Angelo Lopez's blog

In the Long Beach area, a grassroots and coalition campaign is taking place to clean up the air pollution and poverty in the local seaports. The air around the seaports is dirty because port truck drivers earn too little to buy trucks that would belch out fewer diesel particulates, tiny particles that contribute to cancer and asthma.

Lately, a lot of focus has been given to the plight of the big national newspapers that have dominated the media over the past several decades. Part of my work in the library is handling the newspapers that the library subscribes to, and in the past year, several newspapers have folded as a result of declining subscriptions and a younger generation that gets its news from the internet.

Lent has come again, and as it has, I've had a chance to reflect on something that I've been grappling for the past several years. What do I still believe about God and Jesus and the church?

I've thought a lot about issues of war since I was a teen. I'm not a pacifist, but I do believe that this country has gotten into too many unnecessary wars. Like most people my age, my views on war were heavily influenced by the Vietnam War, seeing how it affected the older generation and the Vietnam veterans.

I'm not sure how I got on their email list, but over the past couple of months I've been receiving emails from MoveOn, a progressive Democratic web organization that was started by Joan Blades and Wes Boyd, two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs

Ever since the special elections where Scott Brown won Ted Kennedy's Senate seat, I've been disappointed and a bit angry at the results. As a Democrat, though, I have to admit that we Democrats have only ourselves to blame. Ever since conservative activists made a lot of noise at the town hall meetings in August, these conservatives have been able to control the terms of the debate.

In San Francisco this January, a federal trial is taking place to argue the legality of Proposition 8, a proposition that was passed in the California election in 2008 to ban gay marriage. Chief U.S.

In the library in my city, one can check out a wide selection of DVDs, from feature films, to documentaries, to foreign films, and whole seasons of a television series. One day I noticed a few DVDs of the series All In The Family.

A few months ago I decided to reread Henry David Thoreau's essay, On Civil Disobedience. I hadn't read it since college twenty something years ago, and kept running into references from people on how much this essay influenced them. Reading it, many years later, Thoreau's essay is a lot more subversive than I remember it being.