Voices from the Bottom

    The Poor People’s Campaign is speaking loudly in hundreds of voices in every corner of the country.  It is organizing privileged people like me and people living out of their cars.  If you aren’t already on board, go to June2020.org and you will be.  I went, and I listened to three hours of illustrated testimony by the PPC Virtual Assembly and Moral March on Washington, June 20, 2020, attended by over two million people.

    Here is what I am learning.  

    One: Silence is Betrayal. The refrain for one of the many songs written for the Campaign is, “Somebody is hurting my people, and we won’t be silent anymore.”

    Two: The frontline workers whom we can’t pay a living wage are acting out of “sacrificial love,” and it is love that is showing us the way. It is who we are, and together with love we can change everything.

    Three: Hope comes from the bottom up.  We change the narrative about poverty and race by changing the narrators.

    Four:  Our moral compass was coopted by right wing religious nationalism, and we need to get it back with a moral revival based on love and justice for “the least of these.”

    Five: A few statistics that caught my attention:   

**The suicide rate among Kansas farmers is 85/100,000.  Kansas water is polluted by fertilizer run-off, causing high rates of cancer.  **39 million children live in or close to poverty.  Poverty is traumatizing.. °°80% of low-wage workers have not had a pay raise in 50 years.  **The water in Flint, MI is still poisonous sixyears after it was revealed to carry lead and other chemicals from industrial plants.  **In Dallas, Texas industries causing contamination of air and water in poor neighborhoods are called the Corporate KKK.  **There are voter suppression laws in 27 states.  **There are 45 million immigrants, 11 million of them undocumented; they are most of the “essential workers”; they all pay taxes. **Half of public schools are Re-segregated. **The US has 25% of the world’s incarcerated, but just 4% of the world’s population.

    Six: We live in a capitalistic society that says, “I will take from you.”

    Seven:  The U.S. Constitution legalizes black bondage. It declared that black people were 3/5 a person.  The 14^thAmendment should have corrected that by freeing slaves, but it allowed prisoners to be used as free labor.  Gerrymandering and voter ID laws further legitimize racism.  Thus it has always been legal to oppress black people.

    Eight: Every day we are fed the "lie of scarcity."

    Nine: Most of our policies have a “death measurement.” For example, the government’s slow response to Covid-19 caused more deaths, and black and brown communities are disproportionately affected.

It is TIME to change .  It is TIME for justice.  

Is There Hope?

    My heart is aching from just watching a moment by moment video of the police assassination of Raychard Brooks, 27 year old father of 3, who is black. Since George Floyd was lynched*, I have been to two marches and numerous vigils for Black Lives Matter.  Many newly aware white people and youth have been to those same protests, but the deaths keep happening.  Two trans black women were killed, maybe not by police, but by our racist police culture. Then two black men were found hanging from trees in rural California.  Suicides? Why should anyone believe that story? 

     As if by answer, after I wrote this piece, there were reports of five nooses in trees in Oakland, and of a 17 year old hung in a playground in Spring, Texas, and of a Latino hung in Houston on June 15.

    It seems that depravity, like racism, is inbred in America. I understand Langston Hughes when he says “America never was America to me.”  It is amazing that any black person could emerge from slavery and all the Jim Crow laws after it with any love for America.  I loved America until I found out what it had been doing to Latin America since - I don’t know - since taking a huge chunk of Mexico that lay North of the Rio Grande in 1848?  Since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823?   I couldn’t love a country that was using its power to take land and life from other countries.

    I was 22 when I got a scholarship to study in Argentina. I started to meet students who spoke about “Yankee Imperialism.”  I thought they were crazy, thanks to my American, middle class, college education. So I took my naïve self to the American Embassy to do some research.  The Embassy opened its library and even its social circle to me until I learned that what the students were saying was true.  My new education was hurried along by news of the Cuban revolution and how it was throwing off the yoke of U.S. domination.  Cuba was taking America’s knee off of its neck.

     That knee.  The same one that killed George Floyd, and Raychard Brooks, and Breonna Taylor, and, and, and.  It’s a wonder that anyone who wants justice has any hope at all. A line from Maya Angelou says, “when the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate,” and I wonder will the curtain ever fall? ( I had to look up “minstrel show” because I am white. It was a popular form of entertainment for white audiences with white actors in blackface denigrating black people.)  But I didn’t need to know the definition to know that Maya was a strong, proud, black woman who saw the world through eyes that could see every assault on black bodies.  She could see all that and still create beauty.  Next to that kind of creative resistance, that I also observe in Palestine, I feel incomplete, like I am missing a gene for hope.

     The other day Angela Davis said that the current uprising is qualitatively different from the explosive protests of 1968 when King was killed. Angela has a long view, a lived view, so she may be right.  I will borrow hope from her and let that hope take me into the streets to support Black Lives Matter. I didn’t think America had it in her to stay in the streets.  If she does, then I’ll take her back.  In fact, I’ll do my part. I’ll ask you to be in the streets with me to see if we can bring down that curtain on the minstrel show of hate.  The next time a black or brown person dies of this hate, I will try to remember them as a martyr to the cause of racial justice. Like George Floyd gave his life so we can be free.  Martyrs in a nonviolent army for freedom.

    Most times it looks like this army won’t win, but maybe it can, because finally there might be enough white Americans in the streets with them.  Please, don’t stay home.  I would liketo love America, would like to have hope enough to see America’s birth in genocide and enslavement finally undone.  It isour only hope.  It is my hope.

*Lynching is "murder without legal approval," not just by hanging.

Tributes to George Floyd, and all the rest.

This is an opinion piece I wrote for the Greenfield Recorder where it was published on June 4, 2020.  Following that is a poem I wrote for the same reason.

IN HONOR OF BREONNA TAYLOR, AHMAUD ARBERY & GEORGE FLOYD

Black men being lynched by white men in daylight, with witnesses.  Still.  It is not O.K.

Black mothers of black boys unable to keep them safe once they walk out the door. It is not O.K.

Navaho Nation deaths from Coronavirus way higher by comparison because they are historically denied access to clean water and adequate health care.  It is not O.K.

Privatized prisons, a whole new industry, bulging with black men put there by white society as a substitute for slavery, causing their sons to grow up without fathers or stable communities, and the fathers to be denied the right to vote, further disempowering them. It is not O.K

Cities like Baltimore with sky-scraper downtowns and yet whole blocks of apartment buildings boarded up, as if black and brown people didn’t need housing, and no one held accountable for redlining and slumlords. It is not O.K. 

Children with Spanish names in cages and no one knows where their parents are, while the parents are in tent cities (concentration camps) or in freezing, dirty ICE detention cells until they are deported with or without their children.  Whole families fleeing death in their home countries forced back across the border to camp out in Mexico, prey for gangs and extortionists. It is not O.K.

“Essential workers” (now we find out just how essential) who aren’t paid a living wage. They keep us alive but we don’t keep them alive. It is not O.K.

War is not O.K.  Climate change denial is not O.K.  Upgrading nuclear weapons instead of abolishing them is not O.K.  A foreign policy based on exploitation instead of sharing is not O.K.

We have become, or always were, a country without a moral compass.  Yes, there are good people, neighbors who help neighbors through floods and fires, who sew masks and give them away, medical and nursing home staff who labor to save the rest of us from the deadly virus. But our country is not O.K.

I am not O.K. as long as these things happen in my name.  It IS my country, and I have to take responsibility. I want these words to make a difference. But words can’t jump off the page and create magic.  Actions to take?  Now? With a paralyzing pandemic?  Yes. 

We have a history of resistance and it will continue. Let’s be sure we are part of it. Locally, we took a step towards justice as we protested the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery last Saturday on Greenfield’s Town Common.  For the long, urgent haul ahead, we can join national movements like

The Poor People’s Campaign, the Sunrise Movement, racial and environmental justice groups.  It is harder during the pandemic. I get discouraged too.  Yet, the lynchings must stop; racism and militarism must stop. Destruction of our natural world must stop.   We have to find a better way to be America.

 Not Waiting

This man should not have died:

George Floyd.

Pre-deceased by Ahmaud Arbery

 and Breonna Taylor.

They should not have died.

Predeceased by Eric Garner

and Trayvon Martin

who should be alive today.

Predeceased by Sandra Bland,

Michael Brown, and

12 year old

Tamir Rice.

They should still be alive

but instead their killers

are alive.

White America,

you have a lot to answer for

having started your climb

to fame

with the genocide

of indigenous peoples

whose land you took

whose lives you took.

Who are you, white America?

Who are you and

who gave you dominion

over all of God’s creation

and permission to kill it?

Is it just because you have

the bigger gun,

the bigger bomb

more young lives

to throw away in war?

You have a lot to answer for.

And  where are the answers?

Are they in the prisons

where you put our black men

to further emasculate them?

Are they locked in the brown bodies

That crossed the Rio Grande?

Those that didn’t die in the desert?

Watch out, white America.

You are turning brown.

The hordes you have sent

back to die in El Salvador,

Guatemala, Honduras

have relatives here.

Which reminds me.

There was a brown 

man named Jesus

of Nazareth who 

said your way of doing things

is not God’s way.

God’s way is merciful

but you are not merciful.

There are many dead  

to answer for. Say their names:

George, Breonna, Ahmaud,

Tamir, Trayvon, Eric,

Sandra, Michael. Freddie Gray,

Amadou Diallo, David McAtte,

Tony McDade…

But there are too many names,

new ones every day

and ones I don’t know.

I am not going to wait

for the answers.

Grief doesn’t wait.

Rage doesn’t wait.

The melting Artic

is not waiting.

                                        Sherrill Hogen

                                        June 4-8, 2020