Rightwing funnyman Tom Tancredo, auditioning for the new conservative comedy show, labeled Miami, Fla. "a Third World country.".
Tancredo was right, and he doesn't get it, and he never will. That’s funny.
Ten days ago, ‘third world’ activists in Miami formally christened their enclave — and their effort — Umoja Village.
And this is the future of America.
Photo: Maya Bell, The Orlando Sentinel.
Continued...
There’s way more to Miami than wheezing old anti-Castro caudillos. Miami is one of those places where the future of America is being born, a hotpot of cultures from everywhere in hemisphere.
As Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr., recently put it:
...according to the Census Bureau, Miami's polyglot population represents what America will look like in about 40 years. And if America really understood that, it would be worried.
We owe our fellow Americans from south of our borders — Tancredo’s dreaded ‘third world’ — a bigger debt that we will ever acknowledge for their doggedly loyal exercise of democratic principles in spite of some of our best efforts to stop them. Not the least of those fellow Americans is the founder of this web site.
Umoja is the Swahili word for "unity."
Long ago, my friend Eugene Snowden taught west African drum rhythms in a covered alleyway behind a grungy coffee house in Orlando, Fla. Five bucks each per lesson, Sunday afternoons at 3 p.m. I was his first student. His second, a soulful teenage beauty, is today my wife of three years, my companion of 10 and my greatest source of joy. Eventually there were 30 of us.
Umoja, Gene taught, occurs naturally for most people every day in small, manageable doses.
Skillfully summoned, however, Umoja has supernatural powers. It can make you tingle, make you swoon, make see into the center of the universe. It's what makes some movies inspiring, sports events enthralling, religions fervent, and some parades worth marching in, it's what Sigmund Freud called "that oceanic feeling" (though he thought he was talking about religion).
Rhythmic drummers are particularly susceptible. When the beat is just right, when you’re ‘talking,’ you can visit another world. Umoja takes you over, and when it happens, every drummer knows it. You stop seeing, you stop feeling, you stop drumming, you just live in the moment. You realize how incredibly powerful unity - Umoja - really is. It opens your soul, you know everyone else is doing it too and you know it's the real reason we are all here, breathing and beating.
Okay, we've all been there. It happened to me, drumming, only once, and only for an instant, but it's happened other times and places, and it's happened to many other people I know. It happens quite frequently here at DailyKos, usually in smaller doses, but occasionally in awesome waves. (Allan Ginsberg wrote a poem about it once, the first line reads: "The weight of the world is love.")
Housing is an essential human need
"Shelter" — our homes — are one of the most profound ways we express our worth. How we live is a measure of who we are. "Housing" is a basic human need - a "survival" commodity like food, water, and social interaction, without which human organisms cannot long endure.
Some of us believe housing is a spoil in the war against the middle class. Most of us lease out our labor or our wit to earn enough to satisfy our basic needs. When their price exceeds our ability to earn their procurement, we are on our way to dying. We are slaves.
In Miami, a place to live costs so much that many people - including many who have jobs - have quit the game. For many more, the choice was not so willful. The median price of a home in Miami is $371,700. The median family income in Miami-Dade is $36,089, enough for a home that costs about $130,000. The numbers just don’t work: there aren't any $130,000 houses in Miami.
A housing crisis that effects almost everyone
In a series of unfortunate events, industry, governments, and private capital resources have created a disturbing condition in Florida, in all high-growth states and in most metro areas: the legions of families for whom ‘the numbers just won't work’ is growing by leaps and bounds, and now includes those of teachers, police officers and health care workers - no more worthy human beings, of course, but important to the long-term health of every community.
A study earlier this year showed that 90 percent of workers in Palm Beach County, Fla. (home to Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Ted Kennedy, etc.) can't afford to own a home there.
Doing something about it (keyword: do)
Max Rameau is one of a growing movement of activists who hopes to change that. He’s young, he’s articulate, he’s charismatic and he’s smart. Here’s a great YouTube documentary on him, or you can read more about this (and see the same video) at Florida Workforce Housing Network, where we’ve just begun to cover the story. (Disclaimer: I'm a principal, and here's my diary announcing our project.)
A couple months ago, Max and some friends got a bright idea. The City of Miami owns a small vacant lot in the middle of Liberty City, one of the region’s poorest neighborhoods. For years, the City had been promising to build housing on the site, while the beleaguered Miami-Dade Housing Agency squandered so many millions to corrupt developer types that the Miami Herald called the agency "an ATM for developers."
On Oct. 23 — 45 days ago — Max and his friends arrived at the site with a bold plan to confront authorities in a palpable way: they started building ‘shanties.’
Carlos Miller at Category 305 has a vivid account of Day 1, and some key facts that indicate why this story has serious legs:
"Between 1998 and 2000, the city demolished about 500 apartment units in several lots around here, leaving more than 1,000 people without homes," Rameau said. "And since then, they haven't built anything."
...Rameau and fellow activists converged upon the corner of NW 62 Street and 17 Avenue. They started building shelters out of wooden pallets. A police officer arrived within 30 minutes, threatening to arrest the activists for trespassing if they did not stop what they were doing.
The officer called for back-up. The activists kept working. The first officer kept yelling. Five more cop cars pulled up. Then Rameau pulled out his ace in the hole.
"When he calmed down, we gave him a copy of the Pottinger Settlement," Rameau said.
The Pottinger Settlement, reached by the City of Miami in 1998 after a lengthy court case, states that homeless people cannot be arrested for engaging in "life sustaining" activities, including sleeping, eating and public nudity related to bathing and calls of nature. The ruling, named after a homeless plaintiff named Michael Pottinger, also makes it legal for homeless people to create "temporary structures" to sleep in.
We Americans claim that we value human life highest of all, and principles like freedom and justice. Absent wealth or rank or profession or even employment, human beings in America are, as our founding documents eloquently assert, ‘endowed by their Creator’ with certain rights.
One of those rights is life. Nobody wants crack-heads peeing in their doorway, but a society that arrests people simply for being human — for engaging in "life sustaining" activities, including sleeping, eating and public nudity related to bathing and calls of nature — clearly values rank, position, profession or wealth over humanity, and over its own humanity.
That morning in Miami, something cool happened.
The officer scanned the document and immediately called the city attorney's office. After a short conversation, he was told to leave them alone. So the officers retreated and the activists continued working.
Today, Umoja Village is home to 35 people. They are making a stand. They didn't mean to start a revolution. They meant to solve a problem with the only means available to them: their own hands and backs.
They are smart. From Take Back the Land, Rameau’s blog:
VISIT THE UMOJA VILLAGE SHANTYTOWN. Come see what has been built and feel the love and buy in of the residents. Make the Umoja Village a permanent part of Miami by visiting and granting us legitimacy. We are at 6201 NW 17th Ave., on the corner of 62nd St. and NW 17th Ave. in the Liberty City section of Miami.
When the South Florida Workforce Housing Initiative, an venerable old-school progressive group that has led many housing fights in Miami visited Umoja Village with offers of support recently, residents politely declined.
So Umoja Village might be around for a while. Right now, it's only 35 people, and there's no room to expand. But the idea might. I'm hoping it will.
My wife and I have visited Mexico's back country many times over the past six years for extended periods, long enough to learn just a little.
We're so damn insulated here in the U.S., politically and socially but most of all economically, but throughout most of the rest of the world, common people respect each other and see the enormous value inherent in unity.
In the ‘third world,’ democracy as an active verb, a survival skill, the only defense against oppression. Throughout much of the world, cooperation and consensus are more highly valued than competition and conquest.
We're seeing it now in Oaxaca in Mexico, and we saw it a few days ago in Venezuela.
Abe Lincoln proclaimed that government is of the people, for the people. We are the government. Untended, democracy can slide into tyranny in a generation. Unity doesn't produce Halliburtons and Enrons and WMDs in Iraq. Umoja produces constitutions, babies, Americas.
Nancy Pelosi expressed it beautifully a few weeks back: work, not wealth, that we value, people, not profits. It's the idea at the foundation of DailyKos.com, for which we will all be indebted for a couple generations to come. Universal health care? We will wait forever for 'government' to provide it for us. The health care industry will take even longer. Peace in the Middle East? Same solution. When we make it.
Umoja — a Swahili word — and Umoja Village in Miami are torrid expressions of 'people power' as a verb, not a condition.
If you like the Umoja Village idea enough to support it, Max Rameau's web site, Take Back the Land, has a Paypal account and a community 'needs' list.
You won't find a 'Tancredo' on it anywhere. And that’s funny, too.