No Longer Victims

It was a wonderful weekend in Ohio with family. My Dad's 90th Birthday could not have been nicer. Thanks to my sisters, my son, my niece and nephew and to the great nieces for making a memorable weekend for us all!

My inbox is a blizzard and much of it is Wisconsin specific. But let me first tell you about something I read in the car to and from Ohio. Grace Lee Boggs is 95 years old. She has been a 'movement activist' her entire life. Fifty years of that she has lived in Detroit. To say Detroit has been struggling for decades would be an understatement of epic proportions. Yet Grace and her late husband, Jimmy, stayed in Detroit and made an active life (which she continues to do) there helping to protest, organize and foster efforts to bring Detroit's grassroots together and to encourage sustainable community. Or as Grace loves to say, beloved community, after Martin Luther King, Jr.'s passionate appeal in the 1960's. I was struck on nearly every page by the beauty, intensity and clarity with which Grace writes. She has spent a lifetime sorting and redefining her own position on protest, building movements, fighting injustice and constructing hardy, uplifting groups within cities like Detroit. In a place where industrialization has failed and in its failure brought down neighborhoods, Grace's clear thinking on whether it is more productive to march in the streets or, at some point, to accept that the government cannot and will not respond to those protests and get on with creative efforts to build community from the ground up is breathtaking. We need to hear her words of wisdom today as post-industrial America becomes corporatized America and brings down neighborhoods, communities and support structures that we once believed would continue without interruption. If you have a chance please consider reading The New American Revolution by Grace Lee Boggs. You will not regret the time it takes to read this important book.

I think the movement in Wisconsin is struggling to find the balance between showing our faces to the Walker bunch, just to let them know we are still there, and the building of a grassroots community that can begin taking care of itself, whatever that may mean in to the future. There were a number of updates over the weekend. Here's some of what I received.

Breaking news: One Wisconsin Now has obtained documents showing that 12 current Republican members of the State Senate are forcing you to pay the cost for their private membership in one of the nation’s most powerful and influential corporate policy outfits – the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). ALEC is the corporate front group that has concocted and supported disastrous attacks on the middle class like ending collective bargaining, privatizing public schools, preventing access to affordable health care and starving local governments – taking police officers and firefighters off the streets. Use this link to the see the Senate’s Dishonorable Dozen:

http://www.onewisconsinnow.org/blog/WI%20Senate%20Republicans%20ALEC%20Membership.pdf

Date: May 14, 2011 - 2:30pm - 4:00pm
Wisconsin State Capitol Madison, WI

Walker and legislative allies plan to bypass courts, jam rights-stripping measures through with their budget proposal! We Are Wisconsin and the Wisconsin Wave will host a rally on the Capitol steps on Saturday, May 14, to send Scott Walker and his legislative allies a resounding message: stop your attacks on working people.

One of the things that Grace Lee Boggs repeats throughout her book is her own story of realizing that people do not need to continually define themselves as victims. The huge leap for those of us who protest injustices and work for peace, transparency and honesty in government, is to come to terms with a shift in our thinking - are we to continue on forever in front of the capitols of the states or are we to combine that action with getting busy in our neighborhoods working to plant a community garden, foster organic CSAs, develop co-operatives, re-think education, plant trees. Grace writes of wonderful efforts in Detroit to re-energize the neighborhood communities for conflict resolution thereby reducing potential crimes and providing all with safety. All our neighborhoods and communities need this work. Matthew Fox would call this 'right livelihood'. What is more important than this kind of work? Genuine solidarity, clear protest, understanding our own histories and our country's history and finding new terms to use for ourselves - no longer victims of the system but builders of beloved communities.

For the children -
Power To All The People!