ESPECIFISTA Page 7 * Issue 1

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that our priority is to recruit at Tea Party rallies, but to support Obama
In Remembrance...
would be to miss a genuine chance to show a truly Leftist politics, a com-
pletely different animal than what the Democrats represent.
The endless debate between Democrats and Republicans and
“The Voice of the Voiceless Ones”
the view of a hopelessly polarized America is misleading. Rather, it is
more accurate to say that a majority of people in this country are unhappy
with the way things are. Unhappy does not mean ready for revolution. It She was the voice ex-
means people would be open to an alternative, but see none likely to pressing the sentiments of mil-
happen or possible. lions of Argentinians and millions
This does not stop people from fighting back, and it is a source more of Latin Americans crushed
of hope. The workers of Republic Doors and Windows in Chicago under military dictatorship.
staged an effective and electrifying sit-down strike in December of 2008, Nicknamed “La Negra”
one month after Obama’s election. These workers intuitively grasped a due to her Diaguita Indian her-
timeless fact: direct action gets the goods; that instead of waiting for a itage, Mercedes was a prominent
president or Congress to look out for workers, workers should look out for exponent of the Nueva Canción
themselves and make what they want a reality with the force of their col- movement, which used music as
lective will. a form of social protest and in-
More recently, students throughout California and the nation hit cluded names like Victor Jara
the streets in record numbers, occupying their campuses and shutting (assassinated by the Pinochet
down a major freeway. Those involved were not just the expected student dictatorship) and Violeta Parra
radicals, but “ordinary” students tired of being attacked year after year. from Chile.
As some who were part of this movement declared that “we are Mercedes, who used
the crisis”, they sent a powerful message. Workers, students, people of traditional Argentinian folk music
color, women live the crisis while the rich hear about it on the news and as the building block of her
they sign the memos that destroy lives and families. unique style, was arrested in
Many are coming to understand that it is only by becoming a 1979 on stage in a concert in La
crisis for the rich that results will come. Plata, alongside with the attend-
Actions in response to attacks from the elite are as old as the ing crowd.
history of this country and beyond. By themselves, they are gratifying In exile, Mercedes
and inspirational, but not enough. As I stood the education rally at my moved to Paris and then to
school, I heard many students wondering aloud whether there was any- Spain, always missing her
thing substantial that could be done or what would come next. They knew beloved Argentina. She returned
too well that marches and rallies alone do not change what needs to be after the fall of dictatorship, and
Mercedes Sosa 1935-2009 died of complications of a kidney
changed.
In the May Day rallies of several years ago, millions of immi- disease in October 18, 2009.
grants and their supporters marched through the streets of major cities,
demonstrating an amazing build-up of energy and power, but when the
crowds petered out, the lighting that was caught in a bottle escaped. Sim-
ply reacting to the attacks heaped upon us is not sufficient.
“You Can’t be eutral in a
Instead, we must create an alternative by building power. We
must show, by building truly democratic, mass organizations, that the Moving Train”
world of domination masquerading as democracy is not the best we can
hope for.
Every time they tell us that we cannot make the key political and
economic decisions that determine where we work, how we will work,
who we will love, what kind of living spaces we will occupy, what kind of Author of a “A People’s History
food we will eat, how long we will live, whether we can be healthy, they of the United States,” Howard Zinn en-
are saying that we are too stupid, too lazy, too violent. listed voluntarily in World War II, eager
The sad part is that most of us have come to believe it. Like the to fight the spread of Fascism. Once
child who is abused and comes to believe she really is worthless, we look there, however, Zinn was disturbed by
at the people around us and our communities and see only despair and what he saw, and became a lifelong anti-
ugliness. If we remain isolated, the spell will never be broken. war activist.
But by working with others to grapple with the problems we face, Going to school under the G.I.
by discovering how sweet and exhilarating is the power we can exert as bill, Zinn became a renowned professor
a collective, we can expose the lies about ourselves that we have been in his own right. His lost his job as a pro-
told all our lives. fessor at Spelman college in Georgia in
It will not be easy. It will be painful, filled with conflict and set- 1964 for standing with the students
backs, but ultimately we can come through the other side stronger. We against segregation.
need an economy that is run not by the rich for their own profits, but by He is also the author of the play
the workers who do the actual work. Not by a “socialist” government ei- Marx in SoHo, in which Karl Marx comes
ther, but by democratic communities of workers, students, and human back from the dead to rescue his ideas
beings. from those that professedly followed Howard Zinn 1922-2010
them.
He died while swimming in a hotel pool in Santa Monica, CA, victim of an ap-
parent heart attack. He wanted to be remembered as “somebody who gave people a
feeling of hope and power that they didn't have before."
Zinn is survived by his daughter Myla Kabat-Zinn, son Jeff Zinn and five
grandchildren.
"I am an anarchist, and according to anarchist principles nation states be-
come obstacles to a true humanistic globalization... I think a way to behave is to think
not in terms of representative government, not in terms of voting, not in terms of elec-
toral politics, but thinking in terms of organizing social movements, organizing in the
work place, organizing in the neighborhood, organizing collectives that can become
strong enough to eventually take over —first to become strong enough to resist what
has been done to them by authority, and second, later, to become strong enough to
actually take over the institutions."

Howard Zinn