The Great Thousand Pumpkin March in Downtown Catskill.

by Maddie Fix-Hansen and Dharma Dailey

We’re coming up on the 10th anniversary of the FCC reconsidering its position on Low Power Community Radio. Before the 80s, the FCC was cool with LFPM, then in the 80s and 90s it wasn’t cool with LPFM. But in 1999, after years of pressure the FCC relented and created an opportunity for more community radio. Not the big victory we were hoping for, but a few hundred more community radio stations are out in the world today because of a change of heart of then Chief Commissioner Kennard, now Obama Advisor Kennard. Though it isn’t 2009 yet, Pete Tridish told me recently that its time to start celebrating. It was just about this time 10 years ago now that a number of activists marched on the FCC.  By his reckoning that’s the start of the Prometheus Radio Project.   I headed down to DC to celebrate with Pete and the rest of the Prometheus crew. This time, instead of being outside of the FCC protesting, Pete and Hannah Sassaman accepted  the United Church of Christ’s Office of Communications, Inc.  Everett C. Parker Ethics in Telecommunications Award at a National Press Club luncheon.  Hannah shook the house by asking everyone who would help pass the Local Community Radio Act to stand up.  The wooly eyed DC crowd wasn’t quick to stand on their feet.  But the award is proof that the walls of DC have become too permeable for us to tear down.

While I’m reminiscing it may be a good time to finally read Jesse Walkers’s Rebels On the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America which chronicles my activism, Pete’s, and about 200 other activists who were pressuring for media reform by any means necessary. Where are we now?

Even then I was more of the bookish sort than the take to the streets type. Not much has changed for me: FCC’s Interference Argument Grounded. But what has changed for micropower?

Here are pix from the Award party at the New America Foundation.

Here are a few pix  from a radio workshop that Galen Joseph-Hunter, Kaya Weidman and I did at the Germantown Community Farm.  CSA supporters passed the mic sharing their visions of community radio for our area.  This is part of a series of participatory design workshops and tabling sessions that we’ve been doing in Greene and Columbia Counties in preparation for a full power community radio station serving the two counties.

The Scranton Times

Published: Thursday, September 04, 2008
Updated: Thursday, September 4, 2008 4:27 AM EDT

Having left 15 years ago, it’s a rare occasion when I wind up padding the Scranton streets. I don’t always get the news of Scranton in a timely way. So excuse me if my tirade is old news to you, but I have only last weekend experienced the “renovations” at the Lackawanna County Courthouse Square for the first time. Somewhere there is a highway missing its dividers. Somewhere a mine pit needs to be filled.

Since it is likely that the courthouse will be attacked by terrorists, some sort of massive protection system is no doubt a necessity.But must such a buffer look like a wannabe’s wannabe version of a Maya Lin sculpture? Had the architect seen the Neo-Gothic Romanesque masterpiece made of warm local West Mountain stone that the blah granite bumpers are intended to protect?Or did the county fathers simply unpack a Protection-R-Us blueprint stamped by Homeland Security as a cost-saving measure to ensure that there would be plenty in the budget for kickbacks?

It’s clear that the commissioners didn’t hire people with a grasp of local nature or history to select the quotes for the grey adder. Nor did they —gasp! — solicit input on who or what should be honored in the most visible public space in the county. They seemed to rely on blindfolds and darts.

The commissioners could have redeemed some integrity if they had at least hired a fact checker. How is it possible that Gen. George Patton could relay such a poignant quote two years after he died?

The memorials around the courthouse have always had a random quality. John Mitchell stands out among Washington, Sheridan, Kosciuszko and Pulaski as the only man honored with a statue who had ever set foot in Lackawanna County. The GAR monument and the more modest monuments for more recent veterans have more of a universal soldier feel than the small monuments about town that list the names of the fallen, such as the one at the former North Scranton Junior High School that lists the fallen of North Scranton, including my great-uncle.

Expansion of the universal soldier motif to cover every wall and crevice of the square obscures the role that local veterans have played in serving our country while leaving little room for celebration of the natural, civic, cultural and economic history of the county. Visitors will assume we lean on the general because we are short on specifics.

Now that the renovations are near completion, it is time to inaugurate the process of taking them down.Dismantle the anachronistic wall of generic platitudes. Use the fresh-faced stone to repair the spray painted, broken, toppled, acid-rain-washed tombstones of the Avondale mine disaster victims and the Civil War veterans that lie among the weeds and litter in the Washburn Street Cemetery. There, among the heroes of Scranton, as many gravestones lay fallen as stand erect.

In “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” Central High School alumna, former Scranton Tribune writer, and matriarch of modern urban planning Jane Jacobs wrote, “It may be that we have become so feckless as a people that we no longer care how things work, but only what kind of quick, easy outer impression they give. If so, there is little hope for our cities or probably for much else in our society. But I do not think this is so.”

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An article that I wrote, “The Tools They Use: Online and Offline Collaboration for Media Activists” is available in The Spin Project’s Whose Media? Our Media: Strategic Communications Tools to Reform, Reclaim, and Revolutionize the Media.

Available as a free PDF.