Faith for living

To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places — and there are so many — where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

--H. Zinn

A Geography Lesson from Milpitas

In 1975, The Milpitas Monster told the story of a creature born of a garbage dump that crashed a high school party, and ultimately faced an abrupt death by getting fatally entangled in the town's television transformer tower. Its a good monster movie, and in hindsight, a kind of unknowning introduction to the history of Silicon Valley. It was around this time, that the burgeoning electronic companies in the valley would begin burying enormous chemical waste in the ground all along the neighborhoods near the 101. Santa Clara has more EPA superfund sites than any other county in the country. There are 29, each a red dot on this map below. (Yes, Milpitas has one.) Note their correlation to low-income neighborhoods here.