Durham, North Carolina Leftists Tear Down Confederate Statue Drop All Charges!-Build The Anti-Fascist United Front

Durham, North Carolina Leftists Tear Down Confederate Statue Drop All Charges!-Build The Anti-Fascist United Front  Workers Vanguard No. 1116	25 August 2017

Durham, North Carolina

Leftists Tear Down Confederate Statue

Drop All Charges!

Eight leftists, many of them members of Workers World Party (WWP), were arrested in Durham, North Carolina, last week and slapped with outrageous felony charges—including incitement to riot—for pulling down a statue of a Confederate soldier. Erected at the instigation of the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1924 and paid for with public funds, the statue was a vile celebration of the Jim Crow segregation enforced by the Democrats and the lynch-rope terror of a resurgent Ku Klux Klan. Until it was brought down, it stood for nearly a century in front of the old Durham County Courthouse. North Carolina’s liberal Research Triangle, which includes Durham, and its many universities are littered with monuments to the slavocracy. Those arrested for ridding this majority-black city of the statue have done black people, immigrants and the working class a real service. We demand: Drop all the charges now!

The Confederate Soldiers Monument was toppled during a protest rally called by WWP on August 14. Outraged by the deadly fascist rampage in Charlottesville two days earlier, which ended in the murder of Heather Heyer, more than 100 people turned out in solidarity with the anti-fascists who confronted the stormtroopers in Virginia. Urged on by the crowd’s chants of “No Trump, No KKK, no fascist USA,” Takiyah Thompson, a 22-year-old black student at North Carolina Central University (NCCU) and WWP member, climbed a ladder and slipped a long strap around the statue, while other protesters pulled it off its pedestal. Video of the protest went viral, as Democratic governor Roy Cooper chastised the activists, tweeting, “The racism and deadly violence in Charlottesville is unacceptable but there is a better way to remove these monuments.”

Sheriff Mike Andrews, also a Democrat, swore a vendetta against the protesters, telling the press, “No one is getting away with what happened.” Deputies quickly made good on the threat, arresting Thompson after a press conference at NCCU on August 15. Two other WWP members, Dante Strobino and Ngoc Loan Tran, were pulled out of a courtroom hearing for Thompson the next morning and arrested. A fourth protester, Peter Gilbert, was arrested that afternoon after deputies searched his address. The homes of several other WWP members were also raided. On August 17, up to 300 supporters lined up in front of the sheriff’s office to “confess” to having pulled down the statue. They were refused entry, but deputies executed warrants against Aaron Caldwell, Raul Jimenez and Elena Everett, arresting them on the spot. An eighth activist with an open warrant, Taylor Jun Cook, turned himself in later that day. Meanwhile, the fascist scum, taking their cue from the state’s persecution, have ominously been targeting WWP on social media.

In an interview with Democracy Now! (16 August), Thompson explained she helped take down the statue because it is a symbol of “white nationalism” and noted that she has received death threats on Facebook from fascists. She went on to say, “Anything that emboldens those people and anything that gives those people pride needs to be crushed in the same way that they want to crush black people and the other groups that they target.” Four days after the statue was toppled, rumors circulated of a KKK march in downtown Durham. In response, hundreds came out to counter them, and the Klan didn’t show.

As we wrote in “Confederate Monuments: Tear ’Em All Down!” (WV No. 1113, 2 June), monuments to the Confederate slaveowners who were defeated in the Civil War “represent a racist affront to black people and serve as rallying points for resurgent racist terror.” We have many programmatic differences with the reformist, pro-Democratic Party politics of Workers World Party, which earlier this year pointed to Cooper’s gubernatorial victory as an example of “the power” of the oppressed “to influence the political landscape” (workers.org, 28 March). But we vigorously defend WWP and all those who participated in this act of basic public sanitation in Durham.

Black oppression is the bedrock of American capitalism. It took a bloody Civil War, the Second American Revolution, to destroy black chattel slavery. It will take a third, workers, revolution to put an end to wage slavery and achieve the promise of black equality. The Spartacist League is committed to building the revolutionary workers party—one that is 70 percent black and minority—necessary to sweep away the racist capitalist order. Finish the Civil War! For black liberation through socialist revolution!

The Struggle Continues...Supporter The Military Resisters-Support The G.I. Project

The Struggle Continues...Supporter The Military Resisters-Support The G.I. Project   

 

By Frank Jackman

The late Peter Paul Markin had gotten “religion” on the questions of war and peace the hard way. Had before that baptism accepted half-knowingly (his term) against his better judgment induction into the Army when his “friends and neighbors” at his local draft board in North Adamsville called him up for military service back in hard-shell hell-hole Vietnam War days when the country was coming asunder, was bleeding from all pores around 1968. Markin had had some qualms about going into the service not only because the reasoning given by the government and its civilian hangers-on for the tremendous waste of human and material resources had long seemed preposterous but because he had an abstract idea that war was bad, bad for individuals, bad for countries, bad for civilization in the late 20^th century. Was a half-assed pacifist if he had though deeply about the question, which he had not.

But everything in his blessed forsaken scatter-shot life pushed and pushed hard against his joining the ranks of the draft resisters whom he would hear about and see every day then as he passed on his truck route which allowed him to pay his way through college the Boston sanctuary for that cohort, the Arlington Street Church. Markin had assumed that since he was not a Quaker, Shaker, Mennonite, Brethren of the Common Life adherent but rather a bloody high-nosed Roman Catholic with their slimy “just war” theory that seemed to justify every American war courtesy of their leading American Cardinal, France Spellman, that he could not qualify for conscientious objector status on that basis. And at the time that he entered the Army that was probably true even if he had attempted to do so. Later, as happened with his friend, Jack Callahan, he could at least made the case based on the common Catholic upbringing.  Right then though he was not a total objector to war but only of what he saw in front of him, the unjustness of the Vietnam War.

That was not the least of his situation though. That half-knowingly mentioned above had been overridden by his whole college Joe lifestyle where he was more interested in sex, drink, and rock and roll (the drugs would not come until later), more interested in bedding women than thinking through what he half-knew would be his fate once he graduated from college as the war slowly dragged on and his number was coming up. Moreover there was not one damn thing in his background that would have given pause about his future course. A son of the working-class, really even lower than that the working poor a notch below, there was nobody if he had bothered to seek some support for resistance who would have done so. Certainly not his quiet but proud ex-World War II Marine father, not his mother whose brother was a rising career Army senior NCO, not his older brothers who had signed up as a way to get out of hell-hole North Adamsville, and certainly not his friends from high school half of whom had enlisted and a couple from his street who had been killed in action over there. So no way was an Acre boy with the years of Acre mentality cast like iron in his head about servicing if called going to tip the cart that way toward straight out resistance.         

Maybe he should have, at least according to guys he met in college like Brad Fox and Fritz Tylor, or guys who he met on the hitchhike road going west like Josh Breslin and Captain Crunch (his moniker not real name which Josh could not remember). The way they heard the story from Markin after he got out of the Army, after he had done his hell-hole thirteen months in Vietnam as an infantryman, twice wounded, and after he had come back to the “real” world was that on about the third day in basis training down in Fort Jackson in South Carolina he knew that he had made a mistake by accepting induction. But maybe there was some fate-driven reason, maybe as he received training as an infantryman and he and a group of other trainees talked about but did not refuse to take machine-gun training, maybe once he received orders for Vietnam and maybe once he got “in-country” he sensed that something had gone wrong in his short, sweet life but he never attempted to get any help, put in any applications, sought any relief from what was to finally crack him. That, despite tons of barracks anti-war blather on his part from Fort Jackson to Danang.     

Here’s the reason though why the late Peter Paul Markin’s story accompanies this information about G.I. rights even for those who nowadays enter the military voluntarily, as voluntarily as any such decision can be without direct governmental coercion. Markin, and this part is from Josh Breslin the guy he was closest to toward the end, the guy who had last seen him in the States before that fateful trip to Mexico, to Sonora when it all fell apart one day, had a very difficult time coming back to what all the returnees called the “real” world after Vietnam service. Had drifted to drug, sex and rock and roll out on the West Coast where Josh had first met him in San Francisco until he tired of that, had started to have some bad nights.

Despite the bad nights though he did have a real talent for writing, for journalism. Got caught up in writing a series about what would be later called the “brothers under the bridge” about guys like him down in Southern California who could not adjust to the real world after ‘Nam and had tried to keep body and soul together by banding together in the arroyos, along the railroad tracks and under the bridges and creating what would today be called a “safe space.”

Markin’s demons though were never far from the surface. Got worse when he sensed that the great wash that had come over the land during the counter-cultural 1960s that he had just caught the tail-end had run its course, had hit ebb tide. Then in the mid-1970s to relieve whatever inner pains were disturbing him he immersed himself in the cocaine culture that was just rearing its head in the States. That addiction would lead him into the drug trade, would eventually lead him as if by the fateful numbers to sunny Mexico, to lovely Sonora way where he met his end. Josh never found out all the details about Markin’s end although a few friends had raised money to send a detective down to investigate. Apparently Markin got mixed up with some local bad boys in the drug trade. Tried to cut corners, or cut into their market. One day he was found in a dusty back street with two slugs in his head. He lies down there in some unknown potter’s field mourned, moaned and missed until this very day.  

Maine Peace Walk for Conversion, Community and Climate October 13-21, 2017

Maine Peace Walk

for Conversion, Community and Climate

October 13-21, 2017

Art by Russell Wray (Hancock, Maine)

The sixth Maine Peace Walk for Conversion, Community and Climate will be from October 13-21.  This year the walk will largely be centered in Bath and concentrate on the serious need to convert Bath Iron Works (BIW) to peaceful and sustainable production.

As the planet heats up, the oceans warm and acidify, and Arctic ice melts we witness the release of methane that only accelerates the global warming problem.  The response of the government has been to unleash geoengineering of the sky which further exacerbates the problem.  In addition the US military has the largest carbon footprint of any organization on our Mother Earth.  Waging endless war consumes massive amounts of fossil fuels and lays waste to significant environmentally sensitive places on the planet – particularly the oceans.

If we have any hopes to secure a future for the coming generations then we must immediately begin the conversion of the military industrial complex to environmentally appropriate renewable energy systems. What could be more important at this moment?

Studies at UMASS-Amherst Economics Department have long shown that producing commuter rails systems, offshore wind turbines, solar and tidal power would in fact create more jobs at facilities like BIW than we currently get building warships.  Spending on education, health care, and other social programs also creates more jobs than does military production.

But if the environmental and peace movements don’t make the demand for conversion it will never happen and our children will be left with the devastating consequences.

While in Bath during October 13-21 we will hold morning and afternoon vigils at BIW to bring the conversion message directly to General Dynamics (owner of BIW) executives and shipyard workers.  During each day we will go door-to-door across Bath to drop flyers at every house and business in the community. During the evenings a public program, film and music will be featured.

We will have a special guest during the peace walk from Jeju Island, South Korea where a Navy base has been built in a 500-year old fishing and farming village that worships their relationship to nature. Gangjeong village was torn apart to construct the Navy base but for the past 10 years daily non-violent protests have been held and they continue to this day.  The warships built in Bath are already porting at this new Navy base.

We welcome everyone to join our peace walk for an hour, a day, or more and to help in any way you can. Accepting our present condition of endless war for fossil fuels is a dead end street that if not reversed will lead to our collective demise. We must have a conversion that begins with our hearts and extends to the timely task of totally reorienting our national production system.

Maine Peace Walk is sponsored by:  Citizens Opposing Active Sonar Threats (COAST); Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space; Maine Natural Guard; Maine Veterans For Peace; Maine War Tax Resistance Resource Center; Peace Action Maine; PeaceWorks; Veterans For Peace, Smedley Butler Chapter (Boston area); Waging Peace Maine

(Groups are invited to co-sponsor and asked to make a donation toward the walk)

Contact: globalnet@mindspring.com    207-443-9502

* See this video song by Jeju Island activist Joyakgol. It’s a new song about all the trash coming from US warships porting at the Jeju naval base, THAAD, overdevelopment, nukes and etc. Joyakgol will come to Bath in October for our Maine peace walk.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QzZDR0qIws  

In Boston-Sunday Sept 24-  United Nations International Day of Peace

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United Nations International Day of Peace

Sunday, September 24, 2017

1-3 PM

Boston Common

near the Park Street MBTA Station

Music, Dance, Song, Poetry,

Artwork, & Peace Education

Face-painting and Activities for Children

  

Followed by Workshops at

Beacon Hill Friends House

6 Chestnut Street, Boston

and

Church on the Hill (Swedenborgian)

140 Bowdoin Street, Boston

starting at 3:30 PM

United Nations Theme for 2017 International Day of Peace:

"Together for Peace: Respect, Safety and Dignity for All"

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This year's program includes the following:

Wompimeequin Wampatuck

Toussaint the Liberator

Raymond Street Klezmer Band

Brian Quirk

Zenaida Peterson

Rodney Petersen

National Liturgical Dance Network - Massachusetts Chapter

Robert Lewis

Miranda Henne

Cole Harrison

John Gross

Kaeza Fearn

Ghanda DiFiglia

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Workshops include:

Premiere of "Peace and the Planet:

War, the Environment, and Your Taxes"

Check out our Facebook Events Page

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Thanks to our 2017 Sponsors

(would your organization like to join the list?)

American Friends Service Committee

Be Our Guest

Cooperative Metropolitan Ministries

Friends Meeting at Cambridge

Louis D. Brown Peace Institute

Massachusetts Organization for Addiction Recovery

Massachusetts Peace Action

Merrimack Valley People for Peace

Safe and Sound Recovery Center

St. Paul AME Church

Veterans for Peace

(click on sponsor name to reach their website)

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View a video of the 2016 Boston celebration

View the 2016 Boston Celebration program

View the United Nations International Day of Peace site

View the 2015 Boston Celebration Program

   

contact us at InternationalDayofPeaceBoston@gmail.com

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International Day of Peace Boston

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VoteVets Launches Nearly $400,000 Ad Blitz Against Privatization of the VA-Stop Back Door Privatization Efforts Now!

WASHINGON, DC – A new ad blitz launching today aims to stop efforts aimed at privatizing the Department of Veterans Affairs, in their tracks.  The ads, sponsored by VoteVets Action Fund, will be airing nationally and on the internet, with particular attention paid to areas with lawmakers who will be influential in deciding the future of veterans health care.  The total buy for the ads is $390,000, with $320,000 on television and $70,000 on the internet. The ads will run, beginning today, for one week.

While the ad is airing nationally, particular attention will be paid to people living in Alaska, Florida, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, Ohio, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas and West Virginia.

The first ad, airing on television, features Patrick Cleveland, a Vietnam Veteran.

In the ad, Cleveland explains, “In Vietnam, I counted on my fellow soldiers to help me make it out alive. Here at home, the VA has done the same. They caught my lung cancer early. At another hospital, they would have never known that was connected to Agent Orange. But some folks in DC want to privatize my VA. The VA is better prepared to serve veterans because they know what we veterans have been through. The VA saved my life. Now it’s up to us to save the VA.”

That ad can be viewed, here: https://youtu.be/idKVyrTEuSQ

The second ad, which will appear online, to target a younger audience, features Victor Phillipi, an Iraq War Veteran.

In the ad, Victor says, “When I was a Platoon Leader in Iraq, we had to lean on one another to get through. My PTSD really got worse around some anniversary dates of combat operations I was involved in. That’s when I first went to the VA for treatment. They helped me tremendously through a little bit of some medication and being around other veterans and talking. But some folks in Washington DC are talking about privatizing my VA… And I’m not sure I’d get health care I trust. The way I see it: the VA saved my life. Now it’s up to us to save the VA.”

That ad can be viewed, here: https://youtu.be/_JPi0oDW_mo

Both ads end with the same call to action: “Tell Congress, don’t let Trump privatize my VA.  202-225-3121.”

The Trump administration is making good on the Trump campaign’s word to consider moving veterans health care to “some form of privatization,” as campaign advisor Sam Clovis put it, in May, 2016.

In testimony to the Senate, VA Secretary David Shulkin outlined a plan that, if implemented, would begin the creation of a VA insurance plan which would be divorced from VA care, and take funds away from care. Under that plan, the VA could begin sending veterans directly to the private, for-profit sector, and close VA centers as they become underutilized.  The result would be a fast track to privatization of the VA.

Polling shows that veterans strongly oppose privatization and voucher schemes.  One bi-partisan poll, for the Vet Voice Foundation, found that veterans opposed privatization and voucher schemes for the VA by 64-29 percent.  And 57 percent of veterans said that they would be less likely to vote for a politician that supported such schemes.  That poll can be found here: http://www.vetvoicefoundation.org/press/new-bi-partisan-poll-of-veterans-shows-they-oppose-privatization-or-voucherization-of-va-care

VoteVets Director of Government Relations, and Iraq War Veteran Will Fischer explained the purpose of the ads by saying, “The Koch Brothers are using everything they’ve got to try to push through privatization of veterans health care, which would toss veterans into the for-profit, private system.  We’re here to say that veterans are going to fight it, all the way. Our ads make clear that the VA does incredible work, and deserves more support, so it can properly serve all veterans. For those public servants standing up against privatization, we want this to serve as encouragement to keep up the fight. To those who find themselves leaning towards supporting the Trump privatization scheme, we want them to know we’re going to let their constituents know what is happening, so they can hold those politicians accountable.”

Mark Rothko Dwellth At The Museum Of Fine Arts In Boston This Fall

Mark Rothko Dwellth At The Museum Of Fine Arts In Boston This Fall (2017)  

Zack James comment: I have always been interested since I first saw Mark Rothko’s work at a Harvard University location (the location of which did great damage to those works and required much work to restore) long ago. While he is not my favorite modern artist who thought outside (Robert Motherwell probably has that designation) you cannot understand the drift away from pure abstraction for its own sake without tipping your hat to Rothko (and Frank Stella). If you are in Boston this fall check this exhibition out.   

  

In Boston (Everywhere)-Build (and Nourish) The Resistance!-Introducing The Organization "Food For Activists"

In Boston (Everywhere)-Build (and Nourish) The Resistance!-Introducing The Organization "Food For Activists" 

As The Burns-Novick Vietnam War Documentary AirsAn Uncounted Causality Of War- The Never-Ending Vietnam War Story

As The Burns-Novick Vietnam War Documentary AirsAn Uncounted Causality Of War- The Never-Ending Vietnam War Story



Markin comment:

THERE IS NO WALL IN WASHINGTON-BUT, MAYBE THERE SHOULD BE


This space is usually devoted to ‘high’ politics and the personal is usually limited to some experience of mine that has a direct political point. Sometimes, however, a story is so compelling and makes the point in such a poignant manner that no political palaver is necessary. Let me tell the tale.

Recently I returned, while on some unrelated business, to the neighborhood where I grew up. The neighborhood is one of those old working class neighborhoods where the houses are small, cramped and seedy, the leavings of those who have moved on to bigger and better things. The neighborhood nevertheless reflected the desire of the working poor in the 1950's, my parents and others, to own their own homes and not be shunted off to decrepit apartments or dilapidated housing projects, the fate of those just below them on the social ladder. While there I happened upon an old neighbor who recognized me despite the fact that I had not seen her for at least thirty years. Since she had grown up and lived there continuously, taking over the family house, I inquired about the fate of various people that I had grown up with. She, as is usually the case in such circumstances, had a wealth of information but one story in particular cut me to the quick. I asked about a boy named Kenny who was a couple of years younger than I was but who I was very close to until my teenage years. Kenny used to tag along with my crowd until, as teenagers will do, we made it clear that he was no longer welcome being ‘too young’ to hang around with us older boys. Sound familiar?

The long and the short of it is that he found other friends of his own age to hang with, one in particular, from down the street named Jimmy. I had only a nodding acquaintance with both thereafter. As happened more often than not during the 1960’s in working class neighborhoods all over the country, especially with kids who were not academically inclined, when Jimmy came of age he faced the draft or the alternative of ‘volunteering’ for military service. He enlisted. Kenny for a number of valid medical reasons was 4-F (unqualified for military service). Of course, you know what is coming. Jimmy was sent to Vietnam where he was killed in 1968 at the age of 20. His name is one of the 58,000 plus that are etched on that Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington. His story ends there. Unfortunately, Kenny’s just begins.

Kenny took Jimmy’s death hard. Harder than one can even imagine. The early details are rather sketchy but they may have involved drug use. The overt manifestations were acts of petty crime and then anti-social acts like pulling fire alarms and walking naked down the street. At some point he was diagnosed as schizophrenic. I make no pretense of having adequate knowledge about the causes of mental illnesses but someone I trust has told me that such a traumatic event as Jimmy’s death can trigger the condition in young adults. In any case, the institutionalizations inevitably began. And later the halfway houses and all the other forms of control for those who cannot survive on the mean streets of the world on their own. Apparently, with drugs and therapy, there were periods of calm but for over three decades poor Kenny struggled with his inner demons. In the end the demons won and he died a few years ago while in a mental hospital.

Certainly not a happy story. Perhaps, aside from the specific details, not even an unusual one in modern times. Nevertheless I now count Kenny as one of the uncounted casualties of war. Along with those physically wounded soldiers who can back from Vietnam service unable to cope with their own demons and sought solace in drugs and alcohol. And those who for other reasons could no adjust and found themselves on the streets, in the half way shelters or the V. A. hospitals. And also those grieving parents and other loved ones whose lives were shattered and broken by the lost of their children. There is no wall in Washington for them. But, maybe there should be. As for poor Kenny from the old neighborhood. Rest in Peace.

“Strobe Light’s Beams Creates Dreams”-The Summer Of Love, 1967-The Boston Museum Of Fine Arts Take

“Strobe Light’s Beams Creates Dreams”-The Summer Of Love, 1967-The Boston Museum Of Fine Arts Take   

By Political Commentator Frank Jackman  

  

Early this year driven by my old corner boys, Alex James and Sam Lowell, I had begun to write some pieces in this space about things that happened in a key 1960s year, 1967. The genesis of this work is based on of all things a business trip that Alex took to San Francisco earlier this spring. While there he noted on one of the ubiquitous mass transit buses that crisscross the city an advertisement for an exhibition at the de Young Art Museum located in Golden Gate Park. That exhibition The Summer of Love, 1967 had him cutting short a meeting one afternoon in order to see what it was all about. What it was all about aside the nostalgia effect for members of the now ragtag Generation of ‘68 was an entire floor’s worth of concert poster art, hippy fashion, music and photographs of that noteworthy year in the lives of some of those who came of age in the turbulent 1960s. The reason for Alex playing hooky was that he had actually been out there that year and had imbibed deeply of the counter-culture for a couple of years out there after that.

Alex had not been the only one who had been smitten by the Summer of Love bug because when he returned to Riverdale outside of Boston where he now lives he gathered up all of the corner boys from growing up North Adamsville still standing to talk about, and do something about, commemorating the event. His first contact was with Sam Lowell the old film critic who also happened to have gone out there and spent I think about a year there, maybe a little more. As had most of the old corner boys for various lengths of time usually a few months. Except me. Alex’s idea when he gathered all of us together was to put together a small commemoration book in honor of the late Peter Paul Markin. See Markin, always known as “Scribe” after he was dubbed that by our leader Frankie Riley, was the first guy to go out there when he sensed that the winds of change he kept yakking about around the corner on desolate Friday and Saturday nights when we had no dough, no girls, no cars and no chance of getting any of those quickly were coming west to east.

Once everybody agreed to do the book Alex contacted his youngest brother Zack, the fairly well known writer, to edit and organize the project. I had agreed to help as well. The reason I had refused to go to San Francisco had been that I was in the throes of trying to put together a career as a political operative by attempting to get Robert Kennedy to run against that naked sneak thief of a sitting President, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who had us neck deep in the big muddy of Vietnam and had no truck with hippies, druggies or “music is the revolution” types like those who filled the desperate streets around Haight-Ashbury. Then.  Zack did a very good job and we are proud of tribute to the not forgotten still lamented late Scribe who really was a mad man character and maybe if he had not got caught up in the Army, in being drafted, in being sent to Vietnam which threw him off kilter when he got back he might still be around to tell us what the next big trend will be.              

The corner boys from the old Acre neighborhood in North Adamsville are, as the article below demonstrates, not the only ones who are thinking about the 50^th anniversary of the Summer of Love. Not only did the de Young cash in on the celebration which is to be expected since it is right in San Francisco and right in Golden Gate Park where the Be-Ins, and many concerts by Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company, the Doors, etc. played (many times for free if you can believe that in the now age of high priced tickets for the Stones, etc.) but the Museum of Fine Arts in staid old Boston has tipped its hat as well. The exhibit in Boston unlike San Francisco is small and concentrates on the graphic poster art and photographs but is similar in intent to the larger exhibits (also one at the Berkeley Art Museum around the same time as the de Young). Boston had its own smaller Summer of Love experience as well in 1967 but it was a pale refection of the big deal in Frisco town     

Still no question as I have mentioned before around this celebration year 50 years later looking at the art, the posters, photographs and listening to the music makes me once again realize that in that time “to be young was very heaven.”    

In Boston- Resist Deportations!-Mobilize Saturday, September 16

Resist Deportations!

Defend DACA! Extend TPS! Jail Joe Arpaio! No Ban! No Wall! Defend Transgender Rights! End Racism! Black Lives Matter! ¡Respeto a los pueblos indígenas! Permanent residence for all 11 million undocumented migrants!

Mobilize Saturday, September 16

Rally: 1:00 PM, steps across from the Massachusetts Statehouse
followed by a March to the JFK Federal Building

The government in Washington has stepped up attacks on migrants to levels not seen in years. Trump's attacks on Muslim migrants were only the beginning. Deportations are accelerating. Trump is terminating the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and has pardoned the racist ex-sheriff Joe Arpaio. He also threatens to shut down the government if a Mexican border wall is not built. He threatens the Temporary Protected Status program. This comes on top of his recent bigoted executive order against transgender troops in the US armed forces and his defense of Fascists in Charlottesville, NC. Claiming that human caused climate change is a "hoax", the Trump Administration has pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord. The falsehood of this claim has yet again been demonstrated by the horrendous hurricanes that have devastated the Gulf Coast. As US wars have created massive debt and refugees internationally, the consequences of corporate greed at home have created refugees within our own borders. Millions of youth and decent hard working people are under attack! Trump and his cheerleaders in the U.S. Congress are leading a generalized assault on our lives, rights, and living conditions. The leading edge of this assault today is the stepped up attacks against migrants. Enough is enough! An injury to one is an injury to all! Mobilize September 16!
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