“Working at UPS should be the best job in America and it just isn’t.” — — a Teamster negotiator to a UPS official during the tense 1997 national contract negotiations.
I was once a package driver for a brief time back in the 1970’s at a non-union local Silver Spring MD delivery company. I did enjoy being out on the road, meeting people on the loading docks, listening to the occasionally humorous chatter on the dispatch radio and knowing the best places around DC to cop a submarine sandwich for lunch.
But one day after almost 12 hours on the road, I fell asleep in the slow lane of a Northern Virginia highway and woke up in the fast lane. I was lucky. I could have killed several people including myself. I quit that company soon afterward and found warehouse and trucking work at a place with regular hours and a union.
Yes, working for United Parcel Service, the leading US package delivery company should be a good job, as the anonymous Teamster negotiator indicated. Joe Allen’s new book, The Package King: A Rank and File History of the United Parcel Service, explains why it isn’t.
Today’s UPS package drivers are subjected to intense surveillance, constant speedup, are subject to serious injury and face a harsh disciplinary system where guilt is assumed. In the warehouses, workers are subjected to brutal unsafe working conditions and many are part-timers laboring at poverty wages.
“And this hunger strike has taught people that we don’t have to fight by other peoples’ rules. And we can make the decision…if you could please repeat after me…make the decision…that you will not bow down to people that don’t love your children.”
— Jitu Brown speaking at Rainbow PUSH
IT WAS an emotional moment for the Dyett hunger strikers at the weekly Rainbow PUSH Coalition livestream TV broadcast on Saturday, September 19. Joined by Rainbow PUSH leaders and other hunger strikers, Jitu Brown made the announcement that the hunger strike was coming to an end after 34 days. Brown pledged, however, that the struggle to create the Walter Dyett Global Leadership and Green Technology High School would go on.
Speaking at Rainbow PUSH, Jitu Brown announced the end of hunger strike
The Chicago Board of Education was forced by the pressure of the hunger strike to reopen the now-closed Dyett high school, located in the historic African American neighborhood of Bronzeville. But instead of accepting the proposal that the Coalition to Revitalize Dyett had submitted for a global leadership-green technology school, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) insisted it would reopen Dyett as an arts-focused school, with a technology component.
Hunger striker Jeanette Rahmann-Taylor embraces a supporter
Forest Claypool announced the hastily cobbled together “plan” 15 minutes after informing Coalition spokesperson Jitu Brown that there would be no further negotiations. Coalition members were excluded from the September 3 press conference. So the hunger strike continued.On the September 9 Chicago Tonight show with Carol Marin, Brown explained why green technology was such an important part of the Coalition proposal for a community-based neighborhood school:
Why did we settle on Dyett Global Leadership and Green Technology High School? Number one, Dyett sits in the heart of Washington Park. There’s a wildlife observatory there, there’s a fully functional pond where people go fishing, there’s a thriving youth-run farm and, most importantly, green technology is the number one growth industry in the U.S. So when the mayor imposed an arts school on the community, it was insulting, and that’s why we didn’t stop.Because what’s the number one industry for unemployment? The arts. We are not opposed to a strong arts program in our school, but we just want to see a school that prepares our young people to be the next scientists, the next civic leaders and the next doctors.
At the core of the Coalition’s green technology plan is organic urban agriculture. A 2013 United Nation report stated that small-scale organic farms are the best way to ensure that humanity has an adequate food supply while also improving the quality of the planetary biosphere. Dyett students could even participate in researching this through their own urban farming projects, especially when coupled with the global leadership component.In addition to its global leadership green-technology focus, the rest of the Coalition’s proposal envisions a rich, full curriculum, with democratic school governance and deep-rooted community involvement that could make Dyett one of the best schools in the city.
Since the Dyett proposal’s neighborhood school model could be adapted to areas of concentration besides global leadership and green technology, it could become a blueprint for revitalizing public education in Chicago. That makes it a threat to the school privatization efforts favored by Emanuel and the city elite.
Talks with the Chicago Board of Education which Brown characterized as “conversations” rather than “negotiations” continue.
A city-wide rally is planned for 5:30 PM Tuesday September 29 at the Thompson Center in Chicago: 100 West Randolph. The struggle for the Walter Dyett Global Leadership and Green Technology High School is not over.
Below is the speech, edited and lightly excerpted for publication, that Jitu Brown, surrounded by hunger strikers, gave at Rainbow PUSH announcing the end of the hunger strike and the beginning of a new phase of the struggle. You can download a copy of the original Coalition to Revitalize Dyett proposal here.
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Speech by Jitu Brown at Operation PUSH
“FIRST, BEFORE we make some statements, I want to give a heartfelt thank you to Rainbow PUSH Coalition. For us, it’s truly been Dr. King’s workshop. This has truly been freedom’s house. For many weeks, we slept here at night, right up on this stage. And whatever we needed, Reverend Wilson and Reverend Jackson and Brother Jonathan Jackson were steadfast in making sure we had that support. So we really want to say thank you.I would just like to say that the stereotype is that parents don’t care and communities don’t care, but the reality is that we’re not welcome. As we have been fighting for Dyett High School since 2009, my personal learning has taught me that the same thing happening in Chicago is happening in Philadelphia. It’s happening in Detroit. It’s happening in New Orleans. It’s happening in Baltimore. It’s happening in Oakland. And it’s the destruction of public education as we’re being removed from those cities.
So we had talked to every bureaucrat. We had jumped through every hoop. We had been nice. We realized that at some point, our voices weren’t valued because at the same time that we were struggling just to have a neighborhood school, other communities that didn’t even want resources were being flooded with resources.
So as we began to do this hunger strike (because we want folks to know a little chronology), Chicago Public Schools last year didn’t want to reopen Dyett High School, and as a result of consistent advocacy and pressure from the people behind me and also from the community, we won that school being reopened last year.
This year, we stopped it from being privatized. So it will be a public school, a neighborhood school. And now, we are working diligently to make sure that we are part of the vision and the development of that school from the ground up. We are committed to that process. But also, we want you to know that the fight for Dyett Global Leadership and Green Technology High School continues.
It does not stop.
But we realize, unfortunately, that when African American people have a strong show of self-determination that goes against the public narrative. That goes against what people expect us to be. So we began to realize that they will let us die. They will watch us waste away.
This is the 34th day of our hunger strike. We don’t want a charter school. We don’t want a contract [school]. We don’t want to be insiders. We just want the district to do the same thing for the children in Bronzeville that they do for children in Lincoln Park. So the fight for the Dyett Global Leadership and Green Technology High School only intensifies.
So we want to announce here today that we are ending our hunger strike. We are going to feed our bodies so that we can rest, take a deep breath, do some pushups and come out swinging. But the most important thing I want to say to you is that what I’ve learned with these brothers and sisters that are with me is that there should be not one more school closed in this city.
And this hunger strike has taught people that we don’t have to fight by other peoples’ rules. And we can make the decision…if you could please repeat after me…make the decision…that you will not bow down to people that don’t love your children. Make the decision…make the decision… that justice is worth being uncomfortable for.
Because through this hunger strike, we have seen in a hyper-segregated city like Chicago, we have seen emotional commitment from around the city. I want to give love and thanks to Teachers for Social Justice: Dr. Pauline Lipman, Dr. Rico Gutstein, Asif Wilson who is standing behind me, Monique Redeaux and the rest of TSJ. They have been brothers and sisters in the struggle. I want to say thank you to every organization: Parents for Teachers Northside Action for Justice and every organization in this city that have come together across race and say, “I’m going to fight with you.”
When does that happen in Chicago?
So we maintain…even though we are going to get a sandwich…eventually, we’ll get that together, we maintain that the fight for education justice has forever been changed. And we are proud to make that contribution. Thank you once again. We really appreciate you, Reverend Wilson, and just thank you very much and that’s it.”
The words of James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing” echoed down Drexel Ave on Chicago’s South Side the mild summer evening of September 8, 2015. Down the street from the Chicago home of President Obama, the Dyett hunger strikers and their supporters, holding candles in the deepening darkness, shared this song that is often called the Black National Anthem:
“Lift every voice and sing Till earth and heaven ring Ring with the harmonies of Liberty; let our rejoicing rise, high as the listening skies, let it resound loud as the rolling sea sing a song full of faith that the dark past has taught us, sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us; facing the rising sun of our new day begun, Let us march on till victory is won. ”
It was an opportunity for the hunger strikers and their supporters to reflect on the centuries-old African American struggle for freedom and their role in the struggle—Day 23 of the hunger strike to create the Walter Dyett High School for Global Leadership and Green Technology at the now closed Dyett High School building in Chicago’s Washington Park.The hunger strike is now at Day 28 as of this writing and the Chicago Board of Education has finally opened talks with the strikers. There is a cautious optimism that perhaps the Dyett struggle, which in one form or another has been going on for at least 6 years, will reach a milestone in its journey toward education justice.
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Hunger strikers and supporters hold a candlelight vigil near the Chicago home of President Obama
When Dyett was closed earlier in 2015, there were no more open enrollment neighborhood high schools left in the South Side Bronzeville neighborhood it once served.
The hunger strikers have been willing to put their lives on the line for quality education, an African American tradition that goes back to slavery times.
“Even when we were in slavery black people fought for schools. And our ancestors evacuated the South to come here, to find a better life for their children…. The institution that our ancestors fought for and won—we’ve got to reclaim it.” —- Jitu Brown a hunger striker and member of the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization( KOCO) and the Coalition to Revitalize Dyett.
Jitu Brown with hunger striker Irene Robinson(left)
KOCO plays a key role in the Coalition to Revitalize Dyett (which I will refer as the Coalition for the rest of this article), the organization that is out to transform the now closed Dyett High School into a 21st century freedom school. These are their demands for reopening the school:
1. Green Technology in school name and in school curriculum.
2. Global leadership/ world studies curriculum
3. Duane Turner as the school principal, who was selected by Coalition to Revitalize Dyett
4. Fully elected local school council in year 1.
5. Coalition to Revitalize Dyett represented on design/planning team with 6 members in prominent positions. Those who paid protesters to support closing Dyett cannot be on planning team.
6. The school must retain the name Walter H. Dyett.
7. Vertical curricular alignment with the 6 feeder schools identified in the Coalition proposal.
8. Community school (open till 8pm daily, with programs and resources for parents, students and the community)These demands grew out of the struggle to save Dyett High School and the detailed proposal the Coalition wrote to meet the educational needs of an African American community living in what Mayor Rahm Emanuel likes to tout as a global city.
The proposal envisions a rich full curriculum of the humanities, the arts, math, music, world languages, science and physical education as well as green technology and the development of leadership skills. The governance of the school would be based upon a participatory model that includes parents, teachers, students and staff. There would be close collaboration with the community at large.
As Coalition member Pauline Lipman said at a speak-out supporting the hunger strikers, the proposal could serve as a model for working class education throughout the city.
“School closings are a hate crime.”—- Irene Robinson, Dyett hunger striker.
Years before being closed at the end of the 2014-15 school year, Dyett had been a highly regarded neighborhood middle school where parents from around the city also sent their children. Dyett is located in Bronzeville, a historically African American neighborhood that has become contested terrain because of its location between the glittering towers of downtown Chicago and affluent Hyde Park where the University of Chicago is located.
Gentrification efforts were stepped up in Bronzeville in the late 1990s and resulted in a wave of Bronzeville elementary school closings. Bronzeville became a living laboratory for the city elite on how to do school closings, resulting in the infamous 50 school closings of 2013. Most of those affected have been Black and Brown students.
“I live in a city where the only mistake of me and my children is being black. I live in a city where the mayor and alderman don’t respect working families, no matter which way you try to say it.” —- Hunger striker Jeanette Taylor Ramann
Jeanette Taylor-Ramann
According Jitu Brown, the problems for Dyett began in 1999 when against the wishes of its local school council, it was changed to a high school, but without the necessary resources. Dyett was to be starved into destruction. In 2011 CPS announced that Dyett would phased out.The last handful of students were reduced to taking courses like art and PE online.
The practice of starving neighborhood schools in Black and Brown working class neighborhoods, labeling them “failing” and then opening up charter, contract and turnaround schools to replace them is part of an overall privatization drive closely linked to a general disinvestment in local businesses and social services necessary for strong and positive social relations.
“We’re not just seeing school closings here, we’ve seen the closings of hospitals and trauma centers, the elimination of grocery stores and more. We’re looking at a systematic disinvestment in our families, our youth, our elders, our communities.”- Jitu Brown
School closings are designed to destabilize working class communities. Neighborhood schools are part of a complex set of intergenerational human relationships that help hold communities together that under siege from outside forces. As people leave the neighborhood in desperation, this opens the way for profitable city-subsidized redevelopment schemes that push out remaining working class residents (mostly people of color) in favor of mostly white affluent newcomers.
School closings are part of the general disinvestment that fuels violence and social alienation, especially among young people. In an interview with hunger striker Irene Robinson she said this to me:
“Children naturally want to love. But this society has inflicted so much hate on Black and Brown communities that the violence you see stems from that. It’s manufactured… Dyett was our school. It had been there for 30 years. There was so much love and memories there. They didn’t just close a school, the closed the doors on the future of our children. They killed so much memory .They can never pay us back for what they have done to our children.”—- Dyett hunger striker Irene Robinson
Irene Robinson
It is class and ethnic cleansing by economic means— but communities do not go down without a fight. Led by KOCO, community residents came up with a plan to save Dyett. Eve L. Ewing a Harvard PhD student writing her thesis on South Side Chicago school closings, focusing particularly on Bronzeville explains:
“After CPS’s plan to close Dyett was announced four years ago [2011], a coalition of community members led by KOCO created a proposal for it to reopen as what they have called a “global village academy,” an open-enrollment neighborhood high school where teachers, parents, and local school council members would work together with educators from the local elementary schools to share resources to create a continuous educational pipeline for students from preschool to twelfth grade. The district ignored the idea.”
But facing more protest, the Board of Education finally agreed to solicit ideas for how to save Dyett, the last open enrollment neighborhood high school in Bronzeville. The Coalition to Save Dyett in close consultation with parents and community members wrote an ambitious proposal for a global leadership-green technology high school with partners that included the Chicago Botanic Garden, the University of Illinois and the Chicago Teachers Union. There were proposals from two other groups, neither of which were very inspiring.
The Board promised an answer in August 2015. When they postponed their decision until September, after the start of the school year, the Coalition concluded the fix was in. Drastic action was needed. The hunger strike began with the strikers sitting outside of the Dyett building in a small circle of folding chairs, meeting the media, consulting with their supporters and organizing actions like the non-violent disruption of a Mayoral town hall budget meeting which saw Mayor Emanuel flee out the back door. The strikers have received help from a variety of organizations including the Chicago Teachers Union.
The hunger strikers lead a protest at a Mayoral town hall
On September 3rd when CPS announced that Dyett would be reopened as an “art and technology” high school, the strikers were not impressed. This so-called “compromise” was engineered with the help of South Side politicians close to the Mayor. It was a patched together public relations scheme with no community involvement; just another hasty back-room deal Chicago-style. The Coalition was not consulted and told flatly by Chicago school chief Forest Claypool that there would be no negotiations. The group was even locked out of the press conference announcing the “compromise”.
This was not what the community had been fighting for. The strike continued. The strikers went on with their protests, rallies and news conferences. Some of the hunger strikers flew to Washington DC to meet with Education Secretary Arne Duncan. They are thinking about taking their case to the United Nations after Chileans who battled school closings in their country told them of the success they had when the UN became involved. The battle had gone international.
Then on the September 11, the hunger strikers got a call from the Chicago Board of Education saying it was finally ready to talk. The results of the meeting were inconclusive, but the hunger strikers expressed cautious optimism to their supporters at a meeting held that evening at Operation PUSH.
But what is it about the Dyett high school proposal that is so abhorrent to the Mayor and the city elite?
“Our model is of a sustainable school deeply rooted in the community. This proposal comes from the people of Bronzeville who speak from the heart about a school that lives in a village of tightly interconnected feeder schools, community institutions, local school councils of dedicated and loving adults, relationships, and the meaning of place… This is a model that nurtures leadership, it teaches perseverance, expects the best and supports solidarity. It is a model based on a broad notion of success for the students, their families, neighborhood, city, country and world.”— excerpt from the proposal submitted by the Coalition to Revitalize Dyett
This vision of education runs completely counter to the corporate-driven model favored by the Mayor: with its rigid top-down curricula; its brutal regimen of high stakes testing; its racist allocation of resources; its sneering contempt for Black and Brown people and its privatization of public education. The Mayor’s vision rips communities apart and divides them. It is designed to blunt the intellect and shrink the imaginations of Black and Brown working class youth so they will submit to the demands of austerity capitalism.
As hunger striker Irene Robinson put it,”“They starve our schools. They hurt our children. And they don’t care if we die.”
One afternoon before we marched to President Obama’s home for the candlelight vigil, I sat down for a conversation with Rico Gutstein. Gutstein, a University of Illinois education professor, helped design and coordinate the writing of the proposal for the Walter Dyett High School for Global Leadership and Green Technology. Gutstein emphasized that the ideas came from a carefully conducted community process.
The idea of a sustainable neighborhood school lies at the very heart of the Dyett proposal. Gutstein outlined some of its basic principles:
Principle 1: The curriculum should be based in the culture, traditions, language of the local community. It should use that as starting point for a critical look at what is really going on there and asking profound questions about power and injustice. By addressing these questions in depth students can begin to learn the academic disciplines necessary to advance their own lives and the community in which they live.
Principle 2: There needs to be high quality teaching by teachers who are actually allowed to teach, not simply treated as disposable test monitors and collectors of misleading “data” from the deeply flawed corporate created barrage of high stakes testing.
Principle 3: The students will have thorough wraparound supports with counselors, social workers and other professionals who can help address their social and emotional needs. But the Coalition wants to go beyond simply the therapeutic model. The Coalition envisions a series of internships, apprenticeships and colloquia that would help students find themselves by giving them actual responsibility as they learn practical skills for navigating human relationships and meeting the challenges of social justice.
These experiences would begin in the 9th grade with a local community organization and change the 10th grade year to an organization dealing with city-wide issues, then an organization that deals with national issues at the 11th grade and finally move to one that has a global focus as seniors. As students grow, mature and discover more about themselves, they also gain understanding of their complex relationship to a global society.
Principle 4: One of the contradictions of US public education is that while it is supposed to prepare students to live in a democratic society, the actual organization of most schools is based on a totalitarian model of control and management from above.
A sustainable community school seeks to end the adversarial relationship between teachers and administrators, among teachers themselves and between the adults and the youth. This is done through an intense collaboration that emphasizes how all members of the school are part of the same struggle. Gutstein quoted a teacher friend of his who said,” My students don’t resist me because we are too busy resisting the system together.”
Restorative justice would be an important component in rethinking relationships within the school. Although Gutstein did not elaborate on what restorative justice means, here is one definition from the Chicago youth advocacy group Alternatives:
“…peer conferences, restorative conversations, and circles, create non-judgmental spaces for a student who broke a school rule, those affected, and members of the school community to discuss what happened, build accountability, and collaborate to find solutions that will repair the harm caused. This approach empowers students to be leaders in violence prevention, conflict resolution, and school safety.”
Principle 5: Although often derided as a liberal cliche, the term “It takes a village to raise a child” is taken literally in a sustainable community school. Gutstein emphasized how the experience, knowledge and wisdom of the adults in the school community and in the larger community is the foundation upon which one can build parent committees, the local school council and various advisory groups. Teachers can then learn from parents and people in the community about building the curriculum and shaping the goals of the school. All of this requires parent spaces within the building.
Why green technology in Bronzeville?
I asked Rico Gutstein this question directly because I know there are people who wonder about that. His answer was quite direct,”For one thing, it’s a food desert. That’s the starting point.” There are few general supermarkets in working class communities of color and when nutritious organic food is available, it is too expensive for tight working class budgets.
Organic urban agriculture. is at the heart of the Dyett green technology plan. The Windy City Harvest farm is right next to the Dyett Building and along with three other urban farms is a partner in the Coalition. When Dyett High School was open, students worked in the Windy City farm through the school year, but mainly in the summer where they held a weekly farmers’ market.
Windy City Harvest
The Chicago Botanic Garden, a Coalition partner, would like to create a rooftop garden and also use the atrium spaces to grow food. The Coalition plans to integrate their urban farming concepts into an already existing CPS culinary arts program. Students could not only learn how to work in restaurants and food stores, but could prepare for careers in organic urban agriculture and green urban planning that works with the already existing food distribution infrastructure to transition into creating a new food infrastructure that works for working class communities.
In 2013 the United Nations issued a report saying that we must phase out the current system of industrialized agriculture with its reliance on fossil fuels, chemical fertilizers and pesticides if humanity wants to feed itself. The Dyett organic urban agriculture plan is right on time.
In addition to the urban agriculture component, The Coalition would like the Dyett building to be certified as LEED platinum, the highest green building rating. This would be a multi-year process which would involve the students in planning and creating the the ecological systems necessary to achieve this. Energy conservation and renewable energy sources are critical for meeting today’s environmental challenges. Once again, the Dyett vision is right on time.
Artist’s conception of a future Dyett H.S. with solar panels on roof
It’s important to understand that the Coalition’s vision goes far beyond preparing students for the option of getting green jobs, as important as that is. There is also an all-encompassing philosophical or spiritual component that will go along with everything they plan to do, that the earth is our mother and human consciousness must be in harmony with that basic reality.
Young people as global leaders
“Why are they fighting us so hard about such a good plan? Why don’t they want our children to have a high quality school? Why don’t they want our children to succeed, to feel good about what they are doing in school?”——Irene Robinson
Why indeed? Why on a planet undergoing terrifying climate change, and whose human population still suffers from the twin curses of poverty and violence, would the Mayor and Board of Education oppose a school based on green technology and global leadership?
The Coalition proposal speaks of young people entering the global stage as actors who have studied social and physical reality in depth. Of young people people learning academic and artistic disciplines on behalf of environmental sustainability as well as peace and justice.
Does anyone seriously believe we can achieve environmental sustainability, peace and justice within the confines of our present badly broken racist social system? Either in the community of Bronzeville or in the world at large?
The system may be badly broken for most of us but it works well enough for the corporate elite which is who Mayor Emanuel and the Board of Education truly represent.
The Dyett proposal speaks of young people using their education to become global leaders, transforming their world and bettering the planet. This is education for liberation and is implicitly revolutionary in its implications. What if other communities began to demand such an education, an education that challenges a corrupt and brutal system of oppression? What then?
Perhaps this answers Irene Robinson’s question,”Why are they fighting us so hard about such a good plan?”
Hunger striker Anna Jones at Operation PUSH
All photos by Bob “BobboSphere” Simpson. More photos HERE For further reading
It’s been a tough week for the environment. A chunk of glacier so big it could bury Manhattan in 1000 feet of ice fell into the sea off Greenland. Monstrous forest fires raged in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest with some of those fires weakening the permafrost which protects us from a possible methane apocalypse. Scientists in Europe reported that climate change may be degrading soil quality, threatening a dangerous reduction in the world’s food supply.
And in Chicago’s largely African American Bronzeville, 12 people have been on hunger strike since August 17, demanding a high school in their community that would focus on green technology and global leadership. With humanity facing the greatest environmental crisis in the history of the species we could sure use more green technology and global leadership. Right?
Hunger strikers Jitu Brown and Irene Robinson are joined by
AFT President Randi Weingarten at an August 25 press conference
Well, Mayor Rahm Emanuel sure doesn’t think so. The Coalition to Revitalize Walter H. Dyett School has met nothing but delays and resistance to their proposal to transform the now closed Dyett school building into the Walter H. Dyett Global Leadership and Green Technology High School.
“If gold has been prized because it is the most inert element, changeless and incorruptible, water is prized for the opposite reason — its fluidity, mobility, changeability that make it a necessity and a metaphor for life itself. To value gold over water is to value economy over ecology, that which can be locked up over that which connects all things.” ― Rebecca Solnit
The nightmare that comes to me while I sleep always begins the same way. I am standing next to Colesville Road in Silver Spring, Maryland, near where Northwest Branch creek crosses this highway.
But instead of the small filtration station that once served the modest-sized dam a couple of hundred yards upstream, there is massive hi-rise development everywhere: acres of uber-modern condos and swanky shops cover the ground where I once pried off samples of translucent mica from the soft sandstone in the forest above the creek.
In the nightmare, the stream valley on both sides of the highway, once crowded with ancient trees, has been denuded and the resulting silt has turned the once clear waters a sluggish brown. The boulders and small waterfalls downstream are still there, but bake in the sun instead of being protected by the cool shade of an Eastern forest.
When I to hike down the creekside trail, it never leads to the house I once called home. I become lost amidst unfamiliar boulders and side trails that lead nowhere. When I awake I am filled with a deep and terrible sadness. This is a recurring nightmare of mine. It comes upon me frequently.
During my teen years I explored that publicly owned stream valley for miles in both directions, often hiking through the water in an old pair of tennis shoes. I came to know the sucker fish who swam in the shallows, the tadpoles of the vernal pools and the box turtles who would seek relief from the summer heat in the calm areas of small feeder streams.
Fallen logs across the creek provided easy bridges to the old suburb of Woodmoor, high on the other side of the valley, where the branch library kept me furnished with a steady supply of science and science fiction books.
In the winter, the half-frozen waterfalls became an ever-changing sculpture garden of icy surrealism.
Northwest Branch north of the small dam
Teddy Roosevelt visited Northwest Branch in 1904 and wrote to his son: ” … there is a beautiful gorge, deep and narrow, with great boulders and even cliffs. Excepting Great Falls, it is the most beautiful place around here.”
Northwest Branch crosses the geological fall line between the Piedmont and Atlantic coastal plain regions which explains the small waterfalls south of Colesville Road.
Rachel Carson’s former home where she wrote much of “Silent Spring” is near Northwest Branch. The trail there is now called the Rachel Carson Greenway. Famed photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt photographed her near the creek for a 1962 Life Magazine article.
Although the stream quality has been adversely affected by storm water runoff from the crowded suburbs that surround it, it is afforded some protection by government agencies of Montgomery and Prince Georges County. The Neighbors of Northwest Branch organization leads nature walks there and monitors its condition.
Rachel Carson birdwatching along Northwest Branch
So why do I have recurring nightmares about Northwest Branch instead of recurring dreams of its beauty, a beauty that has largely survived since the end of the last Ice Age?
Why? Perhaps because Northwest Branch is a part of the Anacostia watershed.
It empties into the dangerously polluted Anacostia River which flows past Southeast DC, a largely African American working class community. Much of the pollution comes from suburbs upstream or from the rest of DC across the river. A short distance away, across the bridges that span the river, are the EPA headquarters and the Congress that passed the Clean Water Act.
Trash in the Anacostia River
According to the National Resources Defense Council: “Toilets in the Capitol regularly flush directly into the Anacostia — our federal government needs to show leadership and contribute its fair share to cleaning up the District’s rivers.”
Apparently Congress really does give a shit about our watersheds. That contrast alone is almost too much to bear, even as citizens groups and official agencies work to slowly repair the Anacostia River.
But in the face of greed and misplaced priorities, official agencies and well intentioned citizens groups are an easily breached line of defense. Powerful financial interests do it all the time.
So despite its present status as public parkland, the eco-system of Northwest Branch remains vulnerable.
But perhaps these nightmares about a favorite creek also stem from other places as well. Three women I’ve met are in a Michigan jail for non-violently protesting an Enbridge company pipeline that would carry Canadian tar sands oil across the Midwest. Tar sands oil is one of the dirtiest petro-products ever.
In 2010 leakage from an Enbridge pipeline caused the largest inland oil disaster in US history when it polluted Michigan’s Kalamazoo River.
In both West Virginia and North Carolina, energy companies recently leaked toxins into rivers with seeming impunity. In Northern Alberta where oil and gas development has ravaged the traditional lands of the Cree peoples, Melina Laboucan-Massimo said this:
“My community has dealt with three decades of massive oil and gas development. And this has been without the consent of the people or without the recognition of protection of the human rights which should be protected under section 35 of the Canadian constitution, which protects aboriginal and treaty rights.”
It is the reckless burning of coal, oil and gas that is accelerating climate change, drastically altering the hydrology of the entire biosphere.
Meanwhile, the snowpack of the High Sierras in California shrinks as climate change sweeps across the planet. What will become of those frigid fast flowing mountain streams whose waters I drank and whose rushing sounds lulled me to sleep as I camped near their banks.
And how many Californians depend upon that snow pack for their home water supply?
The UN tells us that,” More than 2.7 billion people will face severe shortages of fresh water by 2025 if the world keeps consuming water at today’s rates…”
I can’t be the only person who is having nightmares about fresh water, the lifeblood for terrestrial beings. My prehistoric Scottish ancestors once designated pools, springs and other water sources as sacred places of worship, as did other peoples around the planet.
But as social critic Karl Marx wrote,”… all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
I believe in neither gods nor goddesses. But the next time I visit Northwest Branch, my own personal shrine to water, I will offer a silent prayer.
May we please make water sacred again?
A small waterfall along Northwest Branch
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A socialist since he was a child, Bob “BobboSphere” Simpson is a retired history teacher now living in Oak Park IL.
November 4, 2013 by Bobbo · Comments Off on Neo-liberalism, climate change and militarization: The Perfect Storm Filed under: Environment, Global issues, Militarism
In October of 1991 a convergence of powerful weather systems created a monster storm in the cold waters of the North Atlantic. It killed the entire crew of the fishing boat Andrea Gail among other storm casualties. Journalist Sebastian Junger used the phrase “The Perfect Storm” as the title of his book about this unusual weather event. The book became the basis for a Hollywood film of the same name.
Since then the term “perfect storm” has entered the language to mean any catastrophic collision of natural, political, or social forces that combine into a disaster greater than the sum of its parts.
Lasting only a few days, the 1991 storm was centered along the US eastern seaboard region. Neo-liberalism, climate change and militarism is “The Perfect Storm” engulfing the entire biosphere and is projected to last for years to come. It is a perfect storm of planetary proportions.
Domination of the global economy by powerful corporations and financial institutions created neo-liberal capitalism or neo-liberalism for short. It is the latest evolutionary restructuring of global capitalism, which has shown a remarkable ability to adapt to changing conditions.
The destructive effects of neo-liberalism
We can see the direct effects of neo-liberalism in the collapsing factories and deadly fires in the Bangladeshi garment industry. We can see them in the privatization of public education in the USA and the proliferation of corporate dominated charter schools.We can see them in the melting polar ice caps as well as the number and intensity of extreme weather events. We saw them in the Iraq war; a war for control of oil resources.
Neo-liberalism seeks to reduce everything to a market commodity. Its direct attacks on working class organizations like unions; its privatization of the public sphere; and its dismantling of public welfare have dramatically increased the global gap between rich and poor.
Lately institutions like the IMF and the World Bank have indicated that perhaps neo-liberalism has gone too far, been too destructive. But it is doubtful that even these powerful organizations have either the will or the means to restrain it.
Perhaps most frightening, neo-liberalism has also contributed to global environmental degradation, most notably climate change. Its profits are heavily fueled by coal and petroleum.
The least worst case scenario for this planetary vandalism is grim enough. The worst case scenario is a mass extinction more severe than the Permian extinction 250 million years ago, when the majority of the earth’s living organisms perished because of sudden climate change.
The social effects of neo-liberalism have fueled civil resistance including strikes, occupations, mass marches and riots. From Occupy Wall Street, to Tahrir Square; from the mass strikes in South Asian garment factories to the thousands of striking teachers who jammed the streets of Chicago; from the indignados of Spain to the student strikers of Chile; from the anti-nuclear marchers of Japan to the shack dwellers movement of South Africa, the resistance to neo-liberalism is truly global.
But neo-liberalism’s global plunder have also been at the root of ethnic and religious strife, as well as wars among nations. The competition for scarce resources has led to desperate acts and appalling violence, often encouraged by authorities who find it a useful form of social control.
As a result, an outrageous amount of the planet’s resources have been diverted into militarization. This includes the militarization of police, who now appear in armored vehicles and have easy access to automatic weapons if tear gas, plastic bullets, sound cannons and riot clubs prove inadequate for suppressing mass protests.
Even the corporate media has shown some recognition of the dismal state of capitalism today.
Excerpts from some this writing would not look too out of place in your typical socialist publications. Liberals, progressives and socialists alike might be wondering if socialism is perhaps around the corner.
So what about socialism?
Not so fast. The socialist movement is not in great shape. The twentieth century socialist movement broke up into roughly three groups: Soviet-style repressive “communism”, social democracy and a small number of dissident socialists who embraced neither model.
Soviet-style authoritarian regimes mostly collapsed into typical capitalist countries. Those that did not, like China or Vietnam, became authoritarian market economies under repressive state domination. Vietnam is now a major destination for global corporations seeking cheap labor.
Social democracy still exists in some countries, with Scandinavia being its jewel in the crown. Social democracy did tame the worst excesses of capitalism where it took root, but its social welfare systems are now under attack from neo-liberal pressures. Social democratic parties now generally collaborate with the austerity pushed by global neo-liberalism, often as a kind of austerity-lite.
An extreme example would be the USA whose Democratic Party emerged from the Franklin Roosevelt years with a social democratic platform, but which today gives little sign that such a thing ever existed.
Both major trends of the 20th century socialist movement represent no threat to the dominant neo-liberalism of the 21st century.
As for the dissident socialists who yearn for an economy owned by the working class and a society governed in a democratic fashion, they remain a minority with relatively little organizational influence. At least not yet. But many of their best ideas have permeated the global justice movement.
Ironically, classical Marxism teaches that socialism will emerge from highly developed industrial bourgeois societies. But what if industrial civilization is creating the very economic and environmental crises that will result in its self-destruction? An old labor song says,..”we will build a new world from the ashes of the old.”
But what if the ashes are dangerously radioactive or chemically poisoned?
From global resistance to global revolution?
So what does the future hold for the diverse civil resistance confronting today’s global Perfect Storm? The World Social Forums reveal a global justice movement with competing visions of how to build economically cooperative egalitarian societies that are environmentally sustainable, appropriately technological, and practice participatory democracy.
With the global neo-liberal elite waging a brutal well armed class war against the rest of humanity, can global resistance transform itself into global revolution? No one can say with any certainty. That is a feature of revolution, not a bug. They can erupt unexpectedly, surprising both those who welcome them and those who fear them.
The clock is ticking for finding solutions. Normally cautious scientists are ringing a clanging alarm bell about climate change while normally cautious economists are doing the same about the accelerating wealth gap between rich and poor. Even ex-generals are raising their voices against the colossal waste of human life and resources resulting from runaway militarism.
In truth, The Perfect Storm is already raging in some parts of the world.
One model of resistance and transformation
Recently climate activist Tim Decristopher visited Chicago and gave a well received talk. He stated bluntly that it is too late to stop dangerous climate change. We may be able to limit its most extreme effects, but at this point that’s the best we can hope for. So what do we do?
He pointed to Occupy Sandy as an example. When Hurricane Sandy devastated communities in the NYC area, members of Occupy Wall Street organized themselves into the Occupy Sandy relief effort, already having a network of experienced individuals with access to resources. Working directly with residents, some of whom were socially and politically conservative, they showed what was possible.
Occupy Wall Street and its new allies were able to organize Occupy Sandy as both a survival and a resistance group, one prepared to clear wreckage, search for survivors and rebuild; but also to make demands on the State as people learned how to wage an egalitarian cooperative resistance.
Dechristopher was directing his remarks toward environmental groups, but they apply to any socio-political organization. His point? That groups with experience, imagination and cooperative socio-political relationships are best prepared to deal with crises.
70,000 years ago humanity faced the possibility of total extinction when a huge volcano in Sumatra exploded and disrupted the earth’s climate for a time. A fraction of the human population survived. We can only speculate on how they did it, but I suspect it was because they had deep experience in cooperation within their small tribal groups.
We must apply that human ability to cooperate in the face of danger to an entire planet. The Perfect Storm of neo-liberalism, climate change and militarism will not go away on its own.
Dr. King once spoke of the “fierce urgency of now.” BTW, now means NOW.
Bob “BobboSphere” Simpson has been a socialist since childhood.
“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature — the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.” ―Rachel Carson
Rachel Carson had a life-long love affair with nature that was accompanied by a deep and terrible sense of loss because of the human destruction wreaked upon the biosphere. Although Carson’s literary fame is based on only 5 books, she also wrote numerous short pieces during her employment at the US Fish and Wildlife Service, as well as newspaper stories, magazine articles, speeches and personal letters. She was among the finest writers of the 20th century USA.
Her biographer Linda Lear has done a great service by sharing a sample of these virtually unknown Carson writings in the anthology Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson. These give us a glimpse of the living breathing woman behind the environmental icon.
“Caterpillar has work plans, processes, policies and people ready to be deployed in the event of any business interruption, whether it is a tornado, fire or a strike.”—Caterpillar spokesperson Rusty Dunn: April 30, 2012
Thanks for nothing, Rusty Dunn. You just equated 780 striking Caterpillar workers to a potentially disastrous tornado or fire. The strike began on May 1 with peaceful picketing by the International Association of Machinists (IAM) Lodge 851. A few days later the union called for a solidarity rally in front of the Caterpillar plant near Joliet IL.
Mr. Dunn, I was at that IAM Lodge 851 strike rally on Friday May 11. I saw a sea of a red union shirts. I heard speeches and I listened to what the striking Cat workers had to say. I walked among people who made Caterpillar a global leader in heavy construction equipment. They are builders, not wreckers. I saw anger, but not rage. I saw quiet determination, but not fury. I saw human beings who work hard and solve complex production problems everyday. They are worth every penny that Caterpillar has been paying them and more. Rusty Dunn, you owe them a heartfelt apology.
May 7, 2012 by Bobbo · Comments Off on They Call Themselves the Troublemakers Union Filed under: Global issues, Unions
Because I am also submitting this to a local Chicago publication, the diary mentions mostly Chicago participants.
Over the weekend of May 4-6, 1500 union members, workers’ center activists and working class rebels gathered at the Crowne Plaza hotel in Rosemont IL for the biennial Labor Notes Conference. Labor Notes is the monthly magazine for labor activists who “want to put the movement back into the labor movement.” The publication grew out of the rank and file labor revolts of the 1970’s and for the past 33 years has reported on key labor struggles and issues. Not satisfied with just writing about labor insurgencies, Labor Notes also convenes special organizing workshops in addition to their regular national conferences.
Labor Notes readers proudly think of themselves as part of the “International Troublemakers and Boat-Rockers Union”. Their symbol is the slingshot, a weapon associated with David bringing down the mighty Goliath. It’s not an actual union of course, but a state of mind. Their brand of aggressive organizing is hated by global corporations. It is also unwelcome among those union leaders who cling to the tattered status quo of their big salaries with little effective action to show for it. Workers from 20 nations, including the USA attended the 2012 meeting.
