Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign

Thursday, May 31st - Thursday, June 13th 2018

Kensington, PA - Washington, D.C.

Diary, Part 2

June 2nd

I DIDN’T GO TO WORK TODAY… I DON’T THINK I’LL GO TOMORROW

It doesn’t take long without easy access to amenities to become dishevelled, grumpy, sweaty, sore, and in unclear ownership of certain possessions.  Other problems that I face when I am marching come to mind on day one: spending an introductory period formulating a super cool contribution only to talk myself out of giving it; finding myself right in front of march security guides shouting in my ears; the chanting, and the discussion about how damn corny it normally makes protesters sound (a discussion that rarely takes place).

We pass a poster for a hip hop festival in Philadelphia that night, Roots Picnic, with an enviable line-up: The Roots, Rapsody, Badbadnotgood, Sun Ra Arkestra.  I can’t wait until our own festival next weekend.  Like victory, it seems a long way off.

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June 5th

ALARM CLOCKS KILL DREAMS

We wake up on the church floor of another American town named after a rich English playground (Oxford, PA).  The feelings of physical pain and fatigue that I have in my back, feet and calves at this point are similar to ones that I’ve had during particularly brutal employment periods (eg. Party City, the most evil company that its ever-widening market will allow.  If crude oil became a hot party supply beyond its use in endless plastic products, they’d be Chevron).  I have to wonder if the teens here, sleeping later than 6:30 or 7 even as the noise in the room rises, are partially doing so because “work” hasn’t yet trained them out of more natural sleep cycles.

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CLASSICAL MUSIC

Not waiting until the artists meet us at Dupont Circle, the participants entertain themselves.  Music is everywhere here.  Folk singalong hootenannys take place of an evening, in measured doses.  Poor News Networker Tiny moves back and forth throughout the single file of marchers, streaming interviews and broadcasting hip hop.  A rendition of Rich Man's House by supporter Sandra Rivera becomes an unofficial anthem.  Rage Against the Machine and reggae boom from the support van at appropriate stops.  We listen to Flesh and Blood by OT The Real: the soundtrack for last years film of the same name starring Mark Webber, son of PPEHRC National Coordinator Cheri Honkala.  You might know her best as the Green Party’s Vice Presidential candidate for 2012.  It’s a good job for all of us, as Philadelphia’s OT says in the song, that money doesn’t equal love.  But it is nevertheless at the heart of everything in our current reality: a fundraiser to house participants of this march, and pay expenses from the march, is taking place on “independence day” in St. Petersburg, featuring certain-age childhood favourites P.O.D., Lit, and Alien Art Farm.  Capitalism: you’ve been struck by a smooth criminal!

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June 6th

CLASS ACT

We’ve made it to Maryland.  Walking up and downhill on an increasingly narrow shoulder, with school buses and logging trucks on the left and ankle-breaking gutters on the right.  Marching is not always a fluffy activity…

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We stop to rest on the highway by a billboard that says the average American wastes 290 lbs of food a year.  “I’d like to dispute that,” says our travelling comedian and wiseman Standup Steve.  It’s been a tiny scream in the mind of eco-warriors like me, but we’re wasting food on this trip due to generosity.  We have more than we need, which it’s fair to say is not a normal state of affairs for most here.  According to a recent study, those with healthier diets rich in fruits and vegetables tend to waste more.  That’s not particularly surprising, if you consider that healthier diets are linked to higher incomes, and higher incomes are linked to burning through more resources.

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THE GLASSES AGAINST THE CLASSES

You see the need for a radical economic approach to environmentalism when you come to terms with the fact that, small conscientious choices aside, people generally consume as many resources as their incomes allow.  There are a few exceptions: currently, it’s only when you have money that you can regularly afford organic food or a non-leaking, remotely efficient house fit for human habitation.  But that house will still likely be bigger and thus filled with more stuff.  The bottom line is that any solution to the environmental crises that are currently converging to punch the global poor in the face is going to have involve much better levels of income equality and some form of wealth redistribution.  $15 an hour and lowered shareholder profits, for example.

We trudge along often busy roads breathing in the fumes of car culture.  So much of American activism is directed at getting the attention of motorists isolated in their vehicles, peering out from behind sunglasses.  The immediate damage of dead possums, turtles, other “roadkill,” and the obvious danger we face marching alongside them, is just one thing to hate these machines for.  Cars are directly linked with the capitalist system that makes us poor.  Look at the Reclaim the Streets movement of the 1990s.  Communal space is given over to places where folks sit alone, off to ruggedly get their own bacon, feeding the mindset that as individuals we don’t need other people to survive.  The private vehicle becomes your best friend.  It’s antithetical to the movement of empathy and love that many in this crowd wish to build.  When we aren’t marching on a sliver of land permitted for pedestrians, we are clawing back a sliver of space from both cars and capital.  Getting that pinky toe of interaction that slips through the atomisation - the supportive honk - should be just a start.

  

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Part 1 of this series can be read here.

Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign

Thursday, May 31st - Thursday, June 13th 2018

Kensington, PA - Washington, D.C.

Diary, Part 1

June 1st

NO SLEEP TILL KENSINGTON

Being in this van at 4 a.m. is like being in Guantanamo Bay: loud as fuck music, blasting cold air, darkness, stress positions, no chance of sleep, and if things keep getting worse under the current administration, inside a metal canister hurtling at high speed across the landmass. As in the regular lives of poor people, we are fighting over limited resources such as space, our immediate interests are conflicting (the drivers need the bloodcurdling metal to stay alert), and we wonder why we got ourselves into such a degrading situation, before feeling guilty for thinking that way, because hey, this HAS to be done. I am not sure how I will get through this. I left home in such a rush I neglected to bring a sleeping bag, roll mat or even a coat. My immediate van buddy has spent hours grabbing at my hands and feet and knees and ignoring my clear discomfort. And if I have to carry these bags 140 miles in a week I'll reach D.C. looking like a white walker. But like working people always say to themselves in the brief respite between the end of one grind cycle and the start of the next... I made it. 

I should have taken the lack of visible basic details and logistics as a sign, and protested by not coming on the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign. It's too late now though. We are knee deep in the shit of it. It will either be a foul experience full of inspiration, or a total waste of my time. I'm mostly pinning my hopes on a larger crowd once we get to Philadelphia.

To the 8 person funk we now add McDonald's, acquired by creating huge drive-through lines behind us and confusing the hell out of a fellow poor person with a convoluted set of orders. Funding your class enemies is a necessary option a lot of the time. It is 6 a.m. and I still haven't slept. We are listening to Big Pun and Naughty By Nature, and I am wearing a ridiculous functional hat with dog ear flaps and a chinclip. Fucking hell.

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“It is patently ridiculous for the United Nations to examine poverty in America,” so said the US representative at the U.N. this week, Nikki Haley. Not to do anything about it, just look into it. It was in response to U.N. special rapporteur Philip Alston, who recently toured the country and reported that 40 million live in poverty and 5.3 million in Global South-style material poverty. That latter number comes from a metric developed by one Oxford economist earlier this year, with 6.9 million people in the EU in similar conditions. To acknowledge these people in what Haley somehow described as “the wealthiest and freest country” in the world is patently ridiculous.

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It is a rare moment where a hurricane of mad shit isn't swirling around Reverend Bruce Wright. After a 90 minute search for a very particular Philadelphia cheesesteak, we go on an extended manhunt for two people who’ve disappeared on an impromptu drug score. When a couple of cops shut down some young black men playing music and breakdancing in the edgy South Street district, an argument over how to handle the situation leads to Wright flooring our van in fury, and a 25 minute lecture from a longboarder who sleeps rough in downtown St. Petersburg regarding his vast and untapped economic, religious and political power. Arguments break out within and without the group all over, all the time. I say these things not to point and laugh at either Bruce or his Brucie Bonuses, but to demonstrate what a character St Pete has bred. He chooses to work alongside and associate with those who aren't deemed worthy of company by polite society. Despite his infamous short temper, he doesn’t throw people with problems out of the stroller as if they were worthless. We should celebrate him.

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June 2nd
JONESING FOR JUSTICE

In 1903 there were ten thousand textile workers on strike in Kensington, Pennsylvania. They were the young children of Kensington, part of a larger contingent of seventy-five thousand that were taking part in the action. The labour rights activist Mother Jones took some of the children on a week-long march to Oyster Bay, New York, home of President Roosevelt, to shed light on the terrible conditions of child labour. They slept in barns, bathed in rivers and relied on the kindness of those along the route for food and assistance. It’s eerie how much this echoes the march we made in 2018, from Kensington to D.C.

The fortunes of Kensington -- and Philadelphia in general -- don’t appear to have changed a lot since 1903 either.  There were 1200 overdose deaths in the city in 2017, one of the highest rates in the country, mostly from opioids.  Trash adorns every square foot, piles mount outside businesses and on sidewalks. Many sidewalks are so poorly maintained they are barely walkable. Drug users nodding out on corners are a common sight. Tent cities like the ones in St. Petersburg are visible and Kensington is home to multiple open-use heroin encampments. The trains and old buildings are cool though, rundown as they might appear. The still-funded police get in our space for the second time in twelve hours, this time almost literally. The cute terraced street where we are staying in an ally’s house - where kids are dancing in an open fire hydrant as we arrive in the summer heat - apparently has a lot of desperate people squatting empty buildings. After a neighbour makes a call to the cop shop, they’re threatening to throw us out or arrest us if the owner of the house doesn’t immediately show up with proof that we’re there legally. Heaven forbid she go out for a few hours. Thankfully she does return, but not before we’ve panicked and thrown all our possessions out in the street, and our reverend looks about ready to go Operation MOVE on some motherfuckers.

Incidentally, Kensington is named after a London borough that today has the highest levels of income inequality in all of England; it’s home to both the ashes of the former government housing block Grenfell Tower, where 72 lost their lives in a fire last summer, and also the palace that houses certain trendy young bloodsuckers of the Royal family, recently seen popping out welfare kings and queens worthy of the title. 

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