiku is a poem designed to capture a single moment
in time with a very specific structure. While poets
have argued for centuries how best to communicate the
concept of the haiku from Japanese to English, we have
used the basic 5 7 5 syllable structure.

MLK VISTAs
are welcoming and open
to difficult tasks

good people help clean
they presume it is healthy
but is it really?

I'm here to do chores
piles of unknown treasures
now where to begin?

I did not know that
eggs left warm for several months
become black and soft

so discouraging
imagine if it were me
I can't even start

on linoleum
crunching sounds under your feet
must be cockroaches

smells bad, very sad
look at the situation
are we helping her?

the dishes are clean
and the florescent lights work
back at BCC

how has this happened?
what is this person's life like
how does she feel now?

she does not smile
we are invading her space
for her case-worker

we dug out his home
he will not be evicted
this month, anyway

make a difference day
protect against eviction
is it possible?

she once was homeless
jesus I hope that she's not
homeless again soon

a vast swarm of flies
rode a wave of awful smell
when the door opened

hey dave, I got one
make a difference day service
or a paper cut?

what else does she need?
support, luck, a second chance,
community, me?

my friends in Spokane
are gathering cans of food
I hope not to eat

there is way too much
I want her to keep her home
but can she finish?

the man with no shirt
with flies in his apartment
does not want our help

George W. Bush
sent us a support letter
I wish he was here.

- posted by Joseph Baruch @ 8:27 PM 0 comments

 
President Bush sends greetings and words of encouragement to Make A Difference Day volunteers.
I send greetings to all those participating in Make A Difference Day, 2004. The strength of America lies in the hearts and souls of our citizens. Across our country, people are making a difference in our communities by donating their time and talents to help those in need. These individuals are part of the armies of compassion, working to build a culture of responsibility in which the sick are comforted, the aged are honored, the immigrant is welcomed, and the weak and vulnerable are never overlooked.
My Administration encourages all Americans to volunteer to help make their communities and our Nation better and stronger. I created the USA Freedom Corps to help more Americans find opportunities to volunteer. As I travel around our country, I am honored to meet citizens of all ages who serve others through Federal programs such as Citizen Corps, AmeriCorps, Senior Corps, and the Peace Corps, as well as many other local organizations. Their good hearts and service set an example for our Nation and help transform people's lives.
I applaud all those who have answered the call to serve. Laura and I send our best wishes for a memorable and rewarding day.
President George W. Bush

- posted by Joseph Baruch @ 10:03 AM 0 comments

 
Make a Difference Day

If overwhelmed do following

1. Start with garbage bag and clean out fridge of rotten food and old debris. Pick up obvious garbage and food products around kitchen and living space. All surfaces. The more garbage is picked up, the better sorting will go. Be careful of receipts, Rx information, or bills. Ask resident before throwing away if looks iffy.
2. Do dishes in sink. Drain nasty water first, start with clean water.
3. One person can do bathroom, sort like things together, throw away trash. Let tub soak in cleanser.
4. Change gloves often and take trash out as it fills.

I thought that the smell could have been in my head. The smell in Adria’s car of old leather and young friends, of English pubs and American greasy spoons, of college parties and high school barbeques may have been something I imagined. And why shouldn’t it have been? Why wouldn’t I imagine the beautiful smoky smell after the putrid odors of the last 2 hours?

Next I noticed the tiny gray flakes. It could have been dust. It could have been stains left by the car’s previous owner. And even if I was right, I didn’t want to be the one to say anything.

The stress level in the car, while neither unfriendly nor hostile had become palpable.

The smell of the apartment we had just left lingered in our noses. The parts of our body that had been exposed to the rancid air in that tiny residence felt as if they couldn’t be cleaned with an hour under a hot shower and an entire bar of Zest deodorizing soap.

Finally, the cruel still of the moment was broken. Adria said exactly what was secretly on all of our minds.

“I have never wanted a cigarette so badly in my life.”

I reached in to my gray fleece Washington Service Corps vest and pulled out a pack of Parliament Lights.

The mood of the car shifted from edgy discomfort to profound relief.

So we lit our cigarettes. We cleared our lungs of the air contaminated by rotting eggs, rotting milk, and rotting pizza crusts; by dog s#!t and laundry left unwashed for months, possibly years, and thousands upon thousands of bugs.

As the warm, sweet smoke began washing me, cleansing me from the inside out like Russian Lump incense purifying a confessional where the most egregious of human sins has been forgiven in the eyes of god and the church, I realized both how stupid I am and what a wimp I am.

In my Americorps grays, with my Americorps smile of idiot optimism I had begun the day with a vision of the Volunteer Chore Service experience resembling an equal mix of friendly old people needing help tying up a month’s worth of Seattle Post Intelligencers for recycling and an episode of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

When flies swarmed out upon the opening of the woman’s door, and when we all nearly gagged at the smell, the contrast between real and imagined life became stark.

Last year, for Make a Difference Day I gave books to kids. This year for Make a Difference Day, I nearly vomited down the rubbish chute of a subsidized apartment building.

Most of the time that we spent working on the woman’s apartment, I was running the nearly 200 lbs of garbage from the apartment to the dumpster. Why? Because I am a wimp. I would try to help with the clean-up inside of the apartment, but I would go back to running the trash because the rancid thickness of the air and my overpowering fear of cockroaches made the inside of the apartment unbearable for fragile little 2-showers-a-day me.

As all newly acquainted smokers do, we all told each other how long we had been smoking and lied about how close each of us was to quitting. We smoked and smoked and calmed our frazzled and confused nerves.

There is a right way to react publicly to a situation such as the one we had just shared, and it was exactly what we did. We were calm, cool, and collected. We were polite and we acted as if this was the sort of thing that we did all of the time.

However, internally the correct reaction to such a situation is much more ambiguous.

Can I feel disgusted, admitting that each time I’ve ever used the word squalor until now has been massive hyperbole? Should I feel guilt about my disgust? Should this reinforce my fear of ever living alone (something I have never done)? What about my fear of growing old? Is my fear of growing old linked in any way to my love of smoking?

I took another drag from my cigarette.

Service, I thought, can’t be about me. It can’t be about MY fears, about MY fragile sensibilities; it has to be about the person being served, or in a truly ideal world, about the service itself.

I lit a second cigarette with the butt of my first.

If service is about the servant instead of the served, the focus is necessarily misplaced. So why do we spend so much time on reflection, or as Jesse once put it with such vulgar eloquence, “developing our members?”

Does engaging students, or ourselves for that matter, in service with so much attention paid to the students’ learning, or our reflection and growth by its very nature cheapen the value of the service?

I shouldn’t use my Make A Difference Day Volunteer Chore Service to grapple with my fear of old age. I should use my service to help an old woman clean her house so that she doesn’t get evicted.

We got back to our home base at Jefferson Terrace. I put out my cigarette and worried about the moral implications of the Americorps and Service Learning foci on reflection. I laughed at the irony, because I knew that I would soon write a reflection essay on the subject.

- posted by Joseph Baruch @ 2:30 AM 0 comments

 
A brief reflection piece.
-They say that cigarettes are more addictive than heroin.
-I still think that the bus tunnel is novel and cool.
-When you stop using butter, a hell of a lot of your food will taste dry and bland.
-I don't know who I will miss more, Julia Child or Rodney Dangerfield.
-I shouldn't have done another year of Americorps, and I certainly shouldn't have done another year of Americorps in Seattle, but I am really (mostly) extremely glad glad that I did anyway.
-Spell Check has both caused and saved me from embarrassment many times.
-Alcohol has both caused and saved me from embarrassment many times.
-If all buses were expresses to exactly where you wanted to go, I bet you would ride the bus more often.
-Do you brush your teeth when you fast? 'Cause I do.
-The Electoral College, while flawed, is a much better idea than it seems.
-The most effective use of this "List Reflection" technique ever was on Bruce McCulloch's "Shame Based Man" CD.
-The Least effective use of this "List Reflection" technique ever was in a response paper to "A Separate Piece" in an English class I took in 1996. Sorry Ms. Valach.
-In retrospect, "Titanic" was a really horrible movie.
-I miss Reno as much as I had missed Seattle.
-Nostalgic Longing is as much a part me as my eye color.
-There is NEVER a happy reason for the back of a Metro bus to smell like vomit.

--
Would you like to see Some Interesting Things?
http://home.earthlink.net/~notatyrant

- posted by Joseph Baruch @ 9:04 AM 0 comments

 
Did anyone notice that the SERVES Institute evaluation
is on something called Survey Monkey?
How much less dignified could a website name be?
I remember a time when websites were given subtle, nearly meaningless
names like Amazon and Ebay, not Book Monkey or Buy Crap from Everyone
Monkey.

--
Would you like to see Some Interesting Things?
http://home.earthlink.net/~notatyrant

- posted by Joseph Baruch @ 8:03 PM 0 comments

 
Reflection! I wrote this on the bus this morning. Enjoy!
Forgotten Verse
Joseph Baruch Warren

At the Seattle Cluster Meeting last Friday Erin included in our agenda, pictures of the gang from Cheers, the TV show about the Boston bar that, from 1982 to 1983 was broadcast to a nation longing for a sense of community and camaraderie portrayed among the sometimes goofy bar tenders and drinkers. The theme of the meeting was "community," so the agenda decoration was absolutely appropriate.
People who know me understand that being handed a piece of paper with pictures of the Cheers gang will, inevitably will lead to me, singing the theme song.
I started with the opening verse, which everyone knew from a decade of weekly broadcasts on NBC, and two decades of daily broadcasts on channel 11 during our most formative years.

Making your way in the world today takes everything you've got.
Taking a break from all your worries, sure would help a lot.
Wouldn't you like to get away?
Sometimes you want to go, where everybody knows your name,
and they're always glad you came.
You wanna be where you can see, our troubles are all the same
You wanna be where everybody knows your name.

This was a definition of community that we could agree upon. The members of the community get together, know each other, and share each other's sorrows and troubles.
Then I started remembering the other verses:

All those night when you've got no lights,
The check is in the mail;
And your little angel
Hung the cat up by it's tail;
And your third fiancÃe didn't show

And

Roll out of bed, Mr. Coffee's dead;
The morning's looking bright;
And your shrink ran off to Europe,
And didn't even write;
And your husband wants to be a girl

As you can, no doubt see, the definition of community we had agreed upon initially, a bar full of friendly drunks who knew who you were is transformed. The 'troubles' that are 'all the same' are far from universal. Transgendered spouses, psychopathic children, repeated abandonment at the alter; these are pretty specialized and intense 'troubles' to share among all community members. In fact, these are the kinds of problems that most of us would look at as the problems of an entirely separate other. We can look at these 'troubles' and, far from saying that they are the same as our own, we can say, "At least I don't have those problems, no matter how bad my life is."
But the song tells us otherwise. In this definition of community that we had agreed upon, our troubles, no matter how severe, were shared at a fundamental level by everyone in the community. We don't just feel sorry for the person abandoned by her psychiatrist just as she is
losing the connection that she thought she had with her spouse, we genuinely share the pain and loneliness she is experiencing. Our Troubles are all the same. The community truly shares the burden of the trouble, not just pity or money or booze.
When I got to the second and third verses of the song, everyone laughed. They had never heard the verses, and thought that I was making them up. It may well have been the result of the really damned funny lyrics. It may have been my struggle to remember them after all the years since the show went off the air that made them think I was improvising lyrics. But more influential was, I think, the shock of realization that our seemingly easy-to-agree-upon definition of community held some very demanding requirements of community members. Just because we say we can universally accept an idea as a good thing, does not mean that we are willing to follow through with it when the idea becomes complex or demanding. Once the rats have been drowned, we don't want to, um, pay the piper.
One of the examples of this phenomenon that I find most jarring is our national exploitation of the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Like the first verse of Where Everybody Knows Your Name, Americans can agree with near universality on the wisdom of King's "I Have a Dream"
speech. But when his speeches and writings (most of which are shockingly out of print) beyond the "I Have a Dream" first verse demand more of us, we tend to shy away, or laugh it off.
While we AMEN to "I Have a Dream," most of America refuses to practice or believe in the idea that vast social change can, and even must happen through nonviolent means. While we can all celebrate the possibility that some day the State of Alabama "will be transformed into a situation where little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers," very few of us seem willing to work towards
the fundamental changes needed to fight racist economic, political and social systems.
Last MKL Day, in fact, the image was delivered of our president, George W. Bush placing a wreath on King's grave. Bush, a president who, arguably, owes his presidency to the systematic
disenfranchisement of African American voters; Bush, who brought his country to war based on premises that have proved to be shaky at best, was honoring the greatest hero of the civil rights and antiwar movements.
When we forget the second and third verses, and the huge tasks that they require of us to truly belong to a community; when we forget everything about Dr. King's life that doesn't fall within the four paragraphs we memorized for 5th grade social studies, and when we see our National Service as something smaller, and lighter than it really is, we severely stunt our potential.
When Lyndon Johnson established Volunteers In Service To America, the first incarnation of National Service as we experience it, the goal was the elimination of poverty in America. It wasn't to make American poverty more comfortable, or to reduce the number of people on welfare by a certain percentage. It wasn't to make poor folk smile. The goal was to be a fundamental shift in the way the country works. While the first "verse" of our Service is easy to warm to; people in grey shirts cleaning streams, working at food banks, tutoring underserved children, recruiting college aged volunteers, we have to remember that there is a second verse to the Americorps theme song.

--
Would you like to see Some Interesting Things?
http://home.earthlink.net/~notatyrant

- posted by Joseph Baruch @ 1:56 PM 0 comments

 
Joseph, can you send out that invitation for this again? I'm trying to help one of the members get onto the blog but we can't figure out how to just look it up and have her add it. Thanks!

Bryce
- posted by Bryce @ 1:47 PM 1 comments

 
I wonder if we can connect the blog
with the list serve. Now that the List is up and running this little document seems less relevant.

- posted by Joseph Baruch @ 11:40 AM 0 comments