This archive article is selected from The Cleveland Pages, the city's only weekly independent journal of politics and opinion on the Internet. Find out all about the Cleveland Pages here, or check out the current issue.
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Some regular Cleveland Pages correspondents have given me their usual load about skipping three weeks worth of updates. I suppose that's fair ("something new every Friday!") but, well, there are the deadlines you get paid for and the deadlines you don't get paid for. Guess which one this is. Sometimes "act locally" translates as "make sure the mortgage check clears."
That's true about any form of activism, Cleveland Pages included. A typical person who has a job and family, or who is working on them, doesn't have much time or energy left over to change the world, or even one city.
On the other hand, someone who lacks those commitments has a hard time being taken seriously. You can't win, it seems.
Recent national events provide a nice example of what I mean by this.
The national media conduits enjoyed their opportunity to lambast and ridicule those who gathered in protest of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank meetings in DC this month. Apparently taken unawares by the startling volume and strength of protests at last year's conference of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle, the opinion-makers this time were as well prepared as the riot police. In some cases, the warm-up invective started days early!
National Journal editor Michael Kelly, to choose just one of the IMF-basher-bashers, griped in a Washington Post op-ed that targeting debt relief for poor countries somehow cheapened those honest, good demonstrations in the 1960s for Black voting rights, speaking specifically of Martin Luther King's 1963 March on Washington. Kelly told of his vague uneasiness at the "presumption" that his own participation in later protests against the Vietnam war "occupied anything like the same moral plane." And then, to pile guilt on top of guilt, he attacked those IMF demonstrations as "an imitation of an imitation of a form of politics that was once reserved for life and death."
It was good rhetoric, although I've read better. But debt relief is a matter of life and death for the people affected. Poorer countries do without sanitation, immunization, and other public health projects to meet payments on loans backing projects that were questionable to begin with. Some African countries have reduced their public education spending similarly. That much is obvious, and well documented.
Hardly any mainstream media even mentioned the substance of anti-IMF complaints. The paragraph right above this one may have delivered more such information than you've seen on all TV networks combined. It's an old tactic: zoom the cameras in on the wackiest-looking protestors, but don't quote anyone who might sound coherent.
Media condescension directed towards IMF demonstrators for being young, white, and privileged is puzzling. That tone might have sounded pretty good against the young, white, and privileged northern college students who participated in Mississippi's "Freedom Summer" movement in 1964. Would people like Michael Kelly feel better if today's protestors received the treatment of Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney? Would that have made the IMF protests honest and meaningful?
Normally I wouldn't try to put words in Dr. King's mouth, or attempt to speak for anyone else. I'll make an exception since Kelly opened the door by invoking King's name in his rant. It seems that moderating multilateral debt levels would be something King would have supported in the name of fairness to the world's poor.
I mention this article at all not because it has anything particularly to do with Cleveland. I use it as an example of the sort of wiser-than-thou thinking that permeates the mainstream media. Those a bit younger than I (now 34, not much younger than Michael Kelly) were vilified for supposedly being too wrapped up in consumer and career pursuits, not attuned to the needs of others, and just too narrow-minded.
Now that some people a little younger in turn than that cohort have turned to organized nonviolence in the face of powerful international institutions, their elders and mine aren't satisfied: we're not sincere enough, the causes aren't glorious enough, the rhetoric isn't deep enough. It's as if the Baby Boomer critics are embarrassed about having had ideals long ago. More likely, though, they're more ashamed of having lost them.
Which reminds me of a story.
It was about three years after I'd graduated from college, gotten married, and mostly busied myself with buying a house and functioning in a corporate job. I had "gone private" for a while; in retrospect, that was the right thing to do, because I do need to have a place to live and my little people about me. Our first child, Adele, was about three months old.
Anyway, at this meeting, Ione Biggs made an appropriate fuss over the baby. Then she told me, in her kind but authoritative way, "Now you know how important it is to make this a better world."
Ione Biggs never gives a lecture when a well-chosen reference to one's own experience will do. It was her way of chiding me for having been out of touch with the complex community of little local movements in and around Cleveland.
But life is like that. There's a time to take care of your own family and a time to consider the larger family. From one year to the next, priorities emerge, environments change, and events either reassure one or sound alarms. Other people's expectations are for other people!
Admittedly, the teens and twentysomethings who appeared most visibly at those IMF protests were there, perhaps in part, because it was a school break or because their job pressures were modest. Why is that such a bad thing though? They march and chant in the place of like-minded people who couldn't get a babysitter or who couldn't afford to miss work. They bring their presence to bear for others who are too self-conscious or lacking in energy to do so.
Michael Kelly says he felt good about Martin Luther King's March on Washington, in August of 1963, when he was six years old, because he was helping his own mother handing out cups of lemonade to the marchers on their street.
I hope my son Ben, now not quite six, feels the same way about this spring's march to the Cleveland Clinic. Because his own father was there, holding his hand all the way from Wade Park to Carnegie and snapping pictures with the free hand. But more importantly because we live in a corporate age, so we all need to develop ways to overcome what Rabbi Michael Lerner (from the magazine Tikkun) calls "surplus powerlessness."
We're overwhelmed by governments and institutions. It seems that every community endeavor is about profit-making or shilling for a poorly-hidden corporate agenda. Politicians call it "reasonable" and "realistic" when they trade off public interest for respectability at the next Growth Association gig.
For self-respect, for sanity, for democracy--people need to get out from under those institutions, even when they serve us too. Kindergarten is not too early to start on this lifetime pursuit. Most people never master it. Many never even start.
For this, we should thank organized labor, specifically those unions with more activist locals such as CWA and SEIU. Decades of negotiation and confrontation have yielded slow progress towards living wages, together with reasonable working hours. These unions help to fund, train, and support organizers who can devote more time and energy to causes that matter to working people and the poor.
Although fair-minded people will have minor or major differences with any union's political program, it's critical that those interests be represented. At their worst, the unions can be narrow-minded, selfish, and organized corruptly against their own members. Sometimes they can appear so overtly political that you might question where the membership is involved. But at their best, they teach the rest of us lessons about setting goals, managing resources, and sticking through hard times.
This spring's sustained picketing, the bus ride to Delaware, the ongoing command center at Broadway Methodist Church, the march on the Cleveland Clinic... these were good things, hopeful signs, totally aside from the very important questions of closing one hospital or selling another.
At this point in the city's history it's good to see people energized enough about anything to be heard and seen. Even if their protests are misguided. Even if they're wrong on the issues. And maybe even if the causes aren't, in some eyes, as noble as the epic struggles that happened in black-and-white and scratchy audio, before some of us were born.
Oh look. It's Friday morning and another client deadline is today.
Geez, Ione, I'm trying!
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