FREE SPEECH

The Brooklyn Rail presents "Free Speech: A Literary Celebration" with Jason Flores-Williams, Mark Read, Ted Hamm and special guests. Fri 3/16 12:30 pm, Zuccotti Park

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Come to “Free Speech: A Lit Event” w/ Jason Flores-Williams, Mark Read, Ted Hamm and special guests. Fri 3/16 12:30 pm, Zuccotti Park

Bios:

• -Jason Flores-Williams is a writer and criminal defense attorney. His story “The Battle of the Open Heart” is an OWS classic.
• -Mark Read is an activist, educator, and the artist who coordinated the "99% Bat Signal" that has inspired Occupiers everywhere.
• -Ted Hamm is editor of the Brooklyn Rail.

[The short essay I wrote for this is HERE - Paul]

& More on The Rail's Free Speech Weekend menu! >

SUNDAY, MARCH 18 AT 10 AM @ LEFT FORUM:

THE FUTURE OF THE FIRST AMENDMENT IN NEW YORK CITY

A panel discussion with the NYCLU's Donna Lieberman, civil rights lawyer Norman Siegel, and Brooklyn College professor Alex Vitale. Moderated by the Rail's Ted Hamm.

More on Left Forum (3-16/-18 @Pace) is HERE.

OWSJ: No es lo Que Dicen

By Jason Flores-Williams for the Occupy Wall Street Journal

[LINK]

[EXCERPT]:

When you see prison movies or documentaries about prison, it’s all about the visits. Wives coming on Thursday, girlfriends coming Friday, kids coming on Saturday. But prison is really about distances and disconnection. It’s loneliness and estrangement. One person’s life is frozen while the other person’s life has movement. This creates fractures between people. The inmate is sitting in a cage thinking that everyone’s forgotten him, while the other is trying to survive in the ruins often left by the inmate.

Prison takes a terrible situation and makes it exponentially worse. Rather than healing or rehabilitating people, it deepens every wound, rips open every scab and spreads infection in every possible direction. Prison mutilates families. It takes whatever might have been once healthy, good or at least salvageable, and leaves it twisted and damaged beyond repair.

That the Christian family values people are the ones most in favor of the drug war, incarceration and severe punishment is one of the sickest and most grotesque cancers on our society. Nothing reveals the lie that is the Right in America more than the fact that these self-proclaimed lovers of liberty and personal freedoms are the ones most responsible for the draconian laws that have ripped families apart for generations. It is my fervent belief that the drug war—which has damaged millions of children and families for more than forty years across five continents—would have been addressed more pragmatically and sensibly if not for a pocket of right wing Christians in North America who have used it as a vehicle to express the blackness of their ugly and vindictive hearts.