I am marching
http://www.newsreview.com/sacramento/content?oid=1414216
Union members and others walk 365 miles up the state to urge new
thinking on California's budget mess
By Sasha Abramsky
04.29.10
Thousands of protesters, many of them bused in from around the state,
joined the March for California's Future last week as it made its way
from Sacramento's Southside Park to the Capitol building, 48 days and
365 miles after its core group began walking from Bakersfield on
March 5. They congregated, huddled in the muddy park under
green-and-white-striped umbrellas to protect themselves from a
late-season storm. Then they made their way north on Sixth, west on
T, north again on Fifth and finally east along the Capitol Mall, the
glorious domed Capitol building growing ever larger as they got nearer.
Out of the speakers on the flatbed truck leading the marchers through
downtown Sacramento blared "California Dreamin'," "Hard Workin' Man,"
"I Feel Good," "Dancing in the Street." The lead walkers, all wearing
"I am marching" T-shirts, obliged. As their entourage snaked its way
into the Capitol Park, they literally danced the last few meters of their trek.
For a few hours along the west side of the Capitol, as afternoon gave
way to evening and rain clouds ceded the sky to sun, the crowd,
perhaps 5,000-strong, chanted and sang, held up banners and passed
out fliers. They were there to urge the state's voters and political
leaders to do two things: end the requirements that two-thirds of
legislators have to approve the state budget and any tax increases,
and, by extension, work out a way to properly fund the state's
collapsing public-education systema system that has lost roughly $18
billion over the past several yearsas well as to shore up other
vital and at-risk social services. Union leaders addressed the
gathering; students talked; marchers made their final fiery speeches.
This is, after all, the season of California's discontent.
From the right, tea party activists congregate at the Capitol and
elsewhere to protest taxes and call for the ever-greater shrinkage of
government services. Playing to a deep-rooted anti-tax sentiment and
the public's sense of economic insecurity in a time of historically
high unemployment, all the major gubernatorial candidates have
pledged not to increase Californians' tax burden. But that promise
comes with a cost: Lower government revenues imply less money
available for education, public safety, environmental programs and a
host of other public benefits. And so, from the opposite side of the
spectrum, progressives, trade unions, parents' groups and others have
begun calling for higher taxes on the wealthy as a way to avoid huge
public-sector cuts.
In this era of austerity, tax-and-budget models have become something
more than a technocratic, wonkish sideshow. In play are drastically
different visions of what a post-financial-implosion California ought
to look like.
"This is not the end of our march for California's future," Doug
Moore, head of the United Domestic Workers Association, and one of
the march's most involved supporters, shouted from the podium. "It's
the beginning of a movement. We have people power. We are here today
to send a message to the people of California: 'Open your eyes! Look
at what is happening to public education.'"
While the march began mainly as a way to draw attention to the
inequities of a system that requires the two-thirds vote, over the
weeks, it evolved into something more. The marchers and their
supporters wound up laying down a program of action to save a
cash-strapped public-education system: plugging corporate tax
loopholes, taxing oil production, raising sin taxes and so on. Many
of their supporters used a language of working-class solidarity that
would have been familiar to their grandparents during the Great
Depression, a language rarely heard in American political discourse
in recent decades.
"This march," Jim Miller, one of the core walkers, told the crowd, as
his wife Kelly and 6-year-old son Walt, just flown in from San Diego,
stood proudly by, "is a civil-rights struggle, and this is a
social-justice movement. We are in this for the long haul, and we are
in this to win."
Walk this way
The protesters on the Capitol lawn were guest actors brought in for
the crowd scenes in the final episode of a drama that, from start to
finish, had six main starsfour teachers, a probation officer from
East Los Angeles, and a young Brown Beret community activist from
Watsonville. These men and women had traversed the Central Valley on
foot, sleeping in RV parks, union halls and school gymnasiums,
holding rallies and teach-ins every day for more than a month. Some
days they had walked nearly 20 miles; other days they had stayed in
one place for the whole day, bouncing from one locally organized
event to the next.
Atop the credits: Irene Gonzalez, juvenile probation officer based
out of Baldwin Park, Los Angeles, on the march to protest recent cuts
to her probation department; Jenn Laskin, a young high-school teacher
and community organizer in Watsonville, who lived and taught for
several years in Mexico earlier in the decade; Jim Miller, a
45-year-old community-college lecturer, novelist and union activist
from San Diego; retired Los Angeles physical-education teacher and
Vietnam vet Gavin Riley, aged 65, looking to draw attention to
education cuts, with a secondary, personal goal of dropping 10 pounds
in weight over the long march; substitute teacher David Lyell, a
gentle, soft-spoken, vegetarian enraged at state and local decisions
that have decimated the education system in recent years, from the
beach town of Playa del Rey; and the kid of the group, 21-year-old
Watsonville community activist and bike mechanic Emmanuel
Ballesteros. A seventh marcher, retired Berkeley-area teacher Anna
Graves, had had to leave early on, after she came down with the flu
and then suffered a burst eardrum.
These were the ones who had responded, last August, to requests by a
Fightback Committee of the California Federation of Teachers, for
marchers willing to highlight the state's savage cuts to public
education. A long march seemed, somehow, more tangible than simply
chanting slogans at a rally for an afternoon, or writing letters to
state legislators, or penning editorials for local newspapers.
The six had left spouses, lovers, children and colleagues to throw
themselves in with a group of strangers to march day in, day out
through the farmlands of Central California. Miller, for example, who
had been involved in the Fightback Committee from the outset, had a
6-year-old son, Walt (named for Walt Whitman, he explained happily)
at home; the boy was proud of his daddy's actions, and periodically
would fly up with his mother to join the march for a day or two, but
still missed being able to go to ballgames with his father. They had
left jobs and wages behind them. They had substituted comfortable,
private bedrooms for crowded RV cubicles or shared pop-up tents,
having to stumble through dark campgrounds to not always terribly
clean bathrooms in the middle of the night in the cold of late
winter, early spring; and had left favorite eateries, pubs and home
cooking for a prolonged diet of peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches,
burgers and greasy fries, donated soft drinks, side-of-the-road
picnics, or sometimes, on a good night, an evening campfire barbecue.
It was both quixotic and also viscerally powerful. At times, they
would come into small towns and be greeted like conquering heroes; at
other moments, they'd be all but ignored. When they arrived in
Sacramento, they had high hopes of national media coverage; instead,
the larger newspapers paid no attention to them, The Sacramento Bee
printing only an inside-page photograph and one paragraph of text.
In some of the RV parks they ended up in en route, Miller admitted,
the longtime residents looked at them like they were nuts,
middle-class denizens slumming it for a cause as abstract as
reforming the state budget process. "The Merry Pranksters, minus the
acid," Miller said, laughing, referring to novelist Ken Kesey's group
of acid-munching hippies who toured the country by bus in the
mid-1960s, their vehicle driven by beat-era hero Neal Cassady, the
ultimate goal nothing much more concrete than personal enlightenment
and, perhaps, the pleasure of shocking a few suburbanites out of
their complacency.
Tilting at windmills or catalyzing a new politics? Whichever
interpretation one ended up with, as the weeks went on, the walkers
realized they were having the experience of a lifetime.
Visiting towns like Wasco, Delano, Allenswortha
turn-of-the-20th-century utopian community set up by
African-Americans, these days a state park being forced to shutter
its gates several days a week due to budget cutsTulare, Visalia,
Dinuba, Fresno, Modesto, Galt, the protesters were, quite
deliberately, recreating the meandering itinerary of the great Cesar
Chavez walks of earlier decades. They were visiting what one of them
called "the backyards of California." And they were focusing on great
social challengesshuttered health clinics, schools unable to afford
to keep on teachers or buy basic supplies for kidsin parts of the
state that, historically, have been both poor and conservative, using
the protest as a vehicle to get local students and workers more
involved in community activism, in pushing for political solutions to
economic collapse and public-sector squalor.
The marchers felt that they were walking their way into a glorious
history of struggle, a story of empowerment that encompassed not only
Chavez but also African-American civil-rights protestors, industrial
union organizers in the 1930s, anarchist organizers with the Wobblies
at the turn of the last century and myriad other movements. "The
generation that came before us was Cesar Chavez," explained Emmanuel
"Manny" Ballesteros. "Now I just want to follow behind his footsteps.
The march has been a good experience to learn about labor, teaching
me how to be a better organizer, opening my eyes much better to how
voting effects the economythe two-thirds passing [requirement] of
the budget, for example."
For Miller, a keen student of labor history, the ghosts of America's
past surrounded the marchers. "The thing that keeps resonating for
me," he said softly, almost as if he were imparting a fragile secret,
"is The Grapes of Wrath, Woody Guthrie, the Dust Bowl. In some of
these little towns, unemployment is 40 percent. We're seeing up close
and personal this inland depression in California."
As they got closer to Sacramento, the march became, at least in the
participants' estimation, evermore of a movement, an augur of change
not dissimilar in aspirations to Upton Sinclair's radical End Poverty
in California campaign of 1934. It was intended to get people fired
up and to make the political classes sit up and take note.
"I've talked to a lot of people," Laskin recalled, somewhat
nostalgically, as the march neared its conclusion. "But I've listened
more than I've talked. Trying to get their stories on tape." Like the
others, as the march progressed, she found herself snapping photos
almost compulsively, desperate to record her experiences for posterity.
Oftentimes, they would find themselves taking photos of other
marcherspeople they hadn't known from Adam weeks earlier, but whom
they now viewed like familytaking photos. Miller, who had never even
owned a cell phone until the march began, stored up huge photo
archives on his new iPhone. When the Brass Liberation Orchestra came
out to raucously, anarchically, serenade the marchers one day, Miller
hit the record button on his video app. When the entire student body
of a small school in a tiny town came out to gawk one morning, he
photographed the scene.
People in the small towns of the Central Valley would come up to the
marchers and show them their pink slips, perhaps just looking for
sympathy at jobs lost and dreams dashed, perhaps hoping the act of
showing them the pink slip would somehow convert the dreaded piece of
paper into a talisman warding off actual unemployment. Wave the
notice of impending redundancy and maybe, somehow, funds would be
found for the job to be kept. Older men in farmworker communities
would beckon to them to come over and then tell them about marching
with Chavez, about their glory days.
Along the route, drivers, many of them in pickup trucks, honked their
horns, some in support, others visibly angry at the traffic hold-up
caused by the snail's pace of the march support vehicles, or
antipathetic to the demands for fairerperhaps highertaxes to fund
education properly. During a season of tea parties, the group was
traversing conservative rural counties speaking up for the necessity
of properly funding local and state government. They anticipated some
hostility, and occasionally they found some. Miller blogged,
incredulously, on The Huffington Post at one point, about a grizzled
old farmer who drove up to them on his tractor to state that children
in hard-hit schools should be "swatted" rather than given more
educational resources. In one particularly down-at-heel RV camp not
far out of Bakersfield, they encountered residents walking around
bellicosely with crossbows. It wasn't necessarily a political
statement, but it was terrifying, reminding them of the movie Deliverance.
When the enthusiasm kicked in, however, it could be infectious: One
woman followed the marchers for three days in her car, giving them
bottles of water and words of encouragement. Pastors invited them
into churches to talk to congregants. Some Sundays, they would
address three or four church groups before midday. In the fields they
marched along, they saw snakes and mice, hawks circling above for
their prey. They witnessed the wondrous, intimidating skies of winter
storms descending over the farmlands.
They grew to love the low-key beauty of this oft-ignored interior
region of California. Evenings, they called home; checked e-mail on
smart phones; several of the walkers blogged or updated diary
entries. They developed their own rhythm, their own sense of time.
They became something of a world unto themselves. And yet they were
never really alone.
The backup team
The march's six main stars were ably backed up by a larger cohort of
supporting actors: the van drivers who shuttled the walkers to
rallies and campsites at the end of each day, one of whom, Bob
Benoit, was a fiery Cajun who played a mean accordion when they
stopped for lunch roadside. The PR team, led by 24-year-old Melissa
Arrigoni, a recently transplanted Chicagoan, that followed the
walkers in, and at nights slept inside of a colorfully decked-out
Campaign for California's Future RV that they called the
"blogmobile," driven by an out-of-work-Teamster who had previously
driven trucks at the Los Angeles port; it was from the blogmobile
that the march posted YouTube videos and regular updates on Facebook,
and corresponded with reporters. The union organizers, especially
teachers and home health-care workers, who worked night and day to
generate crowds at the rallies and in-city demonstrations, and who
would join the marchers for days at a stretch along the route.
Sometimes, the newcomers would treat the entire group to a feast of
In-N-Out Burger come nightfall.
Most importantly, there was Bob D'Ausilio, a larger than life retired
firefighter from San Diego who drove the flag-bedecked flatbed truck,
chose the music that blared from several huge speakers roped to its
rear, made announcements over the PA system, used his first-aid
training to treat blisters and keep walkers hydrated, set up the
pop-up tents in the campgrounds each night and got up early5 a.m.
some daysto prepare large breakfasts (the food donated by
sympathetic trade union chapters) each morning. He played a lot of
Beatles music for the marchers, turned "California Dreamin'" into
their anthem, got their juices flowing again after a hard morning's
slog with the theme tune from The Partridge Family. Not infrequently,
Buddy Holly or the Everly Brothers, ramped up to full volume, would
set the quiet countryside aflutter. There was something appropriate
when passing these time-stood-still little farming towns playing the oldies.
When the music was blaring from the truck crawling along in front of
them on the hard shoulder of the fast rural roads, the marchers let
their natural walks take over. "Hard Workin' Man," for example, would
set Gonzalez off walking as if she were dancing, her whole body
moving with the beat. Laskin would lean her torso slightly forward as
she walked, clicking her fingers to the music. Miller and Riley, the
self-proclaimed pace setters, who situated themselves at the front of
the group holding their banner between them, would ratchet up their
pace, Riley with his balding head down in concentration, Miller
walking more assertively, like a New Yorker in a hurry. Ballesteros
and Lyell, both of whom took on the role of directing traffic around
the walkers, would stay near the rear, walking slowly, meandering,
sometimes lost in their daydreams. The blogmobile, its brakes
creaking, would slink along patiently behind them.
D'Ausilio was the Neal Cassady for this group of Merry Pranksters, a
smart-talking, no-nonsense, impossible-to-pigeonhole
jack-of-all-trades; a union activist who voted Republican, loved to
bad-mouth communism at any and every opportunity"Why can't we
produce our own goods?" he wondered, instead of buying everything off
the goddamned communist Chineseand, with a volley of finely crafted
swearwords, took immense joy in puncturing any and all intellectual
bubbles that floated his way.
Beneath the bluster, though, D'Ausilio was as passionate as the rest
of the marchers. "I'm tired of hearing everyone blame unions for
California's problems," he averred. "We need to start getting back
our foundations that our forefathers left us. I still think
California is the best state in the union, but we're tarnished right
now. We need jobs back, industry jobs."
They are marching
As they snaked through the middle of California, accompanied,
periodically, by burly motorcycle police and California Highway
Patrol officers, the marchers and their support crew got ever more
immersed in the experience.
Each day they'd put on their white "I am marching" T-shirts and do a
round of callisthenic stretches to relax their walking muscles;
they'd spray sunscreen onto their faces and arms, then they'd form a
circle, introduce themselves to the new contingent of
marchers-for-a-day, do a rapid-clap cheertheir version of, say, a
rain dance or a corporate pep rallyunfurl their banners and,
sandwiched between the flatbed truck and the blogmobile, set off walking.
"Physically, you get used to it," said Miller, whose major health
complaint during the weeks of walking was a worsening of his asthma
due to toxins and pollen in the Central Valley air. Some days, smells
from the cattle farms, or industrial pesticides off of the fields and
orchards, would hover over them like nature's halitosis. But the
walking itself soon ceased to be a challenge. "My feet are fine,"
Miller said. "The short days seem like nothing. I enjoy the walking
more than the down days." The other walkers agreed; they had gotten
fitter along the route, their bodies tougher and leaner, their minds
better equipped to deal with the travails of the road.
In Modesto, hundreds of home health-care workerswhose jobs are on
the line due to a near-90 percent cut in state funding for the
in-home programjoined them in a spirited demonstration through the
downtown. Many brought their children; some brought their patients.
Moore and his team had been working their members for months, getting
them involved, signing them up to take days off work to come to
Sacramento on April 21. Given that most are paid near-minimum wage
and don't get paid vacation time, this was no small commitment. But
the organizing effort was paying off. Based on the numbers who had
signed up for seats on the buses heading to the demonstration, Moore
expected more than 1,000 of his members would show up at the Capitol
that afternoon. In Galt, high-school students joined the walkers when
they arrived at the little town's one high school after a 10-mile
walk north from Lodi.
"I didn't realize how poor the Central Valley is," D'Ausilio
explained one evening, at an RV park near a cemetery a few miles
north of Modesto, as he let his bravado down and allowed his emotions
room to breathe. "In Modesto alone, there's a 20 percent unemployment
rate. Working families that have lost their houses are now living in
trailer parks and RVs. Some of the places in California are like
Third World countries. I'm shocked."
It became far more than a march to reform the budget process and
reinstate funds for schools, it became a psychological journey. They
learned things about their co-walkers, and they learned things about
themselves. They learned how to navigate a crowded environment with
humor and grace. When an Orange County college administrator joined
the marchers for a few days, he rapidly developed a reputation for
extraordinarily loud snoring. The pop-up tent in which he slept was
christened the "bear's den," and those assigned to share the tent
with him were genially warned to expect an interrupted night's sleep.
When Laskin had to leave the march for a few days to attend a
conference in Seattle, she felt guilty leaving, like she was somehow
leaving her friends in the lurch. Her one-bedroom apartment back in
Watsonville suddenly seemed to her a huge amount of space for one
person to occupy; she'd grown used to living in the blogmobile with
four or five other residents.
They were, the marchers started joking with each other, living in a
reality TV show, their every move, their every bodily function under
the microscope. Perhaps surprisingly, no serious feuds developed.
Cliques didn't form. No one quit the march in a huff.
48 days later
For the marchers, the week or two leading up to Sacramento had been
one long, slow goodbye. From Stockton on in, they'd started counting
down the days. Leaving Lodi, six days before the final rally, Lyell
quietly pondered the fact that this was the last Thursday of the
march. So was he aware of all these psychological milestones?
Absolutely, he declared. Every day from here on in would be the last
Friday or the last Saturday … and so on. He missed home, sitting on a
beach just watching the waves crashing against the shore, but, in
anticipation, he was already starting to ache for his companions from
the seven-week adventure. Laskin had started mentally putting
together to-do lists for when she got home; she was going to give
herself a few days in her apartment to decompress and then had a
bunch of presentations about the march already in mind, committees
she had to get involved with again, work with her trade union. Jim
was scheduled to fly to Detroit the following week to address a labor
gathering on lessons learned from the march.
When the group arrived at the Sacramento County line, in the
overgrown Delta countryside just outside Galt, they stopped. To a
person, they took out their cameras and started shooting photos of
their friends next to the green county-line sign. They smiled. They
raised their fists. They waved at passing cars.
Despite the marchers' innate modesty, they had all taken on the
trappings of folklore heroes over the weeks and months of walking.
They had learned to rile up large crowds in English and in Spanish;
had been welcomed into poor communities as traveling heroes, as
chroniclers of despair and of resilienceWoody Guthries for the
modern age; and had developed intense feelings of loyalty not only to
the other marchers but to the broader movement that was building up
steam along the route of their journey.
Over the weeks, they had morphed from being simply a group of
well-meaning, anonymous protesters to being the stuff of headlines.
When they came into small towns, they knew they would be greeted by
local reporters and television crews, by banner-waving union members
and cheering kids.
Now, as the march reached its conclusion in the state capital, they
had to ponder what would come next, what the follow-on chapters of
their lives would involve.
That evening, after the union buses had filled up and started the
long drive south again, and after Capitol Park was quite once more,
the walkersand 40 or 50 well-wishersgathered at Ambrosia Café on
the K Street pedestrian mall for a private party celebrating their
achievement. Top trade-union leaders toasted their accomplishment
with Chandon champagne, and the cafe's waitresses walked around
distributing Thai chicken skewers. There were platters of fruit and
miniature frosted cupcakes. There were three kinds of red wine and
three of white, along with pitchers of beer and chips and salsa.
After 48 days on the road, the walkers had reached their destination.
Slightly uncomfortably, they were schmoozing, shooting the breeze
with friends and strangers. Already, they were starting to
reacclimate to life on the outside. The march, only moments in the
past, was already starting to disappear into the irreclaimable mists
of time. The folk heroes were starting to make the psychological
journey back to civilian life. They promised each other they would
stay in touch, gave hugs, wrote messages on each other's T shirts.
But looking in their eyes, you could tell that at least some of them
were mentally already on that airplane home.
"Like anything," said Riley quietly, "you're anticipating the end,
and then, when the end is on top of you, you go through a period of
nostalgia." He stopped, pondering what he'd just lived through. "For
waking up freezing in a pop-up tent, stumbling around an RV park,
shaving in RV bathrooms." He laughed, but then got quickly serious
about the mission and the message once more. "Everybody ought to be
angry," he said, reasoning out loud as to why he'd joined the march.
We hope the Legislature sees the level of anger, because angry people
tend to be voters."
.
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