Celebrating the Militant Mothers of Raymur
By Carolyn Jerome January 4 2021
 Daughter
Liisa Atva and Militant Mothers Barbara Burnet, Joan Morelli, Carolyn
Jerome and Muggs Sigurgeirson in front of the overpass they got built
50 years ago. Murray Bush - flux photo 2014
It
seems like a very long time ago now (50 years this month) that a group
of us living in Vancouver’s Raymur Housing Project took on the Canadian
National (CNR) and Burlington Northern (BNR) railways. Our children had
to cross the busy rail tracks to get to and from Lord Admiral Seymour
public school and it just wasn’t safe. So a group of determined mothers
took it upon ourselves to change things, and eventually we did.
This is our story, told from the perspective of one of the Militant Mothers of Raymur:
We
were two single moms in 1970-71 living in the high-rise at 400 Campbell
Ave. and we would see each other in the elevator. We would talk about
the control the BC Housing Commission exerted on its tenants –
especially its policy of no guests allowed after certain hours,
complete with eyes peering from the Housing Commission office located
by the elevator. That got us laughing. Those elevator conversations
inevitably turned to challenging the audacity of the nearby railways.
They were running their trains to and from the docks at the same time
that our kids had to cross their tracks to get to school....
-- read more...
An Open Letter to the American People
by Don Weitz
Letters to the Editor: 2020-12-19
President
Donald J. Trump is not only threatening to impose martial law in many
states, he also threatens violence. Trump is a loser who will never
accept he lost the US presidential election in November to
President-Elect Joe Biden. There was absolutely no factual evidence of
any “voter fraud,” as he repeatedly and wrongly claims. Trump is trying
to destroy all government agencies, advisors and lawyers he has
identified as “enemies.” Further, Trump is illegally and
unconstitutionally using the Oval Office to fundraise to enrich
himself.
Trump poses a dire threat to national and world
security, who threatened to start a word war with North Korea. After
his impeachment by the Congress he should have been criminally charged
and convicted of many federal and international crimes, including his
racist immigration policy that authorizes mass arrests and
imprisonments of Latin-American migrants and the forced separation of
thousands of children who were cruelly locked up and drugged in cages.
It
is shocking and criminal that hundreds of Republican Party members,
together with much corporate media, including Fox News, continue to
parrot and support Trump’s irrational, racist, destructive and
treasonous policies, threats, actions, and lies. Inauguration Day can’t happen soon enough. Be prepared.
Don Weitz, social justice and human rights advocate author of Resistance Matters (2019)
Trouble Ahead, Trouble Behind: An American Exile Looks South
By Tom Sandborn
Vancouver, BC. November 4, 2020. Like many others, I have been
paying obsessive attention to the febrile grotesqueries of American politics
these days. My angst is similar to the nervous apprehension of someone who
discovers himself living upstairs from a crack house. The US, where I was born
and spent my first two decades before escaping to Canada, has recently been
wracked by a lethally mismanaged pandemic, murderous police violence, economic
collapse, a president who clearly wants to install himself in authoritarian
permanence and growing evidence that the Republicans’ dog whistle politics of
resentment has tapped into and promoted a distinctively American kind of racism. It all evoked a mood of
Hunter Thompsonesque fear and loathing. The news that even the vile Mitch
McConnell, looking more and more every day like the result of a love match
between a shark and a giant slug, is going back to the Senate does nothing to
improve my mood.
As this column is
being written, victory in key states has not yet been called by media observers
and it remains unclear whether Biden or Trump will get the nod from the
ornately anti-democratic College of Electors when all the dust (and desperate,
bad faith litigation from Republican operatives) settles. The returns that have
been counted and announced suggest that Biden, like Hilary Clinton, will win
the (constitutionally irrelevant) popular vote by a margin of millions. It
remains to be seen whether he will end up with the necessary 270 electoral
votes.
Even more uncertain is the question of whether a peaceful transition
of power will occur in January. Trump made the expected but flagrantly false
announcement early this morning that he had already and definitively won the
election. He called for an end to counting the vote, invoking again the theme
he voiced throughout the election- that the unprecedented level of mail-in voting this election- inspired by concerns
that in-person voting exposed voters to Covid danger- created an opening for
massive voter fraud. No one outside the fever swamps of Trumpland takes that
purported danger seriously, but it has become a recurring trope on Fox News and
other pro-Trump outlets, where many benighted voters turn for information and
analysis.
Even if Biden wins both the popular vote and the electoral
college contest, we have no reason to be expect an orderly hand over of power
in January. Trump clearly means to take the issue to the Supreme Court to “stop
the voting.” And there is no reason to think that The Orange Beast will urge
his white supremacist followers in the Proud Boys and other neo-fascist
formations to “stand down,” even if the Federalist Society partisans he has
added to the SC cannot stomach the judicial coup he hopes for. We could still
see the armed struggle in the streets of America the Boogaloo Boys and their
testosterone inflamed allies have desired for years. Trump has already
signalled ill-disguised encouragement for vigilante violence and the Bubbas
with Bazookas may very well rise up to demand another term for their boy
Donald, no matter how the final vote count reads.
And that takes me to my final and darkest reflection today.
Even if Trump is unsuccessful in his attempt to pervert the electoral process,
the whole world has to deal with the fact that millions of Americans did
vote for him. That means that a significant share of the electorate
supported Trump despite the heart breaking images of refugee children held in
cages, despite the bungled Covid response that drove up the pandemic death
count and despite four years of evidence that the president is a mendacious
misogynist, a ranting racist and, to use one of his favorite tropes, “a bad
hombre.” (At this point, it looks like Trump will emerge from this election
with a larger share of electoral support than Hitler got from the German voters
in their last election before the Nazis came to power!)
As a recovering American who left the Excited States in
protest against the Vietnam War, I have a life-long love-hate relationship with
the country of my birth. Today’s reflections do nothing to diminish or resolve
that tense dialectic. The fact that so many
Americans voted for Trump signals big trouble yet to come, I fear. This
prospect saddens and frightens me. We may well see eruptions of street violence
from Trump’s white supremacist supporters, and yet more public chaos that will
make it even harder for America to deal with the butcher’s bill of Covid deaths
that mounts every day. We are likely to see an emboldened far right swaggering
on the streets of America and trying to pick fights with Black Lives Matter,
antifa and moderates.
All of this is rooted in America’s original sin, chattel
slavery. The Trump phenomenon cannot be understood without taking into account slavery’s
long shadow and its foundational relationship to American capitalism. We are
still in that dark shadow today, and Jefferson’s anguished comment on the
institution he criticized but never broke with is as pertinent now as it was
when he first wrote: “Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God
is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever;”
Whether we share Jefferson’s conflicted Deism, another form
of religious faith or no faith at all, the warning is timely. We should all be
trembling now. Trump, for all his glow in the dark evil, is not the only
problem here. Progressives around the world have our work cut out for us. We
need to think deeply about the implications of the Trump phenomenon and build
on the hopeful mass mobilizations by people of colour and their allies over the
last four years. We have a lot of work to do, no matter who sits in the White
House next year.
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