17 posts tagged “activism”
Students at the school that employs me, Columbia College Chicago, have been very active in trying to save the Monetary Award Program in Illinois. This publicly funded program helps tens of thousands of young people in Illinois gain access to higher education. Right now the program is, like all worthy public programs, facing a dire threat of defunding. I am impressed by the mobilization I see among Columbia's students. They have been tabling in the lobby of my department's building everyday, and a student delegation went down to Springfield to lobby today. I hope my colleagues who teach in other schools around Chicago are seeing the same.
Here is an informative video made by Columbia students about the MAP program and what it means to students.
Go here to add your support to this important campaign.
With our hotel room assignment, the trip to Detroit began on an auspicious note.
After all, love is the drug.
My three days there ended on the celebratory and very inspiring occasion of Grace Lee Boggs' ninety-fourth birthday. There was a party attended by a couple hundred people, and a celebrity appearance by actor Danny Glover. Glover's interest and commitment to political activism is well known, but I had never actually heard him speak at events of an activist nature. Although this was a birthday party, and Glover filled his turn at the mic with accolades and warm wishes for Grace, he also went on a terrific rant, rendering the low-powered mic superfluous.
Grace herself was seated in a wheelchair. She seemed to be absorbing the remarks of well-wishers with quiet satisfaction. When she finally spoke, she made much of the community in evidence in the room: multiracial, intergenerational, full of life and love.
I could not get close enough to Grace for a good pic. The hall was just that crowded.
Here is video of a very moving event in Chicago organized by religious leaders and the Tamms Year Ten project. What to call it? A demonstration? A service, a rally, a vigil? Maybe it was all of those things. No matter, it is another reminder of what Tamms is: a living hell that we have the power to eradicate.
During and after the June 2008 Drift talk of Detroit came up with some regularity. It was only natural. After exploring the rural and small city radical threads in downstate and outstate Illinois and Wisconsin, curiosity about the post-industrial land- and social-scape of Detroit made it a reasonable next place to investigate. This summer a few of us aligned our schedules around the Allied Media Conference. That was the excuse. The reason, Detroit itself.
But for the first conference day I managed to skip out and spend a little family time with my aunt and uncle in Ann Arbor, and, not least, to visit the Labadie Collection. I had something to see: Open Road, the radical paper out of Vancouver published from 1976 to 1990.
There were good articles (and great graphics) about radicals on the run, like Dennis Banks and Russell Means...
and the Weather Underground splits.
What I took from my quick study was that the late 70s was indeed a time of repression and fracture for the radical movements and groups that emerged in the late 60s and early 70s. Starting a radical publishing project under such movement conditions inspires even today. Initiating such projects when it is hard, when radical winds shift and wane, is sometimes when it matters most.
But the sparkling network well in place by the mid and late 70s is still in evidence, most clearly in the fact that the issue number Two did not come out until a year or so after issue number One. In an explanatory editorial in issue number Two they write that the delay was a result of having received more than 1200 (!) letters of correspondence, offering encouragement, criticism, and thanks. They say that it took a lot of the editorial collective's time and energy responding to them. That blows me away; 1200 letters, from all over the world, and they wrote them back! By comparison, communication is indeed much broader now, but also far thinner.
By the mid and later 80s the project seems to have lost energy and suffered dwindling resources of labor and funds. Here is the farewell graphic from the last issue published, in 1990.
Today on WORT's noon time show, A Public Affair, host Chris Dols had a much needed conversation by phone with Bob Quellos, an architect and Chicago citizen who is helping with the activist effort No Games Chicago. This was the first time I've heard in Madison a critical discussion of the City of Chicago's effort to woo the International Olympic Committee and the 2016 Summer Games. The reason it is important that this analysis be heard in Madison is because our city has become part of Chicago's official Olympic bid, having officially been named as the site of several competitive events. The governor and the mayor are on board. There has been virtually no voice on the issue other than that of those who are already sold on the idea. Predictably, from the get-go they have deployed the usual boilerplate about tourism and economic boons.
Missing is any analysis that takes into account what hosting the Games will probably mean for Chicago, and, in turn, how the crushing fiscal burden left on Chicago by the Games might affect the surrounding region. Including Madison. This lack of analysis is major problem given the anxiety bourgeois Madison feels regarding poor and working class people moving to Madison from the nearby big cities of Milwaukee and Chicago. How the economic and living conditions in those cities are managed and, in this case, maybe worsened substantially, should be of concern to people (and activists) here precisely because the demographic shifts in Madison probably correspond to those changing conditions.
Instead of blindly considering a Chicago Summer Games an automatic good, and, in the worse cases, simultaneously bemoaning the outsiders who are bringing to Madison new levels of violence and lawlessness, we should be thinking through the operations that make the nearby big cities unlivable, driving poor people out. This would include such strikingly neoliberal developments like hosting a summer Olympics. Unfortunately, even during the conversation on-air there wasn't much time spent on the regional ramifications, but it was a good start.
This past Saturday, the ongoing collaborative creativity between artists and the Tamms Year Ten organization reached another high water mark. Some thirty activists took to the streets and plazas of Chicago, publicizing the campaign to end torture in Illinois and shut down Tamms. These folks used a method of stencilling developed by Milwaukee street artist Jesse Graves. The coloring agent: mud, a new/old medium for legally uncontrollable expression, and absolutely green (or rather, brown). I love that they took their messages to the museums, as in the last pic, outside the Museum of Contemporary Art. This is urban earthworking at its best and most politically engaged.
Today, another SOHO highlight!
Beatrix Zobl, my indefatigable curator-collaborator helped me make the acquaintance of Margit Appel, an activist for what they call Grundeinkommen, or a basic income. And today Margit and a crew from the self-organized, grassroots group with which she works, Runder Tisch Grundeinkommen (the Round Table for Basic Income), came by for nearly a full day of collaborative text-writing, prop material production, public dissemination, and then an evening review/evaluation/discussion session. The whole thing was an experiment, none of the activists being art identified or trained. But open-minded, willing to try something new, and even a bit anxious for a fresh group and public exercise. They have spent most of their time and energies 'til now focused on conferences, panel discussions, studying policy, and the like. No creative public action.
So we got together and riffed on the various rationales for a basic income.
We talked, and wrote, together:
Then we put the text into visual form, via lo-tech methods and by hand. In other words, we had a little drawing party, with photocopying, folding, and tearing, too.
The natural next step: dissemination, on the streets.
And after that, a little break for food and rest, and then regrouping for review, evaluation, debriefing. All in all, a very useful exercise for all. For the Runder Tisch Grundeinkommen, a lesson in fast, cheap, practical group creativity, and perhaps more to the point, experimenting with a new way to relate to each other, a different way to collaborate. (Up 'til this event, the group's activities have mostly been about conferences and policy.) This, I told them, is one simple way the group can cultivate itself as a culture.
There was big crowd on hand for Noam Chomsky. Not surprising considering this is Madison, after all. There were probably two thousand people or more.
I had my usual Chomsky gripes, though. To sum it all up, it goes like this: AND???
As in, okay, American hypocrisy is a fact...AND?
Okay, our elected leaders and ruling elites are morally bankrupt...AND?
Okay, some of them are honest and/or brazen enough to not even lie about it, thereby skirting the hypocrisy charge...AND?
Chomsky is uncompromisingly negative, frames foreign policy tightly around admirably simple moral codes (um, 'though shalt not kill' comes to mind), and exposes the brutality of projected American force for what it is.
But we already knew all that. Going to see Chomsky is like the inverse of going to see Neil Young. We don't want the nuggets, the sing-alongs, the greatest hits...we're buying tickets to see him take some risks, say something experiemental. And he never does.
And one other gripe: in the introduction Scottish physician-activist Dr. Graham Watt made a joke about how when he told a Canadian colleague that he was headed to America, to Madison, for a symposium, the colleague then said, 'Madison? That's not America!' The assembled throng let out a collective chuckle, unmistakably self-satisfied in tone. It irked me. I am as happy to be living in a non-conforming city like Madison as anybody, but a rolling of the eyes would have been a more appropriate response. Let's us never forget, yes, Madison is the enlightened city, in many respects more European in feel and governance. But like small, homogenous, wealthy European countries, Madison's progressivism is built on a kind of affluence that is not to be shared, an affluence that allows for a measure of denial.
More promising was an event two nights later. This was a screening of Democracy's Ghosts, an excellent documentary about the disenfranchisement of those with felony convictions. The event was part of an ongoing monthly screening series about prison-related issues at Rainbow Bookstore. The small room was maxed out at about twenty-five people, and the ACLU reps on hand did a good job breaking down the situation here in Wisconsin.
Looking forward to hearing Noam Chomsky's latest thoughts on the Middle East. He's coming to Madison for this three-day affair, co-sponsored by many Madison organizations. As of yesterday, there were tickets still available at Rainbow Books. $10 a piece, well worth it, considering it is events like these that keep the Madison activist scene vital, visible, and moving forward.
I've heard Noam Chomsky speak in person once before. That was in college, probably twenty years ago. He held a small group discussion afterwards. Well, it was small (40? 50?) in comparison to the full chapel audience for the main lecture, anyway. He was terrific, astounding as always in his straightforward, practically emotion-free delivery while relating searing analyses of US involvement in atrocities in country after country. I asked him a question about censorship and marginalization regarding his own work. This was at a time when he'd been addressing in his book just out, Manufacturing Consent, the general problem of media self-censorship and bogus neutrality. I remember him saying, as part of his answer, that if he were black and not a famous scholar, he'd have been not simply marginalized but silenced, and if not killed, then certainly threatened, as many of the black militants of the Sixties had been. I was like, hm...well, that's a pretty good answer.
Anyways, the man is still doing it, telling it like it is, carrying the standard for a kind of informed activism - and activism of information - I sometimes take for granted. And he's old enough to say, we've got a global treasure here, let's appreciate and engage with him while we can.
A few days ago writer, teacher, and curator Bert Stabler posted to the gochgo list a link to a video document of the remarkable Piñata Factory project, which he, his public school students, and many others helped make happen. Mike Bancroft initiated the project. You especially gotta love the broad daylight stealth 'Streets & San' truck deliveries. Equal parts service work, social activism, anti-authoritarian provocation, and classroom student art project, Piñata Factory inspires. Check it out on Current.
