The Bremen Bod Blog

By now you’ll have seen the disturbing footage from Buffalo of a rather grandfatherly looking gent being shoved backwards by the Police, followed by the image of dark blood seeping from the back of his skull as it smacked into the concrete. It turns out that this 75 year old man was Martin Gugino, a long standing peace activist and member of Amistad Catholic Worker. I’m tempted to say he’s one of our own, if only to highlight the acute problem of us not always thinking of everyone else on such protests as ‘one of our own’.    Fortunately, Martin’s condition is described as stable and his friends say Mr Gugino would want us all to get back out onto the streets and continue to protest and resist alongside Black Lives Matter activists, while he remains in hospital, just as Dorothy Day stood with  Martin Luther King  Jr. and  Cesar Chavez.    That after all, is the Catholic Worker way but if you were to ask a Catholic Worker how else we mig...

I was very interested to see a digital copy of the 1935 Gourock Directory posted on social media last week. There are dozens associations listed in the Gourock Directory; From cooperatives, guilds, fraternities, friendly societies, libraries, reading rooms, to a League of Nations Union branch, various social clubs, working mens clubs, political party branches, trade unions and numerous sports clubs and Church denominations. Reading this fascinating piece of social history highlighted just how associational and voluntary our community was back then, and how strong our civil society was too. It’s clear that in those days, people tended to do more things collectively, within institutions and not so much as individuals. This was also a time when small towns had their own thriving cultural life, long before the dominance of big cities and the centralisation of capital, subsequently closing down many of our local banks and financial institutions.   In my opinion, associa...