Welcome to Bushville, USA

[Guest guest]

http://www.alternet.org/election04/19726/

 

Welcome to Bushville, USA

 

By Rachel Neumann, AlterNet. Posted August 31, 2004.

 

At the March for Our Lives, a thousand people attempt

to move a mountain.

 

Heather McKelvey has been sharing a tent in an old

church in Brooklyn for the last week with two other

adults and eight children. Liz Theoharis is there too.

So is an 80-year-old woman in a wheelchair, lots of

other children, and adults of every color, age, and

size.

 

Welcome to Bushville, population 200. Its residents

came from around the country to be in New York for the

Republican National Convention, but unlike the

delegates, they aren't staying in the Plaza or the

Westin Hotel and they're not spending their time at

the theater or fancy restaurants. Instead, they've

been camped out all week, sharing tents and bathrooms,

preparing for Monday's march to Madison Square Garden

to represent the 35.9 million poor people in the

United States and the 45 million without health

insurance.

 

" As poor people, the only resource we have is our

voices, " says McKelvey. " We've tried testifying to

Congress; we've tried talking to our local

politicians. No one listens. So we're taking our

message directly to those in power. "

 

The march was unpermitted and the marchers determined

to present their calls for economic justice to the

official convention. This March for Our Lives, as it

was called, brought home the daily lived consequences

of government policies. " Over 18,000 people die each

year from lack of health care, " said Cheri Honkala,

director of Kensington Welfare Rights Union in

Philadelphia and one of the organizers of the march.

" We are literally marching for our lives. " The front

lines were a young boy and an old woman in

wheelchairs, parents with small children, and white,

Arabic, Asian, African-American, Native, and Latino

women and men in white T-shirts protecting them. While

Sunday's march may have had the bigger numbers and the

brighter costumes, the thousand people who marched

from the United Nations to within one block of Madison

Square Garden were the ones who most reflected this

country's economic and racial diversity and the only

ones, so far, to actually delay the convention

proceedings.

 

Arms linked, the group wound its way through midtown

Manhattan, closing in on the Republican convention,

singing:

 

I went down to the RNC

To take back what they stole from me

To take back my dignity

To take back my humanity.

 

Dignity and humanity. Michael Franti, musician and

activist, marched along and nodded his head to the

singing. " Bush has taken the exploitation of workers

and the disregard for working people to a new

extreme, " Franti said. " There's no accountability but

these people marching here and I'm here as one drop in

this river that will move the mountain. "

 

The mountain, draped in opening night pageantry in

Madison Square Garden, responded to the hundreds of

poverty rights activists at their doorstep demanding

" No more starvation in this wealthy nation " by

adopting a party platform that spent paragraphs

affirming the rights of unborn children and the

sanctity of male-female marriage, but made no mention

of the millions in poverty.

 

Exhausted by the long walk but still singing and

chanting, the marchers made their way back to

Bushville, undaunted. " Our numbers are growing, "

McKelvey said. " One way or another, we will hold this

administration accountable. "

 

Rachel Neumann is Rights & Liberties Editor at AlterNet.