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| Top, Jennifer Flynn Walker by Elizabeth DeutschBottom, at the Hart Senate Building in DC. Sisters are doing it for themselves! #FamiliesBelongTogetherAnd |
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| Last Saturday, at the #AbolishICE-themed NYC Dyke March (has it only been a week?) — withAlexis Danzig and LA Kauffman. |
I spent the week trying to figure how to
get to DC on Thursday and Vermont on Friday to pick up our little one from
summer camp. Finally, I realized it was not going to happen. Family obligations
are important and a privilege. Like aging,
they are not something not everyone gets to experience. But they make the world
worthwhile. No family is the same. There is no one right family. And not all families will be reunited, not in this lifetime. But those that can be, should be.
The Women's March outlined the terms for the action.
The Women's March outlined the terms for the action.
On Thursday, June 28th, Womens March and partners are organizing a mass civil disobedience in Washington, D.C.We call on women from all communities to descend on our nation’s capital and demand the safety and freedom of immigrant families and children. We will put our bodies on the line to demand an end to this administration’s the zero-tolerance policy that automatically criminalizes undocumented immigrants and tears families apart, and to call on congress to abolish ICE, an agency that is terrorizing our communities every day.We will take escalated action in D.C. on June 28th demanding lawmakers and federal officials do everything in their power to #EndFamilyDetention. On Saturday, June 30, we will rise up in cities across the nation to say #FamiliesBelongTogether in freedom, not in cages. We cannot allow these atrocities to go unchallenged. The time to ACT is NOW.
Marching is no longer enough, not when this administration is enacting policies that violently separate families, incarcerate children in detention camps and criminalizes human beings coming to our country in search of safety. Not when we see photos and videos of children separated from their families and held in child prison camps. Not when we hear their cries for their parents and see their fear and trauma.
We now know what immigration enforcement does, and what it looks like. The images we have seen, the cries we have heard evoke the worst moments in our country’s history, and we can no longer turn away.
This is a DEFINING moment. One that will shape our generation. We need bold, strategic and targeted resistance. We cannot be silent. On Thursday, June 28th, women TAKE ACTION!
Marching is no longer enough, not when this administration is enacting policies that violently separate families, incarcerate children in detention camps and criminalizes human beings coming to our country in search of safety. Not when we see photos and videos of children separated from their families and held in child prison camps. Not when we hear their cries for their parents and see their fear and trauma.
We now know what immigration enforcement does, and what it looks like. The images we have seen, the cries we have heard evoke the worst moments in our country’s history, and we can no longer turn away.
This is a DEFINING moment. One that will shape our generation. We need bold, strategic and targeted resistance. We cannot be silent. On Thursday, June 28th, women TAKE ACTION!
All day long on Thursday, I watched videos
of Jennifer Flynn and the Center for Popular Democracy’s 2000 Women Action,
that amounted to six hundred arrests in a mass civil disobedience action at the
Hart Senate Office Building over the US zero tolerance policy.
“We do care!” thousands of women screamed,
making a point that they were not going to stand by while the US gradually
descends into an American exceptionalist form fascism, based on exclusion,
income inequality, family separations, weakened unions, mass incarceration, and
racist segregation. The US feels like
Germany 1929. But urbanites, the majority
of the US population, appreciate the gifts immigration brings to communities, creating
a dynamic urban cultural mix.
As the women were getting arrested in DC,
Amy Cohen was initiating a 24 vigil to call for State Senator Marty Golden to
expand New York’s speed safety camera program.
My brother and his family and I met Cohen in
front of Golden’s Bay Ridge office.
Why don’t you leave the Senator a note,
suggested Amy.
So I drafted a postit note for his office.
“@SenMartyGolden do the
right thing!!! Speed cameras save lives!
Cohen explained she’d spoken with the governor
today. He said he’d hold an extra session
if Golden said he was on board.
So keep calling him, Amy reminded me.
I looked at a sign she had posted declaring: "Our Children Have Been Killed. We have nothing left to lose!"
I looked at a sign she had posted declaring: "Our Children Have Been Killed. We have nothing left to lose!"
Earlier in the day, my arm bracelet for her
son, who was killed by a speeding car on Prospect Park West before his Bar Mitzvah,
broke. I always show Amy my bracelet.
Do you want to get arrested with us
tomorrow, Amy asked.
I’d love to but I can’t I am picking up my
kids from camp, I said, immediately regretting referring to my kids.
It’s a complicated story. While some have seen their families
separated. Others, such as Jennifer
Flynn Walker have reminded us that families come in countless forms. And they behong together. Others, such as Cohen, have seen their kids killed by speeding cars. So they have organized, reminding us to do
the right thing, using their tragedies to point us in more intelligent, more
just directions.
According to Families for Safe Streets:
“Drivers Have Killed Nine Children in
First Half of 2018, Matching Total Child Deaths for All of 2017.”
Cohen’s vigil ended Friday at 9 a.m., coinciding
with the release of a report co-authored by Transportation Alternatives and
City Council Member Justin Brannan which shows New York City drivers have
killed at least nine children in traffic crashes less than six months into
2018, the same number of children killed by drivers in all of last year.
With two child pedestrians killed earlier this week, New York City is now
on pace to see twice as many child fatalities in 2018 as last year. On Monday,
four-year-old Luz Gonzalez lost her shoe on a sidewalk in Bushwick. Her mother
ran back for it and bent to strap it on the little girl. Then, with her mother
at her feet, a driver ran over Luz with a Nissan Rogue. Earlier that day,
17-year-old Madeline Sershen was crossing the street in front of her school,
St. Francis Prep High School in Queens, when an elderly driver sped through a
red light and crashed into her. Madeline was pronounced dead less than 30
minutes later.
Lawmakers can and must do more to protect children on New York City's
streets, especially where they should feel safest: on the sidewalk and in
crosswalks in front of schools. But the city's proven school-based speed camera
program will expire on July 25, at which point the 140 speed cameras currently
protecting children outside their schools will be turned off. A bill which
would renew and expand the speed camera program, S6046-C, is currently being
held in committee by Senate Republicans who oppose the child-protection
devices.
Key findings from the report:
An analysis of publicly available data and news sources found that, as of
June 26, New York City has seen at least nine children aged 17 or younger
killed in traffic crashes on New York City streets in 2018. Two-thirds of
children killed by drivers so far this year were pedestrians.
New York City is currently on pace to see twice as many child fatalities
in 2018 as last year , and the highest annual total since 2012, before the
implementation of Vision Zero.
While overall traffic fatalities citywide have declined since Vision Zero
was implemented, child traffic fatalities continue to grow year-over-year.
At the 24-hour vigil outside Senator Golden's office, Families for Safe
Streets, anchored by founding member Amy Cohen, honored their loved ones and
the nine children killed by drivers this year in New York City, demanding
action from the senator to renew and expand the city's school-based speed
safety camera program. Expanding school zone speed safety cameras across New
York City is the single most effective way to prevent child traffic deaths.
That’s why 64 percent of New York voters, including 70 percent of seniors and
60 percent of car owners, strongly support more speed safety cameras near
schools. In order to ensure the cameras continue doing their job, state Senate
leaders and the governor must reconvene the Senate and vote on S6046-C.
"We will not sit idly by while an elected official who himself has
been caught speeding in school zones 10 times tries to deny us the tools that
we know are making the streets safer for our children," Cohen said.
"Senator Golden told us with a straight face that he supported expanding
the speed safety camera program, only to turn around and suggest scrapping the
cameras in favor of stop signs. He should be ashamed."
"This is a crisis. Children are dying, and once speed safety cameras
are switched off, drivers are going to be emboldened to break the law and
endanger our kids," said Paul Steely White, executive director of
Transportation Alternatives. "One has to wonder, where does a person find
it in themselves to publicly oppose a solution that has proven time and again
to reduce speeding, prevent crashes and save lives?"
The 24-hour vigil for speed safety cameras outside State Senator Marty
Golden's office was held to demand the Senate reconvene and guarantee a vote on
S6046‑C, the bill to extend and expand New York City’s proven school-based
speed camera program. In New York City school zones where speed cameras have
been deployed, speeding dropped 63 percent and pedestrian injuries fell by 23
percent in the first two years. S6046-C would continue the program until 2022
and allow the City of New York to expand the program from 140 cameras to 290.
As we were heading up to Vermont to pick up the little
one from camp, Cohen was staging her civil disobedience in front of Golden’s
office to draw attention to these preventable deaths.
The next morning we stopped by the Families Belong
Together rally in Burlington VT, meeting outside an
old Church and Pearl in front of the Unitarian Universalist church for initial
speakers.
“We are outraged by the
atrocities ICE and DHS are wreaking on immigrants and asylum-seekers on the
southern border of the USA. These concentration camps hold men, women, and
children ransom for bond money, traumatizing them physically and
psychologically. The American immigration system must be completely reformed.
We demand that for-profit detention centers be banned, families be released and
reunited, and immigrants welcomed….We'll
march down South Winooski, past the Farmer's Market, up Church Street, and
follow Pearl Street to Battery Park.”
I talked with one women who appeared to be
in her 1970’s carrying a sign declaring:
“Immigration makes America great.”
Others pointed to a humanitarian need to
keep families together.
What about family values another asked.
Jews Against Concentration Camps, noted
another sign, making an analogy between today’s anti-immigrant policies and those
family separation polices of past eras.
Thousands of us marched for a more inclusive
caring America.
Walking out of the rally, a man wrote me a
poem:
“Jesus
Christ would say
Forgive
them for they know not what they do;
Jesus Christ has hung on a cross,
his followers hunted
down,
his word made perverse
and his memory pimped
on daytime radio
his image work around the neck
of a modern professional nazi.
we learn
history
so as
not to repeat it,
learn
from this.
j.o. 6/30/18
Burlington vt.”
Driving home I reflected on Amy Cohen and
Jennifer Flynn and the other women I know taking the lead, organizing
communities to resist the rising tides of fascism in the US lurch to the right. Like Ella Baker, they all revel in the lesson
that the body of the movement is the leader, not the top. We don’t want charismatic leaders. We will lead ourselves. We will resist, even as the right rigs the
system. We will fight using every tool
in the toolbox.Soon enough four of nine of the judges on
the supreme court will have been appointed by leaders who lost the popular
vote.The majority in 2000 and 2018 called for a
different urban focused agenda, friendly to climate science, reproductive autonomy,
and community health.The gains of the last four decades are in
question now.
As my friend Andy Humm put it, this is a
civil war. He wrote Thursday:
I'm 64. Until I was 26, "sodomy" was a crime in NY
and I had a good time breaking the law. When I was in high school, abortion was
a crime in New York and good people--including a whole cohort at the
Judson Memorial Church--helped women find safe abortions. When I was in grade
school, African Americans in the South were, for the most part, not even
allowed to vote but they were well into a movement that transformed the heart
and soul of the nation.
We are in the midst of an enormous backlash and people are saying
"it's over" and "we've lost."
WE HAVE NOT YET BEGUN TO FIGHT.
If abortion is once again made illegal, we will help women
obtain them safely.
If the sodomy laws are reinstated, we will still make love
with people of the same-sex.
If private businesses are allowed to discriminate, we will
not patronize the businesses that do.
If benefits are taken away from us by this cruel and
uncaring regime, we will take care of each other.
We will never bow down to the false gods that they worship.
We will never give respect to the government they have
stolen from us.
We will work for the day when our country finally has a
government worthy of its people and responsive to us.
They can spew all the racism they want, but they will only
further isolate themselves and never earn anything but our contempt and
pity--never our complicity.
When they shout their racism and sexism and homophobia, we
will not be silent no matter how much temporal power they illegally acquire.
While they wallow in their bigotry, we will continue to
build a society that embraces diversity and consigns their hatred to the
dustbin of history.
When they pass evil laws, we will disobey them no matter how
often an illegitimate court declares them constitutional.
THINK THEY HAVE DEFEATED US? THINK AGAIN. WE ARE THE
AMERICAN MAJORITY AND WE WILL NEVER SURRENDER.
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| @senmartygolden do the right thing!!! Speed cameras save lives! |
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