I woke up today feeling tempted to write a post about how full of shit the media is. But since it’s Fourth of July and little over a week since the US Social Forum in Detroit ended, I keep comparing the Social Forum this year in Detroit to the Tea Party Convention last year.
I am thinking about it today because I am writing from the South on the Fourth of July. Now, depending on who you ask and where you are, Florida is either the South, the northern tip of South America, or a southern enclave of Northeastern old people. But Florida did secede from the Union during the civil war. And if you drive on the I-4 corridor in central Florida you will see the largest flag of your life…a Dixie flag. And you’ll even see throwback shirts of people wearing a Dixie flag with words underneath saying “you wear yours and I’ll wear mine!” Clearly alluding to a time more than a decade ago when young people where wearing Malcolm X shirts as a fashion statement. Yeah…over a decade ago.
Some of my southern friends that come from old school Southern White families tell me that Fourth of July is not too popular in some parts of the South. You know, the whole Civil War and all. To some old-school Southern White families not celebrating the Fourth of July is a form of resistance. Ironic, cause some of my progressive friends don’t celebrate Fourth of July either. For them, it is the legacy of slavery, violence and US imperialism. Two forms of resistance. Can you guess which one is more likely to be called an act of treason? The answer is so obvious that we take it for granted. We take for granted that some social movements have been given a pass no matter their past, present, or intended sins.
I was reminded of this when I attended the US Social Forum almost two weeks ago. The US Social Forum is self described as a ”movement building process. …the next most important step in our struggle to build a powerful multi-racial, multi-sectoral, inter-generational, diverse, inclusive, internationalist movement that transforms this country and changes history.” In sum it is probably the most formidable meeting of Progressive minds in the country. Now, I give it two minutes before Glenn Beck starts blabbing about how it was a convergence of Lenin’s little idiots. Yeah…F**k him.
Organizers estimate the number in attendance at the US Social Forum at 15,000. Even if someone calls bullshit and puts the number at 10,000 I personally saw at least 3,000 people at the afterparty (yes, an after party) to the Social Forum alone. So for argument sake, let’s just halve the estimated in attendance to 7,500. How many people attended the Tea Party convention? The one with Sara Palin as the guest speaker for about $200k? According to the press, about 600. Ok, so the media bullshits and lies. So let me double the number of people at the Tea Party convention to 1200. It still means that twice as many people were shaking their ass on the dancefloor of the US Social Forum afterparty than in attendance for the whole freaking Tea Party convention. And unlike the Tea Party convention, which was about as melanin-rich as a bridge game, and had as many young people as a Depends undergarment commercial. The US Social Forum had old and young; white, black and brown; gay and straight; poor, working, and middle class; immigrants and citizen. It represented virtually every cross-section of society. It wasn’t unusual to see the young Black, middle-class, queer/trans immigrant from the country nor was it unusual to see the poor white straight older white man from Detroit. Both doing serious work in their/our community to make it better.
But if you believe the mainstream media, the tea party is the biggest social movement in the country right now. And the Tea Party talks about itself that way via its mouthpieces such as Glenn Beck. But the Social Forum is barely talked about or talked about disparagingly in most media outlets.
Before you get it twisted though, underestimating the Tea-baggers as a viable social movement, and reducing them to a haven for white supremacists and Sara Palin fetishists is to our detriment. In fact, some of the blame for the growth of the Tea Party is squarely placed on the Democrats and Republicans that have failed to do anything but exploit the day-to-day social and economic realities of white working class communities. I think it is also fair to blame some of us progressives for failing to more deeply engage white working rural and ex-urban communities that feel left out of the political and economic process, but just have really crazy ways of expressing it (but that is another post).
As a person that has been part of two of the biggest modern social movements, the anti-war and immigrant rights movement. I have seen for myself how mobilizations in the hundreds of thousands can produce only a blip in a major newspaper. But there seems to be a paradox amongst progressives. We are really hard on ourselves about not building movements to scale, despite all evidence to the contrary. But then we make excuses for why our ideas don’t penetrate the consciousness of regular folks, and attribute it to a media blackout.
This isn’t the whole answer, but is seems to me that we don’t have a lack of people, but a lack of effective mouthpieces. I don’t mean leaders. For every progressive meeting of 2, we have 3 leaders. But we don’t yet have the adequate “stuff” to communicate with communities that haven’t heard all we have to say about why the world is f**ked and how WE can fix it. America is a huge freaking country. 300 million people, two of the longest natural borders, and plenty of open space. But some of our progressive communications is still stuck in a handful of metropolitan areas. For us to build to scale, we just may need to be able to communicate with the millions of folks that are losing their homes, have families locked up, got kids dying in the war, friends getting deported, or just people that feel they don’t have a voice. And I mean the ones that don’t watch the same shows we watch, don’t read the same books we read, don’t listen to the same radio shows we listen to, but they do feel the same things we are feeling.
The Social Forum proves that we can bring our thoughts to scale. We can think and feel through the problems of the entire planet. Now can we communicate what we are thinking and feeling to scale?
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I’m gonna leave you with what my friend left me with today…Fredrick Douglas’ thoughts on July 4th.
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