I have been in a brief email exchange with my son. My son is an amazing man, talented, bright, full of promise. He lives in perhaps one of the most dangerous cities in the country, Flint, MI. Now, I am not suggesting that the people of Flint are more dangerous than in other distressed cities but given the general population numbers, there are an inordinate amount of violent crimes. I grew up in Flint, but left for Chicago, 13 years ago and never looked back. Indeed, my entire family remain in the Flint area and I do go back for visits. I don't really enjoy those visits, not that I don't enjoy seeing my family, which, of course, I always do. I don't enjoy the visits because I feel in the air a sense of doom and foreboding... a sense that life is holding on by a shredded thread and that there's not much to be done short of a communist revolution. Well, I do believe a revolution is the only actual solution to the continuous and deepening crisis here and around the world. I know so many people still living in Flint, and many of them make their lives there with fore-thought and deliberateness. They, like my son, have made a conscious decision not to abandon this city that is abandoning them. They have decided to use their education, knowledge, skills, talent and energy and attempt to contribute to a revitalization of the city and the people of Flint. While I am all for that, I cannot help feeling fearful for their lives and their loved ones. I read the statistics about Flint, the growing poverty, the rising crime rates, the wholesale theft from the city coffers by the corporate rulers who are about the business of buying up all public assets for pennies on the dollar and figuring out how to steal even more. With the help of Governor Snyder and the state's legislatures and other local politicians, they have determined a course of action to take over and force people to buy back, at a very high cost, the very public assets that we were once so proud of. I was educated in an era when Flint had one of the best school systems in the world. Workers could access public education literally from cradle to grave, from the break of dawn until midnight 6 days a week. Community education was viewed as a tremendous public asset and an educated workforce was to be desired. Those educated workers could do more...we were for the most part an educated and literate population. Black and white kids aspired to go to college and go we did, in untold numbers. We were educated in our public schools by PhD prepared instructors who actually earned more money as public school teachers because of strong union contracts than professors in many universities. When my son graduated from Central High School, which closed a few years ago, most of his professors held doctorate degrees and that education brought a standard of education rarely seen. With the public education my son received in 2000, he was able to place out of his first year of university allowing him to complete his undergraduate degree in 3 years! There is a direct correlation between the demise of Flint and the introduction of labor-replacing technology in the auto industry. I remember when the first robotic arm was introduced in the auto plants in Flint. It once took 400 some odd men to move 800 plus pound molds but once that robotic arm was introduced those men became obsolete. We have never before in human history seen technology that permanently replaces human labor. With technology that permanently replaces the need for human labor to join with it for the purpose of production we have entered an entirely different stage in human history. For the first time we have the chance to liberate ourselves from the back-breaking, mind-numbing toil of the past. I will just end this post by suggesting that history points us toward a struggle for democracy that we've not ever engaged in. I think every era has to face the challenge of moving humanity closer to our own higher humanity. I think we've done amazingly in a short period of time already. I am proud of the struggles we've won for civil rights, for the destruction of segregation and slavery, but I think we all know that the types of exploitation of humanity that exists today is far more sophisticated and developed than anything we've ever faced. But I sincerely believe we are up to the challenge. We prove it everyday with our acts of resistance and the struggles in which many of us are engaged. I want to encourage resistance and challenge us to talk to one another to network together and really talk about where all of our separate struggles could lead and then develop strategies and tactics to move further into the inevitable battle for human freedom and genuine democracy.
