Seeding Spartanburg

Couldn't resist sharing this article from CNN.com.

Your Blog Can Be Group Therapy

So true. This blog and my readers (all four of you) have played such a huge role in my personal growth throughout the past few years. It has no doubt been an incredible part of the journey that I wouldn't take anything for…

t

I enjoy Gervais over at BBQ & Politics SOooooooooo much. His use of the word tally-whacker in his most recent post…fantastic.

But, that's not what I was originally sharing…it was Gervais's post that took me to Bob Dalton's (SHJ Reporter) post on his blog on the SC Club for Growth which made me smile.

Bob calls "the Growth" out for lying about the voting records of Spartanburg State House Reps Scott Talley and Keith Kelly. And for continually calling Spartanburg native and State Supreme Court Justice Don Beatty a liberal activist judge. Bob even calls out a couple of respected Spartanburg businessmen for serving on the Board of such a sketchy organization.

NICE one Bob. NICE. The final line:

"Finally, a doctor friend of mine once told me that the best way to deal with a suspicious Growth is to cut it out. But if that's not an option, you've always got to keep an eye on it."

I'm for cutting that sucker out.

And by the way…thanks Bob.

t

Over the past year or so, after watching “The Future of Food” my attention has been drawn to food labeling and Monsanto and I’ve desperately tried to draw the attention of others.

I really don’t know how else to get people to pay attention to what this company is doing without flat out begging each of you to PLEASE pay attention. This is our FOOD SUPPLY we are talking about. Our right as citizens to know what we are eating and feeding our children. 

Read the latest article in Vanity Fair by two of Americas TOP INVESTIGATIVE Journalists and go from there:

Monsanto’s Harvest of Fear

I will try to simplify as much as I can because I know there will be a few who say “oh, she’s just talking about Monsanto again.” As if this doesn’t affect you or because of a belief that at the end of the day…surely our government won’t allow a corporation to screw the people.

Really, y’all. Haven’t we learned our lesson in regard to our government and large corporations by now?

So, what should you know? You should know everything in the article I cited above. I know it’s a long article but it is full of info you should be aware of. Let me give you an example.

Okay. You all know I’ve been trying to eat healthier. Grow organic veggies. I’ve been purchasing organic milk, meats with no antibiotics or hormones, avoiding processed foods full of partially hydrogenated everything because I believe those are bad choices for my children.

THAT is my choice as a consumer. I choose to pay more for those products. I prefer to NOT feed my children with pesticide laden fruits and veggies, milk with RBGH hormone and so on.

I know Monsanto promises that their RBGH hormone is perfectly fine and doesn’t hurt humans. And maybe it doesn’t. I know our government, based on research provided by Monsanto, has deemed this hormone OKAY, despite the fact Europe and Canada have said HELL NO and I too, still have my doubts.

I PREFER THE kind of MILK MY GRANDMA DRANK. She didn’t drink milk with hormones and did JUST FINE.

I don’t need your hormone Monsanto and I don’t want it. That is MY CHOICE.

Yet, Monsanto says it is not. So they started websites like ‘Stop Labeling Lies” where lobbyists like Steven J. Milloy, a known paid advocate for Monsanto, Philip Morris ( “no! cigarettes aren’t bad” ) and ExxonMobil ( “oil is in abundance, so drive!” ), attempt to explain why the federal government shouldn’t allow ‘organic and hormone free’ on LABELS because those labels imply that Monsanto milk is bad therefore hurting the sales of milk from cows that have been given Monsanto’s RBGH hormone. So in Monsanto’s opinion…consumers don’t have a right to know. We should just accept whatever it is they give us.

They won’t be happy until they CONTROL it all. They are currently trying to buy up all the seed companies in the country. As the article above states, “Whoever provides the world’s seeds controls the world’s food supply.”

The thought that I couldn’t plant a non-genetically modified seed if I wanted to…is frightening. Not everyone wants seeds that are resistant to Monsanto’s “Round-Up” product. I don’t mind WEEDING my garden…thank you very much.

Please tell me you have a problem with the fact that this corporation wants to control everything you eat and everything you feed your children. Because it annoys me to no end. I’m very frustrated because it is very scary that these corporations are allowed to do whatever they want with our lives, our country, our world…just so they can make a buck. And we have no leadership in office or in the pipeline that cares either way.

What are we to do?

Stand up for ourselves.

Let's.

Please.

t

I did!!!! Remember, I planted it a couple of months ago. This past Friday, I made my family a gorgeous salad for dinner made with lettuce I grew all by myself.

I’m so proud of myself. I have pictures to share…I just have to figure out how to get them up here.

My little organic veggie garden seems to be doing well. I have tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, zucchini, bell peppers, okra, lima and pole beans planted. If this whole process of planting seeds and things growing actually works, I’ll be able to provide my family with fresh, local, cheap, organic produce for the summer which should definitely help with the dang crunch gas is putting on the family budget.

I commute about 60 miles a day. So it REALLY has an effect. I have been carpooling with 2 co-workers for about a month now AND driving my Mom’s little compact car instead of my Jeep. That helps a ton but geez. It’s still a punch in the gut. I don’t know how people that have not made changes to their lifestyle are doing it. We gotta change folks. It’s ridiculous that people are still just paying for gas as if there are no other options. There are options…they may be inconvenient at first but know there are options. I figure it is easier to transition into the change now instead of waiting until I am forced to change.

Ahh…changes…which takes me to the community forum I attended this past Friday about sustainability and green issues and what we can do in Spartanburg. It was a nice event. Read more about it here. One thing I have realized for sure is that some of the major things I need to be doing are focusing on how I can change my own house to make a difference. Then maybe I can focus on fixing the rest of the world.

What else? Oh, I am going to have an essay on my encounter with Charlie Daniels in the upcoming Hub City Writers Project book, “Stars Fell on Spartanburg: Hub City’s Celebrity Encounters”. HCWP is now accepting donations to reserve a hardback copy (this is the ONLY way you can get it in hardback). Hub City books make great holiday gifts not to mention it is important we support them!!! So please do.

Spring Fling is this weekend. I hope it doesn’t rain. Seems it does every year. I always feel SO sorry for the organizers. It sucks to work your tail off for an event and then have it rain. Oh, don't I know. So I’ll keep my fingers crossed for those folks. Jack and I went out in the rain last year anyway. We will this year too. Also, if you’ve never gone to the Steadman Hawkins Classic…GO on Friday!! I know absolutely nothing about professional bike racing but this is an experience. Those folks are CrAzY!!! They go like 40 mph on those bikes. Eek. It's cool.

We’ll load up the wagon on Friday and walk down for the bike race and Jazz on the Square and enjoy community. And then again to Spring Fling on Saturday. They moved it back down to Morgan Square so it is just a few walkable blocks. Which is good for me to walk after I drink a beer or two and eat some really good greasy spring fling food. YUM.

Also, mark your calendar for the Hub City Farmers Market. It is scheduled to begin on May 10th.

Woohoo for supporting community!!

t

With every day that passes, the more this song becomes more TRUE.

The hardest to learn was the least complicated.

We spend so much on the things that don't matter.

I hope we'll work to change that.

Let's.

xo, t

A friend and fellow USCS (Upstate) alum, Lucas Patterson, started this cool little paper a year or so ago entitled "ROOT: Spartanburg's Journal of Uncommon Kindness." It's a great paper…so if you see it around town…pick it up and give it a read.

Out JUST today is the Earth Day edition. Another friend, Allyn Steele, was responsible for putting this edition together. Local officials and the 6 colleges that make Spartanburg home all weigh in on what they are doing to make a difference in our community in regard to going green.

Great stuff guys!!! Thanks for caring so much about our community and using your free time and resources to get information out and encourage the rest of us to look at the issues that matter to our community.

t 

On this Earth Day….what can I do to make a difference in how I impact the earth?

Watch “The Story of Stuff” and rethink your consumptive habits. (It all starts with ME.)

Attend the Community-wide Forum sponsored by Spartanburg Educators for Empowered Communities (SEEC) this Friday (April 25th) from 4:00 to 5:30 at the Hub-Bub Showroom, where Mayor Barnet, the county, US House Rep. Bob Inglis, SC House Reps. Harold Mitchell and Scott Talley and all six campus administrations will share their respective visions for creating a more sustainable Spartanburg and SC. The session will run something like a forum/press-conference, where the audience and media will have the opportunity to ask questions and make statements. Please join us!!!! And invite your friends.

Start a vegetable garden or buy local!

Replace at least ONE incandescent bulb in your home with a Compact Fluorescent Light Bulb. 

Sign up for the Palmetto Clean Energy Program

Start using reusable grocery bags. 

Plant a tree.

Use green cleaning products and safe cosmetics.

Walk, bike or take public transportation.

Unplug chargers and appliances when not in use.

Watch Captain Planet. He really simplifies for you.

I was reading an opinion piece in The State this morning about green issues. 

It ended with a great line:

“So on this Earth Day, let us remember that there is no substitute for conservation.”

Amen. There is NO substitute for conservation. We are wasteful in every sense of the word. We don’t need to come up with new ways to keep living the way we are. We are the ones that must change. We can’t continue to treat the Earth the way we have been. We need to learn to respect and protect her. She’s all we got.

Start today and live Earth Day everyday.

t

UPDATE: Support your local land trust!!!!!!!! How could I forget that?!?!

I am definitely in a transitional period these days. I feel it. My family feels it. I think this is probably the largest personal growth transition I’ve been through since graduate school. A transition that has me thinking about everything I am doing with my life.

Why? I don’t know really. What caused it? Dunno. Just like I can’t define exactly what it was in grad school that got me thinking one day…it was something and then it just avalanched from there.

Maybe it started last year when I took part in growing a community garden and began to wonder why I paid $2 a pound for crappy tomatoes from 1500 miles away when I could eat really good local ones for cheap from the farmers market or grow my own for cheaper. Or maybe it was when the recession and rising gas prices started taking hits at our family budget or maybe when I started reading up on sustainability and green issues and global warming issues or when I watched “The Future of Food” at the Hub-Bub green film series and became obsessed with what I was allowing my children to ingest on a daily basis that our government said was “okay.” Or maybe it was “The Story of Stuff” a 20 minute video that made me wake up and realize that I am spending my life working to buy STUFF and for what?

Ultimately, I think it is the fact that I became a parent 5 years ago and as time went by the more I truly started thinking about the personal responsibilities I have to my children to raise them in the most responsible and smart way I can. And that I love them SO much that THAT is exactly what I want to spend my life doing and by doing so, in the process, my life is better and what I contribute to my community is better.

And I can’t help but think my transition is happening right in time. Because the more I learn I’m realizing I can either start transitioning now or be forced to do it soon because it won’t be long before America wakes up and realizes that the way we live our lives is NOT SUSTAINABLE and that things are going to have to change. That Earth Day will be everyday not just once a year and that life is about way more than clothes and cars and jewelry and such.

When we can’t get fruits and veggies, for instance, because gas is so damn high and truckers have parked their rigs…do you think we’ll notice THEN that it is important we learn to sustain ourselves? Probably not. Some company will come up with a fruit substitute made of kool-aid, high fructose corn syrup, partially hydrodgenated oil and "all natural ingredients" that you can add water to and feed kids instead of an orange or a banana. Voila. Just as good.

I look at my own City. Spartanburg. And I think…what can we do to sustain ourselves? Why are we not striving to be a Local Living Economy? Cities should be taking a look at this. We should be able to sustain ourselves from the inside out not have to depend on outsiders for everything we need. Why are we not encouraging little things like growing your own garden, for instance? Or recycling? Using reusable grocery bags? Using flourescent light bulbs? Commute together/walk/bike/use public transportation? Little things that you and I could realistically do to make a difference.

Because if we do this stuff in Spartanburg and people do it in Greenville and Columbia and Charleston and so on…guess what? It’s like a big quilt and we’re each doing our own to maintain our little square. It’s pretty common sense yet we don’t do it.

Currently, the pro-Localism/Buy Local crowd is overwhelming full of college educated folks who are often branded as ‘elitist’ for buying organic, pushing green and encouraging hybrid cars.

Oh, enough already. That’s called politics and therefore BS and you are a sucker if you allow yourself to buy into that.

It's quite simple really…Is the cost of gas hurting your budget? Okay, then LOCAL is important to you. It doesn’t take a college degree to realize that.

Local is me. Local is my family. My home. My neighborhood. My City and so on and on. It's all the same for you. That is something we ALL have in common regardless of our political differences. And the reality is we live in a society that depends on oil and guess what? Oil isn’t going to last forever and unfortunately our country is either not smart enough or not willing to be pro-active and conserve or prepare therefore the results will be devastating to those of us that aren’t in the upper crust.

And if you think it’s not going to affect you. You’re kidding yourself. And like oil, the same thing goes with the threats of economic collapse and climate change.

So get reading. Explore what’s out there. How can you make a difference? Here are some recent finds that I recommend to get you thinking:

The Story of Stuff: The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. It'll teach you something, it'll make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever.

Going Local: When oil becomes scarce, our current way of life will become obsolete by James Howard Kunstler

WorldChanging Blog: Change your thinking 

Duck & Cover: The New Survivalism: NY Times article 

Organic Consumers Association

Like Urban Renewal, Only Backward: America’s mayors are in a unique position to help rebuild our blighted federal government.

As Earth Day approaches and my garden starts to grow…I will probably be sharing some of my thoughts and experiences with you all or maybe I won’t…I may be too tired from working in my garden! I hope so. Y'all go plant a garden or a least TWO tomato plants. How 'bout it?

Why not?!?! It will at least be a few less crappy tasting, overpriced tomatoes you'll have to buy this summer.

t

So we’ve got this situation on the Goupstate.com forums. There is a poster/commenter on there who is a big racist. Big whoop. I know. We’ve got a lot of racists in SC who go into public forums and make racist, sexist, anti-gay comments. But, this guy is different. This guy calls himself Lamb.

I’ve watched him closely for a couple of years because I knew, based on his comments, that he worked at/had close ties to the Spartanburg County Courthouse. My fear was that he was a public official/employee at some level. I knew he hated black people. I came to assume he had worked as a policeman early in his career and was now maybe a lawyer of some sort or an investigator because he had such a strong knowledge of the City and the County and such hatred for what he called “poor white trash or poor black trash.” He claimed to dislike them all the same. It was obvious to anyone that took Psych 101 that his pride and ideals had been crushed from working so closely with this segment of our population which, I think, all of us can admit, would not be easy. But he had no fear of saying the things he said…things that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up out of fear, disgust and sadness that such an angry person was in a position where he came in contact with so many. He also had no fear that his hateful comments would come back to haunt him.

A couple of months ago, he suddenly deleted all of his posts from GoUpstate.com. I immediately knew something was up. Then, Felix, a self proclaimed member of the Spartanburg GOP came onto the forum and teased everyone that many of us would be voting for Lamb in the upcoming election and wouldn’t even know it. Within 10 minutes, after 2 ‘threatening public posts’ in response this GOP member’s original post, he took his posts down and deleted his account (if you go read the threads…the original post can only be found on page 2 where it was quoted by another poster).

And the speculation has gone on and on.

If it’s nothing. Then it’s nothing. But I find it an interesting dilemma and one that I feel the media, the Spartanburg Herald Journal, in particular, has a responsibility to address. They own/have access to an email address and an IP address that they could easily review to see if this warranted any more investigation. How much do ‘privacy statements’ and ‘membership agreements’ cover? Is a political candidate or elected official’s privacy protected when they post anonymously on a public forum? The SHJ makes it very clear from the get-go when you sign up on their forum that they OWN these forums so, in my opinion, if someone posts these opinions on a site owned by the press, the press then has the responsibility to protect the interests of the public. So, if Lamb is the guy many people think he is…does the SHJ protect him or the voting public?

Do WE have a right to know that a public official harbors such hate toward blacks, women and gays?

I think we do. I think if Lamb wants to believe these things he has every right to do so on HIS time but on MY time…OUR time…makes it a different story. He should have the brass ones to face his comments in a true public forum. If he is a wannabe public official he does not have the right to hide behind his computer making discriminating comments about the public he is attempting to serve. C'mon…if the media can tell us EVERY single time Brittney Spears blows her nose…surely they can tell us if a wannabe public official has used their public forums to anonymously espouse their true views of their fellow citizens. 

I think other newspapers should chime in. Or fellow bloggers? Maybe Will Folks? Or Earl? NVB? I even asked Rick Beltram, Spartanburg GOP Chair, who posts on the GoUpstate forums under the name “apron” what he thought about the Spartanburg GOP supporting Lamb (who, again, is well known by all in the forum community for his anger and hate) but he ignored my post. Imagine that.

I think this could be a new chapter in the textbook for a “Law & Ethics in Mass Media” class. I know Brad Warthen at The State has discussed similar issues on his blog in the past.

And I think there should be more discussion. Free speech does not guarantee privacy. You can't yell "fire" in a crowded theatre because it is a threat to the public well-being. And I don't believe you should just be allowed to say whatever you want when you want and claim anonymity when it suits you in an online PUBLIC internet forum. This is a new problem that poses the same sort of interesting questions and it is bound to be faced in other communities with the new forms of media put out there by the Internet. This is NOT about outing people who post on forums at work or discouraging honest discussions that people enjoy on these forums in anonymity. This is about addressing a guy who thinks he can insult minorities then turn around and delete those posts and run for public office.

Not to mention…if Lamb is who people say he is…you’d be surprised to know that some of Spartanburg County’s top officials have endorsed him. We have a right to know how that plays into our votes as well. Remember when Senator John Hawkins rape charges came out and his endorsers cringed? Same kind of thing.

If we want to take SC from the bottom to the top…we’d best start looking a bit more closely at who we are electing. Our public offices have been used by good-ole-boys for too long and running for public offices with a high salary that you aren’t qualified for because you ‘know people’ is certainly not the way to move up.

My community deserves better.

I’m tired of working my butt off to make this community better only to have losers like this guy destroy efforts. Why do we tolerate this? Will we continue to do so?

That remains to be seen and we’ve got until November to discuss it. And believe me…I will be. I promise you that.

t

For the final season.

Barbeque & Politics

Gervais REALLY knows SC politics and the shady folks that run it. This past week he returned. And I've never been happier. Bookmark his blog. Read often and share with your friends. Wondering who is behind South Carolinians for Responsible Government? PFC? and the rest of the groups all about "reforming" SC? This is the blog to let you know what they're up to.

Be smart South Carolina. These groups, SCRG, PFC. Carolinians for Reform, et. al. They bank…literally BANK…on the fact that you won't be.

I have a feeling we'll prove them otherwise.

Happy Friday!

t