In a disappointing move, the Supreme Court decided today in Kelo et al. vs. City of New London that a city may seize private property to give it to another private entity.

While generally I believe that the good of the many outweighs the good of the few, I was troubled by this case. The New London Development Corporation wanted to bulldoze people’s (owned, maintained, and unblighted) homes and small businesses in order to build a commercial development. I suppose it just strikes me in this instance that maybe this was a case of the good of the few vs. the possible good/possible bad of the many. Yes, New London needs to reach out and attract more businesses and tourists to its shoreline city. And, yes, the tax base does need to be bolstered. But this didn’t necessarily strike me as the best way to go about it.

The Court’s majority believed that a city generally has the overall best interest of its citizens at heart and that they would not knowingly put their citizens at risk simply for economic gain.

Oddly enough, it was the conservatives who ruled against big business and for the little guy. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor argued against uprooting families in order to accomodate wealthy and powerful developers: “Any property may now be taken for the benefit of another private party, but the fallout from this decision will not be random,” she wrote for the minority. “The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms.”

Some New London residents say they will barricade themselves in their homes to avoid being pushed out.

This case has repercussions throughout the nation where thousands of residents face eminent domain for private development. The repercussions here in D.C. include the new baseball stadium, which stands to be built where private businesses currently exist.

Sufficed to say, I’m disappointed to see this turn of events.

It’s hard to believe that this week marks two years since D.C. became bearable.

It was two years ago that D.C. for Dean came into being. We had our first outreach event (Pat, Alex, Anne, Rudi and I handed out flyers at the Mt. Pleasant Fest). We had our first Dean rally (at the Take Back America conference).

I had had a rocky first three months in D.C. I hadn’t wanted to move here. I was broke. I was underemployed, subsisting on crappy temp jobs as a receptionist while waiting for a real job that seemed like it would never be found. I didn’t know anyone here, and I missed my friends back home. In short, I was miserable.

Rudi didn’t know what to do with me. So when I told him there was a get together of people who liked Howard Dean (a presidential candidate we’d been following for months) across town and I was interested in going the first week of May, he jumped at the opportunity to do something I actually seemed excited about. We went. I didn’t have a good time, but we’d gotten our names on a list of local people who were interested in volunteering.

Pat, who was organizing the local Dean group, scheduled a follow-up meeting two weeks later, at which we formed some ad-hoc committees. He asked for a volunteer to head up the “visibility committee” I’d sat in on, since he was heading up the whole group and couldn’t devote sufficient time to the committee. Silence. You could have heard crickets chirping.

It felt like the silence went on forever. Looking back, it was probably five seconds. Maybe ten. But somehow, within that silence, I forced myself to raise my hand and say, “I’ll do it.”

Without a doubt, that was the best decision I’ve made in my life. Well, okay, maybe not in my whole life. But definitely in the last five years.

Because what came out of that impulsive, guilt-induced volunteer job (in addition to a wearying year of sleepless nights and 40-hour weeks devoted to Howard Dean) was a whole social group. United in our desire to change the world (initially through a Dean presidency, but later through other means as we morphed into D.C. for Democracy), we formed bonds that have sustained even outside of the political world. We celebrate birthdays, promotions, moves, births, holidays, and sporting events together. We’ve become a community.

So three cheers to the D.C. for Democracy/Dean groups that made D.C. seem a bit more homelike. We will celebrate with you tonight at Ben’s with our monthly Meetup and some tasty burgers and fries.

And, now, special shouts out to special friends:

• Pat and Heidi (and now Jack), who brought us together in the first place and keep us together still
• Susan and Phillip, who provide fun Saturday nights and enjoyable conversation
• John, who offers up deep insights and delightfully snarky comments without aiming them too personally
• Gail and Chris, who left but who are not forgotten
• Kathie, whose laughter is contagious

Thank you all for making life here so good for me and Rudi.

Excerpts from historian Howard Zinn’s commencement address to the Class of 2005 at Spelman College:

“The lesson of that history is that you must not despair, that if you are right, and you persist, things will change. The government may try to deceive the people, and the newspapers and television may do the same, but the truth has a way of coming out. The truth has a power greater than a hundred lies.”

“My hope is that whatever you do to make a good life for yourself — whether you become a teacher, or social worker, or business person, or lawyer, or poet, or scientist — you will devote part of your life to making this a better world for your children, for all children. My hope is that your generation will demand an end to war, that your generation will do something that has not yet been done in history and wipe out the national boundaries that separate us from other human beings on this earth.”

“I learned something about democracy: that it does not come from the government, from on high, it comes from people getting together and struggling for justice. I learned about race. I learned something that any intelligent person realizes at a certain point — that race is a manufactured thing, an artificial thing, and while race does matter (as Cornell West has written), it only matters because certain people want it to matter, just as nationalism is something artificial. I learned that what really matters is that all of us — of whatever so-called race and so-called nationality — are human beings and should cherish one another.”

“My hope is that you will not be content just to be successful in the way that our society measures success; that you will not obey the rules, when the rules are unjust; that you will act out the courage that I know is in you.”

“You can help to break down barriers, of race certainly, but also of nationalism; that you do what you can — you don’t have to do something heroic, just something, to join with millions of others who will just do something, because all of those somethings, at certain points in history, come together, and make the world better.”

The complete text of Zinn’s speech, Against Discouragement, is available online.

Photo: Stephen Dunn/Hartford Courant

I was sorry to see the Groton Naval Submarine Base on today’s list of base closures.

I went to college directly across from the sub base. I have never set foot on their base, but I did enjoy the SubFest fireworks every summer from the bank of the Thames River.

And one of the most extraordinary (and rare) sights you ever came across was when a sub came home from a long-term mission. The subs would surface in the Long Island Sound and come up the river in full sight. Every midshipman not involved in driving the sub up the river would be standing on the deck of the sub in their dress uniforms trying to be the first one to see his loved ones on shore. It was always a moving sight.

[Mum, was there a homecoming sub the day we visited Conn that first time or am I confusing that with another time?]

Because of our proximity to a high-profile nuclear target, the New London phone book did include evacuation instructions. Everyone in the service area was supposed to drive up to the East Hartford High School 50 miles away. I thought it nice they had thought out an evacuation plan, even if it was ridiculously impractical and most of us would die anyway.

Groton, known almost exclusively as the “Submarine Capital of the World,” was home to the first nuclear sub launch, in 1954, of The Nautilus, which now serves as a museum on the base.

As Jesse Hamilton of The Hartford Courant wrote earlier this week, “If this town were a person, the Navy would be its skeleton — the hard strength running through everything, keeping a subtle record of its early growth and the breaks it has suffered through the years. This skeleton might also show the town’s age, how time and pressure have painfully bowed its back.”

Closing the base will devastate the Groton and surrounding environs’ economy. It is likely that Electric Boat, which builds high-powered subs just down the river from the base, will, at the very least, have to cut back its employment. Civilians who work on the base will lose their jobs. And the struggling merchant base will lose much-needed customers.

These were things I didn’t think about when I was younger. I didn’t understand how interconnected and fragile everything was, at least in that regard. I will be paying attention to see how Groton — and other communities in similar straits — will cope with these losses.

In the last two years, 1,200 American soldiers have had to seek medical treatment as a result of anthrax and smallpox vaccinations they received from the military.

While in most instances the side effects — which included temporary headaches, fatigue, fever, nausea, and dizziness — were not serious, some of the illnesses were debilitating. These included chronic fatigue syndrome, migraines, cognitive problems, multiple sclerosis, and degenerative arthritis.

According to the article in Global Security Newswire, “None of the personnel treated in fiscal 2004 ‘has suffered loss of life, limb or eyesight,’ according to a statement from Walter Reed Army Medical Center, which houses the main Vaccine Healthcare Center in Washington.”

I understand we are talking about degrees. Walter Reed probably feels that compared with the shattered kids they get back daily from Afghanistan and Iraq that being diagnosed with MS or arthritis is minor. I also realize that our soldiers are placed in situations where having been vaccinated against biological agents may save lives.

But I do think this story should receive more attention than it probably will. Remember, in the wake of September 11, the government sought private citizens to volunteer to test these vaccinations. Mass-marketed drugs are recalled for fewer problems than this military study displays. And certainly no drug with a sample like this in clinical trials would be approved by the FDA.

It seems, then, that the prudent thing to do would be to cease public trials pending further study. Also halt new military innoculations pending further, in-depth study of those who have already received vaccines against the two diseases to best determine what the safest course should be in the future.

Unfortunately, according to Global Source, that seems an unlikely scenario unless there is public outcry: “The Pentagon, citing a determination that there is potential for a heightened risk of an anthrax threat to U.S. forces, announced Tuesday it would resume providing mass anthrax vaccinations to service members mainly in South Korea and across the Middle East and South Asia.”

If we claim that we want the best for our soldiers, let’s make sure that they also receive the best medical options. Chronic illness is an unacceptable way to say thank you for putting your life on the line for the rest of us.

In the summer of 1955, a 14-year-old Chicago boy went down to Mississippi to visit family. He didn’t return alive.

Emmett Till was tortured and then killed by a mob, purportedly for whistling at a white woman clerk in a store. The woman’s husband and his half-brother were arrested, acquitted by an all-white jury, and then confessed in a magazine article to the heinous crime. Because of double-jeopardy (and a complicit judicial system that seems unwilling to have found subsequent, alternative charges), the two men remained unpunished.

My guess is that Emmett Till’s story was, although sad and horrifying, not particularly remarkable. But he did have a remarkable mother, Mamie, who went to court to get her son’s corpse back from Mississippi authorities, smashed open the casket herself with a hammer when the funeral director refused to go against a police order not to open the padlocked box, and then demanded an open casket funeral for her son. The images are stark and moving. I cannot imagine remaining unchanged after seeing them.

Yesterday, the FBI announced their plan to exhume Till’s body from its grave site in Chicago and conduct an autopsy. They believe that Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam (both now dead) had 14 accomplices, six of whom still may be alive and who could still be prosecuted under Mississippi state law.

Bob Dylan wrote “The Death of Emmett Till” in 1963. It ends:

“But if all of us folks that thinks alike, if we gave all we could give,
We could make this great land of ours a greater place to live.”

May we finally show some greatness in this case and convict those who perpetrated the crimes.