To hold the mirror of moral clarity

A call to action on Gaza, then a 'state of the newsletter' report

Hello all! Hope the settling reality of 2025 isn’t hurting too bad this morning. Today’s post is a ‘state of the newsletter’ report, mostly. But first some information that’s more useful than that! No time to waste, let’s get to it.

Gaza Demonstration Round II—state of the newsletter—new year, new approach—odds and ends

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To hold the mirror of moral clarity

We’re doing it again, folks. After some stern nudging from the ACLU, Mayor Joe Petty (and no, not the clerk, who just does what the mayor wants) has allowed a petition from a local multi-faith coalition concerning the genocide in Gaza back on the agenda for the meeting on Tuesday night. Item 8t, it asks the council to sign on in support of a ceasefire in Gaza, the return of all hostages and detainees¹, the free flow of aid into Gaza, and a halt on weapons sales and transfers to Israel.

Follow the coalition’s Instagram for more updates

Ahead of the 6:30 p.m. meeting organizers will hold a vigil for the more than 46,000 murdered Palestinians. That starts at 5:30 p.m., just outside the council chambers. Same as last time, we should expect a small coterie of death cult psychos to counter-protest. For that reason, it’s important to get as many people out as possible. But more importantly: the most we can realistically hope to accomplish vis-a-vis our reflexively hostile council is showing them how unpopular their positions are. The more people in the room, the stronger the case. I’m sure the coalition has the speaking roster covered. Just showing up, preferably dressed in black, as the organizers suggest, is enough. See you there!

After the de facto 5-6 vote the council took on this resolution in October, I’m expecting another “no,” stated as indirectly as possible. (For those in need of a catch-up, I wrote a soup-to-nuts account of the night: "Shame on those with the power to act who choose silence instead"). To plainly say ‘genocide bad’ takes a temerity unavailable to most of the council. Similarly, to say ‘genocide good’ is impolite and too honest for comfort. So they’ll squirm to get out of it. Expect a discussion mired in process questions so as to avoid getting too close to the actual question. It will look pathetic. It will engender secondhand embarrassment.

The councilors themselves will remain blissfully unaware of this. Rather they’ll adopt a posture of indignancy. Aggrieved by a disobedient public. Their default position—the corner they safely retreat toward, fingers in their ears. Lalalalalala. I’ve seen this outcome enough times I’d bet real money on it.

It’s on us to hold the mirror of moral clarity up to their faces. To say that if you can’t take a stand on this, what can you take a stand on? And, if it bothers you so much to see an organized and motivated public demand something, maybe politics isn’t for you, actually? Maybe just hang it up? No one would blame you... Just think about it, okay?

Every time we hold this mirror up to these six or seven councilors reliably standing in the way of everything, they take damage. It doesn’t look like it in the moment. It looks like we’re getting ignored. Told to fuck off. But under the surface it chips away at them.

They didn’t take the job to do politics, they took it to look like they’re doing politics. Feel like it. Put the American flag pin on the lapel and see a proud statesman in the mirror on their way out the door, into the community over which they fancy themselves a responsible steward. Frolic around city hall like some pissy flâneur on a power trip.

Every time you put them in a position to actually do politics, it desaturates that filter a little bit. They resent the reality introduced to their walking dream. They lash out in self-righteous anger. The lack of respect! But the damage done to the illusion is irreversible. After so many times it’ll wear off completely. Made at last to take that first honest look at why they’re sitting there, will they like what they see?

The lashing out is also on the agenda Tuesday. Mayor Joe Petty filed two items that are transparent digs at individual councilors, both of them among the minority who try to use their power to improve the city. That, for a guy like Petty, is cause for disciplinary action. So he has an order asking for information on in-meeting decorum (item 11h, targeting King) and attending meetings via Zoom (Item 11i, targeting Nguyen). Neither will accomplish anything but the sending of a petty message. ‘She doesn’t even go here.’ Both will be sent to a subcommittee controlled by Moe Bergman, who’s among the cattiest of the old guard councilors and sure to happily pick up where Petty left it.

As has been the case lately, better ideas are coming from the citizen petition section than the section for orders from councilors. Resident John Keough has two good ones, 8u and 8v. The first would require that the clerk read the council rules to the mayor whenever he tries to respond to a councilor “from the chair,” a rule Petty frequently violates. The second asks for guidance on the “purpose and scope” of Kate Toomey’s standing committee on public safety. Recently, in a comment provided to This Week In Worcester, Toomey let on that she really doesn’t understand the assignment. That is, of course, why Petty put her there in the first place.

Other stuff:

—A plan to expand public trash cans and recycling bins on city streets, like normal cities have. (9.32A)

—King’s asking for an update on his 2020 order asking for a report on creating a civilian review board, lol. (11d)

—In accordance with the new state law allowing cameras on school buses, Haxhiaj is asking for increased enforcement of drivers passing school buses (11g), while Toomey is taking the opportunity to for another toy for the WPD: “analytic intelligence software” for reviewing video footage of traffic violations (11n). Hmmm wonder who told her to put that on.

—And then of course the council needs to do something with the petition from police union officials they held at the last meeting (18a). The one that asks the council endorse the doxxing of victims who reported sexual assault at the hands of police officers.

Going to be a long night. As always, we’ll be streaming it on the WCT3k Twitch channel.

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State of the newsletter

As we head into the new year, it’s a good time for a semi-annual look inward at how things are doing in Worcester Sucks land. Recently, this newsletter hit two very cool milestones: We got up above 750 paid subscribers and cleared $50,000 “gross annualized revenue.” Very cool!

The business model of this newsletter is so simple that the paid subscriber figure is the only one I really have to pay attention to. Just by looking at the above chart, we can see 2024 was the best year in terms of growth since 2020, when I started this thing. I’ve also reinvested more money than ever before in good work from contributors and regular columnists. The two clearly go hand-in-hand. Encouraging that that particular gambit paid off. I very much plan to double down on it as much as I’m able.

The total number of subscribers continues to climb faster and more steadily than the paid version, which is to be expected. As of my writing this, we’re at 4,483 subscribers overall.

As you can see there that means we’ve added almost a clean 1,000 this year. Tremendous! The free-to-paid ratio is another thing to keep track of. In that category, we’re a veritable industry outlier! A geographical oddity. A rate of 10 percent paid is generally considered the goal. We’re at 17 percent, which was also the case last year, give or take. That we hit that ratio without putting any work behind a paywall speaks to two things: There’s an inherent value in what we’re doing and maybe just maybe paywalls overall are counterproductive.

In the ‘carrot-stick matrix,’ paywalls are obviously sticks. Perhaps in the process of whacking people with it, the journalism industry has been whacking itself harder than the readers. Better, I think, to focus on the carrots. Producing journalism that doesn’t suck is the carrot I think the industry tends to forget about. No gimmick or ‘perk’ is going to take you further than a piece of writing which actually grabs the reader, teaches them something, motivates them to get involved. And it doesn’t help that the journalism that sucks the least is also the most likely to be hiding behind a paywall, its audience pre-trimmed like some ornate and archaic bonsai tree.

Or maybe I’ve been leaving a ton of money on the table every year by not paywalling half my posts! Oh well. Guess we’ll never know. Stuck with this approach. But, as the new podcast develops, I think we might explore a free-paid schedule for that, not least of all because when you paywall a podcast episode you can play clips from songs and TV shows and movies without having to worry about licensing issues. (In case you missed it, the most recent episode of Outdoor Cats features Shaun Connolly as we go over the goofy ‘best songs of 2024’ list the mayor put out. It’s a lot of fun.)

Page views don’t matter so much for our business model. Not like they would if we were in the advertising game (thank god we’re not). But 2024 was also a banner year in that regard, so why not. Here’s 2024...

Versus 2023:

Substack’s metrics-keeping for traffic is lacking, but at the glance it gives, we see 2024 was a lot better than 2023. Like twice as good. This is useful only insofar as it helps track our reach. (If we sold ads, we’d be looking at raising rates right about now.) The ‘why’ here is simple: We post a lot more. Whereas back in early 2023, it was just me plucking along with a post a week or so, we now have five distinct media “properties,” between my posts, Bad Advice, Worcester Speaks, and WPS In Brief and the new podcast, Outdoor Cats. Each is unique to itself, and that’s the way I like it. Between all of them, we put up 162 posts on the year.

—Top read, with 11.6 thousand ‘views’ is ‘Whatever you’re doing is what it is,’ from February.

—Hilariously, coming in a close second is the Ralph’s ‘protest’ story—”BREAKING: Ralph’s haunted attraction sparks religious protests”—at 11.4 thousand.

—Encouraging, though, that third highest is from a contributor, and is not a joke. Greg Opperman’s ‘This City Kills Children’ came in at 8.7 thousand views on the year. It was also syndicated on Mass Streetsblog, where it got more views than that, I’m sure. It also put it in front of the Boston cable channels, leading to Opperman getting interviewed by one such station and really letting it rip. That was fun! You can’t quantify real impact. It’s something you feel and observe. And of all the stories we published this year I think this one had the most obvious and immediate impact. (Keep the pitches coming, Greg!!)

The rest of the stories hover consistently between 3,000 and 5,000 views. Very few stinkers falling below the 3,000 view mark.

That there’s been no drop in free subscribers is the best indicator we’re not wearing anyone out by posting “too much,” a concern I used to fret about endlessly. But I’ve softened on it lately. I need to trust more that people enjoy having an outlet like Worcester Sucks in their city, and aren’t going to get sick of it if they’re getting four emails a week instead of one.

We might not have the money for a staff of full timers (yet) but with four distinct local columnists, we’re already doing a better job in that department than the Telegram. This is an idea I explored at length in a story for the Columbia Journalism Review last January: “Why communities need columnists.” I like the way Walter Crockett put it in a Facebook post sharing Aislinn’s last WPS In Brief: “This is a valuable blog for people who care about Worcester's public schools. Aislinn Doyle writes it for Bill Shaner' Worcester Sucks and I Love It media empire.”

The opportune word is valuable. What lies at the heart of this “media empire” (a joke I so love to see catch on) is that everyone involved follows their proverbial nose toward the most valuable work they can produce. (Just wait until you see the big, ambitious feature Aislinn is working on).

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Goals and wishes for 2025

Hitting 1,000 paid subscribers this year is just on the edge of attainable. With that sort of revenue coming in I could cap my salary in a formal way and start setting the rest aside for special projects, more contributors, and better pay for the existing ones. More programming like the book club last year, which went well, and ideally a speaker series.

Hitting 1,500 paid subscribers—which is not very likely but a boy can dream—and we’re looking at all that and a second full time employee on a modest but nonetheless livable wage. Two Bills! Can you even imagine?

There’s no shortcuts to either goal. We just have to keep putting out the best, most ambitious and most valuable work we can, and hope more of the community sees enough value in it to directly support the work.

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As a writer, there are two major projects I’d like to get done. First one is the people’s history of I-290, which I’m giving myself until March to complete, and while I’m still in the research phase, I’m highly considering releasing it as a narrative podcast. Second one is a proposal for a book on homelessness and policing. I also want to freelance more for larger outlets, and take on more state-level reporting work. With more money to pay for contributed work, I’ll have more time to pursue these writing goals, all of which in turn help the newsletter grow its profile.

A larger profile is not merely a vanity concern though there’s no denying I have an unrequited appetite for proving myself to myself (I’ll let you know if that ever happens). Under Trump, municipal-level work takes on an increased importance, and city-focused activists, thinkers, organizers, and politicians need to build pan-city networks for mutual aid, tactics, chronicling of wins and losses, and good information.

Looking ahead, to the nightmare times, I’m taking an approach to this newsletter that’s more municipalist than municipal. Seeing Worcester as entirely unremarkable but useful. Taking what lessons it has for a municipalist struggle and pulling in lessons from elsewhere. Getting more involved with groups like The Solidarity Research Project, for instance.

What we need for a real pan-city network of municipal organizing are reliable channels for that good information. Ones that stand outside the sea of slop the internet is increasingly becoming. Ones that are undeniably in the hands of human beings who care.

And, just as we’re reaching outward to other cities, we need to be building new solidarities in our own little city, which has been so tragically solidarity-averse for so long it’s been the subject of academic study. How do we fix that? Is there a way we can approach the upcoming municipal election cycle, using it to try and break whatever weird spell hangs over this city? Reframe a local election as a way to build a movement, as opposed to building a movement for an election? Invert the means and the ends? Fuck it why not, right? We have nothing to lose and there’s no one coming to save us but us.

For instance, we don’t have to wait around for someone’s approval to try out a citizen assembly, as was recently featured in the New Yorker: “What Could Citizens’ Assemblies Do for American Politics?”

Many citizens’ assemblies follow a basic template. They impanel a random but representative cross-section of a population, give them high-quality information on a topic, and ask them to work together to reach a decision. ... Though still rare in America, the model reflects the striking idea that fundamental problems of politics—polarization, apathy, manipulation by special interests—can be transformed through radically direct democracy.

Might an election cycle be used to pull people into tenant organizing? The housing crisis hits our city especially hard. So why not try to replicate the recent actions of Kansas City renters, which I learned about from a recent JP Hill post.

“Tenants in Kansas City went on a historic rent strike in October at two major buildings with hundreds of residents. It’s the biggest rent strike in decades, the longest ever in Kansas City, and the first to deliberately target federal regulators. ... The striking tenants out in Kansas City are member of KC Tenants, the city-wide tenant union, which in turn is part of the first national tenant union federation in the country, created this past year.”

Or why not try what the teacher’s union in Chicago is doing, as Hill writes: They’re “going far beyond trying to win better wages and job conditions; the educators of Chicago are aiming to get housing for homeless students.” In Worcester, there are hundreds of homeless students. Something for the Education Association of Worcester to consider! Something teachers could organize around pressuring their union reps to propose.

Or, how do we organize against the practice of throwing unhoused people’s shit in the garbage? Great story in Probublica recently about it. This is one of the many facets of the city’s homeless response in which the official party line (“we don’t throw shit out”) differs from what people have told me over and over (“they threw my shit out”). The city supposedly has a storage shed it uses to keep people’s belongings somewhere, kept by the DPW. I talked with a few people who’d know about how to get any sort of documentation about it being used or not, and they came up empty as I did. It’s on my list of records requests to file. But the city owes me about a dozen other ones at the moment. Thank you to reader Walter Crockett for sharing! (And for sharing our stuff on Facebook all the time!)

It takes seeing Worcester as a small node in a wider struggle, I think, to put the necessary meaning into the seemingly mundane act of giving a shit about your city. It’s on the city level where a necessary consciousness shift has the best chance of happening. It’s where you can see most clearly that maybe just maybe we’ve been living under fascism for quite some time, and that Trump 2.0 won’t provide some new jackbooted spectacle so much as exaggerate what already exists. I like the way Kelly Hayes put it recently:

While people often imagine that fascistic violence under Trump will be a spectacle reminiscent of the 1940s, it’s important to recognize that systems that sort people into categories of disposability and manufacture premature death are fully functional in the modern day United States, and that most people have already been successfully conditioned to ignore the violence of those systems. The violence of police and prisons, like the violence of war, is background noise to most people in the US. If we want people to have anti-fascist, anti-authoritarian politics that truly challenge the destructive capacity of the regime, we must bring that background noise into focus, and rally people against carceral violence, militarism and the disposal of human beings.

“Bringing the background noise into focus” is a perfect mantra for Worcester Sucks in 2025, I think. Really, it’s what we’ve been doing for a while now, perhaps without thinking about it too much. But the current moment demands we think about it pointedly, and harder than we ever have. In that light, I look forward to seeing a lot of you at the Gaza demonstration on Tuesday.

And then on Wednesday, consider this your invitation to join me in attending a virtual panel on community defense put on by the Municipalism Learning Series. It has nothing to do with Worcester but everything. It starts at 7 p.m. and you can RSVP here.

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Odds and ends

One more subscription pitch for the road! I hope by now you’re convinced that it’s $5 well spent.

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Things are heating up again at St. Vincent Hospital, after two deaths in the intensive care unit led nurses to file a sixth complaint in recent memory against the hospital’s ownership company, Tenet Healthcare. Per GBH:

The complaint highlights safety concerns related to inadequate staffing, equipment not being properly sterilized, and restrictions on use of IV fluids. The nurses allege these issues resulted in two patient deaths in critical care units.

“It’s unsafe. I 100% feel it’s unsafe, and it breaks my heart to say it,” said Carla LeBlanc, a registered nurse at St. Vincent and member of the Massachusetts Nurses Association board of directors.

The nurses’ union said it has made repeated appeals to management regarding their concerns and filed more than 1,000 official reports showing the conditions that jeopardize the safety of patients.

Meanwhile the months long all-heel wrestling match between insurance provider Point32Health and Tenet ended juuuuust before some 17,000 people were about to find out their insurance was no good at St. Vincents. Evil people, evil system! A special rung in hell for all involved.

In a guest op-ed to The Telegram, Councilor Etel Haxhiaj writes about the need for the city to opt in to a state law requiring multi-family buildings to have sprinklers. A no brainer, given all the deadly and otherwise tragic fires we see in our old, crumbling, poorly maintained multi-family housing stock. Nothing’s a no brainer in Worcester, though. For the crime of suggesting a sensible public safety policy, a townie on Facebook by the name of Ed Ryan called her Adolf Haxiaj (sic) and took it upon himself to twist her words: She was trying to ban all smoking within city limits, actually. Just like Hitler.

This law’s been on the books since the 1990s and Worcester has yet to “opt in,” as it were. Haxhiaj writes: “Worcester's elected leaders have never debated the cost-benefits of adopting this law, but we can do so now.” Worcester’s also full of Ed Ryans. Coincidence? I think not. Sad truth about it is this city would benefit from a few traditional re-education camps. Mr. Jinping, we are ready when you are. In the meantime the state legislature needs to cease with this “let the towns decide” bull. Make State Laws State Law Again.

A weird one: Assumption College kids are facing kidnapping charges after doing a To Catch A Predator-style stunt for TikTok. I searched TikTok for a few seconds and couldn’t find any of the source material. But per Brad Petrishen at the Telegram, what happened was a female student lured a presumably older man into a communal lounge area, where he was jumped by a mob of 30 private university students doing a ‘street justice’ bit for the camera. “The group of men, emerging from “secreted” locations, grabbed the man and prevented him from leaving, while accusing him of being a predator.” The man broke free. A chase through the campus ensued. He got to his car. Drove it through a mob of private university students as they kicked and punched the vehicle. Now five of them are facing kidnapping charges and you can’t even find the video they’re facing real jail time for. Living in Am-eeee-ree-cah.

But one good thing about America: Robert Eggers. Saw Nosferatu on the big screen last night. What a movie. Willem Dafoe in a Van Helsing-type role is just the best. I’ve seen people online panning the film because it made them laugh, as if that’s evidence of it failing to be ‘scary,’ and thus ‘not good.’ Baby brains, all of them!

Past few days I’ve been working my way through Kim Kelly’s top metal albums of 2024 on her new music site Salvo. Currently blasting Beating the Drums of Ancestral Force by Tzompantli. Goes hard.

1. worth thinking about who gets to be a “hostage” and who is relegated to “detainee” in the peculiar imperial lexicon of our times