Honoring the March Continues Tonight

Tonight we continue our community’s commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington with a screening of Brother Outsider.  Please visit the Ossining Documentary & Discussion Series website (www.OssiningDocumentarties.org) for details about the impressive panelists who will help us explore more about Bayard Rustin, the latest recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and organizer of the historic march.  We look forward to seeing you at the Ossining Library’s Budarz Theater at 6:30 tonight!

Last night’s event honoring the landmark civil rights event had a great turnout, passionate participants, and an enthusiastic audience.  We had moved the venue from the beautiful waterfront to the community center because rain had been predicted to continue on and off throughout the night.  In hindsight, we might have gotten wet while setting up and people’s blankets would have been damp, but the rain ending up being done in time for the event.   Darn.  But thanks to social media, and help from friends, we were able to get the word out on the new location and the gym at the Caputo Center was full.  Helping to organize this event gave me an opportunity to meet and work with so many people in our community, and there are so many people to thank.  For now, here are a few pics…

GOTV captured the whole event on video which should be available to watch soon.  Meanwhile, a couple of folks that weren’t able to attend last night’s program asked to read my remarks.  I’ve included them below.

My sons are 5 and 6 years old.  They have only ever known a world where their president is Black, their mayor is gay, and their classmates are teaching them to be bilingual.  Their hearts and minds are more open to “judging others by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin” than any generation before them.  So when will that translate to economic justice?

Fifty years ago when Martin Luther King gave his I Have Dream Speech the unemployment rate for Black people was twice the rate for whites.  It still is.  Thankfully it can no longer be said that people of color live “on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.”  There is an African American middle class today that did not exist half a century ago. 

And yet the disparity between rich and poor is greater than it has been in a hundred years, and it is growing.  And people of color continue to disproportionately be poor.

Before Congress left for their summer break, they passed a Farm Bill that for the first time did not include funding food stamps.  Many Republicans in Congress felt that food stamp spending had grown too large.  I agree.  I believe the solution is to pay workers a living wage.

This summer we’ve seen fast food and Walmart workers go on strike.  Tomorrow fast food workers across the country are striking to demand $15/hr and the right to unionize without retaliation. (lowpayisnotok.org).

If the tea party Republicans have their way and continue to block food stamps, they may be in for a rude awakening.  If the millions of people who are just barely getting by because of food stamps suddenly don’t even have food in their bellies, the frequency and size of these strikes might start to grow.  People who have nothing to eat, have nothing to lose.

Food stamps are not welfare for the poor.  Food stamps are welfare for corporations.  Food stamps enable fast food restaurants and Walmart to pay workers less than a living wage.  Food stamps enable Nestle and Kraft to sell poor quality food to poor people using cheap ingredients subsidized by taxpayer dollars thanks to legislation written by Monsanto.  Food stamps enable JPMorgan to earn billions of dollars as the largest processor of food stamps in the country.

We can have an in-depth discussion about the degrees of privilege we experience because of our color, where we grew up, and who are parents are.  There are very real differences.  But I suggest, as important as that discussion may be, it is not the primary reason that the extremely rich are growing richer and one third of people in our country are at or near poverty.

While we are arguing amongst ourselves, corporations are writing our laws and deciding what news we will watch and read.  Many of us take the easy road of hatred and blame; the one laid out for us by mainstream media; the one that tells us if a McDonald’s worker gets paid a living wage we won’t be able to afford a Big Mac.  Why is it that the freehand of the market can only be trusted when corporations want deregulation?  Don’t Big Macs always cost exactly as much as McDonald’s number crunching geniuses have figured out the market will bear?

Jim Crowe laws would never have taken hold if plantation owners hadn’t been able to convince poor white people that they had more in common with rich white people than poor black people.  What if instead, poor people of every color had recognized that they shared more with each other than any of them did with rich plantation owners?  Now it is time for individual people to unite.  Corporations are not people.  We are the people.  This nation is by us, for us and of us.