So, what is it like here on the ground at Take Back the Capital for the People? I am so glad you asked gentle reader! This morning before the attempt to meet the 99 worst Reps and Senators in their offices I had a chance to talk to a few folks here.
The first person I talked to was not even one of the protestors, but a Lookie-Lou who was simpatico with the aims of the protest, namely more jobs, more unemployment benefits and more representation of the 99% by our elected officials.
He is attending a dinner at the Library of Congress this evening and intended to ask some blunt and pointed questions of the Representatives that he expected to meet there. More power to him!
I then sat down with a couple of teachers from Tacoma Shannon Sehlin and Susie Esqueda. They were both here to make a point about jobs and education in particular.
Susie’s has three adult children. Two are in the process of losing their houses, and the third, who is 41 is living with her now. These are all well educated people who can’t seem to find work, let alone meaningful career work.
Susie was also really concerned about the cuts to Planned Parenthood that the Congress wants to enact. She is old enough to remember when the phrase “Children having children” was more than just a slogan and is very concerned about the lack of education about and access to contraception that the radical Right is proposing.
Her friend Shannon is very concerned about what cuts to education mean for para-educators and special programs whether they are Special Ed or Art or Band or even recess. From her own experience she knows what it means when class sizes go up and there are not teacher’s aids to help.
Both were motivated and Susie had a great quote “It is all about what you give” she said in regards to having a responsive government, I highly agree.
I then moved on to talk to Olive` Hendrick (pronounced Oliv-a). He is a 27 year iron worker from Boston. Since 2008 he has had exactly 6 months of work and is now out of unemployment benefits and it likely to lose his house soon.
For all that the man is a bit of a Rock Star when it comes to representing the 99%. He knows who is at fault and is not afraid to say so. He blames the banks, but has an interesting take on the bonuses paid to the bankers.
Mr. Hendrick thinks that a lot of the money is hush money, in the sense that the banks are buying the complicity of many of the employees there. He thinks there are folks who work at the banks that might rat them out, might air their dirty laundry in public, were it not for the giant checks that get waved in their face. I am not so sure, but it is an interesting idea.
He was very sure that things will change and that the message of the people would be heard. When I asked him what it was exactly that he wanted to tell his representative he quoted me a Bible verse, Job 34:7 , which reads in part “Can he who hates justice govern?” Personally I think that is a great question to ask every Republican who looks out for the rich and couldn’t give two shits for the poor.
The mood here is upbeat for all that it is raining and starting to turn into a mud bowl on the mall. The protestors seem to be energized by meeting so many people like them, hearing the stories that are just like theirs and being in the Capital.
It is to be devoutly hopped that they will take that same energy away with them when they go home. After all the point of this is not just to meet with Congress, or to annoy K street or even to get together for mutual support.
The point here is to activate new activists and having them take the fight home with them to spread the grass roots effort even wider and make the voice of the 99% even louder. A couple of days in the rain can dampen (sorry for the pun) anyone’s spirits, but I have hope that they will also nurture an ember in the breast of all here that will turn into a full fledged fire when they get home.
The last group of people that I have talked to a lot have been the police. There are a lot of police in DC, Capital, Park, Metro the list goes on. As a rule they are pretty cynical people and were less than impressed by the protests.
This is not so much because of the cause but because they have seen it all before. I got very different numbers when I asked how often they had one of these things, between 400 a year and 5 or 6.
They were all just what you’d want from police, there were there to be sure things were safe, but beyond that they had no interest in getting in the way of the protests or protestors. As one told me; “As long as they are being polite, let them have the same right to speak as anyone else”.
It is easy to see the police as part of the problem, and sometimes they are, here in DC, so far, the police are doing the job of keeping the peace and nothing more.
The floor is yours!