connecting*the*dots

Cara Michele Forrest is one of the good people, fighting the good fight. She’s a tireless advocate for the rights of homeless people in Greensboro, NC.

When I say tireless, I’m not using empty rhetoric. Below is a shot of her in front of the NightWatch truck that hits the back streets of Greensboro each and every Friday night, usually getting her — the mother of teenagers — home well after 2am.

She’s a mixture of spunk, sass, righteousness and southern momma to boot. It’s hard to imagine anyone not appreciating her take no prisoners attitude when it comes to serving the needy in our community.

Well, don’t look now, but it’s starting to look like she’s catching some blowback for her no nonsense approach to advocacy.

It’s not coming from her friends on the street.

And it’s not coming from Greensboro residents or businesses who more often than not have adverse relationships with the homeless in town.

The unfortunate element of this story is that the flak she’s beginning to receive is from players within the very same agencies that she works with on a daily basis, in the common goal of eliminating homelessness in Greensboro and Guilford County proper.

Who Is Cara Michele Forrest?

There are a bunch of issues at play here and being that Michele is too good of a soul to air some of the details — she’s too humble to frame the issues in the context of her daily life on the off-chance of making it about her rather than the work she’s doing — I’m going to play advocate for her position.

If you have any issues with this post, it’s my thinking, reasoning and positioning.

Mine and mine alone.

Let me start off by stating that Michele isn’t a career advocate — she doesn’t take a salary to help people; she helps people because it’s a part of her calling.

It’s how she walks that fine and narrow line with Jesus.

So when push comes to shove, Michele not only has zero reasons to back away from doing everything she can to serve her community, but she refuses to bow to situations that might lead her off that narrow path.

Basically, she’s the type of person that gives Christianity a good name.

I bring this up to distinguish Michele’s character and her purpose in life. It’s what makes her such an amazing advocate. She doesn’t serve the numbers of homeless folk in town; she serves her friends in need.

She listens.

So when she tries to advance the notion that there are homeless people that can and should represent their own needs during Task Force conversations — meetings that eventually craft an approach to helping the homeless — and it falls on deaf ears, she feels wounded.

Or the time Michele worked out a program with the Greensboro Public Library to provide library cards to the homeless (usually reserved for people with proof of residency in Greensboro), but the providers in town failed to see the importance of the program and wouldn’t agree to vouch for the people they serve.

To a soul like Michele, it’s just another example of talking loud and doing nothing.

The Bottom Line

Over the last month or so, Michele has become increasingly upset with the bureaucratic machinations of the homeless industry that she finds herself dealing with on a daily basis.

She refuses to give me details regarding most of her problems — being the narrow path, tightrope walker that she is — but I know she feels that there might be improprieties in play with the operations of the Homeless Prevention Coalition of Guilford County.

A few days ago, she openly questioned an element of a certain initiative — something innocuous like the non-announcement of its launch date — but after following up internally and getting an answer she retracted the post.

Maybe she should’ve posted an update to the post with the newly found information, but she killed it instead, so all parties involved should’ve been satisfied.

Not quite.

The HPCGC now wants her blog, Chosen Fast, de-linked from their member page, stating:

“The HPCGC website is not the place to share your personal opinions and thoughts, particularly ones that are contrary to the success of the Coalition. No one’s trying to stop your advocacy, Michele, but you need to use the proper channels.”

If the HPCGC considers a link to a blog “sharing personal opinions and thoughts” they’re sitting a bit too close to their monitors.

What their position says to me is that they’re extremely controlling with their organization, and particularly inept regarding the role of the internet and their objectives in the 21st century.

More precisely stated; they value appearance over substance.

Sounds like some marketing and PR consultants have made a buck or two over there.

Here’s a little insight of my own (for what its worth):

You don’t gain trust and credibility with your clients, customers, constituents or neighbors by coming off overly slick, rounded and without flaws; you gain such respect by delivering for them while allowing yourself to be viewed as a human being.

Try to name one organization on this planet that isn’t made up of the blood, sweat and tears of human beings.

You can’t.

So why represent yourself or your organization otherwise?

I’m sure the people at HPCGC think they’re doing “the right thing,” but this is how bureaucrats stomp the passion out of people trying to make a positive difference in the world — people who are more concerned with the well-being of the people they serve than becoming a sycophant to folks who are primarily concerned with their job security.

It’s not right and it’s not fair, to both Cara Michele and her homeless friends.

And the bottom line is that it’s just not good business.

I found this striking mural a few months back while knee deep in my late night Flickr ritual of browsing imagery by contextual navigation of topical tags. As the night wore on I drifted from tags like art to street art to graffiti, eventually resting on Malcolm X.

After staring at the shot for a few minutes, I realized why this particular image struck me — on two distinct levels:

• The mere existence of such a powerful representation of Malcolm X and his words embedded in the public square for all to see
• The absence of his complete representation, both physical and philosophical, due to elemental deterioration over time

In the real world — before the internet created another dimension for the documentation of expression and our collective histories — all atom based elements had a shelf life.

Street art, by it’s very nature, had even a shorter life span.

But here I was, stumbling across this deteriorating, real world representation, frozen in time (at what point in time I have no idea) by someone who made an explicit decision to digitize the real for the sake of posterity.

Without the internet, this work — this message — might have already drifted away from our consciousness.

Speaking of the message, only a few lines of Malcolm X’s quote remained legible in it’s original format. It seemed familiar to me, so I took a few moments to run a Google search of the words I could decipher.

Thanks to the collective participation of people publishing to the internet, within a matter of moments, I was able to piece together the original context of the quote from the mural:

“With every succeeding page, I also learned of people and places and events from history. Actually the dictionary is like a miniature encyclopedia. Finally the dictionary’s A section had filled a whole tablet — and I went on into the B’s. That was the way I started copying what eventually became the entire dictionary.”

Context is knowledge, so I circled back to the image and added the text that would have surrounded the original quote on the wall if the wall were 50 feet high.

The Internet On This Day

Eighty-two years ago today, Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little to Earl Little and Louise Helen in Omaha, Nebraska.

Depending on your company, Malcolm X is often remembered as either an inspiration — an educated, revolutionary, evolutionary force — or an extremist that preached hate.

Without the internet, the latter of these two descriptions could easily edify his legacy for future generations to come.

With the internet, we have context of evolution and truth:

The Early Years In The Nation Of Islam

Debating At Oxford University

Returning From Mecca

A New Direction, Seeing Death In The Distance

The Assassination Of Malcolm X

Paying Tribute

Living In His Footsteps

Our Collective Responsibility

Prior to the internet, the reality of our lives drifted into the annals of time and both the discrete and general narratives of history were crafted by those with the power to publish and distribute knowledge.

Today, we must recognize the importance and responsibilities of living in a digital age.

It is our responsibility that we be vigilant in documenting our knowledge for the serendipitous discovery of our fellow man, both today and years into the future — no matter our focus or industry.

Because if it’s not us taking advantage of this platform, the traditional owners of history will be more than happy to seep into play and stake their claim.

And that would be a wasted opportunity to make his-tory, our-story.

Al Gore from:
The Assault On Reason

[…] “Fortunately, the Internet has the potential to revitalize the role played by the people in our constitutional framework. It has extremely low entry barriers for individuals. It is the most interactive medium in history and the one with the greatest potential for connecting individuals to one another and to a universe of knowledge. It’s a platform for pursuing the truth, and the decentralized creation and distribution of ideas, in the same way that markets are a decentralized mechanism for the creation and distribution of goods and services.

It’s a platform, in other words, for reason.

But the Internet must be developed and protected, in the same way we develop and protect markets—through the establishment of fair rules of engagement and the exercise of the rule of law. The same ferocity that our Founders devoted to protect the freedom and independence of the press is now appropriate for our defense of the freedom of the Internet.

The stakes are the same: the survival of our Republic.

We must ensure that the Internet remains open and accessible to all citizens without any limitation on the ability of individuals to choose the content they wish regardless of the Internet service provider they use to connect to the Web. We cannot take this future for granted. We must be prepared to fight for it, because of the threat of corporate consolidation and control over the Internet marketplace of ideas.” […]

The Crimson Permanent Assurance, indeed, but younger… and willing to work with their masters while sailing the high seas… and a happy ending?

Arrr!!!

(shot by renocargo)

The Insider: Chuck D
by Andy Langer

WHO: Chuck D, 20-year leader of Public Enemy, the seminal hip-hop group whose 1990 LP, Fear of a Black Planet, was recently chosen by the Library of Congress for a list of 50 recordings worthy of inclusion in the National Recording Registry.

Austin Chronicle: Once again, it seems like best of the times and the worst of times for hip-hop.

Chuck D: It always is. That’s our history. But I think right now hip-hop’s value is too often weighed in quantity, not quality. When you just talk about business, I tell people slavery was a booming business in America, one of the strongest businesses America ever had. It was morally and ethically corrupt and bankrupt. We have to watch ourselves when we measure the success of something based wholly on numbers.

AC: Isn’t the nature of the record business to focus on dollars and cents?

CD: Sure, but I think its lack of emotional attachment to the art and music has really hurt in the digital transition. To me, a lot of the people who replaced guys like Berry Gordy, Ahmet Ertegün, and Al Bell weren’t big enough fans of the music. And you have journalists limited in the knowledge of the music they cover. So the attitude is, “Yesterday don’t count; now counts, and tomorrow we’ll wait for the next big thing, because today’s not that great either.” That’s a terrible attitude to have. The music business is healthy. The record business is in trouble.

AC: Where does that leave PE? Twenty years in? What’s your legacy?

CD: Twenty years and 57 tours. We got our passports in 1987 and have been spreading our dream around the world ever since. We tour the U.S. every four years and meet people who ask, “When are you going to come back through here?” We might not, but that doesn’t mean we’re not getting down. We come around like an eclipse. We have seven continents to deal with.

AC: Have you always gotten the credit you deserve?

CD: Hip-hop doesn’t get the credit it deserves for being diverse and thorough. When hip-hop gets respect as an art form, we get it by default. But people want to talk to us about Flavor of Love, Ali Rap, or our take on Barack Obama. That stuff has nothing to do with our consistency. Controversy has nothing to do with getting down and being good.

We’re the Rolling Stones of rap. I don’t know if Flavor is Keith or Mick, but our performance is a combination of Run-DMC, the Roots, and Rage Against the Machine. We developed the standard for live hip-hop. We’ve truly been the group that represents the meaning of hip-hop and rap music, the respect of music as the universal language, and taken that attitude all over the world.

Americans are poor on understanding time, history, and geography. We try to be strong on all those points. Around the world, PE resonates. America needs to get with it. We never fell off. America did.

Opinions are like assholes, everybody has ‘em.

Ed, if you want to protect yours from the big, bad world outside of Ed, keep ‘em in the paper and off of our internet.

Last year I quietly scoffed at Twitter because I couldn’t imagine how I would possibly keep in tune with my friends updates. Intra-day IM or SMS messages weren’t very sexy options (even Twitterific drives me bonkers to a certain degree), so I left Twitter on the sidelines.

Well, I’m glad to say that I’ve managed to figure out a system that works for me:

• I’ve set my Twitter settings to send direct messages — personal responses to my Tweets — straight to my cell, which so far has only amounted to two or three messages per week.
• I’ve signed up for the RSS feed of my friends page, so I now check it as often as the rest of my subscriptions in Google Reader; Tweets have literally become micro-posts from friends and I comment with direct messages via my cell
• Thanks to Alex King’s Twitter Tools plug-in (with John Ford tweaks), all my Tweets automatically become blog posts here, exposing my micro-posts to a different audience entirely.

I went from hating the thought of using Twitter, to loving the service.

For what it’s worth…