The Beat Within vs. Mother Jones - Essay Example

The Beat Within vs. Mother Jones Introduction Publications may come in many forms and purposes. Two published journals, The Beat Within and Mother Jones are not any different. On the surface, these published journals have striking similarities, but on the whole they have more differences than similarities. Aside from the outright difference in the age of their writers and the type of write-ups and contents, there is more to be said between these two publications. The Publications The Beat Within is a San Francisco literary magazine that started in 1996 and is published by San Francisco’s Pacific News Service. It comes out weekly and includes essays, poems and art done by young people in prison (Sanders 2004). The staff who act as their support group, and who give them workshops, collect writings and artwork from regional areas including halls in Northern California, Arizona, New York, British Columbia and Virginia and publish them. Readership of The Beat Within is primarily composed of the kids who produce them, and each issue would carry a page called “The Beat Without,” featuring an essay of a former juvenile hall detainee (Martin 2005). The Beat Within started as a four-page newsletter when a mentor named Tupac died and the impact was so great, the children needed something to express their feelings on. The story goes - “The 1996 death of Tupac Shakur, an iconic rapper and the militant son of a Black Panther, who himself had been in prison, changed everything. His students mourned his death in such a powerful way that Inocencio [co-founder of Beat] felt their work needed to be shared. ‘I had to put it out there,’ he said. ‘It was urgent.’ Just like that, one mans death initiated a lifeline for others. The premiere of the Beat Within was a thin but powerful eulogy for Tupac.”(Sanders 2004). Now, the magazine runs more than a hundred pages to each issue and circulation has expanded to include interest groups especially those on welfare. Autobiographical in nature, the writings and artwork are believed to give the inmates something to start with (Ibid). A reading of the stories would show a continuum of emotional standing from acceptance of fate and a more relaxed view of life with readiness to change, to an understanding of the past as some childish accident or inevitable part of growing up, to a resigned misgiving about a world and its thinking not yet properly understanding them. The last is expressed by Pure Dragon, a 7 year old boy who left China for America (Parr 1999) – “When I think back on it, it all seems like a bad dream that has no future in it. But this ain’t no dream, this is my life. If I keep getting caught up in this system, I already know how my future would be, but I don’t want that future. I would like to go back to school, back to my family, to find me a job. I think the purpose of the hall is to change us one way or another. They have programs, counselors to talk to us, but they don’t know what we’re going through, so it is not helping us. Maybe if I stayed in China, a lot of things wouldn’t have happened to me.” As children trace back their steps and record past reality, the world outside (the staff primarily working on them) are given windows into their thinking and their emotional health whether much work needs to be done yet or one is ready to go it alone. The staff, as they work with the children acting as shock absorbers, become part of the lives of their wards, and through their perspective the children weigh the world. Later on, Sanders (2004) was to say, “The core staff of The Beat Within is an eclectic group of journalists, ex- convicts, graduate students and youth advocates.” The stories are outrightly therapeutic for the children, allowing them release of the past. Their works are presented sometimes are slices of their lives (a paragraph or two) as apparently most, if not all, of them could sustain the length of stories normally required in magazine writing. These are embedded with articles from the staff or management generously supporting these bits of expressions, as for example this one from a boy left by his father to hang on a tree – “I didnt cry out to my father, because he believed in punishing even more severely those who cry, so I just dangled in the wind trying to pull the unforgiving rope away from my neck as my father tied his end of the rope to the chicken coop, double-checked the knot, then walked back into the house.” (Sanders 2004) These are obviously in answer to questions of the staff who coax them to say something. Writing, it is said, will help them understand things better. The writers are either more of beings who have to recover from bad experience to the lighter mien of acceptance so that they can move on, or simply those with “talents suppressed by circumstance and an untidy loneliness.” Of Jason Treas, for example, age 16. Sanders (2004) said of him – “Treas remembered one of the older prisoners telling him, ‘You are what you experience. Unless you determine what kind of man you want to be, youll end up here’ indefinitely. To figure that out, Treas read the works of Cuban revolutionary leader Guevara and Black Panthers George Jackson and Assata Shakur. He studied the social realist murals of Mexican artist Diego Rivera. He stopped fighting as much. ‘It took a long time,’ he once wrote, ‘and a lot of struggling with myself, but eventually I was able to turn my anger and frustration into a determined energy.’ That energy went into art.” Of his first piece of art, a mural, Treas was said to describe it as having love and hate at the same time. "Its got love; its got hate; its about everyones personal struggle." Mother Jones. Meanwhile, Mother Jones may be said to be a journal of angst by activists, taking its name after a United States community organizer named Marry Harris Jones (Wikipedia). Born in Ireland but moved to Toronto, Canada, Mary had a grandfather who was hanged by the British for his participation in the Irish national struggle. She was introduced to labor unions by her husband, George Jones, who died from yellow fever and that included her four children. From there, she became involved with movements where she had faced many times the courts and lawyers and some imprisonments. She had remained a union organizer until she died (Wikipedia 2005). Because of the American magazine, Mother Jones advocating social views that she held, Jones is now known as the "Grandmother of All Agitators" Earlier known as the "miners angel," Jones had worked much on behalf of coal miners and children in labor (Ibid). Founded in 1976, Mother Jones is published bimonthly out of San Francisco with a circulation of about 250,000. It is considered to be a left-of-center periodical whose investigations are used by people working for social justice. Mother Jones is run under the auspices of the Foundation for National Progress (FNP). The magazine is said to work directly with politicians, educators, advocates and social change organizations. In November of 1993 Mother Jones went online (http://www.motherjones.com/about/admin/faq.html). Some examples of the type of write-ups in Mother Jones are those in their September/October 2005 Issue. Articles are immediately accompanied by commentaries (FAQ 2004) in each issue - Conflict Studies By Michael Beckel et al; News: Our annual roundup of college campus activism; Farewell, Great Society by Bradford Plumer Commentary:  Bushs big post-Katrina speech may have sounded liberal, but his reconstruction plan could set back liberalism for years to come; Bad Fixes, Wrong Problems by Tova Andrea Wang; Commentary:  The Carter-Baker report on election reform misses the point; The Presidency Shines by Tom Engelhardt. Commentary:  The Can-do Bush Administration Does...and the Presidency is at its most effective (for twenty-six minutes). A Failed State by JoAnn Wypijewski Commentary:  With government unmasked as a hollow giant, and both parties equally accommodated to poverty in the midst of plenty, is it any wonder people look to God? Left Behind By Chip Ward Commentary:  Bushs Holy War on Nature Petrotheism Cartoon by Mark Fiore Commentary:  The Quest for Fuel. Services Held Daily! No Exit by Alison Stein Wellner News:  Disaster evacuation plans throughout the US assume that people own a car. Too bad for the 23 million Americans who dont. Corporations of the Whirlwind by Tom Engelhardt and Nick Turse Commentary:  The Bush-friendly companies that ate Iraq are preparing to do the same in New Orleans. A Moral Moment by Al Gore Commentary:  The Bible says, "Where there is no vision, the people perish." The Bush administration has no vision. So the people perish. There was a special feature that said - “A Step Closer to Nuclear Abolition? Even after North Korea’s decision to abandon its nuclear program, there are still over 30,000 nuclear weapons in the world. Download fact sheets from the Arms Control Association to learn more. Then, visit Greenpeace for the latest on citizen nonproliferation actions and tips on becoming a cyber-activist.” (FAQ 2004) Top of Form Conclusion The background of these two publications may shed light into their personalities as crusading journals. The Beat Within was borne out of a need for some children in prison to express their grief for a dead friend. It is barely a decade old but speaks from an earlier beginning which is the environment a child comes upon. As Martin (2005) said, The Beat Within is clearly about more than just getting caged kids to write, but giving them for the future. It is also more from the workings of the inside man, the mind that keeps pondering about life and the cruelties and deprivations of his immediate surroundings. Some of the time, his enemies are found in his own home. It is also about youth advocacy and activism, and when seeking for redress, it will not only be society that has to be remedied but also one’s mind that has to find rest. On the other hand, Mother Jones’ fight is with a quantitatively bigger world out there, institutions that have juridical personalities that can do their bigger version of injustice especially when organized. When seeking for remedy, writers only need to influence opinion makers to move others to relieve their pain. The redress can be mechanical which is far easier done than than when one’s young mind is disturbed. The solution is found in numbers that can rally behind a fighter. Unlike the wards of The Beat Within whose fight is in their minds, it is the evils of society on a wide and scattered scale that Mother Jones is fighting. Readership of Mother Jones is extensive, and can be said to be for the global village, having now its online version. Target readership is the B-C crowd or middle class groups who have much stake with the affairs of government although writers and workers would come from the rising D class. The contents are of investigative journalism and whose results are used by agencies, both government and private. The readership of The Beat Within are the wards themselves, although it has expanded to include immediate concerned groups. The contents are personal essays and artworks as expressions of their experiences coaxed by the Juvenile Hall staff as therapeutic measures. The circulation is local and non-commercial. The contents are experienced-based that have a lot to do with their being incarcerated. They strongly express the workings of the mind of the wards who wrote them, which is why these literatures in themselves are helpful to both the writer and those managing them to get over (Prison wardens could learn from them). One remarkable thing observed among the incarcerated children is their craving to be heard even by just one man, and their appreciation for it which they found in the staff of The Beat Within. They felt they were being given love and importance to the point of being shocked. This observation is made in relation to a government investigation on incarcerated children. Entitled “Juvenile Sanctions: Voices of Incarcerated Youths” and purported interviews done by four people, it gives an outright isolationist introduction which welcomes the views of law-enforcers and the like on the sanctions, but not the children themselves. Consider this – “We do not hesitate to ask what researchers, judges, prosecutors, law enforcement officers, juvenile advocates, and others involved with young offenders think about the relative value of juvenile and criminal sanctions. However, we rarely ask what those who experience the respective sanctions think. We know little about how different sanctions are viewed by youthful offenders or how they think their behaviors will be affected. In perhaps no other area of human endeavor would we so consistently and so confidently ignore the opinions of those on the receiving end of social action.” (Lane et al. (2002) With suck kind of emphatic closure to communication which The Beat Within is trying to de-emphasize, their fight seems tougher than the fight of Mother Jones. References FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions (2004). The Foundation for National Progress Retrieved September 20, 2005 from http://www.motherjones.com/about/admin/faq.html Lane, J., L. Lanza-Kaduce, C. E. Frazier, and D. M. Bishop (2002, July 3). Adult Versus Juvenile Sanctions: Voices of Incarcerated Youths. Sage Publications. Retrieved from http://www.google.com.ph/search?hl=tl&q=Adult+Versus+Juvenile+Sanctions%3A&btnG=Hanapin+sa+Google&meta= Martin , C. (2005, May 26). Finding Their Beat. Creativity sparks youths at Santa Cruz County Juvenile Hall. A&L. gtweekly.com. Retrieves September 20, 2005 from http://www.gtweekly.com/AL/story.2005-05-25.0860464121 Mother Jones (magazine). (n.d.) Wikipedia. Retrieved September 20, 2005 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Jones_(magazine) Mother Jones. (n.d.). Wikipedia. Retrieved September 20, 2005 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Jones Parr, J. (1999, April 29). (Introduction). This Ain’t No Dream, This Is My Life. [How Kids Go Wrong / A Voice From Juvenile Hall / Risk Factors]. AsianWeek. Retrieved September 20, 2005 from http://www.asianweek.com/042999/feature_puredragon.html Sanders, J. (2004, December 27). The Beat is a magazine-newsletter hybrid. San Francisco Chronicle. Release. Retrieved September 20, 2005 from http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/12/27/DDGVUAH2P01.DTL Sandy Close (2005). (Executive Director).New California Media. National Association of Minority Media Executives. (NAMME). Retrieved September 20, 2005 from http://www.namme.org/programs/awards/award-winners/2004_close/ Read More