frivolous vitriol

I don't live in a walkable city.

I live in a mid-sized Texas town that only realizes that there are people who don't drive when TXDoT gives them money for active transportation infrastructure.

People constantly tell me that you just cannot walk or ride a bike in this city. It's impossible!

I do it anyway, because I firmly believe that solarpunk is a useless aesthetic if you aren't living it as best you can. We don't need technology to solve our problems we need will.

Also I do volunteer work on the political side of the local animal shelter and so I find myself at city hall several times a year and there's no bike rack.

Or rather there wasn't a bike rack.

I complained to someone, politely, informing them that I am doing this volunteer work and I don't have any safe place to lock my bike and that locking it to a handrail is inconvenient for everyone and also hideous.

A few months later a single staple-style bike rack was installed at city hall. It's not much, but I got sent a photo of someone else who got to use it before I did, clearly there was a need, if small.

Then I turned my gaze to the local grocery store, which had a bike rack, but the bike rack was terrible. It was too short for modern tire sizes, it was placed too close to the wall so one side was useless, and it was generally pretty cramped.

It took some time, but an advocate friend told me to contact the property owner instead of banging my head against the wall contacting HEB itself, and so I sent another polite complaint with a photo, explaining why it wasn't a very good bike rack and it would be really cool if we had a different one with better placement.

And about two months later, we have new staple-style racks at the grocery store, properly placed for maximum parking.

It's not a new bike lane. It's not a removal of parking minimums. It's not infill development or an active transportation advisory board.

They're just bike racks.

But that's the beauty of it. I, a person with an email address, some basic "how to be firm but polite while making an argument" skills, and a willingness to work out who to contact, fixed two problems for the local community. Trust me, I have had people wait on me to unlock my bike so they could have the "good spot." I was not the only person annoyed at the old rack.

It can be done. You're not powerless. Solarpunk doesn't have to be a wishful aesthetic.

Technology will not save us.

Love, grief, and magic in the mundane

He does this mostly by framing the protests as a conflict between freedom-loving protestors and jackbooted thugs over the soul of America and by painting ICE's victims as martyrs who were killed for no reason and whose names must not be forgotten. Then he pairs the idea of fighting for the soul of America and these newfound martyrs with protecting immigrants and continuing resistance (the refrain of the song is "We'll make our stand for this land/And the strangers in our midst").

This song is also the most overtly political and contemporary of his works. While his most famous song, "Born in the USA," is a critique of how the US military exploited the working class by shipping them off to Vietnam and left them broken and abandoned after their return told through the eyes of a victim of this exploitation, its catchy refrain was enough to give Conservatives a chance to claim the song as patriotic, but his new anthem, "Streets of Minneapolis," does not and is, instead, nakedly and starky about what its about.

in 2001, he released 41 Shots (American Skin), a song protesting police brutality and police killings of unarmed Black people, specifically in response to the Amadou Diallo case.

his 2007 album Magic has anti-Iraq War protest songs like Last To Die (which takes its title and lyrics from a speech John Kerry made against the Vietnam War) and Long Walk Home.

his album, The Seeger Sessions covers civil rights protest songs like O Mary Don’t You Weep, Eyes on the Prize, and We Shall Overcome

he’s even touched in immigration rights before, with American Land, We Are Alive, Sinaloa Cowboys, Balboa Park and Across the Border (the last three were released in 1995, on an album called The Ghost of Tom Joad, which also includes songs about economic inequality, in the title track and Youngstown, themes he also touched on in the album Wrecking Ball)