Tag archives: justice

Centennial Junior High School. Boulder, Colorado. 1973? What happened was this. In PE we were playing soccer (what the rest of the planet calls “football”) and a stocky little guy named Tony kicked the ball out of bounds. Tony was in my German class (please don’t ask), wore his stick-straight hair in bangs and kept […]

“Take a conscious breath,” instructed Rhonda V. Magee, a professor emeritus at the University of San Francisco, during her February 13th lecture at UCSB. “And as you do so, put your feet on the floor,” she continued. Magee gestured her arms around the room as the audience breathed in and out. Magee is a mindfulness […]

Earlier this fall, the Legal Aid Foundation of Santa Barbara County (LAFSBC) marked its 65th anniversary with an early evening gathering at the Anchor Rose in Santa Barbara Harbor. LAFSBC – which works tirelessly to close the justice gap for low-income residents in the area – took the occasion to make note of its own […]

The Fund for Santa Barbara was founded way back in 1980 as a means to support local organizations working for progressive social change. Nearly 45 years later, while the issues, its methods and organization might have grown, that purpose has not been altered at all: The Fund remains dedicated to helping to find solutions to […]

There’s a new club in town! The Commission on Culture, Arts, and Joy Justice (CCAJJ) is a new student government associated organization at UCSB founded by PhD student Charlene Macharia. This week I spoke to Macharia to find out what it means to do creative activism and how social justice activists can keep progress moving […]

The Fund for Santa Barbara’s Development and Communications Manager – Alina Rey Keswani – is understandably proud that Bread & Roses, the organization’s major annual fundraiser, is marking its 30th anniversary this fall. The benefit event that has long been a staple on the social calendar of many in the community has survived massive growth, […]

This week I spoke to Cassidy Miller, one of the publicity coordinators of UCSB’s Students for Reproductive Justice committee, to learn more about how students promote health care advocacy and reproductive rights on campus.  Q. What does Students for Reproductive Justice do? A. Students for Reproductive Justice is a subcommittee of the UCSB Associated Students’ […]

You might wonder how a chowder festival has anything to do with providing free, high-quality legal services to low-income and other vulnerable residents in order to ensure equal access to justice. The answer is, not much, except that prior to the pandemic, the decade-old Santa Barbara Chowder Fest had become the single largest fundraiser for […]

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” This quote by George Bernard Shaw provided the title of a wonderful film about the heroic life of Ralph Nader, An Unreasonable Man. How do you respond when you […]

Anyone who has ever watched a police drama on television in the last 50 years is familiar with the fact that everyone who has been accused of a crime has a right to free legal counsel if they can’t afford their own attorney. But that bright line ends when it turns to civil matters, even […]

The Supreme Court ruling that reversed the half-century old landmark Roe v. Wade decision had been handed down only hours before, but The Fund for Santa Barbara was already scrambling to respond in the wake of the decision.  “It’s a national issue, but there’s actually so much that could be done at the local level […]

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids all men to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread – the rich as well as the poor.” So wrote Anatole France in The Red Lily (1894). It is difficult to express the injustice of the legal system better than that one brilliant […]

Christianity is all about forgiveness and I am writing this during the Christmas season. Could a society function with nothing but forgiveness as an ethical code? Astronomer and 1981 Humanist of the Year Carl Sagan wrote a brilliant essay about this for Parade Magazine in 1993. Here is a link to a copy: https://swt.org/sagan. It […]

Dear Mr. Brutoco, You certainly are an inventive person. You begin your “perspectives” column early by whining that the defense counsel for acquitted shooter Kyle Rittenhouse was “allowed” to refer to the two men killed by Mr. Rittenhouse as “rioters and looters,” and then claim, “they weren’t.” Do you have some secret knowledge as to […]

The trial of Kyle Rittenhouse has galvanized the country, splitting already “warring factions” into something far more dramatic. The travesty of that trial began with the systematic exclusion of Black jurors and was further amplified by a clearly biased and incompetent judge: he openly fought with the prosecution in front of the jury, denied them […]

“Radical” is often used to disqualify an idea as “extreme.” Did you know that it comes from the same origin as “radish” and means to “go to the root” of a problem? Every night, the news is full of the crisis at the US-Mexico border. The “analysis” is limited to the immediate humanitarian issues along […]

The Most Vicious Rapist-Killer in California History Brought to Justice It was a mid-summer’s night in 1981 and Debbi Domingo, a junior at Santa Barbara High School, was just ending her shift at the Granada Theatre on State Street. She was handed a message from her mother’s best friend. “Please come home,” the message read. […]

On April 4 1940, during an early stage of World War II, which American journalists dubbed “The Phoney War,” because not much actual fighting was going on, prime minister Neville Chamberlain, who had led Britain into the war, addressed his Conservative Party with a speech in which he used a common metaphor in a rather […]