A Dream of Justice in the Long Winter of Our Discontent
Globe-spanning corporations and their wholly owned subsidiary, the Republican Party, are carrying out a cruel and systematic class war against poor, homeless and working-class Americans.
Editorial by Terry Messman
A homeless veteran on the streets of San Francisco shows the long-term costs of slashing the safety net in order to fund wars of aggression. Photo by Robert Terrell
For people who care about economic justice, this has been a long, nearly endless winter of our discontent. Poor people face an uphill struggle for their very survival, battered by rent hikes, federal housing cutbacks, unaffordable health care, severe cutbacks of welfare, food assistance, and even aid to disabled and elderly people.
For people of conscience, it is becoming clear that the very soul of our democracy is at stake in this struggle, for our nation's finest values are being bought and sold, co-opted and corrupted, by corporate plutocrats aided by the ruling Republicans.
Every year of the Bush administration, we have faced escalating attacks on the safety net, on environmental protections and on civil liberties. Every year, we watch with a sinking sensation as hundreds of billions of dollars are given to the Pentagon to fight wars of aggression overseas, even while hundreds of thousands more people are abandoned to a life of poverty, sickness and hunger on the streets of the wealthiest nation in history.
Every time any activist or politician sounds a lone populist note or denounces the unchecked greed of our corporate overlords, the news broadcasts are full of Republicans growling that liberals are trying to start a "class war." This is the Big Lie of our time. For it is the extreme right-wing -- the globe-spanning corporations and their wholly owned subsidiary, the Republican Party -- that is carrying out an undeniable class war against poor, homeless and working-class Americans.
Class warfare from the Right
Class warfare is when Republicans and their business allies carry out a multi-year assault on all lifeline services for poor people -- choking off federal housing assistance, and attacking welfare, Food Stamps, Social Security and Medicaid.
Class warfare is when the Bush administration gives unconscionable tax breaks to the richest one percent so the middle-class is forced to pay a greater percentage of the tax burden and the safety net is shredded.
Class warfare is when Congress and the President increase the Pentagon's budget to over $400 billion annually -- money that is directly stolen from the poor and diverted from educational loan programs for students and medical aid for the sick and Food Stamps for the hungry and housing for the homeless.
Class warfare is when elected officials give the military contractors - the very same interwoven alliance of politicians and weapons manufacturers that Eisenhower denounced as the military-industrial complex -- billions of dollars to turn America into a permanent warfare state.
The big picture is that virtually all of the New Deal programs are under attack; and our nation's promises of housing, welfare, food, health care and even Social Security are on the endangered list.
This ambitious assault on social programs for the poor has been building momentum since the early 1980s, when homelessness began increasing uncontrollably. It started when Reagan cut 80 percent of HUD's budget in the early 1980s, cut hundreds of thousands of people off SSI, and slashed welfare programs. It is intensifying now under Bush, as he tries to further cut nearly every domestic program that helps the poor.
This well-coordinated assault on the economic well-being of poor people is what class warfare really looks like -- the direct theft of economic resources from the poor and redistribution to the rich.
The most effective organizing strategy for all who have been left out of a growingly unjust economic system is to build a national dialogue on economic human rights -- the right to health care, the right to living wages, the right to truly affordable housing, the right to food, the right to welfare for those unable to work. All these are enshrined as human rights in the United Nation's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It's just that the U.S. government has no intention of ever honoring them.
I believe that millions of people will -- some day, if not now -- awaken to a clear call for housing and health care and jobs for all. We will someday reach the consciences of people through such a populist call for economic justice, because we are addressing their desire for justice, and their need for material security, housing and health care for themselves and their children.
In an era when even many Democrats are waffling on their commitment to these basic issues of economic fairness, the most important thing we can do is to fight for housing and health care and jobs as economic human rights for all. Since economic rights are part of the spectrum of human rights, those denied housing or health care or employment are victims of human rights violations. People of conscience must stand in solidarity with the victims of human rights violations, in season and out.
Lessons of past movements
These considerations also offer a strategic insight. We won't win this struggle for justice and human rights by slowly convincing a few moderates to not cut services quite so severely. In the long run, we will succeed by laying claim to our own populist values of economic justice and equality for all, and not by trying to sound reasonable to the conservatives.
Let's look at the lessons to be found in two of the most inspiring and successful social-change movements in U.S. history -- the civil rights movement and the disability rights movement.
Only 30 years ago, disabled people were dealing with every stigma and hardship imaginable. And, to make the barriers to justice even harder to overcome, disabled people appeared to be a fairly small minority. There was really no practical hope that they were going to convince business-minded conservatives, or zealous advocates of small government, that it made economic sense to pass the Americans with Disabilities Act, let alone all the other reforms aimed at everything from eliminating employment discrimination, to mainstreaming disabled children in classrooms, to installing expensive ramps, elevators and curb cuts in every city.
Fighting like rebels
One current cliche is that we must work to build a majority movement and moderate our message to attract more adherents. That is a load of crap pushed by sideline-sitting, armchair theorists. Rather than weakening their message and working slowly for decades to beg the legislators to meet their needs, some incredibly courageous disabled activists chose a very different path. They took to the streets. They chained themselves to inaccessible buildings. With a level of courage and dedication that almost appears superhuman, they used wheelchairs to blockade buses. They found attorneys and filed every lawsuit imaginable to gain full access.
The struggle for disability rights is not yet fully won; but it has made enormous strides forward. This was one ass-kicking militant movement led by prophetic figures who were not going to beg anyone for their human rights or meekly appeal for help on charity telethons.
Rather, they knew in their hearts and souls that they were right to say that all disabled people had full human dignity and equality. So they set out on a tough-minded and highly principled course to fight like tigers and rebels in every uncompromising way possible to force this nation to grant them equal access.
The same principle was at work in the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King Jr., in his "Letter from Birmingham Jail," warned supporters of civil rights against watering down their message to appeal to conservatives or even the too-cautious moderates. Instead, the civil rights activists boldly acted with uncompromising zeal to gain full human rights.
Instead of trying to make their message more palatable by making compromises, they formed a brave, uncompromising movement and forced this country into a no-win situation -- either grant their civil rights and dismantle segregation, or arrest them by the hundreds and create a moral crisis. With a courage that defies belief, they confronted the power of sheriff's clubs, police dogs, water hoses, bombs, bullets, beatings, jailings and assassinations. In so doing, they overcame a system of entrenched racism that must have looked unconquerable to anyone analyzing things from the academic sidelines.
Martin Luther King reproached moderates who wanted the movement to slow down the pace of reform. Instead of slowly persuading moderates or lobbying the legislators, civil rights activists confronted the unjust system of segregation with militant nonviolence and fought for their very lives.
The unsung members of these two movements are my heroes and heroines, but they are also my models of strategic insight and brilliance. The civil rights and disability rights movements show us that we don't have to conform to the majority who believe that profits and the free market system make our calls for economic justice impossible or obsolete.
We are right about economic rights for all, and one day we will be proven right. One day, the struggle against poverty must be taken up by labor unions, tenants, religious groups, university students and the peace movement. One day, the social workers and homeless service providers will have to walk out of their offices and join a struggle for true justice with the homeless people they currently counsel.
Until that day comes, all those who work for justice will have to stick up for this lonely cause and speak out for full human rights, in season and out, and against all the odds.
STREET SPIRIT
1515 Webster St, #303
Oakland, CA 94612Phone: (510) 238-8080, ext. 303E-mail: Spirit
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Published by American Friends Service Committee
Editor and Web Design: Terry Messman
