Author: hankkalet

The Mets lost another game last night, dropping to 5-14 in May after a promising April.

Last night’s loss was punctuated — as most of the team’s losses this year, by an inability to get men home when they manage to get them on base. The night before, they were blown out, demonstrating another major problem — inconsistent pitching. (The Mets ERA in April is third-worst on the league and they walk more batters than anyone.) What we have is an old lineup with a young, inexperienced staff, an ownership that won’t spend and a GM who is essentially charged with keeping the wheels from falling off but who has neither the vision nor the tools to move the team into the future.

And yet I keep running into fans like the one I met this morning. He saw my Seaver jersey and bemoaned last night’s loss while talking up the team’s future.

I’d sum up his comments this way: They can’t hit, but Granderson is coming around. They’ve got young pitching, but no one can get through the sixth. They have young talent like Lagares, but they play guys like Chris Young because, well, what else are they going to do. They are coming around. You can see. The future’s so bright, we gotta wear shades.

This is typical stuff for Mets fans — I engage in the false hope of spring every year. I actually thought Tejada might turn it around. Ha.

I am still hoping the team can get to .500 and maybe steal a weak division — wait. That’s just foolish, just the long-suffering Mets fan in me bubbling to the surface again.

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McDonald’s workers are taking their activism to the company’s headquarters — and they are facing arrest to make their point that it’s time we start paying people who grill our burgers and take our orders a living wage.

As Reuters reported earlier today

<span class="articleLocation”>Fast-food workers from three dozen U.S. cities on Wednesday will protest at the headquarters of McDonald’s Corp (MCD.N), calling for a significant wage hike, as company shareholders also prepare to weigh in on the pay of the fast-food giant’s top executives.

The latest, and possibly largest, protest against the global chain comes a day ahead of a shareholders vote on executive pay at McDonald’s, where Chief Executive Don Thompson took home total compensation of $9.5 million in 2013.

Low-wage U.S. restaurant and retail workers are calling for a rough doubling of pay to $15 per hour and the right to unionize. Their frequent protests have helped fuel a national debate on income inequality at a time when many middle- to low-income Americans are struggling to make ends meet.

AP is reporting that about 100 McDonald’s workers are being arrested during protests, after workers breached a barricade “Down the street from Hamburger University” and were met by “dozens of police officers in riot gear (who) warned protesters to disperse.”

Pay is the issue. Most McDonald’s workers — most workers in the fast-food industry and in many other service-sector jobs — are working for minimum wage or not much more, usually working multiple jobs and still not making much more than poverty wages. Most are adults — according to a variety of studies — and many are forced to seek help from government agencies, which puts taxpayers in the position of subsidizing low-wage service work even as the company’s CEO took in $9.5 million in 2013.

McDonald’s is part of a larger problem with American capitalism, of course, one that reaches beyond the fast-food industry and raises questions about how much we really value service-sector work. These jobs are important and should pay a livable wage, but most do not and we don’t seem to care. As long as our Big Mac and fries are served hot and come cheaply, we can continue to look past the man at the grill or the woman at the window. And when we do consider them — usually when we need to complain that the Shamrock Shake just isn’t green enough — we view them as disposable and dismiss them as nothing more than low-wage workers. After all, anyone can do these jobs and, if they want better pay, they should find better work or go back to school, which is a lot easier said than done in an economy where one in six workers is unemployed or underemployed and the cost of going back to school is prohibitive.

No wonder the workers are finally starting to fight back.

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My latest from The Progressive Populist — on the death penalty.

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The news came Tuesday that Camille Lepage was found dead in the Central African Republic. Lepage, as Nicholas Kulish writes in the Times, was a French photographer who had done work for The New York Times and others in war zones around the globe. He described her as someone always looking to tell the stories of those in extremis, of those whose stories otherwise would not be told.

Kulish’s reflection on Lepage reminds us of the dangers that so many journalists face — both overseas and, to a lesser degree, in the United States — and reminder that what we do matters. In age when celebrity gossip and horse-race political journalism hold sway, it is important to remember that the journalist is not only the eyes and ears of the public, but also the mouthpiece of those without power, and often the only way that the powerless can be heard. We bear witness — in Sudan and Central Africa, in Israel and Palestine, in Detroit, Trenton and Newark.

A few weeks ago, I was speaking on a panel at Rutgers on the topic of homelessness and the Tent City homeless camp in Lakewood (it was tied to my friend Jack Ballo’s film Destiny’s Bridge and my own long poem As an Alien in a Land of Promise). We were asked what could be done. My answer, speaking as a journalist and artist, was simple: I challenged my journalism students to act as witnesses, to get into the communities and find those in need. Tell their stories, I said. And I meant it.

Lepage and the journalists who work in war zones around the globe do that under the most dangerous of circumstances. The stories they bring us may not help us make sense of the world — how can they? — but they help us see things we otherwise might be happy to leave in the shadows. They tell us that war and poverty and violence are still all too real and, in doing so, they just might reach those one or two or three readers or viewers moved enough to start agitating for change.

You can see her breathtaking photos here.

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