1 year anniversary and a statement of belief

Dear friends, family, mentors, and general readers,

I want to thank you for following my blog over the last year, as today is the one year anniversary! As you may (or may not) know, I started this blog to keep in touch with my 'idea community' in the states while developing my Fulbright research on democracy and housing rights in São Paulo, Brazil.

Now that I am back in the U.S. and trying to link the struggle for housing rights in Brazil to movements stateside, the blog has evolved into a strange fusion of topics: (1) Urban democracy and housing struggles in São Paulo, (2) ditto in the Midwestern United States, and (3) the occasional reflection on my personal attempts to fuse a useful life's work on these issues from bits of academia, community organizing, political action, and professional training.

I realize that you may only be interested in one or two of these areas, so I have created labels to assist readers in filtering for the content they want. To the right you will see categories for "U.S." "Brazil" "News and Information" "Reflection and Analysis" and "Community or Group Profile." Click at will! Also, if you have any suggestions for how I can make the blog more enjoyable/navigable for your own reading interests, please comment on this post.

As an added bit to commemortate, I am including a personal statement of belief, which I wrote a few days ago for a job application. It sums up fairly well my central conclusions on the current social reality, as I developed them over the last 6-ish years.

I believe that everyone deserves a life where they can control the decisions and processes that determine their fate. A just society is a society where this holds true for all citizens.

I now believe we live in a society that is rightly called unjust for the existence of the opposite: whole segments of our population do not control the trajectory of their own lives. Instead, this is determined by the workings of large institutions, and by extension, a relatively small group of people involved in their navigation.

Ending injustice thus requires fundamental change in how social institutions function. In some cases it may even call for their wholesale dismantling. This cannot occur if we rely on those typically in power for change; it can only be done by building power among those suffering from various degrees of un-control, and recruiting their allies.

Finally, I believe that success in this effort requires that people suffering from injustice actively determine how to use the power that comes from uniting them in organization. They must realize in the movement what they are otherwise denied in society – control over their own lives and direction. In other words, injustice must be fought by practicing its opposite.