I know you’ve heard it before. From high school counselors threatening your chances of getting into college if you don’t have a million volunteer hours to UF Preview pounding the message that college just ain’t college if you don’t belong to 50 different organizations, we’ve all been told the tired reasons to jump into the world of “community involvement.”

But such feats are usually unsuccessful because rewarding volunteerism comes from something more than the desire to beef up college applications or job resumes. It comes from a genuine care for issues that matter to you.

So why should you care? It’s hard enough to manage a 12-credit semester, a monotone part-time job and still find the time to do the laundry in between. And even if you do feel that passion and compassion that compels you to give your time, it’s hard to shake the lingering sense that in the long run, whatever drops of goodwill you can muster will not amount to anything in the ocean of problems in which this world seems to be drowning.

Yes, with the way history is written and taught, it’s easy to feel discouraged. It’s easy to get the impression that only people in high places, like celebrities and politicians, can make a tangible difference in the lives of others. When we believe that history is shaped by a string of brilliant individuals who have carried the masses forward towards social change through their superior talent and courage, we feel powerless before we’ve taken the first step. Reality, however, is quite different.

Behind almost every major turning point in history is the power of collective action, but even a single brave soul has the power to shake and change a community. In Gainesville, you don’t need to look far to find evidence of this.

Sallie Ann Harrison, a local women’s rights activist led the struggle to help victims of rape and domestic violence in Gainesville in the 1970s. Through her work with local churches and fellow activists, she opened the city’s first rape crisis center, a small space staffed by housewives and students devoted to counseling and even personally housing women who fell victim to physical and/or emotional abuse. Thanks to her work, thousands of women in our community now have an invaluable resource at their service.

The history of our city is a testament to the truth in Fredrick Douglas’s words, “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.”

So what will it be? You may go another year spending your free time flipping through hundreds of cable channels. And that is fine; the world will go on without you. Or as I did, you may decide to venture into the Civic Media Center on a Thursday afternoon, peek curiously in to see friendly faces sitting around the volunteer table and shyly ask, “How can I become a volunteer?”

Here’s a list of groups in Gainesville you can get involved with:

Civic Media Center

An alternative reading room and library of the non-corporate press, and a resource and space for organizing. Stop by any night of the week to catch different events like documentaries (Mondays at 8), organization meetings or panel discussions.
Location: 433 S. Main Street, volunteer meetings every Thursday at 5:30pm
More info and events at www.civicmediacenter.org

International Socialist Organization

With branches across the country, its members are involved in helping to improve different injustices, such as the movement to stop the war in Iraq, the fight against racism and anti-immigrant scapegoating, the struggle for women’s rights like the right to choose abortion, the fight against anti-gay bigotry and inhumane treatment of workers. ISO is committed to building a left alternative to a world of war, racism and poverty.
Meetings: Thursdays, 7pm, at the Presbyterian Student Center
More info: On Facebook, search for “Gainesville ISO.”

Students for a Democratic Society

A radical, multi-issue student and youth organization working to build power in our schools and our communities. It is committed to shifting the national priorities from war and occupation to jobs and education.
Meetings: Mondays at 6:30pm at UF in Anderson 34
More info: sdsgainesville.blogspot.com or on Facebook: “Gainesville area SDS”

Animal Activists of Alachua

A UF student group that promotes vegetarianism and animal rights on campus and in the larger community.
Meetings: First meeting of the semester is Sept. 3 at the Reitz Union room 346
More info: http://animalactivists.wordpress.com/

Queer Activist Coalition

A politically motivated activist group at UF fighting for full civil and social equality for the LGBTQ community.
More info: E-mail them at queeractivistcoalition@gmail.com or on Facebook: “Queer Activist Coalition (QAC)”. Also, check out a story written by their president discussing the group in more detail.

Human Rights Awareness

A UF student group dedicated to raise awareness and encourage activism concerning human rights violations around the world, particularly in cases of genocide.
More info: www.ufhumanrights.org

National Women’s Liberation

A Gainesville feminist group who meet to discuss and organize around women’s issues.
More info: E-mail them at nwl@womensliberation.org, or visit womensliberation.org.

Student/Farmworker Alliance

A network of students and youth organizing with farmworkers to eliminate sweatshop conditions and modern-day slavery in the fields.
More info: On Facebook, search for “Gainesville Student/Farmworker Alliance.”

Amnesty International

Amnesty International is a Nobel Prize winning grassroots activist organization. It fights to uphold human rights on the local and international level.
Meetings: Begin in the fall
More info: On Facebook, search for “UF Amnesty International,” or e-mail them at ufamnesty@gmail.com.

Bridges Across Borders

An international collaboration of activists, artists, students, educators and others who cherish cultural diversity and global peace. This organization addresses the root causes of violence and hatred in the world and examines the attitudes that cause humans to view each other as enemies and to seek understanding that allows people to appreciate each other as friends.
More info: www.bridgesacrossborders.org

Veterans for Peace

Through the lessons of their own experience, Veterans for Peace work tirelessly to raise awareness of the detriments of militarism and war as well as to seek alternatives that are peaceful and effective.
Meetings: First Wednesday of every month at 7pm
More info: E-mail the president, Scott Camil, at s.camil@att.net.

The Kickstand

The Gainesville Community Bicycle Project, The Kickstand, provides free or inexpensive bicycle-related services to anyone. The bicycle represents the most affordable, healthy and environmentally sound mode of transportation and recreation. The Kickstand seeks  to encourage individuals to learn to maintain a bicycle and to use it in a responsible manner.
Location: Find The Kickstand every Wednesday at the Downtown Farmer’s Market.
More info: www.thekicktsand.org

The Fine Print

Our mission is to serve the community of Gainesville by providing an independent, critically thinking outlet for political, social and arts coverage through local, in-depth reporting. If you have a passion for independent journalism, writing, art, photography or activism, you might just be the perfect addition to The Fine Print. We are always looking for new talent, so contact us.
More info: www.thefineprintuf.org or e-mail us at alt.publication@gmail.com.

Counterpoise Magazine

Counterpoise is a quarterly review journal of alternative publications and products. The magazine offers internship opportunities, as well as reviewer positions. UF and Santa Fe students are encouraged to apply.
More info: www.counterpoise.info

Committee for a Civilian Police Review Board

CCPRB is a group of concerned citizens who demand the creation of a Citizen’s Police Review Board to fight against the pattern of corruption, arrogance, bias and violence displayed by some members of the Gainesville Police Department. Students and members of the community are invited to join the committee and help demand accountability from our civil servants.
More info: E-mail them at gvillepolicereview@gmail.com

CHISPAS

The Coalition of Hispanics Integrating Spanish Speakers through Advocacy and Service (CHISPAS) is a student-run group at UF comprised of students and community members who are invested in the immigrant community and feel passionate about sparking change on and off campus.
More info: www.chispasuf.org

Protect Gainesville’s Citizens

A group whose mission is to provide Gainesville-area citizens with accurate and comprehensible information about the Cabot/Koppers Superfund site. Through analytical research, outreach education and community participation, Gainesville citizens will have an active voice in the Cabot/Koppers Superfund site cleanup process.
More info: www.protectgainesville.org

If you didn’t see the type of organization you’re looking for on this list, or you want to find out more, check out Radical Rush- an activist fair of student and community organizations organized by the Civic Media Center every semester. This fall, Radical Rush will be held Sept. 15 – 17.  Come out to the Plaza of the Americas to learn more about how to get involved and to meet some of the organizers that are making waves in our community.

With seeds.

From fast-growing summer veggies to Florida wildflowers to culinary and medicinal herbs, our Guerrilla Gardening workshop turned into an insurgency of the downtown area.

The workshop, which I facilitated, made up the April edition of the Gainesville Urban Homesteading Project. The ongoing project aims to provide workshops and skills concerning self-sufficiency, sustainability, frugality and ethnoecological wisdom to urban residents.

While Guerrilla Gardening might not seem to have much in common with homesteading, the two practices are ripe with similarities.

Guerrilla Gardening is the practice of finding a fertile piece of land within an urban environment and gardening it– regardless of who the land belongs to. Typically the land is in a public space and gardened with the intention of offering that space and its fruits to everyone in an effort to challenge the mainstream ideas of land ownership and use.

During the workshop, participants made seed bombs by combining moist, composted manure with flour and seeds to form a sticky ball, teeming with potential flora-to-be. We then wandered around only a couple of blocks, noticing the abundance of fertile land, which before had only been appreciated by the most common and prolific weeds. We stealthily scattered our little bombs of hope, catapulting some and dropping others only inches from our feet. We seed-bombed empty lots, street medians, business lawns, dirt mounds and long-abandoned garden plots, then quickly regrouped on my front porch to talk guerrilla-gardening etiquette and philosophy.

The most obvious reason one resorts to guerrilla gardening may be self-sustainability. But there are plenty of other viable reasons to spread the herbaceous love.

First is the idea of providing local organic food, accessible to anyone who happens upon a plot. Guerrilla gardening creates an intersection between self-sufficiency and a deeper-rooted class struggle, as the gardens offer a healthy option for all people. Another reason may include bioremediation, which is the use of plants and microorganisms to naturally consume and break down pollutants in an environment. Plants are also very helpful in breaking up those pesky concrete slabs that don’t seem to serve any purpose. Growing plants in public spaces also sows the seeds of synergy, understanding and communication.

Which comes full circle to the idea of urban homesteading. The mission of the Gainesville project, manifested by Mary Doyle, is to “organize hands on, accessible workshops designed to share our skills and resources for creative self-reliance and a more sustainable urban community.” Mary admits the project is “a work in progress.”

“It was the awareness of my own ignorance that inspired me to initiate this project,” she said.

Originally the intention of the urban homesteading project was to begin reclaiming lost skills and forgotten knowledge once necessary for survival. As the project has evolved, a skill-share model has unfolded, based on the theory that everything we need to survive and thrive as individuals and as a community is already here and we can “do it ourselves.” As the project continues to take form, new meaning and purpose arise.

One purpose of the project is to enrich the local economy and cultural ecology. One of the first workshops hosted by the Gainesville Urban Homesteading Project was a lesson in beekeeping. As a result, 130,000 new bees were introduced to Gainesville, creating 13 new colonies, all working diligently to pollinate the gardens and wild flora of the local biotopes.

“Let us remember that we have honey bees to thank for pollinating about one-third of all the food we eat,” Mary says. “If all goes well for these local neighborhood apiaries, we may have a million honey bees working hard to cross-pollinate our food and flowers while making us honey. This concept of cross-pollination is a great metaphor for the work of the Urban Homesteading Project in general.”

Another aspect of the project is the preservation and adaptation of folk crafts. By learning to make useful objects, such as candles, clothing, dishes, tools and jewelry, urban homesteaders can feel confident relying on their own creative ingenuity, rather than depending on Wal-Mart and Target to deliver.

“This has the potential to invigorate our local craft economy while simultaneously reducing our use of fossil fuels to import our consumables from across the globe,” Mary said.

Another gathering led the urban homesteaders to the Dare to Dream Alpaca Farm in Newberry. We were able to witness the shearing of several alpacas and buy the wool directly off their backs. Afterward, we learned the traditional art of spinning wool by making a drop spindle out of wooden craft dowels, old CDs and wax. We progressed from spinning the less accessible wool to spinning ideas of making yarn out of grocery bags, bicycle tubes and any other waste product we could think of to create beautiful samples of modern craft.

Last, yet equally important, the Gainesville Urban Homesteading Project focuses on survival.

“Maybe our money will continue to save ‘us’ from droughts, floods, earthquakes, not to mention human violence, but I doubt it,” Mary said. “It is the last frontier of our privilege to remain ignorant, imagining ourselves safely insulated from the hardships being experienced by so much of the world.”

Every day, average Americans drive to their jobs, work for about four hours and then take a legally mandated lunch break for 30 minutes to an hour. After about four more hours of work, they go home.

But Gina Cano and Lowlee Urquia’s workdays were nothing like that. Gina and Lowlee were Honduran sweatshop workers, and they worked as long as it took to make their quota with unpaid overtime, a 15-minute lunch break and medical deductions from their $40 weekly paychecks that amounted to a lack of decent medical services. But as horrific as that sounds to students in the U.S., this job provided them with the few resources that they needed to keep their families alive.

Now that they’ve lost even that, Gina and Lowlee no longer have the chance of giving their children an education or any hopes of owning their own houses.

Lowlee, a single mother of four, can no longer afford to pay for her children’s transportation to school, so she was forced to discontinue their education, Lowlee said in Spanish, alongside Gina, at a presentation translated to English. She also had to suspend the medical treatments that her mother was receiving, as she can no longer afford it.

Gina had a big dream of owning a small house for her family to call its own, but now those dreams are long gone along with her job, Gina said at the presentation.

These two women are not alone. Gina and Lowlee are just two of the 1,656 workers who lost their factory jobs at Hugger and Vision Tex, two Honduran sweatshops, in January 2009, leaving them with no resources to sustain their families.

Many people in Honduras have no other choice but to work under such conditions if they want keep their families afloat, Gina said.

But Gina and Lowlee are not like most people in Honduras; they have decided to take a stand for their rights in order to stop the inhumane treatment of sweatshop workers. These two women are traveling around the U.S. in a 30-state tour starting in Florida and ending in Washington, funded by United Students Against Sweatshops, hoping to find people interested in their message who will take a stand beside them.

“We are in this journey knowing that we will be put on the black list, but we just don’t care anymore,” Gina said. “We just want to fight for what is fair because if these conditions keep going, they will get worse, and we fear that they might even lead us to a state of slavery.”

To kick off their tour, Gina and Lowlee spoke at UF last month about their struggles in the sweatshops and their problems without it.
They explained that after they were fired, the workers from both of these factories were negleted and denied their severance pay.
An estimated $2.1 million was owed to these workers in severance pay.

To date, Gina and the unemployed workers from Hugger have been able to recover 21.5 percent of the money owed to them by selling the leftover machinery from the factory. Lowlee and the workers from Vision Tex have been able to recover 26.5 percent of the money owed to them using this same method.

The women explained how important it is for people to be aware of where their clothes are being made and who is making them. Everyone can make a difference just by being informed and buying clothes that are not made in sweatshops.

“Many people think that protesting against sweatshops won’t help us because they think that any job is better than no job,” Gina said. “But while having a job is better than not having one at all, continuing on this path will lead to worse things.”

But protest can do much more than one can imagine. It brings to light problems that were sitting in the dark before given attention. Those problems, in this case, are the ones that Gina and Lowlee are going through.

“By bringing these former Nike workers, we are hoping to make our campaign stronger by educating people on what is going on,” said Rama Issa-Ibrahim, president of Human Rights Awareness on Campus. “I think people can draw a closer connection to the cause if they meet people who have suffered or gone through the hardships of working under precarious conditions that are presented in sweatshops.”

It is for the rights of individuals, like Gina and Lowlee, that organizations like Human Rights Awareness on Campus and UF Amnesty International work for.

These two UF student organizations partnered to form the Gators for a Sweatshop Free Campus, a campaign they’ve led with the support of many other campus groups over the last year.

The purpose of this campaign is to make UF apparel sweatshop-free, said Elena Quiroz, executive officer of UF Amnesty International. Furthermore, Gators for a Sweatshop Free Campus wants the university to adhere to the standards set by the Workers Rights Consortium, a labor rights organization led by university faculty, students and labor rights experts who work to regulate fair wages and the treatment of garment employees, especially in the factories that produce college-affiliated clothing.

The WRC gives workers a voice by putting them in contact with universities who are willing to speak up for them. Universities that are affiliated with the WRC give companies a code of conduct by which they must abide, and if a company breaks this code, they are then penalized by law.

“Already, more than a hundred universities have affiliated themselves with WRC because of student opposition to sweatshops. This includes Florida State University, Arizona State University, Washington State and of course a huge number of other public universities, as well as private ones,” said Rafiya Javed, vice president of external affairs for Human Rights Awareness on Campus. “UF currently abides by the standards set by the Fair Labor Association, but these aren’t comprehensive enough and do not ensure that subcontractors are actually even treating their workers fairly.”

The problem is that the FLA receives much of its funding from the apparel industry itself, so it encourages the companies to set their own rules. It also does not require that workers be paid a living wage, which is essential to live a poverty-free life.

Campus activist organizations believe that the switch to the WRC would make a tremendous difference in the lives of individuals like Gina and Lowlee.

For the same $50,000 that UF spends annually on its FLA membership, it could join the WRC, which exposed the injustice in Honduras. Joining WRC would also allow UF to require the companies who sell the licensed apparel that UF students buy to pay their workers a living wage.

“Joining the WRC would ensure that UF-licensed clothes would not come from sweatshop factories,” Issa-Ibrahim said.

The Gators for a Sweatshop Free Campus campaign has already had some success among administration.

On the morning Gina and Lowlee spoke at UF, representatives from both of these groups met with administration officials to discuss the possibility of a change to the WRC standards, and they were told that the university would start to move forward in the process, said Emily Flynn, president of UF Amnesty International. About a week later, the University Athletic Department signed off on the preposition.

A letter of intent has been signed by the university saying that it intends to join the WRC. As of now, the university is working on drawing up a code of conduct and when to begin enforcement.

UF joining the WRC is expected to have a great impact on the sweatshop industry and the companies who buy from it.

It would put pressure on the companies to follow the rules put out by the WRC and give power to the universities in terms of being able to regulate and penalize the companies for misconduct, said Rod Palmquist, national organizer for United Students Against Sweatshops. UF ranks No. 2 in sports apparel sales by the Collegiate Licensing Company, so joining the WRC will have a tremendous influence on athletic apparel companies, as well as other universities.

“UF kind of taking the lead will hopefully make universities think twice about joining as well,” Palmquist said.

When Mary Ann Jones bought her house in Northwest Gainesville, the real estate agent said there might be noise every now and then, due to the nearby industrial facility. She was okay with that. She was not warned that her grandchildren could be exposed to a dangerous concentration of dioxins, which are known to cause cancer and a wide range of health problems, especially in small children.

“I felt like this man signed me a death sentence,” she said.

For slightly over a year, Jones has lived at 3118 NW 4th St. with her extended family, which includes three grandchildren. The top of her fence is wrapped in barbed wire, which separates her backyard from the 90-acre Superfund site previously owned by Koppers, Inc. She wants to move away but doesn’t have the financial means.

For 93 years, Koppers, Inc. operated a wood-treatment facility at 200 NW 23rd Ave, releasing industrial toxins—including arsenic, hexavalent chromium, creosote and dioxins—into Gainesville’s air, water and soil. The area is now ranked as one of the nation’s top-100 polluted sites. It has been designated a Superfund site—a place so heavily polluted with toxic waste that it poses a threat to human health and the environment—for 27 years.

“I’m scared to death,” she said. “I like to garden, but now my plants are dead because I’m scared to touch them. We’re pretty much stuck here.”

Her two youngest grandchildren—Carlos, 6, and Aaron, 3—play outside every day without understanding the situation.

“We’re always telling them—if you drop anything on the ground, don’t pick it up and definitely don’t put it in your mouth. And always wash your hands when you come inside.”

Jones said she feels like no one has been there for her—not the local or state government, and certainly not the EPA. Her front yard is peppered with signs, which say things like, “Governor Crist – Where Are You?” and “Gainesville’s Dirty Little Secret is Out!”

The site is currently managed by Beazer East, the company responsible for cleaning up the site. According to disclosure forms filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Beazer was previously known as Koppers Company, Inc., and has an agreement to absorb environmental liabilities from the current incarnation of Koppers.

Legal battles over contamination have followed the companies around the country. Koppers currently faces lawsuits in Texas and Mississippi, though many of the claims have been dismissed. In its latest annual report, Koppers warned investors that, “Litigation against us could be costly and time-consuming to defend, and due to the nature of our business and products, we may be liable for damages arising out of our acts or omissions.”

Years of Uncertainty

Chris Bird of the Alachua County Department of Environmental Protection said the fact that Koppers was allowed to operate its facility for so long, despite the property’s Superfund status, has hindered the clean-up process.

“You can’t make a bed while someone is still sleeping in it,” he said.

Mitchell Brourman, a representative from Beazer East, said there are many reasons the process has taken so long, from Gainesville’s unique geology to discrepancies between state and federal regulations. He acknowledged, however, that the continued operation of the Koppers facility was one of them, “to some degree.”

Local activist groups, including Protect Gainesville Citizens, Ban CCA and the Stephen Foster Neighborhood Protection Group, have documented a variety of health complications among people who live near the site, from cancer to skin problems. They also contend that an unusually high number of dogs and cats near the site have malignant tumors.

Tests performed by the city and state health departments indicate hazardous dioxin levels in an easement between NW 26 St and NW 30 Ave, which serves as a buffer between Koppers and nearby neighborhoods. In 2009, the Alachua County Health department issued a press release warning parents not to let their children play in the easement.

The press release also states, “Incidental ingestion (swallowing) of very small amounts of surface soil in the neighborhood north and west of Koppers is not likely to cause harm.”

Scott Miller, the EPA’s regional project manager, said evidence of cancer in the neighborhood residents has been “anecdotal” and that the EPA “has not observed that effect.”

“The Florida Department of Health is doing a study of cancers in the area,” Miller said. “They will probably be making a response to that specific question with respect to folks living there as well as animals.”

Local resdents say they have waited too long for answers. Protect Gainesville Citizens has received an EPA grant to hire technical advisers, but the grants cannot be used to pay for additional testing. Advisers can only help community groups make sense of existing reports.

“We need more data,” said Cheryll Krauth, one of the group’s officers. “There are reports of health problems, and we don’t know if they’re worse than the average neighborhood or not. The problem is that the entities responsible for testing aren’t telling us.”

For decades, the Stephen Foster Neighborhood Protection Group has not trusted the state, Beazer or the EPA. Last year, they sought help from the Law Offices of Robert H. Weiss, a firm that specializes in environmental justice.

In January, Xenobiotic Laboratories, Inc., an environmental consulting firm hired by the legal team, tested fine dust particles from inside nine randomly selected houses within a two-mile radius of the Superfund site.

“This is unique,” said Stephen Murakami, a Weiss attorney. “Indoor tests are rarely performed [by government agencies]. Outdoor soil testing is their standard, as opposed to indoor tests where it counts—where people live, breathe and make their beds.”

The state has determined that the maximum dioxin concentration for soil outside to be safe is seven parts per trillion. Inside the nine houses tested, the average dioxin concentration was 400 parts per trillion. In one house, they were as high as 1.2 parts per billion.

While toxins can dissipate in the environment, they can accumulate indoors. Murakami said that while outdoor levels may take this into consideration, he believes the results reveal a substantial risk to human health, and he called for additional testing. The test results have not yet been made public.

According to the World Health Organization, long-term dioxin exposure is linked to impairment of the immune system, the nervous system, the endocrine system, and reproductive functions. Chronic exposure may lead to several types of cancer. Small children face the greatest risks.

Mary Ann Jones was recently informed of the tests by Stephen Foster residents. She’s left to wonder whether her family’s ailments, from skin rashes to nosebleeds, are mere coincidences, or signs of toxic contamination. The uncertainty fuels her fears.

“The more I think about it, the angrier I get,” Jones said. “You can’t put no price on my life or my family. Why would you try to cover up something that you know is so deadly? Why do you think money is more important than the lives of my grandkids?”

Water Contamination

The Superfund site is dotted with retention lagoons—unprotected pits where toxic waste is stored, a legacy of lax environmental regulations before the 1970s.

Local agencies had warned that creosote and other compounds could reach the Floridan Aqufer, 200 feet below the surface. The EPA contended until 2001 that the underground Hawthorne clay layer would provide a protective seal.

“We and some citizens had been telling them we didn’t believe that—you haven’t done the right investigations to know what’s happening that deep under the site,” said Rick Hutton, an engineer from Gainesville Regional Utilities.

After further investigations, experts from the EPA, Beazer, and Gainesville Regional Utilities all agree that the Floridan Aquifer is already contaminated. Now, chemicals are slowly moving towards the Murphree Wellfield, where Gainesville Regional Utilities draws the city’s drinking water supply.

“We have wells in between our site and the Murphree Well Field,” said Mitchell Brourman of Beazer East. “Those monitoring wells are consistently clean. The protection of Gainesville’s water supply is one of the premises of our work.”

Hutton said Beazer will probably need to dig more wells to contain “hot spots” of underground pollution, and pump groundwater out of the aquifer at a faster rate to ensure it can be treated at the surface before contaminants reach the water supply.

“We don’t think the low-rate pumping will work,” said Hutton. “The EPA wants to give it a chance. If it doesn’t work, we expect them to take further steps.”

What can we do?

Groups of concerned citizens, including the Stephen Foster Neighborhood Association, Ban CCA, Protect Gainesville Citizens and the Stephen Foster Neighborhood Protection Group, have been working for decades to spread awareness of the issue and encourage community activism.

“Over 158 other sites have been closed since ours was declared a Superfund Site,” said Maria Parsons of the Gainesville Neighborhood Protection Group. “We’re still not cleaned up. Why? People coming together matters. You need to get active. Dig your heels in. Protest. Write letters. Make phone calls.”

Tia Ma, an officer of Protect Gainesville Citizens, has proposed the idea of using the property previously owned by Koppers to build an environmental research center, which would commemorate decades of anxiety and suffering, transforming them into a learning experience.

Brourman said Beazer East has “no problem” with that idea.

“There are going to be some public meetings where people can talk,” he said. “We’re all ears to those sorts of things.”

Update: On Feb. 2, the EPA issued its Record of Decision, a 703-page document detailing their plans to remedy the Superfund site. Have we reached the end of the road? Check out A Haunting Past, Pt. 3: The Record of Decision.

Above: Inside the 90-acre facility operated by Koppers Inc. before its operations were shut down. Photo by Robert Pearce, former president of the Stephen Foster Neighborhood Association.

Tia Ma, a local massage therapist, no longer feels comfortable treating clients at her house, eating herbs from her organic garden or letting her cat roll around in the soil. When she moved into her home at 708 NW 31st Ave. two years ago, she didn’t realize the dangerous consequences of living there.

“I’ve noticed more and more animals with tumors in this neighborhood,” she said. “To hear that three doors down the street, people are dying of cancer and houses are going out for sale – my heart has been broken.”

Slowly, Ma learned about a nearby place called the Cabot/Koppers Superfund Site.

For 93 years, Koppers Inc. operated a 90-acre industrial facility at 200 NW 23rd Ave. The area is now ranked as one of the nation’s top-100 polluted sites. In 1983, it was declared by the Environmental Protection Agency to be a Superfund site – a place so heavily polluted with toxic waste that it poses a threat to human health and the environment.

For decades, Koppers released industrial toxins into Gainesville’s air, water and soil, including arsenic, hexavalent chromium, creosote and dioxins. Combined, these chemicals can cause cancer, rare diseases, changes in DNA, and birth defects.

There’s a 500-foot buffer around the site, including ABC Liquor, Ward’s Supermarket, the Salvation Army, a daycare center and dozens of homes, which the City of Gainesville designated an “area of special environmental concern” in 2005.

Cheryl Krauth is an officer of Protect Gainesville Citizens Inc., an organization dedicated to spreading awareness of the issue. She said the EPA is currently doing too little too slowly to help the residents who live near the site.

“We know there are homes along the border of the site – roughly 20 of them – who received letters from the [Alachua County] health department saying, ‘Don’t allow your children to play in the dirt; don’t grow gardens in your yard; and stop using your wells,’” she said.

The letters also included other warnings, such as, “Do NOT get soil in your mouth, bathe upon reentering the house, and keep a separate set of ‘play clothes.’”

Cindy Harrington, a resident of the Stephen Foster Neighborhood, has been working with Protect Gainesville Citizens for years to help her neighbors. Nonetheless, she secretly hoped her own home would be safe, as it was located across Northwest Sixth Street, outside the buffer area. Slightly over a month ago, a private environmental consulting firm tested nine homes, including hers, revealing evidence of high dioxin levels.

“If you feel your health is at risk and you want to leave, nobody wants to buy your house,” Krauth said. “So there are lots of residents that feel trapped.”

Joe Prager, founder of a local organization called Ban CCA, has personally experienced the damaging effects of industrial toxins. His daughter was born with a cleft lip and a cleft pallet despite his wife’s efforts to stay perfectly healthy during her pregnancy. He later learned that the defects stemmed from his wife’s exposure to CCA-treated wood products, which contain a dangerous mixture of copper, arsenic and hexavalent chromium.

Prager’s personal tragedy led him to years of research. From 2005 to 2008, Prager served on the Alachua County Environmental Protection Advisory Committee and decided to investigate Koppers.

He asked for reports from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection and found that the water run-off from Koppers contained arsenic levels that were eight times higher than what was acceptable near a residential area. Copper levels were 18 times higher. There was one patch of land in which the dioxin levels were 24,377 times higher than the accepted residential standard.

“There have been reports of cancer clusters, large numbers of pet deaths from cancer, [and] more than one case of multiple sclerosis nearby,” Prager said.

In 1988, Koppers sold their property to Beazer East, a private developer that is currently responsible for working with the EPA to clean up and redevelop the area. Despite the property’s Superfund status, Koppers still operated the lumber-treatment facility and continued their toxic operations until 2009. That’s when Koppers decided to leave Gainesville, after all the investigations and bad publicity. Now that the operations are closed, the EPA has a chance to finally do its job.

“The EPA has done little or nothing for 26 years,” Prager said. “They appear to have a cozy relationship with industry as a rule.”

If the EPA doesn’t move faster, there could be permanent consequences. There are spots on the Superfund site where creosote oils – highly carcinogenic toxins – have leached through layers of rock and soil toward Florida’s aquifer system 200 feet below. From there, the pollutants could potentially flow north into the Murphree Wellfield, where Gainesville Regional Utilities draws the water supply for Gainesville and other surrounding communities.

“I’ve called this site the greatest environmental issue for Alachua County, and I still think that’s true,” Prager said. “Our drinking water is at stake here.”

How can we, as a community, hold Beazer and the EPA accountable? Groups like the Stephen Foster Neighborhood Association, Ban CCA, Protect Gainesville Citizens and Gainesville United Neighborhoods have been working hard to spread awareness of the issue and encourage community activism.

“The EPA says they’ve done almost 10 years of studies,” said Ma, who is now involved with Protect Gainesville Citizens. “We have no idea what those studies are. I want a compilation of all the tests that have been done so we can make decisions together. I don’t want to create bad guys. I just want honesty.”

Local activists are calling out to concerned residents, including UF students and professors, to educate themselves on the issue and to contribute whatever skills they might have. This includes a call for artists, photographers, journalists, urban planners, engineers and just about anyone else.

“I think the city of Gainesville and UF can really come together with some creative ideas,” Ma said. “I think it can be an amazing win-win. We should just admit that we’ve fucked up. And we can utilize the resources we have in this town. We can do our best to clean it up and do so publicly and teach others how to do it so this never happens again. It’s not okay to just sit back and let the company decide how to make money on their 90 acres after they clean it up.”

Ma’s lease on the house will expire in July. She plans to permanently leave before then. Ma is a healer, and her beliefs include leaving places in a better condition than how she found them. Her goal is to fill the entire meadow around her house with ferns and sunflowers, known for their ability to heal the earth by absorbing industrial toxins.

Update: A lot has happened since this story was written. New tests have been done and the results are disconcerting, to say the least. For testimony from a troubled family living next door to the site, as well as responses from GRU, Beazer, the EPA, and GDEP, check out A Haunting Past, Pt. 2.

Note: Follow The Fine Print’s complete coverage of the festival, which runs March 19 through March 24, here.

Environmental journalist Trish Riley has lived in Gainesville for three years. The one thing that bothered her was what seemed like a lack of environmental news, especially regarding local issues. In the summer of 2008, while signing books at Goering’s Book Store, she asked the audience, “How green is Gainesville, anyway?”

Everyone in the audience, which included UF students and Gainesville residents, had a story to tell about some kind of grassroots project they were working on, but not a single person knew about anyone else’s project. What the community needed, she realized, was the opportunity to get together and combine their efforts. Without widespread awareness, this could not happen.

“I realized there’s not much environmental news that makes its way through this town,” Riley said.

She started a web site called GoGreenNation.org, a resource for environmental awareness, and a Gainesville chapter of Green Drinks, an international organization for people interested in living sustainable lives. Her goal was to post information on every environmental project in the community so concerned citizens could gather and collaborate.

Green Drinks started meeting on the first Wednesday of every month. At first, there were only three members. By December 2009, there were 60 people at the organization’s first anniversary. This is where she met Shirley Lasseter, the cinema director of the Hippodrome State Theatre.

“I told her we need to have an environmental film fest,” Riley said. “There are so many cool movies that don’t show up in Gainesville, you know, because they’re not Avatar.”

Lasseter had been thinking the same thing. She enjoyed showing documentaries, but they were a hard sell. She and Riley worked together to create something new in order to open people’s eyes.

On March 19, their creation will come to life: The First Annual Gainesville Environmental Film and Arts Festival. It’s a 10-day celebration of the earth and its resources – a chance to learn about the problems the earth is facing and how to build a better future.

“It’s all about positive personal action,” Lasseter said. “We were careful to choose films that give you a way out, that give you an idea, that provide light at the end of the tunnel.”

The festival will be more than just a series of films. Everyone will have the opportunity to speak with local experts in the lobby of the Hippodrome about what can be done in Gainesville to make a difference. There will be long feature films, as well as short ones. Topics include environmental history, overfishing, green building construction, plastic, soil, lawn fertilization, the importance of organic farming and organic foods, herbal medicine, phosphate mining (a huge issue in southwest Florida), water contamination, vegetarianism, and alternative energy, among others.

“We’re planning to have special organic treats and goodies on certain movie nights from local farmers and local restaurants,” Lasseter said.

On March 27, there will be an Eco Fair at the Sun Center with vendors, community organizations, musicians, artists and eco-dancers. The Heart of Florida Chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council, as part of a Haiti relief project, will demonstrate how to build an “earth bag home,” a sustainable, earthquake-resistant shack. The materials required to build an entire shack can fit neatly into a rain barrel. The goal of the project, known as Barrels of Hope, is to send rain barrels filled with supplies to Haiti, thereby providing people with a means of shelter and water collection.

The Alachua Department of Environmental Protection will sell rain barrels at the fair. A rain barrel is a 55-gallon drum that can be put underneath agutter system. It captures rainwater, which can then be used instead of sprinklers to irrigate a lawn.

“Fresh water is a finite resource, and to pour half of it on the ground, as we do in Florida, is crazy,” Riley said.

On March 28, there will be nature outings with local professional tour guides. Throughout the festival, all of Gainesville’s most prominent galleries (basically, everyone who participates in Art Walk), will showcase art with a focus on ecology and sustainability. Lorelei Esser, a self-taught sustainability artist, and Chris Fillie, a co-manager of the South Main Community Arts Center, have been working together to rally local artists behind the festival.

The gallery at the Hippodrome will feature work by local eco-artists, like John Moran, as well as work by Dom Martino, a renowned Gainesville photographer who recently passed away, leaving a legacy of beautiful pictures that highlight the plants and wildlife of Paine’s Prairie.

The films and art will come together to serve a unified purpose.

“My goal is to spread environmental education to the community,” Riley said. “This festival is an extension of that work for me.”

The three-day Harvest of Hope Foundation Music and Arts Fest is back for its second year, March 12

The Harvest of Hope Foundation, a “non-profit organization that provides financial, educational, and service-oriented aid to migrant farm workers all over the country,” according to its web site, was founded by Phillip Kellerman in 1997.

Kellerman’s initial exposure to issues concerning migrant farm workers came from his involvement in 1989 with the ESCORT Migrant Education Program at the State University of New York in Oneonta, where he answered phone calls for the National Migrant Education Hotline. Kellerman says he received hundreds of calls from about 25 states, including Florida, from migrant farm workers seeking emergency aid for “vehicle repairs, housing, utilities, clothing, food, medical services and helping their children in schools.”

“I soon discovered there was not much federal, state or local help in these states. There was no help out there,” Kellerman said. “That’s what led me to set up the Harvest of Hope Foundation.”

In 2004, Kellerman moved to Gainesville.

“Before I left, a good friend of mine I worked with in Oneonta contacted her friend, Ryan Murphy,” Kellerman said. “He really liked the foundation and what I was doing.”

Murphy, who was getting his master’s degree in bilingual education at UF, worked in an afterschool literacy program called Libros de Familia, which promoted literacy to migrant children in Alachua County. The program received funding from the HOH Foundation to buy books, fund afterschool workshops and get UF students involved.

“I met with Phil, and I was excited about what he did [with the Foundation] and asked what I could do to help raise funds,” Murphy said. “I worked at No Idea Records going to school, and once I got involved with Phil, I wanted to bring the two worlds together. Knowing Harvest of Hope needed money, the most immediate thing I could do was to put on benefit shows.”

Murphy thought some bands he knew would be interested because “their politics would fall in line with helping workers and social justice issues.” Murphy asked his friends in Against Me! to play a benefit show, and “they took the ball and ran with it,” he said.

“They did a series of shows around the country and raised $18,000. It got us motivated and inspired Phil to realize other avenues of fundraising.”

“We just thought there was a really good connection between grassroots, alternative and progressive musicians and the grassroots work the Harvest of Hope Foundation was doing,” Kellerman said.

While setting up a benefit show for Against Me! and some other local bands with Ryan Detera of Café Eleven in St. Augustine, Detera mentioned he had “just become the general manager of the Fairgrounds and why don’t we do three days. I laughed because it seemed ridiculous compared to what I wanted to do.  He said, ‘You do the Fest in Gainesville. I think you would have the ability to do it here,’” Murphy said.

As a non-profit organizing an event of that size, HOH was eligible for a grant from the county. They applied and received $50,000, the largest grant ever awarded. The money comes from tax revenue received through tourism, which is then allocated to aid organizations seeking to do special events in the county.

“Once I got together with everybody who works on the Fest and motivated everyone and got them on my team, we couldn’t look back,” Murphy said.

Through both Detera and Murphy’s connections, they began to assemble the 2009 line-up for the first HOH Fest.

“I know a lot of bands, punk bands, through No Idea, and Ryan [Detera] knows smaller indie bands through Café Eleven. He was also booking through the Fairgrounds, so he was working with agents [of national bands] as well,” Murphy said.

They came up with a diverse selection of punk, indie, hip-hop, folk and acoustic.

Last year, although 7,800 tickets were sold and 17,000 people came through the gates, nothing was raised. Kellerman explains it was a first-year test, and “most first-year tests lose a ton of money.”

But Kellerman is not disappointed with last year’s turnout.

“Even though we didn’t make money, the off-shoots from the fest were wonderful. We had a lot of bands, subsequent to the fest, doing their own benefits for the Foundation, locally and around the country. Was it worth our effort? Yes!”

This year Kellerman hopes to see double the attendance of last year and give a stronger focus to the HOH Foundation cause.

“The first year we just wanted to create a general awareness of what it was all about.  This year there will be a much stronger focus on what HOH is about, with a strong emphasis at tables and the non-profit section that works with the migrant farm workers.  There will be a double CD of last year’s event available, as well as a documentary of the first year that incorporates the music and the message” on sale at the festival.

The CD is currently available now at fail-saferecords.com and interpunk.com. Three-day passes to the HOH Festival are available at harvestofhopefest.com for $49.50.

Photos courtesy of Morgan Bellinger – www.movephotography.com/ – and Celia Roberts – www.celiaroberts.com

A few blocks from Tim and Terry’s, Tygur nervously smokes a cigarette. His eyes are red and watery from the other four he just smoked. Every time he gets invited to freestyle onstage at a bar or club, he walks around town and bums as many cigarettes as he can. As the performance draws nearer, he asks me to buy him a beer. I say it’s a bad idea.

“Nah,” he says, “It’s cool, man. You know I do better when I’m fucked up.”

Tygur One, an underground rapper, has lived on the streets of East Gainesville since 1998. A year later, he started an unofficial record label called Phatt Boy Entertainment, which has provided recording time to nearly a hundred local rap and reggae artists.

Tygur can usually be found downtown at Bo Diddley Plaza, rolling his own cigarettes. On a typical day, he wears a colorful beanie over his dreads. The faded black outline of a tiger is tattooed on his left cheek, barely noticeable against his dark skin. Just above his other cheek is a patch of scarred flesh where his face hit the pavement in a motorcycle accident.

Ever since Tygur arrived in Gainesville, his life has been driven by music.

He wants to give every artist he meets on the streets a chance at recording, even if all he can offer is a few pieces of old equipment.

“I wish I could reach all the youth and start a change in society,” he said. “Those young fellas, they gotta grow up and reach for the sun.”

Tygur said music is what saved him from living the wrong kind of life.

“It was a war between gangs, where I come from,” he said. “We were foot soldiers, fighting for superiority on the streets. Only the strong survived.”

Tygur was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. At 3, he moved with his family to Chocolate City, Georgia. In his early childhood, Tygur listened to his dad play reggae and blues with a keyboard, guitar and drums. He started hearing music in his thoughts constantly, which helped him deal with the reality around him. Most of his peers were involved in drug dealing and gang fights.

As he got older, Tygur drifted from his family. His Haitian father envisioned him finding a stable job and conforming to the family tradition of arranged marriage. He began to skip school so he could roam the streets, looking for ways to make an extra buck. Tygur said that’s when his “dark side” developed. At 13, he met a new role model: an older drug dealer.

“A smooth cat,” Tygur said. “A real cool Jamaican. His name was Boxy.”

Boxy asked Tygur to wash his car each week in exchange for some money. In the meantime, Boxy sold marijuana discreetly to passersby.

“It caught my eye,” Tygur said. “The fast money. He started letting me sell weed for him. The more I did it, the more we became friends.”

At this point, Tygur had dropped out of school and rarely went back to his house. He slept in alleys, playgrounds, tunnels and abandoned railroad tracks. At 16, he bought a keyboard and began to practice whenever he could. Still, most of his attention was directed elsewhere.

“By then, I was part of a street fraternity,” he said. “I was selling the most drugs. And this guy I knew, who had a pawnshop, he and my father were best friends. My dad would get all these antique guns and shit and store them in the shop. Getting guns was easy.”

He also found a partner-in-crime: a young man his age named Rodney Jackson, who had his own six-member hip-hop crew called King of Beats. Rodney was the kind of guy who could fracture someone’s skull with one punch. He and Tygur raised hell together.

“Back in those days in Georgia, you had to have a gun,” Tygur said. “I had several. You pull a gun on me, we get into a fight, and I grab your gun. That’s how my collection formed.”

Tygur’s interest in music was still alive. Whenever they could, he and Rodney would show up at clubs and freestyle together. At one of those clubs, Rodney got into a fight. The other guy pulled out a nine-millimeter pistol and shot him in the head. As Rodney was airlifted to the hospital, Tygur realized how alone he felt.

Meanwhile, his talents and resources led to a new lifestyle. By his early 20s, he had a two-bedroom apartment, three cars, and a girlfriend named Alicia Kirkpatrick, who helped him get rich. Together, they recruited eight girls who sold their bodies and brought in tons of clients, including lawyers and police officers.

Spiritually, Tygur felt bankrupt. Alicia fell into a downward spiral, snorting more cocaine than she was selling. Rodney had recently left the hospital in a wheelchair, permanently paralyzed.

“The first time I saw him, all I could do was cry,” Tygur said. “He told me, ‘All this shit you’re doing, man, you can end up like me. The police are watching you. All these boys hanging out with you, they’re not really your friends. They’re all waiting to get you.’”

Tygur said that’s when he started to see the light.

“I realized life is serious, and a gun can really fuck you up,” he said. “I turned to music to escape the drama.”

With Rodney gone, the King of Beats had fallen apart. Tygur sat alone with his keyboard, searching for inner peace. He left Alicia and left the apartment. His travels, which mostly consisted of hopping buses, led him to a small college town in Florida with a thriving independent music and art scene.

“Gainesville was a good place for music,” he said. “A lot of local bands. I made friends with punks and joined the underground movements.”

When Tygur was sitting in a bar one night, depressed, he met a girl named Sparkle. She was a beautiful work of art, with pink, white, blonde and blue-striped hair, fishnets and “at least seventy piercings on her face,” he said.

Sparkle took an interest in Tygur’s music and introduced him to her friends from The Wayward Council, a nonprofit record store on West University Avenue. They invited him out to a place called “the spot,” an old clubhouse on Depot Road, to record some music and party. Thus began his new lifestyle.

Since then, Tygur has rapped at Brophy’s, Tim and Terry’s, The Laboratory, The Kickstand and more parties than he can keep track of. He moves his studio equipment from place to place, such as the backrooms of convenience stores, depending on who will grant him time and space.

“I was living in Babylon,” Tygur said of his life in Georgia. “In Gainesville, I found Zion. Zion is life, art and music. I want to bring Zion to Babylon, you know, and tear Babylon down.”

Tygur is 36 and continues to sleep on the streets. His goal is to find a permanent place to store his equipment and record some music. Until then, he stands and waits for shows, compulsively bumming cigarettes.

I heard about the restaurant first through word of mouth. It wasn’t even open yet, but some of my friends were getting involved. It was opening where 2nd Street Bakery used to be. I heard I should look into getting a job there. I also heard about some kind of “buy-in”. What’s up with that, I wondered.

It was explained that the restaurant is a co-op, a business owned by the workers. The workers purchase shares of the company, and when the business profits, everyone profits. If at some point I must move on beyond the restaurant (or am asked to leave), the money returns to me.

To get involved in this new entity, Civilization, I would have to buy a $1,000 share of the company, one of many equal shares. I didn’t have to pay it all at once; I could put portions of my earnings towards the buy-in or contribute hours working around the restaurant doing landscaping, for example, or generally making things better or creating artwork for the sculpture garden.

The idea of having to pay money in order to get paid kind of bummed me out. I had no idea what it would be like working at a place like this, and I would be invested in this business, meaning it was a commitment. I was also hesitant to get a job in the food service industry, having had bad experiences in the past.

I worked at a Panera before and spent most of my pay-earning hours changing trash bags, bussing tables, being “nice” to customers, hosing off the dishes and spoons, sweeping, mopping, and cleaning restrooms. Over three months, they let me make about five sandwiches for customers, and I paid half-price for maybe 50 sandwiches. It seemed like they had an endless stream of new workers to do the less palatable jobs, and those people would either eventually quit or move up the line if a spot opened up. No one wanted to do what I was doing. I felt no attachment to the place and there was no pride in my work, but I always got paid on time. I got a nice apron and a hat, some flimsy name tags, dishpan hands, and a reason to never eat at one of those places again.

A few months later, I was making sushi at a place called Voodoo Lounge. It was all dead fish, sharp knives and buckets of pink ginger. I could have cut off a finger. At first I loved the job because, to me, I was being trained in this esoteric art form — edible sculpture. I felt I was doing something productive. As for the ambiance, it was all low-watt bulbs and black paint. And around 10:30, when the sushi bar packed up, the bartenders came in, the lasers turned on, the club music fired up, and in came everybody looking to get liquored up. These were not peaceful times for plastic-wrapping fish, nor for wiping down with bleach water. It was never explained to me how things were run there. There was a boss, one manager, and one cook, and I don’t think they knew what was going on either. I did not always get paid on time. After a few months, I wasn’t learning anything new, and our discriminating “clients” just wanted their rolls deep fried or with beef or chicken instead of fish.

Despite my hesitation, I was at a point in my life where having a job was more important than having a good job. I rather like the idea of getting paid, and I like to be learning skills while working; I like food, and I’m willing to clean all kinds of crap. Joining Civilization started to seem like my best possible option.

The restaurant was a particularly promising prospect because as a co-operative it possessed something fundamentally different than the other places I had worked. I eventually slapped together an up-to-date resume and made an appearance.

The grounds were serene. The artwork was tasteful. Everything was well put together. It all made me start doubting that I had what they needed. Thankfully, by the end of the week, I got a call from Chef Maschafino. I came back in to talk to him, and he gently explained the whole co-operative thing to me again. I started the next day.

I wowed them with my dishwashing dexterity, and the restaurant impressed me as well. Everyone was genuinely friendly, the cooks made sure I ate something, I was free to take breaks as I needed them, and at the end of the day, I was even offered a glass of wine. Everyone kept thanking me for what I was doing. That night I left a little damp, but in high spirits. I was completely happy with the situation I had gotten myself into — a boss-free workplace. or something to that effect, John thought it more accurate

This new work was liberating. I was immediately open to meeting all the denizens of Civilization — they all just seemed so independent and personable. I used to avoid talking to co-workers, as I didn’t want to talk about work at work, or outside of work for that matter. I was under the impression that hearing complaints more often than hello or goodbye was normal.

At Civilization, if I have a complaint, letting other people know is actually productive. It’s the same if I have suggestions for improvement. I can bring up the matter at the weekly meeting, and it can be voted on democratically. As it turns out, every place is unique, and there are many ways a business can be structured and particular interpersonal dynamics for each.

It seems like everyone at my sweet new job wants to be there; we have invested ourselves, and we trust the organization. Civilization works for us.

Co-operatives cannot incorporate in Florida, so they have to either operate as corporations or limited liability companies. Other states allow employees, or combination of employees and other people, like customers, to form nonprofit mutual benefit corporations or similar entities to do things like run a restaurant or a farm.

Civilization is located at 1511 NW 2nd Street, and is now serving morning coffee, lunch and dinner.

I’m chasing ghosts in Ybor City.

Outside the rain has finally quit. Plastic beads hang, dripping from the palm trees and window bars. The streetlights glow up and down Seventh Avenue, but there’s hardly a soul around.

A train screeches by across the parking lot. There’s a ragged man in sweatpants pulling cigarette butts from a garbage can. He pops his head up as I walk by.

“Fumar!” he says eagerly. “ Fumar!”

My Spanish is less than proficient—terrible, in fact—but I gather from his gesturing hands that he wants my cigar. I’m bored with it anyway, so I hand it over.

“Gracias,” he says and dives back into the garbage.

They call this street “La Setima”—a throwback to the days when it was lined with cigar factories and filled with bustling Cuban, Spanish and Italian immigrants. It runs right through the heart of Ybor, lined with bars and restaurants, just northeast of downtown Tampa.

Rambling around, I meet mostly beggars. A young guy in a baseball cap hands me a piece of paper on which he’s scribbled the following in blue marker:

“I am deaf. I am trying to get $8 for a bus ticket back to Orlando where my mother was just shot and killed.”

I give him $8 and a smile and feel pretty good about myself. Not two minutes later, on the very same block, I meet another guy with another crumpled note written in the same blue marker:

“I am mute. I was attacked last night, and all my money was stolen. I am trying to get $32 for a bus ticket to Orlando.”

“Sorry, man,” I say, handing him back his bullshit note, “I’ve done my good deed for the night.”

He looks crestfallen.

“I’m trying to get home,” he says. “Just wanna get home.”

“I thought you were mute,” I say.

I meet Gerald and David outside the Green Iguana. We share a table and a round of PBRs. David says little, looks antsy and keeps getting up to go inside. Gerald smokes Stampedes at a suicidal rate—he’ll finish one, snuff it, cough vigorously and light another. He speaks in whispers, but amicably and at length. He tells me he was once bitten by a brown recluse while taking a piss alongside the Autobahn in 1989. I hesitate to ask where he was bitten, but he eventually shows me the scar on his ankle. Nearly cost him his leg, he says. David insists it’s time to go, so I shake hands with them both and watch them walk away.

It’s quiet out. Too many doors are shut; too many signs have gone dim. I splash through puddles, back and forth across the street, reading the names stamped in the sidewalk pavers. The power lines hum overhead.

Where the hell is the salsa music? The trumpets and the drums? I expected the streets to be filled with beautiful, dark-haired women all dancing and throbbing and glistening with sweat. Hot red lights and flowing liquor. Skirts spinning madly. Pouting lips and enticing eyes.

But I see none of that. So I keep drinking. It’s the only thing to do.

The wall clock in the kitchen wakes me around 9 a.m. It won’t be ignored. I curse it passionately and throw off the sheets.

Ah, hotel mornings. Clothes heaped on a strange floor. There’s a scrap of paper on the nightstand:

“James Joyce Irish Pub—green carpet with duct tape on seams—dozen meatheads at bar in Harley shirts—biceps!—crappy fake fireplace with lights and fan-blown paper flames—girlfriends screaming—empty bottles of Jameson and copper tea kettles on shelves—water pipes and wires—”

“Crowbar—$5 liters—DJs, kids break-dancing—PBR labels flying from ceiling—pool game with Max and Christina—stomach hurts—”

Some of this sounds familiar. At least I took notes. My head aches a little, but the day is young and bright, so I shower and pack and turn in my key.

Back in Ybor, I find the Parque Amigos de Jose Marti, a monument to the great martyr of Cuban independence. It was here among the cigar workers that Marti drummed up support for the Cuban Revolutionary Party in the 1890s. The park sits in the sunshine on the corner of 13th Street and Eighth Avenue, across from old Ybor Square. A gleaming white statue of Marti stands in the center, hand outstretched, between the Cuban and American flags. It’s not quite noon, but the gate is locked, so I move on.

A little ways north, just past I-4, the neighborhood is crumbling. I walk past tiny apartments sitting side-by-side on lonely streets. Front doors are boarded up. There are pictures of Che Guevara in the windows and chain-link fences surrounding it all. Everywhere the paint is peeling.

Down on Eighth Avenue, not six blocks away, the tourists are out in full force. They waddle off the trolley in their flip flops and straw hats, stretching the seams of their salsa-stained Capri pants and pastel guayabera shirts. They lick ice cream cones in the Centro Ybor courtyard and squeeze their Winnebagos through the narrow streets.

I grab a cup of coffee at a place called The Bunker then round the corner to the Museum Store and buy a copy of the Selected Writings of Jose Marti. Centennial Park lies across the street, empty and inviting. I take a walk around, crunching the acorns beneath my feet, and sit down on the steps to read.

A favorite passage from one of Marti’s notebooks:

To write: The Supreme Moments: (of my life, of The Life of a Man: the little that is remembered, like the peaks of a mountain: the hours that count.)

There’s something familiar about Ybor. Something that lingers in the cobblestone streets. It’s not the feeling you get in an ancient city. Nothing mythical or grand. It’s a haunting sensation—a closeness. Like an empty seat that’s still warm. You have to wonder who just left.

I’m in town for just 16 hours. The trip is one of those spur-of-the-moment, skin-of-my-teeth excursions squeezed in between work and classes. Call it a mental holiday. I have vague notions of avoiding the tourist sectors in favor of something more genuine, but nothing approaching a plan. Nor do I have a map, for that matter, but I figure I can pick up these things as I go.

My room at the Econo Lodge is a faux-resort mishmash of army green and spoiled-salmon pink. That doesn’t bother me so much, but something is amiss. Every bulb is burning. The AC’s on full blast. The beds are suspiciously disheveled. My first thought is that the hotel has double booked and any second some frenzied Midwestern behemoth is going to come charging out of the bathroom and break my legs in a defensive fury. After a moment of paranoia, I realize there’s no luggage around. Still, I hazard a cautious “Hello” before closing the door and possibly sealing my fate. I realize later that the Goldilocks treatment (“Someone’s been sleeping in my bed!”) is likely some hotel protocol intended to project a sense of welcome and domestic comfort—the same rationale behind the ubiquitous Bible in the dresser drawer and those ridiculous two-cup coffee pots. The assumption here is that most people want to feel at home while they’re traveling, which is probably true and, if so, downright depressing. Travel is supposed to be about finding something new.

Shooting back up I-4, past the spotlights of The Holy Land Experience and miles of outlet malls, downtown Orlando slowly fills my windshield. I turn off on South Street and make a couple of passes around the city before settling, begrudgingly, on a $5 parking spot beneath Wachovia Tower. It’s early yet. The bars are still pretty quiet. The beggars and musicians are laying claim to street corners and setting up for the night. Some of them play guitar; some of them drum on buckets; but most just hold up their hands or their soda cups and say “God bless you” for a quarter.

Out front of the Central Station Bar are a couple of tables and a greasy orange puddle. Fliers plaster the windows. The tables have a nice view of the intersection, which is blocked at the moment by a big Ford Excursion limo full of rapper-types. The place is nothing fancy, but I’m thirsty, and pools of vomit this early in the evening are usually a telltale sign of cheap drinks—so I step inside.
I order a round of 2-for-$3 beers and sit down to take in the atmosphere. Oversized paintings of Gibson guitars hang on the far wall. The bar stretches out beneath a crusty baroque chandelier that looks like it was pulled from the bowels of the Titanic. There’s a small stage tucked away in the back corner, through the cigarette smoke. The general ambience lends itself to a pleasant grunginess, which is horribly interrupted by the endless progression of Jack Johnson songs on the P.A. I take this up with the bartender, who says it’s her Jack Johnson playlist but is kind enough to put on some Dropkick Murphys instead. I make sure to tip her well before I leave.
Outside, the streets are swelling with people. Muffled bass lines blend with the staccato of high heels on sidewalk bricks and the general din of voices. Bike taxis scurry by, bells ringing. Sirens wail. A believer on the corner brandishes a righteous megaphone. “There is a God,” he yells. “I am not him.”

I wander a bit. Grab a slice of pizza and a few more beers. There are gangs of keen-eyed chicks in matching miniskirts out front of the nicer clubs. They schmooze with the spenders, which means they ignore me completely. As the night goes on I find myself more and more underdressed. I try convincing a couple bouncers that the holes in my jeans are designer, without success. In the end, I stick to the places that aren’t charging cover and drink whatever they have on special. There’s still plenty to choose from. Around midnight, I find my car and head back to the hotel, satisfied with the knowledge that you don’t have to dress sharp or drop a fortune to have a good time—you just have to look around.

I’m up and out of the hotel by 9 the next morning. A damnable curiosity finds me in line for a cup of coffee at one of the world’s largest McDonald’s. There’s a little Asian couple in front of me, huddled together in their visors and fanny packs, whispering in whatever their native tongue is—or maybe not—presumably about what they want to eat. Up at the counter, a raging Latino woman is laying an earful of heated Spanish on one of the cashiers. I understand her ranting a little better than I do the Asians’ hushed deliberations, but not by much. I am confident, at least, that I would be unqualified to work here.

With a couple hours left before I have to get home, I head back downtown. The clubs are all shut up. Empty beer bottles stick to the window frames. I park my car on Magnolia Avenue, pay the meter and walk down the hill to Lake Eola.

The carpe diem crowd is jogging round the lake with their dogs and strollers. Fat-footed swans line the path. They stretch their necks to snap at ankles and remorselessly shit on everything. I have to tread lightly, but on the far bank, looking west across the water, I find an immaculate view of the city. It is quiet and warm, and in that moment, it stands just for me.

The thick packet of literature included stories like “Immokalee family sentenced for slavery,” “Apartheid in America” and “A more-complete definition of ‘sustainable.’” By the time we arrived in the desolate town, just after midnight, we felt confident in our school-child ability to recite the labor history of this town and felt briefed on the ultimate reason for our visit.

After becoming fed up with the impoverished condition that enslaved them, migrant workers started a grassroots organization called the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) in 1993. These workers, mostly immigrants from Honduras, Guatemala and Haiti, had already experienced both verbal and physical abuse since their arrival in the U.S. Most of them could remember a time when, back in their own countries, they survived as subsistence farmers — selling crops and living on corn, squash, beans and, most importantly, their own autonomy. They weren’t rich, but they were dignified.

But after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was established between the U.S., Canada and Mexico, these small-time farmers could not compete with subsidized crops from the States. Before, Mexico was a major wheat exporter. Now, Mexico only exports cheap labor.

“I think of myself as a son of NAFTA,” CIW staff member Lucas Benitez said. Poverty and exploitation forced these people north, where they hoped conditions would improve. But in Immokalee, the reality was much different.

As we pulled up to the CIW headquarters, a man whom we only knew through e-mails warmly greeted us. Marc Rodriguez, the national coordinator of the Student/Farmworker Alliance (SFA), directed us to our sleeping quarters — the Immokalee Non-Profit Housing children’s care center, about two miles away. Finally settling down among baby toys and children’s books in Spanish, it dawned on us that we had barely scratched the surface of this town.

The next morning, about 150 people convened in an old church for the official start of the fifth annual CIW/SFA Encuentro. “The meeting,” aimed at campaign strategy for the upcoming year, brought together students and activists from across the U.S. with the like-minded goal of working in solidarity to bring positive change to the lives of migrant farmworkers in Immokalee. After an introduction to the Student/Farmworker Alliance, Benitez and several other members of the CIW filled in a few more gaps in our knowledge of the coalition’s history.

In 1995, the CIW held its first major action. After Pacific Tomato Growers threatened to cut workers’ pay from the minimum wage $4.25 an hour to $3.85 an hour, more than 3,000 farmworkers went on strike for one week without compensation, including nearby citrus workers acting in solidarity, and built alliances with local church groups, schools and universities. The pressure was so great that the company announced it would instead increase the hourly wage to $5.25.

Unfortunately, not all growers were as responsive as Pacific Tomato Growers. In fact, after this first event, it became frustratingly difficult to convince growers to yield to the CIW’s demands of a wage increase of one penny more per pound of tomatoes and to follow a human rights code of conduct.

So the coalition began to research every link in the food supply chain and noticed a striking trend. No matter who the players were, the line of succession was always the same — the food suppliers pull all the strings from the top; the growers act as the strings being pulled; and the farmworkers dangle like marionettes at the bottom.

This system is apparent within the makeup of UF’s own food supplier, Aramark Ltd.

“We strive to offer clients and customers fresh whole foods that are raised, grown, harvested, and produced locally and in a sustainable manner whenever possible. And we partner with suppliers to increase the availability of such foods,” Aramark states on its web site.

However, Aramark is constantly being ridiculed for not living up to its self-mandated standards of ensuring a sustainable supply chain of workers at the ends of its own puppet cabaret: workers like those in Florida who pick roughly 90 percent of the country’s tomato supply while reaping little, if any, of its profits.

On Martin Luther King Day in 2001, the CIW took a bold step to bring farmworkers a little closer to their suppliers. They officially threatened a nationwide Taco Bell boycott outside of the Mexican fast-food chain in Ft. Myers. Three months later, they presented a list of demands to Taco Bell: meet with the CIW and tomato growers to discuss possible solutions to farmworkers’ problems, contribute to an immediate wage increase per pound of tomatoes picked, and join the CIW to draft wage and working conditions standards to be required of all Taco Bell tomato suppliers.

Three years and thousands of protest signs later, Taco Bell folded. The “Boot the Bell” campaign by students and farmworkers was so successful that the victory received Mother Jones’ “Campus Activism Victory of the Year” award.

Taco Bell set the bar, and the rest dropped like flies. McDonald’s, Burger King and eventually all of Yum Brands (Burger King’s supplier), Whole Foods, Subway, and Bon Appétit agreed to pay the people who pick their tomatoes one penny more per pound, as well as agreeing to follow a code of conduct for growers and suppliers.

These victories created an astounding precedent, proving that a group of farmworkers with little to no legal protection could organize, take on huge corporations and actually see a response to their demands.

Back at the Encuentro, everyone prepared for a walking tour, filling their water bottles and gathering big-brimmed hats and sunglasses. We trudged down the sad, steamy roads of the migrant housing neighborhood, stopping in the shaded areas in front of various points. The first site was a small trailer park stuffed with dinky green trailers with bright “for rent” signs shining through their dusty window panes. Our guides Silvia Perez and Melody Gonzalez explained that the dilapidated trailers — most of them lacking basic amenities like AC and hot water — were owned by tomato growers in the area and rented out to migrants for a going rate of $60 per person per week. The growers have the ability to charge outlandish prices for several reasons, including proximity to pick-up points for work and the lack of a housing market demand by residents other than the workers.

A few blocks away, we stopped across the street of the next site — a nonchalant house that looked like its inhabitants had been gone for several weeks. Our guides, apprehensive about getting any closer to the house, began to unfold the tale of its history:

Just one year ago, the owner of this house and several others were arrested and charged with modern-day slavery. Gonzalez, in her rustic Spanish accent, explained that about a year and a half ago a large U-haul was nestled in the driveway. The chain lock around the U-haul was not to keep people out, but to keep them in.

In a fashion similar to the years just after the American Civil War, tomato growers were holding immigrants hostage as indentured servants, working to pay off their “debt” to the growers for bringing them to the U.S. In essence, the growers were smuggling people from Latin America into the States and then enslaving them — making them work long, stringent hours for little or no pay and charging outlandish prices like $5 to shower outside with a hose and bucket and even more obscene amounts for food and water.

And all this was happening within an afternoon’s drive from Gainesville.

In 2008, one enslaved worker escaped and informed the CIW of his condition. The coalition created an uproar, attracting media outlets from across the country and bringing the growers to trial. The tomato farmers were sentenced to 50 years in prison by a federal court for practicing modern-day slavery.

Now, the CIW is turning its attention back to the penny-per-pound campaign. After the coalition forced so many corporations to come to the table, they were ready for something larger: the overarching food service providers, like Aramark, that organize and manage food courts and dining services on campuses, workplaces, tourist destinations and even prisons nationwide. This newest campaign, aptly named “Dine with Dignity,” is in full swing across the country, focusing not only on Aramark, but also Sodexo and Compass food service providers, as well as corporate grocers like Publix and Kroger.

Already Compass has come to the table.

UF just renewed a 10-year contract with Aramark in June of this year while many students were away for the summer, allowing it to pass without protest. But several groups, including the Students for a Democratic Society, The Fine Print and the newly formed Gainesville Student/Farmworker Alliance are not allowing it to go unnoticed.

Concerned students presented a resolution at the UF Student Senate meeting on Sept. 22, which, if signed, would have strongly urged Aramark representatives at UF to enter into negotiations with the CIW. That same night, a different resolution concerning Aramark’s purchase of sweatshop-made clothing was also presented.

It passed with flying colors, but the CIW resolution was not so lucky.

But this hasn’t killed the campaign. In fact, “Dine with Dignity” is swiftly making its presence known on UF’s campus through fliers, petitions and collaboration with student groups on campus, as well as a number of fiery letters to the editor of The Independent Florida Alligator.

In addition, the CIW will be hosting a popular education rally in Gainesville on Saturday, Oct. 23, fully outfitted with the elaborate display of street theater and activist artwork that has made the coalition so well-received around the country. The rally will begin on UF’s campus to protest Aramark and then will head to the Publix at 125 S.W. 34th St. Later, there will be a presentation at the Civic Media Center at 433 S. Main St.

Students and community members looking to get involved are asked to send an e-mail to GainesvilleSFA@googlegroups.com, and sign the petition.

By the Numbers:
- 53 percent of farmworkers in the U.S. are undocumented, according to a 2005 survey by the U.S. Department of Labor.

- 2 million farmworkers have been driven out of business since the enactment of NAFTA in 1994.

- 40 cents is the amount paid to workers in Immokalee for every 32-pound bucket of tomatoes they harvest, which equals $.0125 per pound. Workers can pick between 15 and 27 buckets per hour, according to a UF study.

- Farmworkers have not received a raise per bucket since 1980:

Year                Minimum Wage                    buckets/hour (to receive min. wage)

1980                $3.10/hour                            8
1997                $5.15                                    13
2007                $6.67                                    17
2008                $7.25                                    18

• With a 1 penny-per-pound increase:

future                $7.25                                    10

“The elevation of the family to ideological preeminence guarantees that a capitalist society will reproduce not just children, but heterosexism and homophobia.”

– John D’Emilio, Capitalism and Gay Identity

For the last several months, this sentence has haunted me and kept me awake at night. Every time I hear the word “gay” or “lesbian” in the news, it is followed by some form of the word “equal,” and I can’t help but wonder what that means anymore. It’s the banner of every Rachel Maddow talking point, the pariah of every Bill O’Reilly pundit.

Most people will give a clear, definitive response to what they mean by equality: marriage. Personally, I take a hate-the-sin-love-the-sinner approach to marriage. Activists and lobbyists alike throw their arms up at this injustice, like the worst thing in the world is being denied the right to be a miserable divorcee with the rest of the country. Imagine me, free to be forced to reconcile banking statements, insurance policies, child-rearing practices and geographic locality with the person I thought I loved senior year of college. The American Dream.

The Human Rights Campaign invests billions of dollars for the sake of marriage while transgender teens (a small minority of the overall population) represent some of the highest in homelessness and suicide rates. Equality could start somewhere closer to anti-discrimination, anti-hate speech, domestic violence prevention and health care reform. It could broaden domestic household rights to include any individuals under a roof and provide more monetary autonomy for every kind of monogamous couple. It could fulfill the sexual revolution that the Gay Liberation Front set out to do almost 40 years ago in 1970.

So it would be an understatement to say that a month before the National Equality March on Washington, D.C., I was reluctant. I had tied myself to the irrational idea that I, as a gay man, could go as an observer and “critique” what I saw. I wanted to put my finger to the pulse of this thing, to take it apart and see what makes it tick.

Instead, less than a month away, the opposite happened. This Pandora’s Box, equality, had more going on within it than outside of it. Protesters who had only cared about Proposition 8 began to talk about the endemic homelessness rate among transgender youth. Heterosexual couples began seeking domestic partnership status instead of marriage. In Gainesville, the Pride Community Center wouldn’t throw its support behind the March, and The International Socialist Organization was the only group in Gainesville to provide transportation for interested parties. As socialism is no longer the dirty word Fox News catered it to be, socialists put themselves at the head of a national movement. The Advocate, by no means a left-leaning publication, featured a purple and pink portrait of Obama and asked the question on many queer people’s minds: “Nope?”

So I put my full support into it. I missed classes, asked for donations and handed out fliers. I got a schedule for all the workshops for the weekend. Plane ticket in hand, my obsession doubled. Equality, it seemed, had drawn my attention as well as the nation’s. Equality, it would seem, was in some type of ménage à trois with Liberty and Justice. And this had extended beyond any pornographic desire. I wanted in.

So I decided: to Washington.

Demanding Equality

“We’re not organizing to march; we’re marching to organize!”

– Sherry Wolf, activist

I fly into Dulles instead of Reagan on principle. There’s something about coming to a gay rights march and landing in an institution named solely for the man who killed more gay people with a mere qualification of nonexistence that (because it doesn’t feel right?) doesn’t feel right. Sure, maybe it took an extra two hours to get to my destination 30 minutes before the Metro closed down for the night, but I have principles, damn it.

D.C. is pretty disgusting. Chinatown is all of three blocks and includes a Ruby Tuesday, which, the last time I checked, only specialized in Asian-specific cuisine as a seasonal promotion à la sweet-and-sour Cajun chicken dinner plates. The image of “the man” is pervasive: stopping at street corners on cell phones, scrolling on BlackBerrys in the subway; they can even be spotted on the yet-gentrified blocks of Columbia Heights. Everywhere, the ideal of an overweight white man in a dress shirt is incessant. These are men who buy Bowflexes as living room ornaments and men who haven’t had their pant legs hemmed since the ’70s.

Most of the events start to kickoff on Saturday. The Human Rights Campaign headquarters has a slew of fact sheets for each state and tables for writing letters to your representatives. They have workshops, buttons and sign-making stations for the March on Sunday.

At noon, a small group of us gather at the Taft Memorial, waiting on details via text for a flash mob protest that is supposed to be taking place. “Stonewall 2.0,” they say. We all get notified about a half-hour later telling us to meet at Union Station. In the lobby, it’s starting to fill with people. Another half-hour later and I’m frozen with about a hundred other people, camcorder in hand, trying to record the event for The Fine Print’s web site. We march outside and start yelling chants from generation’s past: “Gay Straight, Black White! Same Struggle, Same Fight!” It seems like the crowd has grown: 100, maybe 200, people, nearly all under 25. It feels good, and as we make our way to the Capitol, tourists look confused. What do we want? Equality! When do we want it? Now!

The Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell protest an hour later isn’t as successful. Forty-five minutes into it and they’re still asking us to text our friends to come. They hand out tattoos straight from the NoH8 campaign that fought the passage of Proposition 8. When I leave, they’re beginning to duct tape mouths. But I’ve got someplace else to be.

I arrive right on time at Busboys and Poets, and there’s a line around the railing outside, circling the building. Inside are Sherry Wolf and Cleve Jones, two of the organizers of the March. They’re giving a talk on LGBTQ Liberation. Jones was responsible for the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt in the ’80s and personally took up the call for the March. Wolf just wrapped up a tour for her new book and to drum up support for the March. I sneak my way in right before they speak. It’s wall-to-wall people inside.

Wolf says the March is about one thing: full equality in all matters governed under civil law in all 50 states. This means adding sexual orientation and queer identity to the 1964 Civil Rights Amendment. She says this concept of pride over protest and lobbying incrementalism over direct action is unacceptable.

She also changes my views on marriage. The majority of the LGBTQ population aren’t the affluent, campy white males we see on television. They’re ordinary, working-class people. The material benefits of marriage are more real to them than my college-educated status will be able to understand. Moreover, most of those economic benefits come from the national level. Even couples in states that allow for gay marriage are denied those rights.

Wolf ties LGBTQ protest to other direct, leftist political actions. She talks about how Harvey Milk was successful in striking beers in gay bars for labor unions and how the Gay Liberation Front, born from Stonewall, was vehemently anti-war.

“I don’t want to see DADT [Don't Ask, Don't Tell] repealed so that our gay brothers and sisters can go on fighting an illegal war,” she says. ”Here is another reality about the U.S. military: it is the largest employer in our country. I want them to be recognized and receive the benefits for their service everyone gets, and then I want to bring all of our brothers and sisters back home!”

It seems like these people care. Like they get it. Like D.C. isn’t just some vacation to them, and it seems as if people might take this stuff back and start organizing. And that’s what Wolf wants, too.

“It’s not a bad start folks, but we have got to walk away from here with a movement. We’re not organizing to march; we’re marching to organize.”

That night, Obama spoke at the HRC, promising to hear our calls for equality if we continue to make them. Our president invoked Stonewall, when transgender, gay and lesbian working-class people, mostly of color, cornered riot-squad officers into a bar, set fire to the bar and continued to riot for the next several days. That night, queer radicals “glamdalized” the HRC headquarters by tagging “Quit Leaving Queers Behind” in pink spray paint on the door and firing off “glitter-bombs.”

Sunday morning, only a few people were wandering McPherson Square, where the March was to begin. But within two hours, curious stragglers had turned into an enmeshed horde armed with signs, screams and a willingness to demonstrate. The parks couldn’t hold crowds, then the streets couldn’t, and people spilled over in every direction.

The International Socialist Organization had a massive contingent group marching, mostly young people. With megaphones and signs to hand out to everyone passing by, they made it clear that, as part of their political belief, they stood for equality for all and saw the marginalization of gay people as a gross inequality.

Signs everywhere referenced Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Employment Non-Discrimination Act and the Defense of Marriage Act. Groups from colleges all across the country, as well as UF, protested that they wouldn’t stand for this any longer. Radical Queers marched against heteronormativity, poverty and capitalism. Even Lady Gaga, as detracting as her and her entourage’s presence may have been, marched.

Past the Washington Monument in the distance, past the White House and those screaming support on the balcony of the Newseum, the crowd spilled into the Capitol lawn for a rally that would last the rest of the day. Jones, two days after his birthday, begged the crowd to please take protest back home with them.

The Politics of Equality

“Perhaps the crowd at the dinner last night was a little more politically aware and had a better sense at what’s at stake and what can be done.”

– HRC President Joe Solmonese, referring to the HRC banquet

Coverage in general was slim. The majority of print media was this: Are the gays mad at Obama? Broadcast tended to say it directly. The Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today all hinted at it. Their scope of issues covered similar ones that were focused on at the March: Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Employment Non-Discrimination Act and the Defense of Marriage Act. Rarely did I hear mention of full-blown, one-measure equality –- like the kind Sherry Wolf alluded to.

CNN did tend to delve deeper. In a five-panel discussion after the HRC banquet, Michelangelo Seniorelli alluded to the fact that the HRC mostly represents white, affluent men. The next day, Joe Solmonese defended the HRC and, in doing so, perhaps suggested that economic privilege is a direct link to incremental, lobbyist approaches.

What still remains unclear is if and how the March on Washington’s aftermath will come to fruition. Will there be a national grassroots movement at all? Will it focus on the high-density urban areas many gay people live in? Will it be for single issues, or will it demand full equality now? Will assimilation versus acceptance, as queer radicals connote, take center stage? Will it incorporate issues such as universal health care and migrant farm labor?

What myopia of these issues was actually covered by the media only scratched the surface. Gay Liberation, to pick up where it left off, is going to require a much more politically astute and active base, and it is going to have to lead the way in activism for many more issues that make up the great “change” our society needs.

These days most dairies are crappy – covered in the feces of hundreds of cows, packed into industrial feedlots, injected with hormones and antibiotics, and engorged with chemical-laced feed, so they can’t help but shit themselves.

But Bubba runs one of Florida’s cleanest milk operations, with some of the state’s healthiest cows. In 2007, Kurtz and Sons Dairy won the prize for the cleanest milk in the state. Since he went into business on his own in 1991, Bubba has won the prize three times and consistently ranks in the top 20, out of hundreds of dairies. His relatively tiny herd has built a legion of loyal customers from Tallahassee to Ocala.

The majority of those customers seek raw milk, a product the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Protection considers unfit for human consumption.

Ever since the emergence of dirty urban dairies a century ago, regulators have required milk to be pasteurized. Pasteurization is a process of heating liquids, usually to 161 degrees or more – high enough to kill potentially harmful bacteria, including salmonella and E. coli. Pasteurization vaporizes nutrients in the milk, along with the enzymes that help humans digest it, which may ultimately contribute to problems ranging from allergies and autoimmune disorders to digestive problems including lactose intolerance.

“A lot of people don’t realize milk has Vitamin C in it,” Bubba says. That’s because Vitamin C is eliminated at roughly 116 degrees.

Bubba, along with a chorus of raw milk advocates, says pasteurization gives farmers an excuse to be less careful.

Raw milk is illegal to sell in much of the United States and all of Canada, but all over North America its evangelists are spawning black-market networks that attract government scrutiny. They insist the stuff is safe, even beneficial, and that it tastes better.

The emerging black market has triggered police raids and sparked legal battles. Last October, Canadian farmer Michael Schmidt asked for the maximum possible sentence after he was found in contempt of court for ignoring an order to stop selling raw milk. The judge didn’t give him jail time, saying he didn’t want to make him a martyr to the cause. Schmidt took a $55,000 fine and vowed to continue the fight, declaring: “When Gandhi picked up the salt, he kept marching, and when Martin Luther started the Montgomery bus strike, he kept going until the law was changed.”

People like Schmidt are motivated by more than a richer flavor and some extra Vitamin C. The government keeps industrial dairy farming alive by subsidizing corn-based feed that cows were never meant to eat, failing to require cattlemen to care for their immigrant laborers or pay decent wages, and setting minimum prices for milk sold in stores. The system creates incentives to produce milk deprived of some its most health-giving properties.

Meanwhile, despite multimillion-dollar ad campaigns (“Got Milk?”), milk sales in America have been declining for more than two decades. But the niche market for raw milk is growing steadily.

The acolytes of the raw milk revolution are questioning the way we feed ourselves. Is it fair, much less sustainable, for the public to prop up farms that consume tons of fossil fuel to grow millions of bushels of corn and soy to feed unhealthy cows that produce bacteria-laden milk that must be sapped of nutrients before it’s safe to consume?

Bubba Kurtz is hardly an outlaw or a revolutionary. He sells his raw milk strictly as pet food, in compliance with Florida law, though what his customers do with it is up to them. He started in the dairy business with a herd that numbered in the hundreds, but three decades working on dairies and immersing himself in the scientific literature gradually convinced him to change his ways. In recent years, curious UF students have made the 90-minute drive north to his farm near Live Oak, to see his radical farming methods up close.

Bubba says his milk is safe to drink raw because of the way he cares for his cows, which now number less than 30. Fewer cows means less stress – both on the Kurtz family and their herd. Less stress means less crap in the parlor during milking time, which means cleaner milk.

Cows produce the most milk right after they calf. Bubba's herd is fertile year round, which allows him to meet milk demand when it peaks in the Fall.

Bubba milks his cows to the sounds of Neil Young and the Beatles, maybe a little bluegrass or what he calls “good” country. Music helps keep cows calm, he says, citing a study by Purdue University. The kind of music isn’t important to the cows; what matters is that they get good vibes from the humans in their midst.

Unlike most larger dairy operations, his cows don’t eat feed. They eat the fresh green grass grown on his ranch, except during the winter when they eat silage and hay.

Cattle feed, made mostly of corn and soy, doesn’t allow the cows’ digestive systems to function properly, Bubba says. To produce the cleanest, most nutritious milk, they have to eat grass.

“One of the old adages in the dairy business is you don’t feed the cow. You feed the bugs inside the cow.”

Healthy cows store trillions of helpful bacteria in their rumens, 30-gallon fermentation vats that store the cud they chew. The bacteria thrive on the cellulose in grass, which the cows can’t break down themselves. A cow fed on fresh grass is a walking ecosystem in which good bugs keep out the bad.

Kurtz calls it competitive inhibition, and cites a test by a California farmer who added E. coli, salmonella and listeria bacteria to a sample of grass-fed raw milk. The germs died within eight hours.

“Chlorophyll is one of the best disinfectants nature has ever made,”  he explains in his deep-throated twang. “It’s anti-microbial, except when it comes to the good bugs.”

At the Gainesville farmer’s market, customers arrive early to line up for raw milk before Bubba sells out.

Anita Sundaram says she drinks his raw milk for her health and because it tastes better. Enzymes in raw milk help reduce lactose intolerance, she adds, and raw milk is easier for her to digest.

“I want cows that are ruminants, that eat grass instead of corn and wheat,” she says.

Noah Shitama, with two young kids in tow, says he likes raw milk for the same reasons, and his children also drink it from time to time. But he would never drink raw milk from what he calls “factory cows.”

“It totally depends on where it’s from,” he says. “Like all foods, if you know where it comes from, it’s usually safer.”

About a year and a half ago, Kurtz and Sons lost some customers after someone arrived at Shands complaining of liver problems after drinking his raw milk. The milk had been purchased at Ward’s Supermarket, so the store pulled that batch from the shelves.

“Now it was one person mind you, and I sold about 300 jugs in Gainesville alone that week,” he says.

The hospital was suspecting ungulate fever . But Kurtz tests his cows for the disease every year, and his whole herd was clean. The diagnosis changed to leptospirosis .

“That’s another funny one there,” he says. “Because I don’t necessarily test for lepto, but I have always vaccinated for it.”

Leptospirosis causes infertility in cows, and the females in the Kurtz herd were all getting pregnant on schedule. The disease infects the kidneys in humans, he adds, not the liver.

The patient recovered and the issue faded away. Nobody knows for sure whether his milk caused the illness.

But regulators and health officials tend to regard unpasteurized milk as suspect. Between 1998 to 2005, there were at least 45 outbreaks of food-borne illness traced to raw dairy products, according to the Centers for Disease Control. In those cases, more than 1,000 people got sick, 104 were hospitalized and two died.

Raw milk proponents say federal regulators, who caution against unpasteurized dairy products, are used to dealing with ranchers who operate on a much larger scale, with less care and cleanliness. Industrial ranchers, they charge, wield far more lobbying power than their smaller competitors.

Bubba likes to say that he is no longer in the “commodity business.” His family’s farm hasn’t been profitable in years.

But life is simpler, less stressful. There are no longer workers to manage, other than his wife and his daughter, Virginia. And the herd is healthy enough to care for itself.

His typical annual vet bill is less than $80, he adds, and that just pays for a routine checkup to ensure his beef is safe to eat. His methods yield between 6,000 and 7,000 pounds of milk per cow each year, compared to the Florida average of 16,000. But by reducing the stress on his herd, he keeps costs down by avoiding antibiotics or other chemicals.

His cows also live longer. The average life span of a Florida cow is four and a half years. Kurtz estimates his herd, which is young, is currently near that average, but he plans on keeping them much longer than that.

“Cows perform better on grass,” he says. “And when I say perform better, I don’t necessarily mean maximum milk production. I’m talking about staying healthy and living a long time.”

Healthy cows produce milk that’s healthier for people. Many raw milk drinkers are interested in feeding the bugs in their own guts. Our internal ecosystems have been losing biodiversity in an era of cheap, sterile food.

A study by the Union of Concerned Scientists found that the factory farms that produce less biologically beneficial but “inexpensive” meat and dairy relied on $35 billion in federal subsidies for corn-based feed between 1997 and 2005, as well as more than $100 million in annual “pollution prevent” payments since 2002. And these operations have suffered during the economic crisis, as commodity prices plummeted.

The current industry norm is not only destructive and unhealthy; it isn’t really economically viable. Meanwhile, farmers like Bubba Kurtz, who don’t benefit from such public largess, are validating the environmentalist mantra of less, but better. Better means cleaner, healthier, safer.

The raw milk revolution augurs an end to the era of more.

The cover of "Sincerely, Severely", the latest album from Gainesville's Morningbell

The first thing you’ll notice about Morningbell’s Sincerely, Severely is the face of it. The cover art is tasteful – classy and clean. In a no-nonsense manner, on a blacker than black background, you find the essential information in weathered calligraphic lettering and three smiling skulls.

At least initially, this all suggests death.

But the music places you somewhere else. The music drives you far, far away from the stillness of a burial mound.

Perhaps the artwork puts you in a Mexican desert, and just maybe the bright colors lapping at the album’s back cover are a side effect of cactus-derived psychedelics.

The psychedelia of Sincerely, Severely, Morningbell’s fourth full-length album, lies in the schizophrenic nature of the songs. Though the majority of the songs could be considered all over the place, the collection of tracks is steadfast in dance-ability and in the capability of the Gainesville musicians – Travis Atria on guitar and vocals, Eric Atria on bass and theremin, Chris Hillman on drums, and Stacie Thrushman on keyboard.

The album plays like a radio station that mixes the hits of yesterday and today. But Sincerely, Severely is more mature, more alive than most radio; it’s as cohesive as one band’s private pirate radio station could be.

What Morningbell accomplishes isn’t easy.  You can’t just throw every musical genre in the kitchen into a blender and expect it to be delicious. The band shifts lithely between the sound and sensibility of specific genres, or fuses them together into a mouth-watering pop pizza.

From an objective stance, it could be said that Morningbell’s method is akin to that of Naked City, or Mr. Bungle for that matter, but yielding a flavor entirely different. Sincerely, Severely is marked by movement, and little time is wasted.

The 14 songs clock in at just about 48 minutes.

“Let’s Not Lose Our Heads” opens the album strongly with its rich percussion. By the time you notice the hand claps, you know there’s a good time to be had. It serves to showcase their versatility and their ability to play or not to play (each when appropriate).

“Hello, Dali” has a dramatic string flourish like the theme of a foreign soap opera with some delicate slices of soul.

Immediately following, “Soul Ma’am” is a breakdancer’s dream with its feel-good refrain, a solid horn line and a little slide guitar. Then later in the second half comes “King Mango Strut,” something like a standard T. Rex boogie but injected with loads of soul.

Also notable is “Stay in the Garden,” which features some thrilling clarinet/trumpet interplay, a fantastic upright bass performance and some very tasteful organ work.  Mix in a bottle of gin and a few packs of cigarettes, and you have a song Tom Waits would tip his hat to.

The second half of the album, which contains the longer songs, becomes tinged with expansive synthesized sounds.

“Good Morning, I’m Here” has an angelic, watery soundscape about it, with its tight drumming and a refrain that would make Bruce Springsteen instinctively grab a Telecaster and wander on stage.

The album ends nicely with “It Was All Mondays,” where you may find yourself in the desert again, in a psuedo-western scene, watching the red sky drain as the sun settles in behind a distant chain of mountains. For a little while a sleepy cinematic scene, but the peyote poppers aren’t quite through; once again, you’re reminded of where you are, nicely parellelling the opening track.

But even if that’s not your thing at all, the production is exquisite.  The majority of the songs are richly layered sonically, often incorporating brass or strings, appropriately layered guitars, additional percussion – everything in its right place.  High fidelity, crystal clear.