On Saturday, this February the 11th, thousands of people from all walks of life will gather for the sixth time to march through downtown Raleigh and make their voices heard. This movement is called the Historic Thousands on Jones Street, or HKonJ for short, and it celebrates the diversity of the state of North Carolina as well as protests the injustices within her borders. HKonJ has a fourteen point agenda that they believe in, which calls for, among other things, the abolishment of the death penalty, fair and diverse public schools, health care for those who can’t afford it, and protection of the rights of immigrants.
College tuition is going up all over the nation, faster than scholarships can cover, faster than inflation, and much faster than the economy is recovering. And, due to drastic cuts made by the NC GOP to education earlier this year, North Carolina is no exception.
Abbey Court is probably the poorest community in Chapel Hill and Carrboro. It’s a complex of condominiums rented out for cheap to a large community, mostly consisting of immigrant families. Every school day it’s common to see entire school buses full of kids empty out into the complex so that they can all return to their respective homes.
Our mental health system here in NC is in shambles. In addition to being grossly underfunded, thousands of people with chronic mental illness aren’t getting the treatment they need. Instead they get shuffled into adult care homes which are not regulated as mental health care facilities and are, in fact, even dangerously inadequate for caring for the mentally ill.
According to the News and Observer, Wake county DA, Colon Willouby, won’t be pressing charges against Officer Michael Hayes, a Wake County jail officer who struck an inmate with his fist and put him in the hospital.
Willoughby says that because the inmate, Joshua Martin Wrenn, attacked Officer Hayes (according to Hayes and “another officer”) that use of hands on force was necessary. He also said that the circumstances for Wrenn’s hospitalization were special because of the pre-existing condition of a brain aneurysm.
Now let’s ignore the fishiness of these facts and the fact that Hayes had more than a few pounds on Wrenn (not to mention a fellow officer who witnessed the event who also could have helped), and focus on some other aspects of the case which are being ignored.
If you haven’t been reading the internet, you might not know that Nov. 16th was American Censorship Day, a movement in protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act (or SOPA) which uses the excuse of protecting intellectual property to ban material, and even whole websites, on the internet. A move many call straight censorship.
So there’s this law, called the Racial Justice Act, which could be up for repeal pretty soon. The Racial Justice Act has to do with the death penalty and it allows people up for capital punishment to appeal on the grounds of racial bias. Which is a very legit point since there’s been a study which states that a defendant will be 2.6 times more likely to be put to death if the victim in the case is white, and that out of 159 people on death row at the time of the study, 31 had all-white juries and 38 had only one person of color on the jury.
Jamie Oliver, TV’s the naked chef, famously campaigned for healthier school meals in the UK after discovering the unhealthy nature of the meals and being disgusted by the severe lack of healthy alternatives. He created a successful British TV show which documented his efforts as he took over the cooking for a school in Greenwich. Surprisingly, the campaign was successful and changed the types of food British schools offered.
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