On Marching, and Changing
This post was originally written on May 17, 2017.
Today was the kickoff for the March to Springfield, where two dozen activists and organizers are walking 200 miles from Chicago to the Illinois state capital in support for a progressive state budget that puts the people and our planet over corporations. Read more about the People and Planet First Budget.
Along with others from across the city, I joined the core group and marched the first eight miles from the Loop to Archer and Pulaski for the first part of the journey. Between the speeches, chants, and singing, I was afforded a lot of time to think about why I march.
(TL;DR: Change is slow, but change doesn’t happen unless people make it happen. So get out and make things happen.)
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In the summer of 2006, I was 19 and interning at an alternative weekly magazine in Norfolk, Virginia. With aspirations to become a journalist, I had the opportunity to join several talking circles throughout the summer as they discussed the importance of creative capital and “brain drain” — the issue of educated young professionals from Hampton Roads leaving the area to pursue opportunities that weren’t available in our somewhat conservative region. Members of the community struggled to gain support from the local government to do something as simple as close a neighborhood street for a few hours to host an event. Jobs for professionals working in media and the arts weren’t very available. For a region of over 1.6 million people, we were incredibly slow to adopt change. At a more personal level, I frequently felt oppressed at the normalization of racism, sexism, and homophobia that were blatantly expressed in my daily interactions with those around me. Though I spent 2.5 years back in Hampton Roads after college, I jumped at the next opportunity to leave. The area wasn’t changing fast enough to my liking. I didn’t see a future for myself there.
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When the Occupy Wall Street movement was happening, I didn’t participate in any of the protests or marches. I believed in the cause, and I was incredibly concerned about the growing gap in economic inequality. I just didn’t think holding signs up and yelling at Wall Street would make a difference.
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My first experience with protesting wasn’t until 2012, when the University of Virginia Board of Directors voted to oust UVA president Teresa Sullivan for “philosophical difference.” The university community was outraged at the lack of transparency coupled with the unsurmountable display of power shown from the board. Thousands of faculty, staff, and students stood in protest on the University Lawn to show their dissatisfaction with the process. Sullivan was later reinstated as president, and the board members who had initiated her resignation eventually resigned themselves.
People can bring about change.
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My next experience with protesting was in 2014. Rolling Stone magazine published a story — that was later discredited — about a UVA student who was allegedly gang raped by one of the fraternities and then discouraged by a University dean to not report the incident and move on. While the story was later found to have been fabricated, this article sparked action from the university to examine their sexual assault policies and make the community a safer place for sexual assault survivors to get the support they need.
As a staff member and an alumni of UVA’s graduate school for education, I attended meetings, helped review and revise the university’s sexual assault policies, and made it very clear in my conversations and interaction with people: Sexual assault is not okay. Allowing fraternities to have control over alcohol distribution at sorority house parties is not okay. Shaming women or men into silence just because the perpetrator “may have made a mistake” is not okay. Making anybody feel unsafe with unwanted advances is not okay.
Ending the normalization of unsafe behaviors starts with calling those behaviors out.
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The majority of my friends, people I love and care about, are in crippling student debt. A small handful are committed to working at nonprofits to take advantage of the student loan forgiveness program that may still be happening, others are working corporate jobs and steadily chipping away at those loans, and many more are doing what they can to make things work with a degree in a field that pays, on average, less than $40k a year. The idea of owning property is foreign to most of us. I’ve done the math and decided to just write the idea of owning a condo out of my future. RV life or bust. I’m okay with that.
But not everyone wants to live in an RV. And I’m almost certain that no one wants to be paying off their student loans until they’re 50.
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Over the weekend, Robert Spencer led a torch-bearing gathering at the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville reminiscent of a KKK rally. Earlier this year, Charlottesville’s City Council voted to remove the statue, because it’s fucking 2017 and we are not the Confederacy, and the white supremacists were not happy.
This, of course, sparked counterprotests because most Charlottesville people are good people who do more than just go around punching Nazis, but for anyone who is convinced that racism doesn’t exist, HERE YOU GO FOLKS, IT IS ALIVE AND WELL.
Despite this maelstrom of terribleness, though, we have come a long way from 1954. It may have taken Virginia another 20 years to integrate their schools, and as a country we are still suffering from the consequences of segregation, but you know what pushed progress and change? Protests. Marches. The People.
People bring about change.
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Being in a large, politically-active city like Chicago has afforded me with a lot of opportunities to get involved with organizing. To march alongside other professionals, students, retirees, city councilmen, people from all walks of life who believe that it is our responsibility to take care of the people and our planet.
Governor Rauner hasn’t passed a state budget in two years, and that directly impacts the education that kids are receiving in the state, and the environment in which they are learning. In many cases, their basic needs aren’t being met because schools can’t afford to update their infrastructure. It impacts the educators who are barely treading water because they are struggling to pay their student loans and rent. If we don’t start valuing our educators and public education, inequality will only continue to grow.
There are many reasons to support the People and Planet First Budget, and education is just one of them.
I march because I believe that education is a right.
I march because I care about the future of the people and our planet.
I march because agency for change is in the hands of the people.
I still have a lot to learn, and I’m still trying to find my place in this community, but progress won’t be made by standing still. So I march, one step at a time.
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I’m lucky to be in a city with such like-minded people. Even Charlottesville, for all its pomp and circumstance over its southern heritage, is a bit of a liberal bubble. But not all of the country is like that.
I visited Hampton Roads over a year ago, and things were very different. They built a light rail so that people could use public transportation to get around Norfolk. There was public art. There was a very active film community. And as basic as a lot of this sounds, it did not exist at this scope when I lived there. And I’m willing to bet that a lot of people in those talking circles I sat in when I was 19 were part of that progress.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the course of the past decade, it’s that change is slow. But change is still a step forward.
So, friends, keep being loud. Keep marching. Keep caring about the people around you and your community. Keep changing.
