Angela Davis was Talking about a Revolution
When I first heard Tracy Chapman sing this song, it was 1988. My son Grey, his dad, and I were living on about $600 a month in a barrio in San Antonio, and things were rough. Things were rough for everyone around us--for almost everyone we knew. And we were hoping, praying for change.
What we got was President George H.W. Bush, and we waited four more years.
When Bill Clinton was elected, people cried with happiness. These weren't liberal elites. These were poor people, working people, students. We believed--believed that the United States was going to change in all the ways Clinton promised. My friend Cyndy, may she rest in peace, talked with such excitement in her voice about how, just maybe, with this election, we'd be able to get insurance for our kids.
And those eight years were good--not perfect, not ideal, not a fulfillment of every campaign promise, but still: pretty damn good for the average working person, for the average mom and dad putting food on the table. We didn't get universal healthcare for our kids, but we got a fighting chance at a job that provided insurance.
Then--well, you know what happened then.
Now we've got another election coming, and we've still got singers singing about revolution. And as much as I'm pinning my hopes on Barack Obama and his plan for this, and his plan for that, and his plan for economic change (including 5 million new jobs in clean energy), I've got to agree with Angela Davis, who spoke last night to a huge and enthusiastic crowd at Lincoln's Malone Community Center.
As Americans, Davis said, we cannot afford to fall prey to a messiah complex. The man in the oval office may wield power--way more power than he should, in some cases--but we cannot pin all our hopes on him and rely on his good will to save the day. The movement for change has got to be grassroots. It has got to have staying power. We cannot relinquish our urgency once the election results are in, even if they're good; we cannot knock ourselves out to get Obama into office and then all go home and relax.
James and I went to see Trouble the Water today at a screening at Lincoln's art theater, the Ross, and I guess my heart is a little broken right now. The pain of Katrina just doesn't dim. Every new story is a revelation of more betrayal, more abandonment, and more government indifference, even hostility, to the suffering of people in need. Trouble the Water is an intimate, immediate, first-person view of that suffering.
There's still so much work to be done. As filmmaker Kimberly Rivers Roberts's cousin said up in Memphis, "If you don't have money, if you don't have status, you don't have the government"--a statement that the film and the historical events prove all too painfully.
Try to see the film. Hey, if it came to Lincoln, Nebraska, it might be coming to a theater near you!
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