Click on the headline to link to a "Boston Indymedia" entry from the U/Mass-Boston Commitee To Have Fun (nice name,right?).
Markin comment:
As most people are already painfully aware of, public services, especially in places like California have been crippled during this latest almost catastrophic capitalist economic downturn. Nowhere is this more true that in the public education sector, including higher education. As a response to the ever-spiraling upward cost of tuition and other expenses and a bizarre corresponding decrease in the number of tenured and secured faculty and other personnel that make a campus what it is California students, teachers and labor leaders took the lead in calling for a nation-wide March 4th action. Hence, this writer’s presence at the U/Massachusetts- Boston rally.
The event at U/Mass, as such, was small but spirited. Certainly the young students who did take the time to make their voices heard, made them heard. And that is no small thing at this campus. I should note that while Boston has many, many colleges and universities, mainly private and expensive, U/Mass-Boston is a commuter school catering to a mainly working class, minority and immigrant clientele.
Although the economic squeeze has hit this population hard in every way the public college student here, in comparison at least to the mass of the private college students, although they are starting to fell the crunch too, are not, at this minute, necessarily the kind of student who will come out to such rallies. Many of these students work, are first generation college students, and have a myriad other responsibilities, many times not academically-related. Moreover, and I know this from personal experience, this campus is filled with “shoulder to the wheel” types who understand the only way out of the ghetto, the barrio and the working class quarters is to get that “education for the 21st century”. We have no quarrel with that aspiration; we just want that to include remembering for where they came and who got left behind...
What amazed me most, however, is that although those who did show up for this rally really were more spirited than I have seen students for a long time, since my school days and maybe yours, they do not have a clue about the wider picture. A huge theme, expressed by radicals and plain students alike here and elsewhere that day, ran along the lines of “taxing” the rich. Naturally, I had to mention that it would be far easier for working people to just take state power than to get the enactment a serious tax program that would put a dent in the fortunes of the “Fortune 500”. Far easier, for that is where they live. Nobody questioned my critique, although nobody really bought into the idea. More prevalent, as one would expect, was the call for politicians, especially Democratic politicians, to do the right thing. And without even one little “or else” attached. We have some work to do.
At the end of the day though what was most telling was the failure to link up the Obama war policies and the economic question. And that is the most revealing different, at least anecdotally, from the crowds, the mainly older crowds, which I have been running into recently at various anti-war rallies. The oldsters, for the most part, can make the link at some level. Strange that today the young are fighting for their economic future and the oldsters are fighting for their political “souls”. We have to put the two together, right? Then that easy road to a workers government mentioned above WILL be mere child’s play.
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