Tag: Pennsylvania

Two Poems

~ Chris Cocca ~ Leave a comment

Two poems previously published at The Shore, the first of which was nominated for the Pushcart Prize:

The Effects of Ground-Level Ozone on the Ecology of Pennsylvania Highways

We could talk about the road
from Allentown to Bloomsburg,
the nuke plant outside Berwick,
the wind mills in Shamokin.
Or I could say what’s plain,
the pallor of the tree tops
too soon against the still-green valley’s
August.

It’s not latitude or elevation
dressing them for harvest.
The civic body pulsing
the freight metastasizing
the emissions of the tourists
come to find themselves
in nature.
Or I could say what’s plain.
There’s nothing in our handiwork
the dying leaves would envy.

Ode to Wallace Stevens

I’m not sure how I feel
about this Wallace Stevens, born in Reading
near the Updikes and the Danners
O’Hara, from the famous brewing town,
Doolittle and Benet from what we still call Christmas City.
Sandburg talked about it.

I was born in Allentown,
half-raised in the townships
with the sons of bankers,
the daughters of accountants,
the sleight progeny of academics,
and half-raised by my father’s
kind of people.

And so when Stevens carries on
and Ezra changes Hilda
into affectation
I think about the blacktop
behind my cousins’ house
the drop-off to the alley
the neighbor kids with summer colds
who smelled like smoke,
no light or warmth in
metaphors or symbols
no prattle about tea—
communal three-speeds, maybe
broken like umbrellas,
free camp at the Y,
baseball in the city parks,
the college hill for sledding.

We go to school or war,
we settle in careers,
like Stevens we get licensed
like Ezra we go crazy
like Hilda we are strung up in the trees.

The halo light of street lamps
has burned out in our alley
Like Hart Crane, one of us is dead.

Rested in an urn on my aunt’s
shoddy mantle
forty cantos east of Reading,
eight west of HD’s plot on Nimsky Hill,
a soldier’s fortune from these lives of letters,
these gadflies we recycle,
and these wars,
also never-ending
so we can have our books
they give the light and heat
by which
my father’s people burn.

Wawa or Sheetz? (A Pennsylvania Thing)

~ Chris Cocca ~ Leave a comment

If you watch The Goldbergs, you know about Wawa. It’s that place of wonders where the JTP gathers to ponder life’s biggest question. It’s also one of the greatest dining-gasoline establishments in the fairest Commonwealth in these fruited plains.

But Wawa is not without its rivals and detractors. In the short video below, I explain the drama, extoll the virtues of Wawa and its chief rival, and do a little folk etymology/amateur bird-calling. It all makes sense in context.

Then, in the comments, I get trolled by my Mom…a very un-Goldbergs move, might I add. That leads to a second video, linked in the comments, about Joe Biden hating young people. He’s from Scranton, so it all connects.

Enjoy! (Like I even have to worry).

The Sub In Suburb: We’ve Been Building Suburbia on the Backs of the Urban Poor for 50 Years

~ Chris Cocca ~ 2 Comments

I just posted an excerpt from and a link to a piece on Atlantic about the future of American cities.  Let me share again this salient point:

“That economic shift away from cities was the root cause of America’s urban collapse. Starting in the 1950s, the middle class – and the American Dream – migrated from urban neighborhoods to the suburbs. Industry and corporations soon followed.

Ester Fuchs, director of Columbia University’s Urban and Social Policy program, details the fallout in the latest issue of Columbia’s Journal of International Affairs:

America’s great cities were left in economic free fall, with concentrated poverty, unemployment, high crime rates, failing public schools and severely deteriorating physical infrastructure, including roads, mass transit and parks. Academics and policy makers agreed that cities were irrelevant to America’s economic future; they would become places for poor minorities who could not afford to move to the suburbs. Urban policy became code for social-welfare policy.

*

This is true in Allentown, and this is at the core of the current debate over the use of EIT (earned income tax) money from people who work in the City but don’t live there.  Where, oh where, should that money go?

In Pennsylvania, until 1962, the EIT stayed in the municipality (read: City) where it was earned.  Then legislators got together with academics and social planners and decided to punish poor minorities for wanting civil rights and jobs in Northern cities.  Low and behold, the EIT, from 1962 on, goes back to the places where workers live, regardless of where the earned income tax was, you know, earned.

The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania thus funded and directed the great subsidization of the suburbs, the chewing up of green space, and the decline and fall of urban cores.  That’s what happened in Allentown and surrounding townships.  Fifty years later, those townships feel entitled to the status quo and to the money their residents earn in Allentown.  Along comes legislation giving that money back to Allentown to help fund redevelopment, and the townships sue the City.

I hope this highlights what’s really needed: a Commonwealth-wide law directing all EITs back to the cities in which they are earned.  Thank you, townships, for highlighting that need. You are, perhaps, more progressive than people think.

Beerituality Panelists Discuss the Penn State Scandal and Wider Concerns

~ Chris Cocca ~ 2 Comments

Friends, this is a re-post from the Beerituality blog.  Beerituality is a monthly gathering at the Allentown Brew Works in Downtown Allentown that aims to bring people together from across traditions “at the crossroads of the sacred and secular.”

Peter Schweyer, Bill White, Tammy Lerner, and Alan Tjeltveit @ Beerituality (November 17, 2011)

Last night’s discussion featured Peter Schweyer, a PSU grad, Allentown City Councilperson and the Chief of Staff for PA Rep. Jennifer Mann with experience in abuse legislation; Bill White, noted columnist for the Allentown Morning Call, a long-time advocate for abuse survivors and abuse prevention; Tammy Lerner, State Director and Vice President of Abolish Child Sex Abuse; and Alan Tjeltveit, Professor of Psychology at Muhlenberg College.

This was an extremely important night of engaging, educational, and candid reflection and dialogue about the wider context of sexual abuse in the midst of the Penn State scandal.

From Tammy Lerner’s organizational website, www.abolishsexabuse.org, a plea for legislative action: Please contact members of the PA House Judiciary Commitee, and demand they hold Public Hearings on H.B 832, H.B. 878, H.B. 549, H.B 1867 and H.B. 1895

Some of the things that struck me immediately:

  • the need to keep talking about this issue, and to encourage people to tell their stories in safe environments. Speaking out about abuse can help dispel the culture of shame we’ve built up around it, so that victims can be empowered to come forward and legal and civil recourse can be taken.
  • In Pennsylvania, coaches are not mandatory reporters.  In some states, they are. Legislation to make coaches mandatory reporters was introduced in Harrisburg this week.
  • In Pennsylvania, university police departments like those at Penn State or Lehigh University are the accredited law enforcement agencies on campus. Unlike other police departments, these don’t report to any elected official or body, but to Boards of Trustees. There are inherent conflicts of interest there on many levels.
  • The need for changes to statute of limitations laws for these kinds of crimes. Currently, if the criminal and civil statutes of limitations have expired before charges are brought, even admitted offenders cannot be named as such in newspapers or with respect to Megan’s Law. This is an area where better legislation can, indeed, help with prevention.

Thanks again to our excellent panelists for the interdisciplinary perspectives and conversation on this hard issue.  We were blessed to be able to assemble this panel.  In the larger context of advocacy and support, this conversation must continue.

Amazon Workers Left Out In the Cold: Excuses Expose Amazon’s Sustainability Issues

~ Chris Cocca ~ 2 Comments

Cover of "Kindle Wireless Reading Device,...
How To Make Enemies and Exploit People

I’ve heard some people in this here Valley saying that Amazon was justified in keeping warehouse workers, often clad in nothing more than t-shirts and short, outside in the wee hours of the morning in the freezing cold for ridiculously long periods of time.  Oh, they’re not saying it exactly that way.  Remember, the evacuations at the warehouses were caused by fire alarms being pulled, and the alarms were pulled so that these workers could steal, so the narrative goes.  Sometimes people with throw the word “lazy” in there before “workers,” or maybe the occasional “thieving.”  So, you know, because some workers are allegedly stealing, everyone has to be exposed to extreme cold for close to two hours so some middle managers can get some iPod Nanos back.  Some of the workers, by the way, have been saying that the managers are the ones doing the stealing.

Amazon and Amazon fans can spin this however they want. The fact remains that these procedures, and the culture that breeds them, are the definition of unsustainable business.  There’s really no better to handle rogue alarm-pulling (if, indeed, that’s what happened) than to let your workforce freeze in the early hours of a November or December morning in Pennsylvania?  That’s atrocious and unacceptable.  Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer, really has no better way of cooling their facilities in the summer than farming out heat-sick workers to local ERs via a veritable concierge ambulance service?  Please.

Strike a blow for sustainability and stop buying from Amazon until they figure out how to run an ethical business on the supply side.

Related articles

The Growing Economic Divide: Occupy Allentown on October 29

~ Chris Cocca ~ Leave a comment

The Justice and Advocacy Committee of the Lehigh Valley Conference of Churches began planning a creative learning event about the growing Economic Divide in America long before we’d heard of #OccupyWallStreet, Occupy Together, or Occupy Allentown.  The Occupy movement affirms the the urgency of these issues for people of faith, and for all people.  Please join us at Zion’s Liberty Bell Church (also known as Zion’s Reformed UCC) at 620 W. Hamilton Street in Allentown on Saturday, October 29th.  Everything you need to know about workshop options, presenters, schedules, and registration is here.