Ruminations - nickdziegler's Blog - Bakersfield.com

Bakersfield Wiki

http://bakersfield.wikispot.org/

So, WikiSpot is a place where one can easily create a Wiki page, for free. I decided to go ahead and generate one for Bakersfield. It's just bare bones right now, but I'd be really interested to see what a bunch of 'fieldians can accomplish with it. Maybe we'll generate a unique community voice? Yes/no?

I'm as of yet not great with the whole Wiki script thing, but I'll be into writing about stuff around town. If any one's familiar with the Wiki format and wants to go ahead and create a nice template/starting point for less advanced users, please do! But of course, no one person has to do all the work. The beauty of the Wiki format is that if every one barely lifts a finger, well, that's a lot of fingers lifted.

But at the beginning, if you want to do anything with it you may have to put some time in.

So any one with the energy, or who's bored enough, feel free to edit. Maybe we'll all discover something about this town to make it more exciting/less depressing/something in between (depending on how you look at it right now).

Urgent! Marriage under fire.

It has been 162 days since May 16th, the day the California Supreme Court overturned the 1977 legislative decision and 2000's Proposition 22 which both defined marriage as being between one man and one woman (at any particular point in time, of course). The Supreme Court saw these measures as unconstitutional:

The state Constitution's guarantees of personal privacy and autonomy protect "the right of an individual to establish a legally recognized family with the person of one's choice," said Chief Justice Ronald George, who wrote the 121-page majority opinion. He said the Constitution "properly must be interpreted to guarantee this basic civil right to all Californians, whether gay or heterosexual, and to same-sex couples as well as opposite-sex couples." (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/05/15/BAGAVNC5K.DTL)

Being a nation of laws, not of men, a group of Californios did the dignified thing: proposed a constitutional amendment.

Since that day, over 5 months ago, marriage in California has been under increasingly severe and disastrous fire. Talk to any member of any heterosexual union you know; even if they cannot explain why, they will not be able to deny that they can feel all the meaning in their marriages, and therefore their lives, slipping away through their once-ample hands. Long the sole bastion of hope for every individual everywhere in the world, the basic reproductive family unit is undergoing a hostile renovation, all thanks to the most egregious act of judicial despotism ever suffered in any of these United States.

For if your neighbor does not value reproductive success and global human monoculture, how will you be able to justify your own values? You will be adrift in a sea of not two, nay, but three or four incongruous identity types. You may have a two car garage, they a three; you, rose bushes, they, petunias. The good citizens of this great, perhaps greatest, state: how are they to live in such conditions? Are they to set out upon their own, defining their own values, perhaps even having to converse in a civil manner regarding legitimate differences in lifestyle and thought? Will you require they accept differences, the cruelest of all human follies?

Good citizens, I beg: do not eat of this forbidden fruit. The sole reason for uniting organs and fluids in holy matrimony is to bear children. It is for this reason we deny the institution of marriage to inter-species couples, and to infertile persons, and to any woman who has already reached the age of menopause. Furthermore, we do not let ugly people marry, nor fat people, nor people of mixed races. You see, these are all really gross and we don't want to see that.

It is time the white Christians and other marginalized groups in this nation stand up and be heard. It is time we end these attacks upon our very well-being. We have suffered indignity after indignity; we have tolerated vice after disgusting vice; and it is time we say no more. No more will we extend the common sensical legal protections we enjoy to groups that we find kind of icky. We feel this is OUR right.

We only pray that our marriages will last until November 4th.

The UNICEF Tap Project comes to Bakersfield!

For World Water Day, March 22, The United States Fund for The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) has initiated the Tap Project, a campaign that asks patrons of participating restaurants to donate as little as $1 as payment for the water they receive for free. $1 will allow UNICEF to supply drinking water to a single child in the developing world for 40 days, or 40 children for one day. With the Tap Project, UNICEF hopes to help all of us approach the UN Millennium Development goal of reducing by half the proportion of humans without access to healthy drinking water by the year 2015. Currently, over one billion (that's 1,000,000,000) persons worldwide live in such conditions; 2.6 billion live without access to basic sanitation. These conditions kill more than 4000 children every day.

Two restaurants in Bakersfield have agreed to participate, and we hope you will support them. Casa Munoz will participate on March 22nd, and Tailgater's will participate for the week of March 16th-22nd. The greater the success these restaurants have, the more likely they and others will participate in the project next year. You are, of course, also welcome to donate to UNICEF directly at unicef.org to help alleviate the suffering of so many who do not have access to a basic resource that we as Americans scarcely need worry about.

To participate, simply be seated and your server will mention the Tap Project. Should you agree to participate, your donation will be added on to your bill, and be forwarded to UNICEF after March 22nd.

Thank you so much, we hope that you join us in this important campaign!

The participating restaurants are:

Casa Munoz

1736 Union Ave.

661-861-1625

Participating March 22nd

Tailgater's

900 Truxton Ave

661-322-9888

Participating March 16th-22nd

For more information, please visit:

http://www.tapproject.org/

http://www.unicef.org/

http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/