kearns launches CannabisPatientVoice weblog to empower, strengthen & unify la GRASSroots journalists in cultural activism (8-05-07)

today in la, sunday, august 05, 2007,
i, richard kearns, am launching
http://CannabisPatientVoice.com
http://CannabisPatientVoice.blogspot.com/

• as a weblog site
• as a hometown for a community of
  new media citizen journalists --- grassrooters ---
• as an empowerment tool for self-advocacy,
• as a resource & record &
  empty page-canvas on which to report
  our experiences & tales & takes & questions
  revealing and respecting our “indigenous”
  expertise as cannabis patients (along the
  metaphoric lines of the 1983 denver AIDS accords)
• as a setting for public personal struggle & discovery
• as a celebration of cultural activism
• as an expression of my own AIDS &
  social justice activities &
• as the practice of mmj community
  self-government

my friend mary calls this the “planting a shade tree
when there’s no hope you’ll use it yourself thing.”
but cpVoice is more subversive than that:
cpVoice requires self-government.
without it we will fail
with it we can accomplish all things

once i’ve worked with you
writing headlines & datelines
i will assign you direct posting access
(& as soon as i figure out how blogger
does it)

your shared task will be to keep the site alive
through the excellence of your reports
not just the more-right-er-ness of your opinions
concrete not abstract. specific not general
factual as well as truthful

it will take six months to a year before
this weblog community begins to gel


to keep this site alive, i ask us to
re-order our priorities, so --- as mlking
suggested --- we each become first in
our unity & journalistic integrity

i will not be a referee or censor
and only a temporary peacemaker
we must govern ourselves on this site
set up a committee of core writers, perhaps
we cannot feud. we cannot bicker
we must avoid provoking one another
twisting the knife
i recommend we praise one another
i recommend we encourage one another
i recommend we seek out ways to empower
to grow to nurture to bask in our mutual
wisdoms to hear and learn from one another
i will help for a year, by which time you
must take over running the thing
you know about love. it is the core component
of passion

in crisis, our community has spent too much time
wrangling over who will wear the buttons & badges &
pins & big hats, who is “us” and who is “them” & patients
are always the first out of the loop. it gives the impression
that only some of us own the movement to engender
wellness through social justice. a self-defeating
waste of resource. a waste of effort. a bad move

fred gardner of counterpunch.org ranted:

The medical marijuana movement would be much stronger today if a fraction of the money Kampia's MPP pissed away in Nevada alone --- millions on failed ballot measures! --- had been spent in California organizing teach-ins on every campus and bolstering the credibility of our serious pro-cannabis MDs.

http://www.counterpunch.org/gardner08042007.html

cpVoice is a virtual teach-in.
& we are the new crop of students
we must train ourselves & doctors &
lawyers & politicians & teachers &
landlords & police & fellow voting stakeholders
the page is the place

i write on the page
i feel its emptiness
fill

& when i read i stand
not in the room but
there in ruins in
battered fields in
harvest in lost in burnt in
unfindable wreckage

home

welcome home.

namasté

---lyr