The Action Mill Blog

With few exceptions, history tends to forget those who make change without resorting to violence. Case in point: the 2003 toppling of Charles Taylor, brutal dictator of Liberia. Taylor, who is currently on trial for war crimes, famously won the 1996 presidential election after a decade-long civil war with the campaign slogan "He killed my ma, he killed my pa, but I will vote for him."

Ministers of the Maldive Islands will hold a cabinet meeting under water on October 17th to demonstrate the threat that rising sea levels pose to their country. The cabinet is taking scuba lessons in preparation for the meeting, and will communicate with whiteboards and hand signals.

In a country where human rights, free speech, and democracy are respected, security forces would protect those who gather in the streets to speak out. Iranians in Kerman are acting as if they live in such a country, and by doing so, they are creating one. In the video below, they march on security forces, bearing flowers and thanking them.

Friday's Boston Globe has a story about the Davis Square Tiles Project:

On tiles, a story of gentrification
It’s been about 30 years since schoolchildren in Somerville created the artwork for a series of tiles - crudely drawn sailboats, rail cars, and clowns - that now adorn the Davis Square T station’s brick entrance wall.

Most of the time, when you see the words YouTube, police and bicyclists in the same sentence, it does not end well. Now imagine if that cop had hugged the guy. Absurd, I know, except the Danes are doing it. How better to encourage bicyclists to protect their heads than to give them a hug and a free helmet?

In collaboration with the Think Tank that is yet to be named, The Action Mill launched a new website today. We started out exploring how a new public transit line might affect the city of Somerville, Massachusetts. Public art from the last time a new line was built there gave us an opportunity to collect personal histories of the residents who were here thirty years ago.

Throwing a pie at a public figure nudges up against the outer edges of what we consider non-violent action (we believe in non-violence both for tactical and moral reasons) but we're fans of working on the edges, so when someone throws a pie, we generally give them the benefit of the doubt. Pieing was originally a staple of slapstick comedy, popularized by the Keystone Cops and Laurel & Hardy almost a century ago.