• writing
• photography
• nicomedia
• about
• home

Kicking It

Watch the whole 90 min film at full screen resolution over at Hulu.com.

In the summer of 2006, while the football world’s attention was focused on Germany, thousands of players around the globe were training hard and competing to be part of another World Cup … The Homeless World Cup. It had been a wild idea by a Scot and an Austrian—to give homeless people a chance to change their lives through an international street soccer competition.Five years later, the annual Homeless World Cup had become an internationally recognized sports competition. 500 homeless players from 48 nations would ultimately be selected to represent their country in Cape Town, South Africa – coming from such disparate parts of the world as war torn Afghanistan, the slums of Kenya, the drug rehab clinics of Dublin, Ireland, the streets of Charlotte, North Carolina, the overflowing public shelters of Madrid, Spain, and the unforgiving city of St. Petersburg, Russia, where the homeless have no rights or identity. Win or lose, for these players it would be the journey of a lifetime.

side effects of clear cutting

“George Bush doesn’t care about black people”

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Albert Camus argued that artists bear a moral responsibility to engage politics with their art. He challenges artists to “create dangerously” and use creation as a medium for social criticism.

There is some honest, heartfelt, critical music coming out of Katrina’s aftermath.

The Legendary K.O.’s “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” — a politicized remix of Kanye West’s “Golddigger”

Public Enemy’s “Hell No We Ain’t Alright”

we should be ashamed

The last time images like this, images from the United States, hit the international news, the Civil Rights movement of the 50s really picked up momentum. The U.S. was publicly embarassed to have the truth of its racist, classist government policies exposed so clearly and so openly. I can’t help but think that emergency response would be different if the images coming from New Orleans were of white middle class soccer moms.

Change is coming.

In the midst of the chaos, David Gonzalez wrote for the NY Times a moving article on how race and class are factoring into the evacuation. If you don’t have access to the NY Times archives, you can find the article at truthout.org.