And my colleagues have begun a clever election-year bird dogging initiative called “Questions for the Candidates,” in which Progressive Cabinet nominees will soon have an opportunity to pose questions to candidates for office.
Also, a Progressive Cabinet Planning Council has been formed. The group has developed a set of eight priorities or themes for the '08 election cycle:
§ Fair Trade, Living Wage Jobs & Healthy Local Economies
§ Climate Stabilization, Ecological Sustainability & Renewable Energy
§ End of War, Dismantling of Empire & the Military Industrial Complex
§ Election Integrity & Renewal of Democracy
§ Housing, Education and Health Care for All
§ Humane & Fair Immigration Policy
§ Celebration of Diversity & Elimination of Racial Disparities
§ Governmental Accountability and Transparency
And this list now brings me to a new project of the Backbone Campaign, a second beautiful form, the Procession for the Future www.processionforthefuture.org.
The Procession consists of a large-group puppet parade that takes up one city block; it’s a varied set of bright large-scale sculptures, inflatable figures, and signage that joyfully demonstrate what everyone hopes our country will look like in the coming years. Talk about transcending partisan politics!
The Procession has, for instance, a blow up green Lady Liberty offering sanctuary to all U.S. residents, a lumbering polar bear, bees on sticks, and frog masks. A large fabric sun opens up to reveal a clean energy and transport town. Fair trade farmers and a single payer doctor show off the tools of their trades. A pentagon “Penta-Gone’ shape is literally deconstructed then transformed -- through simple choreography -- into earth hugging imagery of solar panels, students receiving diplomas, and non-agribusiness farm fields.
And the Procession’s colorful signs contain the propositional themes – in clear language - developed by the Progressive Cabinet Planning Council.
Although I am not involved the Procession project, as an art teacher, I know that appealing and inviting creative actions build group skills, solidarity, confident expression of shared purpose, and joy.
In her recent book Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, Barbara Ehrenreich decries what she perceives in our culture to be a general lack of “collective merriment.” Ehrenreich says that we humans are a social species in need of ecstatic rituals for group bonding, to have an occasional release from life’s challenges, but also to fight oppression.
As the Procession tours around cities and campuses this summer and fall, it may well prove to be a means for our youth to channel their understandable rage - at the world they're inheriting - into non-destructive energetic street actions and substantive political proposals. Activist training is a key component of the Procession.
I hope Students for a Democratic Society, Student Peace Action Network, Campus Action Network, and other college age youth find a means to utilize the Procession in the coming months.
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Here we are, eleven months after the Progressive Cabinet Summit.
Americans are saddled with worsening crises - the continuing Iraq War, quickening global warming, and transport, energy, medical, housing and education disasters around the country. It seems absurd to use language in this way: putting the word “worsening” in front of the action-demanding and charged word “crisis,” but that is the crazy situation we face.
New crises – mounting gas and food prices, the mortgage industry fiasco – are just symptoms of profoundly mismanaged policy by an almost nonfunctioning national government.
I am tired of watching well meaning nonprofits – with unstable budgets and personnel - try desperately to fill in where the federal government has failed.
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