Flashbacks: Protest tokes on the Common, Getting a house for a $1, and Alan Lupo on the business of brutality

"...Once they’d decided which panjandrums to include, they had to assign each a place in the regal hierarchy. Some were easy, like Cheney and Bush as jokers. Or like the four queens: National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice pumping gas in a boiler suit (queen of diamonds); former EPA chief Christine Todd Whitman drawn in front of soot-spewing smokestacks (queen of spades); Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton grinning maniacally and brandishing a chain saw (queen of clubs); and anti-gay demagogue US Senator Rick Santorum, stroking an anxious-looking pooch (queen of hearts). " Read Full article

"Now in it’s ninth year, the rally is the largest pro-marijuana event in the country and perhaps in the world. It is unquestionably one of the biggest events on the Common in the past 20 years, with crowds surpassed only by events like Pope John Paul II’s 1979 prayer mass, which drew a spectacular half-million people. In Boston, fittingly, only the pope outdraws pot.

"...Rally organizers believe that protesting a bad law requires flouting it, so this year - as in years past - there will be lots of audience participation in the form of joints, blunts, pipes and one-hitters. By midafternoon, it is expected, the air above the Common will be thick with smoke and the sweet, pungent odor of cannabis.

"A long time ago, when my job included churning out one police story after another, I teletyped in a nightly frenzy of gore, manmade and natural disasters, near-misses, auto crashes, drownings, hunting accidents, shootings, stabbings...You get inured to it, but occasionally a story was so horrible that even in the midst of trying to make a deadline, I’d stop...And sometimes, I am not ashamed to say, sometimes, contrary to every dictate of the business and defiant of all the macho bullshit that comes with the trade, sometimes I would cry.

"I remember still, 21 years after the incident, the story of a family going home after a vacation, of the drunken driver who drove his auto across the median strip into the lane of oncoming traffic and smashed into that family’s car. A child died...Two decades and a year later, and I wonder how the rest of the family has lived all these years with that one terrible moment...

"Since then, there have been other stories, stories that some might consider to be of greater importance because they involve more people, whole nations sometimes. But I have come to realize that they really aren’t more important. They are bigger because they involve more people, but not more important than the stuff that comes over the phone from the patrolman or sergeant. They are all important for their common denominators -- the unnecessary loss of life and the mutilation of both body and spirit.

"Some journalists escape such stories by covering space shuttles, or organic farming, or the America’s Cup. The rest of us don’t know any better and go back time and time again to the business of brutality."

NO SHIT

"With the frontier having gone as far West as it can, its romance seems now to be reappearing in the wide-open, unclaimed spaces of Boston’s three-family homes, Philadelphia’s and Wilmington’s (Del.) rowhouses, and even in Newark. All those cities are in various stages of implementing urban homesteading, in which city frontiersmen, preferably possessed of good carpenter’s tools and not representing big developers, would be given, for a dollar, abandoned buildings owned by the city. Like the 1862 Homestead Act, which allowed squatters to take title to an acreage on which they’d built a home and lived for five years, urban homesteaders would live five years tax-free on the promise of rehabilitating the dwelling. In Boston, that amounts to a $7000 tax break."