Tuesday, December 23, 2014
Black Lives Matter and the Mall of America.
Monday, August 4, 2014
Gaza and the children crossing the U.S. border
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
On Wisconsin
On Wisconsin
When you don’t live in Wisconsin it is hard to keep track of the flood of new laws implemented to bust unions, eliminate environmental protections, destroy infrastructure, target immigrants, dismantle state health care and all else that is held in common. In fact, those of us outside of the state may be more focused on visions of rallies of unprecedented size and pizza for all. We may feel giddy contemplating a level of global/local solidarity that we didn't know was possible.
We are not attending those long meetings where everyone disagrees and unity seems illusive. We are not around to keep tabs on the electoral and legislative leaps backward; the newly elected judge, a Walkerite, who assaulted a fellow judge in the first days of his office; the cold fact that collective bargaining has been eliminated, come August, for those public employees whose contracts are up. We do not see or feel the effects of school closings, lay offs, speed ups and slow downs.
A teacher of developmentally disabled children in Verona was told her classrooms will have 40 students next year. She has decided to quit her job, knowing she cannot serve the needs of her students with those numbers. For all the talk of getting rid of bad teachers they are doing a great job of getting rid of the good ones- educators with standards, who need to teach and cannot continue in a position where the conditions make that impossible.
In our three days in Madison I had the opportunity to interview three exemplary educators. Elizabeth (Beth) Miller is a bilingual teacher of 4th and 5th grade Latino children. She had lucrative career as an architectural historian before returning to school to get her degree in bilingual education.
When her son was young she volunteered in his bilingual classroom and discovered she loved it. As he grew up she longed to be around young children. In addition she was motivated by a a need to address a pressing social justice issue: filling the educational needs of non English -speaking immigrants.
So she took a large pay cut to become a teacher.
For Beth it is not just the attacks on teachers and public sector workers and collective bargaining that affect her personally. She is also acutely aware of how the anti-immigrant rhetoric and legislation hurt her students and their families. In addition, the elimination of Badger Care will leave many of them without health coverage.
Like Beth, Larry Iles also traded in a much more lucrative career for a life as a teacher. Larry was an engineer, working for a big company, flying around the country. Like Beth Larry also began moving down the path twoard becoming a teacher when he volunteered is his child’s first grade classroom.
Larry teaches math at West High School, where his wife teaches science. They arrive at school early and stay late and weekends are spent grading and planning for the next week. They share students, trade tips; living and breathing teaching... and loving it .
Both LArry and Beth told me about their experience participating in a four day work stoppage organized by the Madison Teachers union (MTI) last February. They called in sick 4 days in a row. and lost four days wages as a consequence. Said Beth "I conisdered it my job, during those days to go down to the Capital and protest." Larry talked about how beautiful it was to see students from rival schools marching together. Beth was inspired by some of her undocumented students and their families who had the courage to come out and join the protests. Both of them said that what happened was unprecdented. Like the 1960s but--- according to Beth--, much more diverse, with people from all walks of life involved and –according to Larry—lcking in the violence he remembers as a kid growing up in Madison during the “War at Home” against the Vietnam War. Now “everyone was polite and cared for each other”.
I also interviewed Donna Vukelich-Selva, a professor of Education at Edgewood College. As a teacher of future teachers Donna is acutely aware of problems in our current education, especially for students of color. She is passionate about training teachers who are culturally competent and understand the needs of children experiencing poverty. Teachers in Madison learn soon enough that many of their children are hungry when they come to school. 50% of Madison’s children are receiving free and reduced lunch. Notes Donna: “The teachers I work with are all bringing in granola bars, cheese sticks and raisin to feed their students”
AS Donna tries to ready her students for the classroom she fears that cuts will make their jobs impossible. The move is to increase class size of every level. High school kids on trips abroad with 40 kids instead of fifteen will get less out of it. More critical is the increase in kindergarten class size. “When you add four five or seven more kids to a classroom more kids are going to fall through the cracks. Beth echoed this concern: “It is about money” she said. Kids need attention and they are not going to get what they need in bigger classrooms
For these three, educators, teaching is a calling, a social justice commitment, a passion. It is their life’s work, not just a job. However, it is possible to turn away even such dedicated teacher. “I’m starting to think about early retirement, said Beth.
Wisconsin uprising is truly inspiring to those of us out side of the state. However, the struggle to protect the common good here has just begun.
Bridging economic and cultural divides
One of the great privileges of this trip is that we get to cross economic, cultural, racial, ethnic, religious and ideological borders and be with all kinds of people in all kinds of settings. We enter a community, at the laundramat, the KFC, the College, the hotel, the RV park. Often we have needs that thrust us into the community for that moment or hour or evening. We need rest, food, water, and always a bathroom. We need help with navigation, seek shelter from the elements, and yes, use wifi.
Often we hear dire warnings from our new community, about those people in the other part of town, or the next town. We have yet to find these warnings to be true.
We (that is – people in the United States – and probably most other places) live in such closed spheres, often side by side. We are often unaware of this and will deny it wholesale.
In Rochester, Cleveland, and Ann Arbor we saw entirely different worlds within blocks of each other. Trees are often an indication that you are crossing a class dividing line- (you know the term leafy neighborhood? What comes to mind? Not a slum. ) Who decides who gets the trees on the boulevards?
North Hampton is the home of Smith College a prestigious private liberal arts college for women. Our daughter’s workshop was taking place there and so it was our first stop. Coming in on the bike trail we missed our mark by one stop . We stopped at the KFC to clean up and to ask directions. None of the dozen people in the KFC- all happy to help- knew where Smith College was! We soon learned we were ½ mile from it. Just four blocks away from the KFC is the beginning of the college-oriented shops. Two different countries just blocks apart. Two worlds that seem to know nothing of the other.
The Smith college shopping area is stuffed with more organic local restaurants, clothing stores, coffee shops, yoga and reflexology studios and day spas than exist along the entire Erie Canal trail. Many more.
The people at the KFC, where we shared shade and clean bathrooms (“checked every 30 minutes”) but not food, were dining on buckets that provide lots of calories and flavor for little money. Around the corner you can spend 4 times as much on an organic mesclun salad.
I do not know what these observations have to do with how Smith College uses its resources to benefit the whole community. At the University of Minnesota where I got three degrees and taught for a decade, I participated in many discussions and projects designed to bridge the divide between “ town and gown”: to bring the resources and the knowledge generated at the university to benefit the community and the wisdom of the community into the university. I found that there were those deeply committed to this endeavor and others, often in positions of power, who preferred the greenhouse effect: a university cloistered from ‘the real world”.
In a car we can pass through areas that are worlds apart from us without learning anything about them. On a bicycle it is also possible to pass the worlds in which you do not belong without letting them touch you. But on a long trip like this we stop when we have needs and given our peanut-sized bladders – we stop a lot. We rely on people from all walks of life to help us out. Hopefully, in the exchange, as we share ourselves with them, we give something as well.
These exchanges are, by far, the best part of this 60 week bicycle trip around the United States.
Friday, June 10, 2011
Stuff
Stuff.
Recently people in Alabama, Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Massachusetts, and North Minneapolis Minnesota have been devastated by Tornados. Hundreds of people have died and thousands have lost loved ones. Tens of thousands of people have lost the stuff of their lives; homes, essentials for eating, dressing and work, and things that make them comfortable, bring joy and provide them with a sense of themselves.
People need stuff; for survival, for pleasure, for identity, for memories. But us homosapians also seem to have a tendency to collect, hoard, accumulate stuff that can hold us down.IT is hard for us to know when we have enough, when more is less, when to let go, when to share. Most of us don't have John McCain's problem - not knowing how many houses we own- but most of us do accumulate things that not only don't we need - but having them actually drags us down. That can happen even when there are other things we need and don't have ( like perhaps we could use one of McCain's houses because we are without but we have collected too many pens, because, you never know.).
As we talk to people about this trip, people tell us about their dreams, where they would go and what they would do with a year. More often than not, in one way or another, people cite stuff as the thing that keeps them from going. Stuff to organize , stuff to remove, stuff that must be dealt with before one can take off, stuff that is too expensive to store, too burdensome to sort through.
David and I like to think we are not that bad in stuff accumulation. Neither of us like to shop. We have been deliberately not accumulating for about five years now, since layoff number one, blah blah blah.
For the past nine months now, the primary - get-ready-for-the-trip activity has been dealing with stuff. Packing away, giving away, throwing away stuff that we forget about the minute it is out of sight. Among the stuff, are hundreds of pens and pencils, over a dozen staplers, same for scissors, ditto on skin cream, (weird since we don't use it much) and combs( yet I never have one) and unfilled photo frames. Hundreds of notebooks, many with one page written in them. Fourteen containers of floss, nine containers of partially-used suncreen. We wont talk about books, magazines, toys, (the kid is 21), and the gazillions of articles cut out of the newspaper and stuffed anywhere because they are SO important, but will never be found when needed. The floss and suncreen containers are going on the bikes - for penance, and because we dont want to pay for more of this stuff!
In one week we will begin a 14 month bike trip,traveling with all of our stuff on our bicycles: bed, house, food, clothing medicine cabinet, toiletries, work, amusment, and of course, transportation. We know we are immensely fortunate to be leaving a house in south Minneapolis, still full of stuff, for us to enjoy , or not, when we get back.
Monday, May 23, 2011
STOP ALL Raids
When my father was five years old soldiers barged into his apartment, upending furniture, tearing apart closets, and taking papers, photos and other possessions, looking for my grandfather. For months afterward the family lived with curtains drawn during the day, hoping not to attract attention from government authorities. When I was twenty-something, my dad and I visited his childhood home. As we stood in front of the stone apartment building, he told me about the raid as though it happened yesterday. His face changed to that of a small child and I was suddenly called to comfort the terrified kid inside a man twice my age.
Today U.S. authorities use raids for a variety of purposes. In Iraq and Afghanistan it is a common military tactic. In the United States raids of homes, workplaces and communities are also conducted by local police, the Drug Enforcement Agency, (DEA), Immigration and Customs Enforcement, (ICE) the FBI, and Homeland Security.
Raids as a military tactic. The wars that the United States fights today no longer involve soldiers facing soldiers. Raids of neighborhoods by U.S. and allied forces are modus operandi. According to Iraq Veterans Against the War “raids of Iraqi homes are a daily occurrence”. If you are Iraqi or Afghani, that is reason enough to subject you to search and seizure at any time without a warrant. In other words, to the foreign occupiers of Iraq and Afghanistan, if you are a citizen of your own country, you are automatically guilty until proven innocent.
Raids as a tactic of immigration policy In the United States, ICE agents have different formula: if you are of Latin American descent, or look like you might be, that is reason enough to warrant raids of your workplaces, your homes, your community spaces. In the case of undocumented immigrants, such a raid can lead to deportation. Documented or not, immigration raids lead to arrests and detentions in centers where civil, and human rights are violated.
Raids in Drug enforcement Have you seen the movie American Violet? It depicts a true story of an apartment complex in a black neighborhood of a racially segregated Texas town in the early 21st century. We know about the raid because one young mother of four accused of selling drugs to children at the local high-school refused to plead guilty and take a plea bargain for a crime she did not commit. This meant she would remain in jail, away from her kids for weeks, lose her job and find herself blacklisted when seeking employment elsewhere. The ACLU took up her case. Their website is full of stories of innocent people losing property and livelihoods due to drug raids. The effect of these drug raids on children in predominately low income and African American communities, are not measured.
FBI raids
The FBI, we are told, is ever vigilant and proactive these days, trying to find terrorists before they act. What I have learned from the raids and subpoenas of anti war activists in our community is that we need to question the motives and judgment of any action taken by the FBI or Homeland Security. Just as these government raiders operate under a “guilty until proven innocent” policy, we who care about human rights, civil liberties and the security of our communities need to view the actions of these officials in the same light.
Surely, not all raids are conducted against heroes, like the Fall, 2010 FBI raids against anti-war activists in Minneapolis and elsewhere. Not all of those who are victims of raids are innocent of any crime, or victims of unjust laws. However, even when raids are conducted against those that most would agree are involved in criminal activities, raids are a blunt instrument that inevitably involve so-called collateral damage. In addition, raiders are highly susceptible to corruption because they are given license to loot property and profit from the latter. In fact those ordering and conducting raids are often the ones engaging in illegal acts: from stealing, to crimes against humanity. In affect then, raids increase crime in our communities and our world. Those damaged by these crimes are often the most innocent among us: children. The damage can last a life time.
Raids are an effective tool for fascists like the Nazi’s who raided my dad’s apartment in Glievitz, Germany when he was a child. They have no place in a democracy.
On "Humanitarian" Intervention
Based on a Speech given, May 4, 2011 at a Forum at the Carlson School of Management, sponsored by May Day Books.
Elites who benefit from war don’t fight them, and those men and women who do, would never pick up a gun to protect the interests of some 19th century railroad tycoon or 21st century oil company or weapons manufacturer. So there must be a trumped up humanitarian justification. Sometimes that humanitarianism is couched in bigotry: the enemies are in need of a different god, or are less capable of governance. Nevertheless, the people are led to believe they are doing good.
A quick review of history of the humanitarian propaganda used to sell U.S. militarism:
• 1600s – 20th century: The “Indian Wars.” These were “manifest”. God willed that the United States spread from sea to shining sea and save Native Americans souls, dead or alive. What is more humanitarian than saving someone from eternal damnation?
• 1846-48: U.S. Mexican war was to “Overthrow a tyrant” Mexican President Santanna was tyrant enough. Nevertheless that had nothing to do with U.S. desire to grab half of Mexico’s land and get access to ports on the Pacific Ocean.
• 1898: The war in Cuba that resulted in the United States inheriting a Caribbean and pacific empire from Spain – was “the splendid little war” (I just read a few days ago someone use that same phrase ironically for the war in Libya). The author of the 1899 best seller Our War for Cuba’s Freedom” argued it was the first altruistic conflagration in the history of mankind. (An ad in the New York Times in late April, put out by the NGO “Global Citizens” made the same argument about Libya, 2011. Like Mexico (and Libya) the Spanish empire was indeed tyrannical. But, to encapsulate the sentiments of Jose Marti; U.S. intervention was taking Cuba from the frying pan into the fire. Cubans could defeat the dying Spanish Empire. But, as Marti said, “once the U.S. is in who will get her out?”
• 1914-1918: In WWI all sides argued they were fighting to defeat a tyrant-- and all sides were right. The U.S. argued theirs was an anti imperialist struggle and a “war to end all wars”. The vibrant pacifist and anti-imperialist movements of the time were usurped to justify a truly insane and deadly war between imperialists squabbling over territory. During this period the United States invaded and/or occupied Haiti, Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Puerto Rico.
• 1930s -1990: Before during and after WWII, “the war to defeat fascism” the United States coddled and trained tyrants fascist and otherwise, in order to “defeat communism”. Anti-communism worked for a while as a humanitarian ideology, but Americans grew wary of it after Vietnam. .
• 1980s: To overcome this “Vietnam Syndrome” covert tactics were perfected to hide wars and interventions from the U. S. public. Most of the Caribbean region interventions (Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras , Guatemala) were covert. The 1983 invasion of Grenada, however, was overt. It took place a moment after an internal coup and so it was billed, not as an effort to overthrow the popular Maurice Bishop, but to “restore democracy”.
• 1989-1991: After the Panama invasion “against a madman” and the Persian Gulf War, successfully sold as an anti-imperialist war (opposing the intervention of a large nation –Iraq- against a small neighbor- Kuwait) Bush Sr. declared the Vietnam Syndrome dead.
• 1990s: Interventions in Haiti and Bosnia were about “nation building,” “avoiding a bloodbath” and “against ethnic cleansing”. In Haiti it appears that the United States heavy hand was involved in the 1991 removal, 1994 reinstatement and 2004 removal of President Aristide, based on his willingness and lack thereof, to comply with Neo-liberal measures imposed on him by the Bush, Clinton and Bush administrations. Nation building?
• 21st Century: Let us not forget that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan 2001 and 2003 were sold as efforts to “take down a tyrant” and “save the world from weapons of mass destruction”.
So that still leaves the question:
Might the intervention in Libya be something different? We can agree the history is sordid but don’t you think change is possible? Ghaddafi is beating up his own people and in the 21st century we shouldn’t let that happen.
I agree. When parents abuse their children, we get in our neighbors’ business. On an international level we need a body that can save the people of our planet from abuses of power.
Juan Cole, the progressive Middle East Scholar who supports the Libyan intervention says he believes that body is the United Nations.
I believe in the idea and promise of the United Nations, as perhaps Eleanor Roosevelt envisioned it, as the glorious UN Declaration of Human Rights embodies it and as many of those who work on the ground in the World Health Organization and UNICEF believe it can be: an international organization in which principals of equality, economic and social justice reign.
However that is not the United Nations that we have. In the U. N. Security Council rich countries rule and the United States dominates.
Unfortunately there is no evidence that the Obama administration is set on changing the course of our country’s foreign relations history; not in the Middle East where tyrants like Mubarak are friends until they are no longer able to hold onto power and wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan still rage, and Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain are still major aid recipients; not in Latin America, where just days ago Obama refused to apologize for the U.S. sponsored coup overthrowing Allende and installing the brutal dictator Pinochet in 1973.
Any entity that uses bombs as the instrument for carrying out humanitarianism must be rejected. The emperor wears no clothes. Bombs are not humanitarian. They kill people. Period.
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Opposing this latest intervention in Libya does not need to be an elite leftist pursuit. We too can capitalize on humanitarianism. I’ve noticed that the gungho veterans in my classes tend to share that extra dose of humanitarianism that WAMM members have. We need to think about how to talk to people of all political stripes who in their core are humanitarians like the rest of us.
We need to talk about real humanitarian alternatives. Unions like the ILWU, the longshoremen’s union use work stoppages to protest attack on workers across the globe. Consumers use boycotts as we did in apartheid S. Africa and in Arizona more recently. The courageous people in the International solidarity movement, Witness for Peace, Non-violent Peace Task force send people to war- torn regions to stand before tanks and broker peace and justice. You don’t have to be a hero. Anyone with a buck can support these organizations engaged in real humanitarianism.
But, as the health professionals say “first do no harm”. Our first responsibility as U.S. humanitarians is to stop U.S. military madness.
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Fight Ignorance not Immigrants: Ethnic Studies Week October 1-7
Dateline June 21 2010: The first day of summer looking back on a springtime of outrage.
There was much to be outraged about during the spring of 2010: Twenty nine miners died at work in West Virginia, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continued to take lives here and there, oil spilled and spilled and spilled into the gulf of Mexico, President Obama signed a law increasing the severity of punishment for government whistle blowers, just as brave soldiers unveiled truths of massacres by U.S. troops, Israel attacked and killed people on a flotilla bringing goods to Gaza, successful Tea party candidate Rand Paul declared that the 1964 Civil Rights, and 1990 Americans with Disabilities Acts represented excessive government intervention, while the governor of Arizona governor passed a law making it legal to racially profile brown people.
Then on May 21, the Arizona governor signed another law making ethnic studies in the public schools illegal and just a week later the Texas State Board of Education passed their new social studies standards and , it seemed to me, these were the outrages that connected all the other outrages together. For if we can’t learn about the lives of people who are not white, if we don’t learn about the history of mine workers and their struggle for safe working conditions, if we don’t learn about wars and the courageous whistle blowers past and present , if teachers can not address issues of the day that directly impact the students, like immigration, race disparities in health, employment, and education, if students don’t learn about how social change happens, if teachers and students are muzzled, if learning about critical race theory and Chicano, African American, Asian American, American Indian studies is a privilege only available to college students, if a tiny group of right wing zealots somewhere in Texas can tell the nation’s children what they can and cannot know, if critical thinking remains an elite pursuit, then blood and oil and hatred will continue to spill. We need to stop and talk and study and think and talk some more about where we are going.
So let’s start the conversation. Join the 155 (and growing) group of educators from around the United States who have come together to let people like Gov Jan Brewer (and unfortunately she has clones in local government around the country)know that if you try to ban ethnic studies , it will spread. We have proclaimed October 1-7 Ethnic Studies Week. All over the country, in schools and communities, people will engage in what would amount to civil disobedience in the Arizona public schools. They will be talking about the issues and people censored by the Texas State Board of Education. To see who we are go to the initiators page of the website ethnicstudiesweekoctober1-7.org You can interact with this website, reporting plans for the week, providing testimony, resources, etc.
Monday, February 11, 2008
Lou Dobbs IMMIGRATION, ECONOMY, WAR, RACE
And most of all, he’s anti-immigrant.
Anti- “illegal” immigrant, anti-“alien”, anti-non-English speaking, anti-“people who sneak cross our southern border”. Furthermore, he wants you to know we are in a CRISIS. The “illegal aliens” penetrating our Southern border are the lynch pin. They are at the core of everything else that ails us. The message is implicit. The “alien” who comes in after hours, who works behind the kitchen door, the one who packages the meat and picks the potatoes for pennies on the dollar; they are the ones to blame for war, corporatism, corruption.
This is a fascist message, clear and simple. It focuses on real issues facing a broad sector of society, unites people who were previously divided and provides them all with a close but alien scapegoat. The previously upper-middle class, join the poor in the “declining middle”; Black and White, now all “Americans”. All of us fed up with this criminal war, disgusted with corrupt politicians and the corporations that support them, are susceptible to his message.
I am searching for a metaphor. Is it like the doctor who convinces you that you are addicted to nicotine and prescribes heroine to kick the habit? The long distance runner who sees they are falling behind and so decides to run back to the starting line with all deliberate speed? Is he showing hungry dogs how their masters gorge and then skinning and dangling the pup that eats the least, in front of the hungry canines? Anyway you look at it the American people are desperate for a cure, they want to win at something, they are hungry. They are willing to attack the weakest link that holds their coalition together. They are ready to take decisive action, even if the action they take moves them precisely in the wrong direction. Lou Dobbs knows this.
One of the first political awakening moments for me was when I was nine years old and sitting on the porch swing next door, in North Carolina in 1967, hearing my southern white neighbors talk about how Wallace was the man for the little guy. I knew that in our house the man was a racist. So how could he provide hope for the little guy next door?
Around the same time I started to talk to my dad about Hitler, and how he was able to convince the German people that the Jews among them were the cause of their very real social and economic ills. My dad was born a Jew in Germany the same year Hitler came to power. I thought he ought to know. But he didn’t, and I’m still trying to figure it out.
I still don’t know. Lou Dobbs of CNN does, and he has the microphone. I just have this blog that no one reads.
Thursday, February 7, 2008
ECONOMY AND WAR : Its the Economy OR the War!
THE ECONOMY AND THE WAR HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH EACH OTHER.
Apparently we, the public, have switched concerns. We are no longer worry about the war because now we are worried about the economy.
Well this may be so, but the mind manipulation coup here is to convince us that we must not connect the issues.
So lets see how well you have been brain washed. Which one of these issues is the war and which one is the economy? Remember CHOOSE ONE. If you choose both your answer will be nullified.
1. The young man or woman in your life signs up for duty in Iraq because there are no jobs at home.
WHEN THE POLLSTER CALLS AND ASKS," WHAT CONCERNS YOU MOST, THE WAR OR THE ECONOMY" YOU ANSWER_________
2. The young veteran in your life is unable to find or afford care for his/her PTSD.
WHEN THE POLLSTER CALLS AND ASKS," WHAT CONCERNS YOU MOST, THE WAR OR THE ECONOMY" YOU ANSWER_________
3. Despite a multi-trillion dollar budget with expanding military expenditures your elementary school has cancelled after school soccer due to lack of funds. You cannot afford childcare because your health premiums went up January 1st. Your child stays at home alone.
WHEN THE POLLSTER CALLS AND ASKS," WHAT CONCERNS YOU MOST, THE WAR OR THE ECONOMY" YOU ANSWER_________
4. You lose your home due to a predatory lender jacking up your mortgage. The government tells you it would be unfair to provide relief for people who try to live beyond their means. Meanwhile they pay private contractors like Blackwater inflated fees for services that include murder and torture. You wonder who is the criminal, and who is irresponsible with their/our treasure.
WHEN THE POLLSTER CALLS AND ASKS," WHAT CONCERNS YOU MOST, THE WAR OR THE ECONOMY" YOU ANSWER_________
Reader: I have to go now. Please add your own test questions! Lets connect the dots and not let them blindside us into not seeing the causes of our hard times, and the true cost of war.
Anne Winkler-Morey Ph.D is an historian and itinerent professor. blog: " People's Living History"
Friday, January 25, 2008
MIDTOWN GLOBAL MARKET: The Global is Local
Coats, hats sweaters, scarves, snow pants, purses, packages of new purchases are piled high on the tiny table. Outside it is eleven below zero, before the wind-chill is factored in. In this inner city neighborhood Latinos and Africans and African Americans make up 65 percent of the population and European Americans, Asian American and Native Americans sharing the remaining third. Thawing out on this make-shift dance-floor in the window corner of the Midtown Global Market last Sunday, were small children and grandparents, professional dancers and first-timers, a panoply of body types, ages, races and ethnicities, gathered for free Salsa lessons.
The Midtown Global Market is not just a colorful place to come and chase the winter blues away. It is sweet revenge, the lemonade from lemons, the silver lining after a horrific storm, a picking up the scraps left by the ravages of globalization and making something beautiful out of them.
The
Sears left the Phillips neighborhood in
In the 1980s, if you remember, the Reagan administration was funding mercenary forces and death squads in Central America, some with drug money that poisoned urban centers like the Phillips neighborhood in
There they mixed with Native Americans from the nation’s only urban reservation, the Little Earth of United Tribes; first, second and third generation African Americans who made their way “Up North”, third, fourth, and fifth generation Netherlands and other more recent European immigrants. In the mid 1990s a combination of drought in Mexico, NAFTA and job shortages in Minnesota, created the push and pull motivations that led Mexicans from the states of Morelos, Puebla and elsewhere to immigrate to Minnesota. They joined a new wave of Hmong and other Southeast Asian immigrants who came to
The Midtown Exchange is by no means some kind of small business utopia. All kinds of corporate compromises were made to fund the project, and neighborhood input was squelched several times in the process. Its survival is dependent on corporate tax dollars from Allina and Wells Fargo, whose offices in the building provide a financial anchor. The condos that fill part of the huge complex--- built right on the Greenway-- a bike, walk and soon-to-be-trolley path that connects the chain of Lakes with the Mississippi—would a great green addition to our city were it not for the sticker price per unit . At $1400 for a one bedroom, they are far from affordable for those who currently reside in the neighborhood.
Still when coats and purses are piled high without concern for security, and strangers from all over the world join each other in this urban core to dance at high noon on an arctic Sunday in January, one can be forgiven for feeling a little bit of euphoria. In the frozen tundra, the globe strikes back….. with a dance!
Sunday, January 20, 2008
TRANSNATIONAL LABOR, THEN AND NOW: Century Old IWW
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COLLEGE RANKING: U.S. New and World Report Move Over:
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LATIN AMERICA LEFT: Bolivians Take to the Streets Summer 2005
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KATRINA, CORPORATIZATION: Water, Water Everywhere........
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BICYCLE TOURING: Biking Across the Great Divide
| I am a city kid. As a matter of fact, far back as I know about, my ancestors have been urban people. Perhaps because of laws prohibiting Jews from owning land in Eastern Europe where my wandering ancestors harken from, the stories passed down are not filled with pigs and chickens. As for me, though I have lived in diverse urban neighborhoods—some wealthy, some impoverished, some insulated University towns and some huge international cities—I have always been close to the inner-city action. This summer I spent five weeks bicycling from Minneapolis to Estes Park, Colorado, with my partner, daughter and niece. For 33 days we moved from one rural community to another, seeking shelter, food, shade and water—and a place to rest during the heat of the day. By the end of the first day when we bedded down in Chaska, Minnesota, we had entered red—as in “red state” or Bush territory—and never left it.  Much of the time I was struck by the width and depth of the rural/urban divide. We traveled through five states, several geographic strata and across one time zone, but the most graphic barometer of a community was not its location but its size. I learned to differentiate between places that I’d previously considered as all rural. Heck, I’m the one who thought I was working in a rural area when I commuted from Minneapolis to St. Cloud, to teach history at the University there, many moons ago. That’s how ignorant I was. Now I know the difference between “rural” communities with populations of 25,000; 10,000; 5,000; 1,000 and those under 500, and to my surprise, I prefer the latter.In these tiny communities (we stopped in every one we came across) there were no McDonald’s, no Dairy Queens and certainly no Wal-Marts. In fact there were usually no choices. If you sought water, food and shelter from the sun and heat, you went to the only café, gas station or bar in town. If there were two or more places, we soon learned how to find the place where the entire town was gathered. It was Sue’s Diner in Peterson, Iowa, Porky’s Bar in Winside, Nebraska, and the Sands Café in Merriman, Nebraska— where pictures of every visitor adorn the walls (we’re in the bike corner).  The wayside bar and café in Hawk Springs, Wyoming—where this shellfish-eating vegetarian made the mistake of ordering Rocky Mountain Oysters—has, at any given time, three times as many diners than town residents.Then there’s the local gas station in a Nebraska town 20 miles outside of Sioux City, Iowa, whose name I can’t remember for the life of me, but whose people I will never forget. Some 30 people gathered at the gas station to kibbitz on Sunday morning, making us honorary members of their community, despite our ridiculous-looking neon bike clothing and our urban origins, and their conservative politics. Conservative, yes, as was evident from the emblems on their cars and houses. They wanted the world to know they supported the war in Iraq, and knew many loved ones fighting in it. Snippets of rabid local radio told me not to start a conversation about immigration or gay marriage with these people I depended on to fill my water bottles. I will never know how much my “white” skin, deep brown from over-exposure to the sun, and my obviously heterosexual relationship (“this is my husband, my daughter, my niece ...”) eased my interactions with my new rural friends. And yet ...  Did you know that Nebraska is the first and only state in the nation to have a state-owned electric company? “If that sounds like communism,” a local book on the subject opined, “it is not an indication of the political persuasion of the people of Nebraska, who are in general very conservative.”So how did this happen? Well sometime in the ’30s the people of rural Nebraska realized they would never get electricity if they did not socialize it because there was no profit in providing this utility to such tiny and disparate communities. I can attest that this socialist mentality continues to exist when it come to basic services in Nebraska. Over and over again, people we met encouraged us to keep our eye out for windmills on every ranch, “Each has a water spigot, the water is good to drink and it’ll cool you off.” We were advised not to be deterred by barbed wire fences—“Those are for cows, not people” or property rights, “People aren’t like that here.” Two things struck me: the generosity to strangers, and the comfort in inviting us to trespass on their neighbor’s land as if it was their own.  We never had to figure out how to get water from a windmill because enough people offered us water from their kitchens and garden hoses. We did, however, borrow shade from a rancher’s only tree or a farmer’s barn. Down we plopped right on someone’s front lawn— can you imagine that in the city? The only question we got was “Are you OK? Is there anything I can do for you?”I wish I had entered into some conversations with the people about the war. I did learn that in communities like Wayne (which is big enough to have a community college, but small enough to have only one movie theater) a whole national guard platoon had left this dying Nebraska Sandhills community to destroy another sand-hill community in Iraq. Every home and business declared its support for these local youth. Other economic options are few in Wayne. If you go to the community college, there is no guarantee you will get a job in your chosen field. There are simply too few people in the region to support much economic activity of any kind. The drought of several years has wilted the agricultural possibilities in a region where cows outnumber people.  We had only one intimate conversation about the war during the trip, with a young man we met in an ambulance when my daughter slit her leg open (another story). This man once lived in South Minneapolis—just off Lake Street—and loved it, but had to move because he could not afford it. He moved to a tiny town in South Dakota. We met him in a town of 5,000 in Iowa, where he was training as an Emergency Medical Technician before going to Iraq. When we were about to leave the hospital he gave us his address and told us to write when we made it to Colorado. He said he would write us when he started basic training next month. When it turned out we were staying in the same hotel, we spent the evening trying to convince him there were options for him other than the military—but with no financial resources, he could not see them.We never found out what all the flags, “God bless America” signs and yellow ribbons meant, in terms of depth of support for the war or the Bush administration, but I wished I’d had a “Vets for Peace” button that suggested supporting the troops by bringing them home. I wondered how a gold-star-mother-for-peace would be treated in these communities. I don’t know. All I can tell you is that people who sported such emblems believe in social cooperation—they share with their neighbors, are intelligent, creative and kind to strangers. They live in places where there are no bookstores within a 300-mile radius, and their libraries, wonderful and inviting as they are, are decorated with posters claming that God loves America. They get only one radio station, and although I imagine they have access to every TV station and internet website, I never saw any other channel but FOX when I turned on TV.  While traveling across country this news-aholic experienced the longest dry spell in her adult lifetime. I have to tell you that out there on the prairie, snippets about Israel and Lebanon, Fidel Castro’s illness and Mexico’s post-election upheaval seemed like absurd science fiction from another planet. Concerned as I was about meeting drunk drivers on the road, the only thing I knew for sure was that I hoped Mel Gibson was nowhere in the vicinity.Perhaps that is the way news from the “rest of the world” appears all the time to the hardworking rural people in these depopulated regions whose lives are filled with concerns about drought and calves and corn. I don’t know. Despite the dearth of people in these intensely rural farming and ranching communities, these European-American rural folk share with Latinos, African Americans and American Indians the tradition of providing more than their share of human cannon fodder for this country’s military adventures, generation after generation. Veterans from these parts, who return to their communities, often become recluses, sheltered from other humans by the vast empty spaces of Wyoming and Nebraska. I can only imagine the difficulty returning veterans face as they try to talk to people in these tiny communities. In the library in Basset, Nebraska, a patriotic local community group decided to interview all the veterans in their county. They found that while World War II vets might tell a battle story or two, Vietnam veterans and those from either of the Gulf wars were decidedly silent. The only comments about these more recent veterans came from relatives. One of the more extensive reports about a Vietnam vet who died at home in an “accident” was submitted by a sibling who wrote, “Like most veterans from Vietnam, he refused to talk about his service.” I wish I had some real words of wisdom, some way of crossing the chasm between rural and urban. All I have to report is this: The people out there in the so-called “red” regions are as tender and vulnerable as those in the inner city. And this war is leaving a gaping wound in their communities, as the howling prairie winds muffle the cries of veterans. The myriad yellow ribbons and the red, white and blue buntings may paper over the crimes of the government against the people for now, but for how long? When they, in the rural areas, and we, in the urban areas, have had enough, who will we turn against? Each other, or the corporations and politicians who seek to divide us and conquer us? || |
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EDUCATION GAP: WWJN (What Would Janelle Need )
Janelle (not her real name) is a bright African American teenager, two years behind in school and currently failing in her course work. She is clearly a child not performing at her academic potential. What if we made policy as if the needs of Janelle, a public school student I tutor, were our primary concern?
What Would Janelle Need to succeed?
Janelle would need a warm safe home that is securely hers. She and her mother and siblings have been shuffling from one shelter to another for at least two years. Whenever she moves she misses school for days, even weeks. Sometimes when I meet with her issues of security, lack of sleep and fear are too great to focus on reading.
Janelle’s family would need a steady form of income. With a preschool child at home, this means her mother must either earn income to stay home with her child or earn enough at a job to pay for high-quality day care. Economic needs are so overwhelming in Janelle’s home that academic needs must be secondary.
Janelle would need a future. She would need to see people like herself who succeed- not fantastic rags to riches stories that she can only dream about but real possible paths to a future that provides a diverse array of positive choices.
Janelle would need a school system that allows her to make real progress. Now when she goes to school she is faced with overwhelming task of running to catch up to a moving train. Her progress is not measured, only the growing distance between her and her class mates. Testing kids to death, closing schools, reducing teachers’ benefits, don’t benefit Janelle. Only fully funding our schools to provide the teachers and materials needed to fulfill the needs of all students, will help Janelle succeed.
As a reading tutor I dream of the day that there is no shortage of books to chose from written to address cultural, academic, social and emotional needs of African American children, and other children of color. We treasure every new book because of its rarity, and the cost of procuring it. Janelle would need books and curricula that speak to her soul and her academic needs. She would need the funds to flood children like herself with books so they can find their own voices through literature.
As the white over-educated mother of a public school high school senior excelling in the same public school system that is failing Janelle, I know how much daily assistance my child has needed in the last thirteen years, from adjusting to kindergarten rules to mining the college application process. If we are ever going to close the education gap Janelle would need a school that provides evening and weekend homework assistance. This is a tall order. It means providing transportation, lights, and heat and salaries.
Janelle would need to know there will be a place for her in college when she gets there. We need to pay her tuition and find her an institution that will take her the next step. As a college educator I know that despite the current hype, selectivity does not create excellence in the higher education institutions. It only ensures that the next crop of college-educated leaders will be as insular and narrow-minded about protecting their class privilege, as the last. We need more colleges and more access, more ideas and backgrounds in the best and brightest pot, so that the next generation of people with
know-power will have the interests of Janelle’s children in mind.
From a home to live in, to college tuition, everything Janelle needs costs money. Anyone who thinks they have a solution to the education gap that will not involve spending more on the needs of our neediest children is wasting their breath and our time.
But here is a question to ask yourself: Would your life be better or worse if the policy makers, from the President to local school boards, asked What Would Janelle Need before they acted?
Would you be better off if no-one was homeless; if everyone had adequate work, and mothers could afford to choose to stay home or access high quality childcare; if everyone had health coverage and every child felt they had a future with choices and a positive and fulfilling role to play in society? Would your world be better or worse if every child was given the resources to reach their education potential at their own pace; if every child had the choice to become a college-educated adult?
It’s an election year. The pundits would have you believe that you, the public, can be divided by your issues – domestic or foreign, economic or social, health care, or housing, or education. Tell them these are fools’ choices. Demand that the candidates and the media spinners dig deeper. Tell them to ask WWJN?---- What Would Janelle Need? And when they come back with “How do we pay for it?” Tell them to begin by STWS---- Stopping The War ……Sweetie !
Anne Winkler-Morey, Ph .D teaches history at colleges and Universities in the Twin Cities area and is a reading tutor for “Janelle” and others in the
IMMIGRATION DEBATE: Back of the Line
The Back of the Line
To hear some Presidential candidates tell it, Americans’ problems will be solved if we just send the lowest paid workers in this country home and make them, “get to the back of the line.” Yes, to those who clean our nations toilets, break their backs in our fields, stand in a frozen puddle of blood processing our nation’s meat, change the diapers of our nation’s children: we not only refuse you citizenship, we not only call you names, but we act as though you are criminals, we arrest you and deport you and tell you to get in the back of the line.
Lets call this what it is: scape-goating. It happens every time things get worse for the majority of us in the vast and diverse middle. We look for someone to blame.
And things are defiantly getting worse for those of us living on $20-100 thousand. Some of us must sell that second home, some of us are cutting back on everything else to pay that mortgage, some of us are facing foreclosure and some of us are looking for a place to rent that we can afford. We all feel the squeeze of rising healthcare, rent, mortgage, food and gas prices. We are seeing our real wages decline.
We are looking for someone to blame.
Instead of looking in front of us to those mortgage, health insurance, pharmaceutical, and utilities corporations, making a killing off our hard times, we turn around and glare at the back of line, to those who feed families and relatives in other nations on salaries of $12,000; those who live without drivers licenses and health care access, those who face discrimination in housing and education. We look back and say “get to the back of the line”!
Immigrants are already at the back of the line. They share that growing backspace with Iraq War veterans, homeless citizens, inner city kids, small farmers and a growing number of people losing their livelihoods as factories cross borders seeking cheaper wages. Let’s show those corporate hogs who say we have money for war, but not housing and education and veteran health care, that we know who is to blame.
It’s not immigrants.
Anne Winkler-Morey has three college degrees, works four jobs, makes $20,000 and would have no health insurance if not for the husband’s union job. She is trying to figure out how to pay her daughter’s college tuition.