Good News and Bumper Stickers

I have had a crisis of confidence; a long crisis of confidence.  I have not posted to my blog since May 2014.  It was getting harder and harder to post until I finally stopped completely. I hated my blog.  I couldn’t imagine why anyone would read it … it was so .. depressing.  I was searching for - and finding in abundance - bad news.  I found much to deplore in the human condition:  greed, selfishness, cruelty, pettiness, cynicism, and more generally, unfettered malignant intent.  I was not driven by a crusade; primarily I was (still am) driven by a desire for wide readership.  Ostensibly, I was developing a readership as a  vehicle for selling trinkets - bumper stickers, actually.  But the posts were all-me:  sincere and earnest.  There was no artifice in my righteous indignation and that constant exposure to bitterness began to tell.

Remarkably, there is good news to report on social injustice and income inequality and all of that is about the responses of good people in the face of that injustice.  I can blog about that; maybe I won’t feel so bad all of the time.  Maybe more people will read my blog.  Then, while I have their attention, I can sell them bumper stickers.

Didja hear the one about the college administrator that took his $90,000 raise and split it among 24 staffers to raise their pay to $10.25/hr - $3 more than the state’s minimum wage?  This was reported by msnbc on August 6, 2014:

Raymond Burse, the interim president of Kentucky State University, recently gave up more than $90,000 of his salary so 24 employees earning the state’s $7.25 minimum wage could collect $10.25 per hour. The minimum wage rate in Kentucky is the same as the federal amount, which took effect on July 24, 2009.

Wait. Wait. How about this one; this is great.  Remember Occupy Wall Street?  Through their Rolling Jubilee Fund, OWS was able to wipe away $3.9 million of student debt for 2761 students of “Everest College - a “predatory” institution that is helping fuel the $1.2 trillion in total student loan debt in the United States.”  

“We chose Everest because it is the most blatant con job on the higher ed landscape,” the organizers said. “It’s time for all student debtors to get relief from their crushing burden.”

The scheme, which will only work in limited application, is brilliant and cheap.

There’s more - thankfully, much more.  Another taste is the example of Jobs with Justice .  JWJ is a non-profit.  They are, nationally, an umbrella for extremely effective local branches.  The local steering committees monitor the landscape for assaults on the rights of workers.  They use a mailing list to raise a crowd of demonstrators, at a moments notice, to show up at work sites, picket lines, courtrooms or other venues, to be seen and heard in support of exploited groups.

These are the stories I would prefer to tell.  

Did I mention?  I opened a store using Cafe Press as the platform.  It’s pretty bare-bones at the moment.  I’m still trying to figure it out. For example, I haven’t been able to change the canned text heading the site.  I only have, I think, about five bumper stickers ready to sell on the site.  From tiny acorns do mighty oaks grow.

Here is the header text that I would like to appear on site:

 Bumper Sticker Wisdom is my vehicle for selling bumper stickers and other slogan-related paraphernalia. At 4 or 5 dollars a pop, I will probably not be selling in bulk. But at my level, and with my limited resources, I can achieve zero economies of scale. So my bumper stickers are for a strictly niche market. Hopefully, the tag lines resonate with you enough that you will pay an outrageous price for a message you may not have heard expressed in exactly this way. Thank you for visiting. Please stay and browse. Please read my blog, Bumper Sticker Wisdom, at http://shareandbenice.blogspot.com/

Please visit my store at  http://www.cafepress.com/shareandbenice