Follow up on Seacoast for Change Community Food Drive

Our January food drive to benefit AIDS Response Seacoast was a major success. We collected approximately 300 non-perishable food and personal care items, including 6 jars of peanut butter, 25 cans of tuna, 40 cans of soup, 25 cans of beans, 30 cans of vegetables, 26 boxes of cereal and crackers, and 30 boxes of pasta/rice/macaroni-and-cheese. (The photo below shows it all boxed up and ready to go.)



Thanks to everyone who participated!

We’ll be announcing the details of our February service project soon! If you have any ideas or suggestions for a group community service project suitable for adults or all ages, please call Judy at 603.479.7217. We’ll definitely plan a beach clean-up project when the weather improves.

More Inuaguration Day News Coverage

I can now write the words I've been longing to say for the past 18 months: President Obama. PresidentObamaPresidentObamaPresidentObama. Feels pretty good, doesn't it?

In case you missed the local news coverage of Inauguration Day events and celebrations, Seacoast for Change got a nice write-up (with photo) in the Portsmouth Herald in Wednesday's paper, and an Associated Press article about the Music Hall event appeared in several New England newspapers. The Portsmouth Herald also covered the Music Hall broadcast, interviewed locals who attended a community viewing in Exeter, and reported on the Leftist Marching Band's packed-to-capacity "End of an Error" Bash at the Press Room. Foster's covered the inauguration broadcast at the Portsmouth Library (see photo of Seacoast for Change volunteer Andy Kaplan), and ran a great story on Tuesday evening's community gathering at New Hope Baptist Church.

Inauguration Day: How Far We've Come

Caroline French sent me this pic of a Get Out The Vote visibility in Portsmouth's Market Square from just before the NH primary. "The wind chill was 0 degrees that day," she writes. It's a poignant reminder of how far we've come in the last twelve months.

Of course, the January temperatures haven't risen as much as my spirits lately:

Inauguration: Transcript of Bishop Robinson's Address

When Laurie McCray and her son Michael dropped by yesterday with a donation for the Seacoast for Change Community Food Drive, she mentioned her frustration that HBO cut Episcopalian Bishop Gene Robinson's opening blessing from the broadcast of Sunday's pre-inaugural "We Are One" concert. Christianity Today published a web video and transcript of Bishop Robinson's moving and politically-direct invocation (under the annoying headline "Gay Bishop Kicks Off Celebrity-Filled Event" ), which definitely deserves to be widely read and taken to heart. The text of the transcript is below.

"O God of our many understandings, we pray that you will bless us with tears -- tears for a world in which over a billion people exist on less than a dollar a day, where young women in many lands are beaten and raped for wanting an education, and thousands die daily from malnutrition, malaria, and AIDS.

Bless this nation with anger -- anger at discrimination, at home and abroad, against refugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people.

Bless us with discomfort at the easy, simplistic answers we’ve preferred to hear from our politicians, instead of the truth about ourselves and our world, which we need to face if we are going to rise to the challenges of the future.

Bless us with patience and the knowledge that none of what ails us will be fixed anytime soon, and the understanding that our new president is a human being, not a messiah.

Bless us with humility, open to understanding that our own needs as a nation must always be balanced with those of the world.

Bless us with freedom from mere tolerance, replacing it with a genuine respect and warm embrace of our differences.

Bless us with compassion and generosity, remembering that every religion’s God judges us by the way we care for the most vulnerable.

And God, we give you thanks for your child, Barack, as he assumes the office of President of the United States.

Give him wisdom beyond his years, inspire him with President Lincoln’s reconciling leadership style, President Kennedy’s ability to enlist our best efforts, and Dr. King’s dream of a nation for all people.

Give him a quiet heart, for our ship of state needs a steady, calm captain.

Give him stirring words; We will need to be inspired and motivated to make the personal and common sacrifices necessary to facing the challenges ahead.

Make him color-blind, reminding him of his own words that under his leadership, there will be neither red nor blue states, but the United States.

Help him remember his own oppression as a minority, drawing on that experience of discrimination, that he might seek to change the lives of those who are still its victims.

Give him strength to find family time and privacy, and help him remember that even though he is president, a father only gets one shot at his daughters’ childhoods.

And please, God, keep him safe. We know we ask too much of our presidents, and we’re asking far too much of this one. We implore you, O good and great God, to keep him safe. Hold him in the palm of your hand, that he might do the work we have called him to do, that he might find joy in this impossible calling, and that in the end, he might lead us as a nation to a place of integrity, prosperity, and peace. Amen."

In the News: Local Coverage of MLK Jr. Day of Service, Inauguration Day

In case you missed it, there's been good coverage in local news outlets about next week's MLK, Jr. Day of Service and Inauguration Day events in the Seacoast area:

MLK Day of Service: Rally, march and fair to be held Jan. 19 in Portsmouth, by Rachel M. Colins, Portsmouth Herald, 01.15.09.

Seacoast Ready for Obama Inauguration, by Rachel Forrest, Portsmouth Herald, 01.15.09. (This article does not include events organized by Seacoast for Change, but the paper did print notices about our food drive and Inauguration Day viz in the community calendar.)

The Wire NH Inauguration Day write-up includes info about events in Concord & Manchester.

Finally, Seacoast for Change was featured this week in a story by staff reporter Adam Krauss in Foster's Daily Democrat: Portsmouth activist staying home for inauguration, 01.14.09. Alas, Mr. Krauss misreported some of the event details (our visibility is from 4-5 on Tuesday), but it's nice to see our grassroots network getting some press.

Good Stuff: New Website Covers NH Legislation

Any local politico or policy wonk can tell you that the nh.gov website provides an online database of current legislation and a calendar of public hearings (as well as the full text of all NH statutes). But despite multiple search paths and directories, it's not always easy to find exactly what you're looking for or track the progress of specific bills. A new website, Front Door Politics NH, offers an appealing alternative for readers seeking straight-forward reporting on legislative developments, as well as (and this what I really like) user-friendly information about the legislative process and how concerned citizens can get involved. For example, the site includes a glossary of legislative terms and a jargon-free primer on how a bill becomes law in NH, as well as an easy-to-scan spreadsheet of the 2009 LSR (the list of roughly 1,000 bills submitted for consideration in the current legislative session). A print version of the weekly blog will appear in the Portsmouth Wire newspaper; according to the site, weekly podcasts are coming soon. Front Door Politics is a project of independent producer Hilary Niles of Barrington.

Follow up on Portsmouth Health Care Forum

Thanks to everyone who came out for the Community Health Care Forum at the Portsmouth Public Library on Monday, December 29. The well-attended event -- which was one of over 300 similar forums held nationwide -- was organized by Dr. Thomas Clairmont of Portsmouth Primary Care Associates in response to a request from the Obama transition team for community input on health care reform.

Participant comments were uniformly thoughtful and constructive -- remarks from several primary care physicians and other local health care professionals were especially informative, as were reports from health care consumers about barriers to purchasing individual health plans and the rising cost of group coverage. Dr. Clairmont shared a copy of the event summary he submitted to the transition team; which includes the key points of the discussion -- you can read it here (in .pdf).

At our Seacoast for Change brunch and community meeting earlier in December, supporters identified health care reform as top priority for local action. In the coming months, we’ll be on the lookout for more opportunities to engage the Seacoast community in discussion and action to support affordable, high-quality health care for all (please send your suggestions to Judy Stadtman at yeswecan.nh@gmail.com). Meanwhile, readers may be interested in this recent article by Niko Karvounis of the Century Foundation (reprinted by AlterNet). Karvounis critiques mainstream media coverage of health care policy developments, noting that news stories tend to focus on high-conflict political debates surrounding the health care reform, rather than providing substantive coverage of the public impact of proposed changes.

“There's no question that health care reform won't be easy; Obama definitely has his work cut out for him, and the public should know it,” Kavournis writes.

“But already the media seem to be licking their chops at the political controversies they see in the near future. Discussions of health care reform are already being wrapped in Obama's political persona, with reports cautioning that partisanship may slay the Uniter and that the Chosen One may come up short. If we're seeing this sort of coverage now, you have to wonder if the media will have the wherewithal to focus on policy once health care reform becomes a long, procedural slog as legislators debate some of the 115 discrete options for reform that the Congressional Budget Office has recently outlined.”

You can read the whole thing here.