Critical Moment Asks for Your Help!

Issue 27 April-May 2008

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Choose from any of the following items:

"Rising Up From the Ashes: Chronicles of a Drop-Out"
A hip-hop audio documentary by the Detroit Summer Live Arts Media Project

"Rising Up From the Ashes: Chronicles of a Drop-Out"
A hip-hop audio documentary by the Detroit Summer Live Arts Media Project

Through the Live Arts Media Project, Detroit Summer is using art and media to voice creative, sustainable solutions to the problems we face in our schools, neighborhoods and the world.

We believe that young people should have a voice in the decisions that determine their lives. Our CD, "Rising Up From the Ashes: Chronicles of a Drop-Out", is a youth response to the drop-out crisis in Detroit schools. If every student who dropped out went back to school, DPS would have enough money to keep all the schools open. What would it take to stop people from dropping out? What would it take to bring them back?

We believe it would take a new vision for the purpose of education, new relationships between students and teachers, between students and students, and between students and the material they are learning. We would need curriculum that was fair and relevant and that prepared youth to solve the urgent problems in their lives and their communities.

To keep our schools open, we need money. But we need creativity, hope and youth participation if we want our schools to fulfill the human right to education.

 

Detroit: I Do Mind Dying

Since its publication in 1975, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying has been widely recognized as one of the most important books on the black liberation movement and labor struggles in the United States.

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Read the rest of Issue 21's Letter from the Editors.

How are we going to get out of this mess? Bush’s “war on terror” debacle is not only destroying Iraq and its other targets, but is doing tangible damage to this country. As the U.S. dumps more resources into a senseless war, poor and working class neighborhoods are increasingly targeted for cut backs.

Every article in this issue of Critical Moment, implicitly or explicitly, connects back to the war.

The ongoing struggle for affordable water in Detroit (page 5) and the fight to halt the shut down of neighborhood schools in the city (pages 6-7) are directly related to the fact that money is being spent on the war, not on our communities. Our article on the Detroit Action Network for Reproductive Rights (pages 14-15) states the facts plainly:

“In Michigan, over $9.6 billion in federal taxes so far has gone to the Iraq war, over $600 million from the city of Detroit alone. This money could provide full medical benefits for every child in the state for two years.”

Because this country has prioritized war over social spending, our communities are more poor, have less access to healthy food (pages 12-13), and are more dangerous (pages 16-19).

We have no choice but to end this war. We need the courage to implement the ideas to end the war articulated in this issue. We need the courage to believe that we have the power to change things (pages 8-11).

When we act with courage, others will follow us. It will spread throughout our communities: courage to speak out, courage to resist, courage to rethink and reexamine old frameworks. Each courageous word, each courageous act does not stay in isolation, but begins to find echoes and reflections in our neighbors and neighboring communities.

Onward,
The Critical Moment Editorial Collective

Download a PDF of Issue 20

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