6 Febrero 2012

This morning, at 5 am, I attempted to convince (in a 20 minute power point presentation) the municipality of madrigal to pay the salary of the future librarian and after school program teacher.

I tried to hit every chord: The future of madrigal. The re-electability of the Mayor. Even videos of the council members’ and mayor’s kids playing and learning at the library.

Ironic, this day where I am fighting for the life of a very young library, I decide to watch the documentary on Howard Zin’s The People’s History of the United States.

Once upon a time, I was riding along in the backseat of my parent’s station wagon, on a cross country road-trip. I think we were outside a petrified wood forest when we went into a small gift shop and bookstore.  I was admiring a book geared towards adolescents interested in understanding sciences:

“Really, mom? I can have it?” I knew the book was expensive.

Then my mother made one of the more grand and ridiculous promises I can ever remember her vocalizing to me:

“I will buy you any book you ever want.”

My mother is an attorney. Her words have weight. She is not someone to ever say anything she doesn’t mean or understand to be true from the bottom of her heart.

This day shocked me. I have never forgotten it, nor have I ever lacked in a novel, encyclopedia, how-to, or textbook in my life.

So, when we took a family vacation to Washington DC over my brief visit to The States over this Christmas holiday, we hit the bookstore of Busboys and Poets on 5^th and U. I was in heaven. My eyes were immediately scanning not only for books in Spanish about unions and activism in the states for the madrigal library, but for as many books as possible to stimulate me when cooped up in my mud hut again. My mother started piling books in my arms. Among them, a DVD, The People Speak. A documentary based on Zinn’s book using clips from the performances of Voices of a People’s History of the United States. Let me allow some of the performances to speak for themselves…

Sojourner Truth

Performed by Kerry Washington in an amazingly moving performance

“That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Huh, nobody every helps me into carriages or over mud puddles, or gives me any best place. And ain’t I a woman? Look at me, I have plowed and planted and gathered into barns, and no man coulda had me. And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as any man when I could get it. And I could bear the lash as well. And ain’t I a woman? I have born 13 children, seen most sold off into slavery, and when I cried out with a mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me. And ain’t I a woman? That man in the back there. He says, women can’t have as much rights as men because Christ wasn’t a woman. Well, where did your Christ come from? Where did Christ come from? He came from God and a woman. Man didn’t have nothin to do with it. If the first woman god ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, well all these women here together auta be able to turn it back and get it right side up again. And they askin to do it. And men better let um.”

Genora Johnson Dollinger

Performed bu Marisa Tomei

When you worked in the factory those days, no one cared what your name was, they were wage slaves. They used to say, “Once you’ve passed the gates of General Motors forget about the United States Constitution. Workers had no rights when they entered that plant. If the foreman didn’t like the way you parted your hair, or whatever he didn’t like about you, he could fire you. No recourse, no nothing. Combined with conditions on the outside, poor living conditions, lack of proper food, lack of proper medical attention, everything else, the auto workers came to the conclusion there was no way they could ever escape any of the injustice without joining a union. We held meetings, in garages and basements, secret meetings, so the people wouldn’t get caught, beaten up. The workers were at the point where they had just had had enough. So they sat down. When the UAW leaders in the big fisher plant one heard about the sit down in fisher two, they sat down also. That took real guts, that took political leadership. The company decided that they had to break the strike. It was very cold. They turned off the heat in the building. Then, the company police and the city police started shooting. Teargas and bullets went over our heads into the crowds that had come to watch. The police were using rifles, buckshot, firebombs, tear gas canisters. It was a shock to a lot of people.  Workers overturned police cars to make barricades. They ran to pick up the fire bombs hurled at them to throw them back at the police. The men wanted me to get out of the way. You know, the old ‘protect the women and children’ business. I told them, “Get away from me!” The lights went on in my head. I thought, ‘I have never used a loudspeaker to address a large crowd of people, but I have got to tell them there are women down here.’ I called to them, “Cowards! Cowards! Shooting into the bellies of unarmed men and firing at the mothers of children!” And then everything became quiet. I thought, ‘the women can break this up.’ So I appealed to the women in the crowd, “Break through those police lines, and come down here, and stand beside your husbands, and your brothers, and you uncles, and your sweethearts.” I could barely see one woman struggling to come forward. A cop had grabbed her by the back of her coat. She just pulled out of that coat, and she started walking down to the battle zone. As soon as that happened there were other women and men who followed. That was the end of the battle, and those spectators came into the center, and the police retreated. There was a big roar of victory.”

Pink

Wrote this song during the presidency of George Bush

“Dear Mr. President”

Dear Mr. President

Come take a walk with me

Lets pretend

We’are just two people and

You’re not better than me

I’d like to ask you some questions if

We can speak honestly

What do you feel when you see all the homeless on the street?

Who do you pray for at night before you go to sleep?

What do you feel when you look in the mirror?

Are you proud?

How do you sleep while the rest of us cry?

How do you dream when a mother has no chance to say goodbye?

How do you walk with your head held high?

Can you even look me in the eye?

And tell me why

Dear Mr President

Were you a lonely boy?

Are you a lonely boy?

How can you say no child is left behind?

We’re not dumb and we’re not blind

They’re all sitting in your cells

While you pave the road to hell

What kind of father would take his own daughter’s rights away?

And what kind of father might hate his own daughter if she were gay?

I can only imagine what the first lady has to say

You’ve come a long way

From whisky and cocaine

How do you sleep while the rest of us cry?

How do you dream when a mother has no chance to say goodbye?

How do you walk with your head held high?

Can you even look me in the eye?

Let me tell you about hard work

Minimum wage with a baby on the way

Let me tell you about hard work

Rebuilding your house cause the bombs took them away

Let me tell you about hard work

Building a bed out of a card board box

Hard work, hard work, hard work

You don’t know nothing about hard work, hard work, hard work

Dear Mr. President

You’d never take a walk with me

Would you?

Emma Goldman during WWII

Performed by Sandra Oh

What is Patriotism? Is it the love of one’s birthplace? A place of childhood recollections and hopes, dreams, and aspirations?

Patriotism, sir, is the last resort of scoundrels. Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who have had the fortune of being born on some particular spot consider themselves better, nobler, grander, more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is therefore the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all others. Our hearts swell with pride at the thought that America is becoming the most powerful nation on Earth. And that it will eventually plant her iron foot on the necks of all other nations. Such is the logic of patriotism. The centralization of power has brought into being an international feeling of solidarity among the oppressed nations of the world. A solidarity which fears not for an invasion, because it is bringing all the workers to a point where they will say to their masters, “Go and do your own killing we have done it long enough for you.”

Marge Piercy

“The low road”

performed by Staceyann Chin

“What can they do to you? Whatever they want. They can set you up, they can bust you, they can break your fingers, they can burn your brain with electricity, blur you with drugs till you can’t walk, can’t remember. They can take your child, wall up your lover, they can do anything and you can’t blame them from doing. Alone you can fight, you can refuse. You can take what revenge you can, but they are all over you. But, two people fighting back to back can cut through a mob, a snake dancing file can break a quodan, an army can meet an army. Two people can keep each other sane, can give support, conviction, love, massage, hope, sex. Three people are a delegation, a committee, a wedge. With four, you can play bridge and start an organization. With six, you can rent a whole house, eat pie for dinner with no seconds and hold a fundraising party. A dozen can make a demonstration. A hundred fill a hall. A thousand have solidarity and your own newsletter. Ten thousand, power and your own paper. A hundred thousand, your won media. Ten million, your own country. It goes on one act at a time. It starts when you care to act. It starts when you do it again after they said no. It starts when you say we and you know what you mean. And each day you mean, one more.”

These are only four that apply to the me and my now, but they are among two-hours- worth of voices performed in the documentary; And these two hours are only a small glimpse of the voices collected in Zinn’s book A People’s History of the United States.

I was crying out of pride, homesickness, sadness, embarrassment, happiness and pride again as I sat close to the speakers to hear the voices over the rain hitting my tin roof.

These words, said 100, 200 years ago, being so applicable to our issues and life today never ceases to amaze me. And how would we know them without books?

This community I work with does not know the people’s history of the world. Not in the slightest. Right now, I am reinvigorated to do everything in my power, though be it very alone, to change this. To bring them as much access to knowledge as I possibly can.

I ask you all to pray or chant tonight that in their meetings tomorrow, the municipality decides to financially feed the library and after school program for the years to come giving these children and youth a chance at the promise my mother made to me over a decade ago.