About
Writing and publishing a blog is a particularly self-absorbed endeavor. You are given free-run of cyberspace and work with the general assumption that, even in this vast blogosphere, you are something special with something work writing and being read. Indeed, this may very well be the case with the blog you have before you. But I like to think that perhaps what does make this blog special is the fact I hardly believe my writing to be of any vast significance and likely of interest to a very small group of individuals not unlike myself.
My name is Jesse Kanson-Benanav. This is a blog written by me. It is about the world, politics in particular, and how I see it all from my little corner of things – a fourth floor walk-up apartment in the Area IV neighborhood of Cambridge, Massachusetts.
But I did not always live in Cambridge. In fact I’ve only been here a fraction of my life having spent my first 18-odd years in the not terribly different setting of St. Paul, Minnesota, a relatively progressive and tight-knit community. I was raised by dedicated and thoughtful liberals, displaced New Yorkers who not only taught but actually lived the lefty-ideals of tolerance, equality, and diversity. I’m sure that, as one reads my reflections on life it will become clear the impact my parents had on shaping the person I am or at least would like to think I am today.
For college I moved just a bit east, to the corn-fields of Northeastern Ohio where I attended Oberlin College. It was there that I was more deeply exposed to radical politics, gender studies, anti-racism and other intellectual pursuits which highlighted for me the shortcomings of the U.S. liberal tradition and made concrete the belief I still hold that we must fight for a more progressive, groundbreaking politics which question the very assumptions of capital and power that define our world today.
After graduating from Oberlin I moved to the Boston-area to work as a Community Organizer in a local community-based non-profit. Since 2003 I have been in this job, working mainly around issues of affordable housing and youth leadership development. While I love my work and feel strongly about our mission, for the sake of anonymity for those I work with and sensitive political-nature of the organization and the work we do, I will endeavor to keep my employer nameless in this blog as much as possible. I do, however, hope to devote a substantial amount of time in this blog to writing about the field of Community Organizing drawing from my own experiences in ways as clear and straightforward as my self-imposed restrictions supply.
As I move forward with publishing this blog I hope to employ various techniques of recording my reflections – not just in the traditional blog-diary text style, but through photos, sound, and video wherever possible. The photograph used in the background is a generic view of Boston from my side of the Charles River, but I plan to rotate the image with my own digital photographs of scenes from around Cambridge and the greater Boston area.
I invite you to participate in this blog through the comment feature or by emailing me. I’d love to know if you like what I say… but please go easy on me if you don’t
