Ames Progressive

On January 24, Iowa State University held its annual birthday celebration for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in the Great Hall of the Memorial Union. Greg Bonett delivered the following speech at the celebration. Bonett is a senior in Electrical Engineering and Physics at Iowa State University. He is a peace activist and a co-editor [...]

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While Iowa was still the epicenter of the 2008 presidential race, Dennis Kucinich was excluded from two significant campaign events here. The first was the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner, the Iowa Democratic Party’s important early testing space for the Democratic candidates. On Democracy Now! Kucinich attributed his exclusion from the dinner to “an attempt to rig the [...]

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Ricky Fields served a week in the Story County Jail from December 14 to 21. He is a graduate of Ames High School and a student at Iowa State University. He wrote the following testimonial on the back of two sheets of paper he found in the complex. “It was dark enough that I couldn’t [...]

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The whole town attended the funeral for the man who nobody knew. They filed into the funeral home and didn’t say a word to each other.
A maid found the man who nobody knew at the Motel 6, floating in the pool with a dragonfly sitting on his head. She called the police.
The officer who fished [...]

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Composing fragments of photographs
Reflections of light
Color dances across our faces
In these streets
These streets where we are so small
From up there
Blank faces on the subway
Seeing no one
But they all must know what it feels like
To capture light
To capture time and decide
That it was real
Rambling through the avenues
Neglecting humanity
The girls who sweep the leaves from the streets
To [...]

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It began as an impersonation
of a TV actor’s oration.
But that original choice
infected by my voice
until it achieved transformation.

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Total acreage of all Wal-Mart stores worldwide: 18,810
Total acreage of the island of Manhattan: 15,000
(Good, Issue 7, November/December 2007)
Salary of Boston Celtics’ Kevin Garnett, the highest paid player in the NBA: $23,750,000
Total team payroll of the Boston Celtics: $74,626,104
(http://www.hoopshype.com/salaries.htm)
Lap dancers tracked in a University of New Mexico study comparing tips and menstrual cycles: 18
Percentage [...]

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