Have the Haymarket Martyrs gotten their due?

May Day has now come and gone. The big marches and the spontaneous protests and the insurrections of “Real Labor Day” are more than a week old now. But that does not mean that the struggles of working people are over… not in the least.

What began as a day to remember an American tragedy and travesty morphed into an international day of action largely ignored in the United States. Until recently, May Day was marked mostly by old Marxists. Latino immigrant rights groups took it up in recent years, turning May Day into a rallying day for the Dream Act, an end to repression and deportations, equal treatment under the law, labor rights and recognition, and other causes. This year, Latinos were joined by the Occupy movement and organized labor in a major way around the country. It looks like May Day is back in a real and powerful way.

During my first year at Hampshire College, Professor Eqbal Ahmad told his story of coming from Pakistan to the United States as a young man and searching all over Chicago for the memorial to the people killed at Haymarket Square in 1886.

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From Amnesty International's replica of a cell at Guantanamo Bay. Photo by Mushroom and Rooster, via Flickr.

On Thursday, April 19, the Pentagon announced the transfer of two men from Guantanamo to El Salvador. Abdul Razakah and Hammad Memet tasted freedom for the first time in 10 years last month and began a new life in their new home.

El Salvador is a long way from China’s Xinjiang Province, where they were born. In 2001, Abdul and Hammad — along with 20 other Uighurs — fled China. As members of that country’s ethnic Muslim minority, they faced growing repression due to a military crackdown on an armed separatist movement in the region. The men ended up in Afghanistan — a place where they thought it would be safe to be Muslims — but it was the fall of 2001 and the United States had declared war. When a U.S. bomb destroyed the house where they were staying, they fled again, this time to Pakistan. There, they were arrested late in 2001 and turned over to the United States military as suspicious foreigners. They ended up in Guantanamo in 2002, where they have been ever since.

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It was a great action. Three years ago, seven activists went to the Alamance County Detention Center in Graham, North Carolina. Two were dressed like ICE agents (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and a third looked like Lady Liberty. In a bold and creative action aimed at drawing attention to the unjust, unfair and racially biased immigration practices, the activists tried to convince jail officials to take Lady Liberty into custody. The rest of the activists blocked the doors to the jail facility.

Immigration is a hot button issue in this area of North Carolina, which has one of the fastest growing Latino populations in the country, mostly because of labor needed in poultry processing plants and agricultural fields.

Alamance County Sheriff Terry Johnson has taken a tough stance on undocumented people. Local authorities are part of 287(g), exercising authority as federal immigration agents under the Immigration and Nationality Act. The program is justified by its intent to pursue violent criminals and terrorism suspects. But in North Carolina, it has meant a lot of traffic violations for Latinos.

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I am big fan of the post office in general and of my local post office in particular. I go there as often as I can (honestly, I do). But, when I needed stamps on Monday, I was not prepared for the line snaking out the door. I had completely forgotten about tax day! I girded myself for a long wait, but the clerks were the very picture of efficiency and I was in and out and all stocked up on bonsai stamps in ten minutes.

While I stood in line, I thought about the peculiarity of our tax system. For most Americans, April is a month marked by terrible stress, paper pushing and a last minute mad dash to get the taxes finished before April 15 (or the 17th, this year). People plan and pine and worry and most pay a sizable percentage (16-20 percent even for people of lower income brackets) of their annual income in taxes.

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I don’t have a TV. But I am always being exhorted to watch The Rachel Maddow Show.

One of the reasons I don’t have a TV is that if I had one, I wouldn’t be watching high-minded, informative news shows like hers. I would be completely hypnotized by the worst of the worst; eye candy dregs like CSI: Miami, The Mentalist, the new Hawaii Five-0 and Two Broke Girls (which I have yet to see).

Let my fixation be a cautionary tale to all the well-meaning parents out there wanting to shield their children from the corrosive effects of overexposure to TV: outlaw TV, and they will be forever in its sway. Let them watch it, and it will make them discerning consumers.

I can still read, though. For my birthday a friend gave me Maddow’s new book: Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power. My eighth celebration of year 30 was only a few weeks ago, but I have already chewed through this hard-hitting, spirited and lucid book.

Maddow is already a household name, with a trademarked wit, a loyal following and a large bully-pulpit. She is also endowed with the intellectual fortitude and homespun wisdom to pull out a new take on one of our most important and least interesting topics — militarism. And it seems to be working. This week, Drift is number 12 of Amazon’s Top 100 — right above the newest Stephen King fantasy and below Marlene Koch’s cook book urging obese Americans to Eat More of What You Love (in low sugar, fat, calorie form). That juxtaposition is worth its own blog post, but I digress.

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Albert Florence

Strip. Bend. Spread. Cough. That is what five of nine Supreme Court justices — themselves swathed in so many layers of robes and clothes to be almost indistinguishable from one another — have just told the American people. Watch out. If you’re suspected of any crime, you may be arrested, processed and strip searched — a severe and invasive form of punishment meted out all before being found guilty.

Any crime. Making a left hand turn without your turn signal. Pooping without scooping. Demonstrating without a permit. Walking a leashless dog.

Before making this judgment, the Supreme Court heard an epic tale of justice failing. One minute in 2005, Albert Florence was sitting in the passenger seat of the family BMW, his pregnant wife behind the wheel and his four-year-old son tucked in his car seat in the back. The next minute, he was off on an eight-day odyssey that included two strip searches. All of it was the result of a computer error.

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By John Bennett, via Flickr.

“What do you do for a living?” — or its shorter (and more annoying) cousin, “So, what do you do?” — is the kind of question I avoid these days.

In my head, I tend to get snotty: “I live for a living, duh!” But out loud I am glib: “I am a woman of leisure”; or vague: “This and that”; or inaccurate: “I’m a housewife”; or an oversharer: “Well, it all started in 2009 when I realized I wanted a radical change in my life…” I can go on in this vein until the listener’s eyes literally fall out of their head with boredom. But on the forms I have to fill out, I am much more succinct. Occupation: unemployed.

In this, I am not alone. The official unemployment rate in the United States — calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — is currently 8.3 percent, or about 12 million people.

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Robert Bales in August, 2011.

I spent yesterday morning listening to my local NPR station, which was broadcasting a discussion amongst a panel of military veterans who had returned from deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. The six panelists were male and female, black, white and Latino, and spanned a few generations. I had one of those clichéd “driveway moments” that NPR loves to raise money from — when you sit in your car in your driveway because you can’t stop listening — even though I don’t even have a driveway. They said all sorts of extraordinary things (and I am paraphrasing here because I wasn’t taking notes at the time):

“To put it bluntly, I killed people. That was my job in the Army.”

“I did not fight for the politics or the big picture; I fought for the guy on either side of me.”

“I’m glad I went in. I got to experience different things.”

As I listened, I realized that I have no close friends who are recent veterans.

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Graffiti on Jeju Island, via savejejuisland.org.

These guys are no joke. Tarak Kauff was a paratrooper in U.S. Army. Elliott Adams was in the infantry as a paratrooper in Vietnam, Japan, Korea and Alaska. Mike Hastie was an Army medic in Vietnam. Now they are all members of Veterans for Peace, and they just got kicked out of Jeju Island in South Korea.

The issue is no joke either. The United States and South Korea have teamed up to build a huge naval base on the beautiful, pristine island of Jeju — a bio-region so unique that UNESCO has identified nine different geological sites there as “Global Geoparks.” In the midst of this natural wonderland, the two military powerhouses want a deep-water harbor for the nuclear-armed Aegis destroyer and other ships that can menace China and protect Washington and Seoul’s strategic interests in the region.

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I learned a new word today: clicktivism. 

Oh, I’m sorry. Am I the last person on the planet to know this word?

In my defense, I am closer to 40 than 30 and closer to 50 than 20 (if you must know) at this point. I am a classic late adopter. I got my first cellphone in 2003 and have not advanced much beyond rudimentary texting (full words and proper punctuation intact). Tablets and iPhones and all of their paraphernalia make me physically anxious (so small, so fragile, so powerful).

The reason this all comes up is that I did my own bit of clickivism recently. I signed an e-petition asking President Barack Obama to veto a bill sitting on his desk.

House Resolution 347 and Senate Bill 1794 were reconciled and approved on March 1 (with only three dissents), resulting in a bill that now sits on President Obama’s desk awaiting his signature. It’s innocuously called “Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011.” Sounds like a public works program, doesn’t it? Is it one of Obama’s shovel-ready projects aimed at getting the unemployed back in the saddle? Not quite.

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