I got nothin' at the moment. There's the plumbing adventure from yesterday. Nah. There's the insomnia, the "I can't find anything to read" oh, yeah, there's the news that I might have a P-Patch, a community garden plot next spring -(if we can work out the whole wheelchair thing. I think it's iffy because there are at least three things that need to be not just fixed, but pretty much redone. But still. The planners seem to think it can be done.)

Instead forgive me, I want to share someon else's words with you today. This is an excerpt from Robert Reich's remakrs at Sproul Plaza at UC Berkeley the other night. Reich moved from the Pauley Ballroom where he was to give the "Mario Savio Memorial Lecture" to the steps of Sproul Hall where Occupy Oakland had joined with Occupy Cal to demonstrate, sit-in, sleep, make themselves heard as students and activists have been doing for decades.

The transcript of his remarks can be found at http://www.dailycal.org/2011/11/18/transcript-robert-reichs-speech-at/.

And as Robert Reich talked about that speech 47 years ago by the brilliant Mario Savio, he said in part

"Now the First Amendment, the right to speak that is not always convenient — it is not always inexpensive; it is sometimes messy.

And because it is sometimes inconvenient and sometimes expensive and sometimes messy — just like democracy — there is a temptation sometimes to want to contain it, to limit it. But it is more important than it has ever been that we all go out of our way, every one of us: leaders, politicians, those of us who have authority and those of us who do not have authority.

It becomes doubly important that we honor the First Amendment and that we are willing and make ourselves willing to pay the price of freedom of speech and also indirectly or — because freedom of speech is so related to democracy — directly the price of a democratic system of government."