If you see these people, notify the authorities! They were seen and heard in Powderhorn Park expressing freedom of speech. L to R: Papa John, Eskit, Bob Carney, Bill McGaughey and Captain Jack
BY ED FELIEN
There was a small but dedicated crowd gathered around the Southside Pride virtual soapbox on the Fourth of July in Powderhorn Park.
Bill McGaughey started things off by talking about the problem of being discriminated against because he is a white man. He was concerned about the “situation of white people following the horrendous shootings in Charleston, South Carolina.” He believes it will be more difficult to achieve integration if some black people continue to discriminate against white people.
A surprising rebuttal to Bill came from his “on and off partner of 22 years,” an African-American woman named Sid. She said she’s going to stick with Bill. She has grandchildren who are Nigerian, English and Spanish, Native American, and she loves them all. She doesn’t love one better. Not one of them is better or worse than another.
Kent Mori from the Anti-War Committee spoke about the tragic war in Gaza that began last year on July 8: “The apartheid state of Israel committed innumerable atrocities for which it still has not been held accountable, not the least of which include 2,200 Palestinians massacred (519 children), United Nations shelters bombed, over 108,000 people left homeless due to the targeting of multistory family homes, the deliberate damaging of Gaza’s only power plant, and clear incitements to genocide from top Israeli officials. The U.S. is directly complicit in these war crimes, providing $3 billion in foreign aid to Israel every year. This past summer we witnessed some of the largest Palestine solidarity protests ever in Minnesota. Join us to continue to build a movement opposing U.S. aid to Israel. Marking the one-year anniversary of Israel’s escalation of the war on Gaza, a march through Uptown was held on July 8, launching our social media campaign #51daysinGaza.”
Eskit sang “Take a Journey with Bernie”: “Take a journey with Bernie to the White House. His message is short and concise. Those pimps on Wall Street fooled us once, but they damned sure won’t fool us twice.” He also sang “Sugar Daddy”—about how nice it is to know a billionaire.
Bob Carney (who now calls himself bobagaincarney, jr., perhaps as a warning that he intends to be a perennial candidate for public office) talked about his success in getting the legislature to transfer money intended for the new LRT line to some other project. He also explained his theory on revolution. He believes there have been many revolutions in our lifetime, and he said revolutions are only successful when they are nonviolent and work with the dominant economic powers. He gave the example of Obamacare. It was successful because it worked with insurance companies and didn’t threaten 3 million jobs. Hillarycare was unsuccessful because it cut out the insurance company jobs. And the difference is that Obamacare exists and Hillarycare doesn’t.
I could not resist the temptation to disagree. Before introducing the next speaker I said that my understanding of revolution is different from his. I believe there have been two major revolutions in this country. The first we celebrate today, the War of Independence, where an entire country was taken away from a king, and the Civil War, in which the property of slave owners was taken from them. Both were violent. I think Bob was confusing reform with revolution. I wish I would have remembered Frederick Douglass’ remark:
“If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
Captain Jack Sparrow, in his basic pirate black, talked about the history of pirates and how they freed slave ships and practiced perfect communism by sharing everything and did democratic decision-making. He said he was a communist in the pirate sense, but he was not a Bolshevik. He didn’t believe in the Marxist-Leninist concept of democratic centralism because there was always too much centralism and too little democracy.
Craig Wood spoke about Gaza and told everyone to come to Loring Park on July 8 at 4:30 p.m. to commemorate the Palestinian lives stolen by the Israeli military’s horrific 51-day bombing of Gaza in July-August 2014.
Papa John Kolstad was the last speaker, and he talked about two things. First, he shared with the audience that he was reading a journal of the American Psychiatric Association and they identified seven types of mental illness, one of which was hoarding. They said that hoarding was dangerous to the individual and to society. Although we normally think of hoarders as older people who never throw anything away and are eventually crushed under the weight of all their unread newspapers and endangering not just the people living downstairs but everybody in the building. Papa John pointed out that people who hoard wealth, like the Koch brothers, are also a hazard to themselves and to society. At this point I began to remember that Papa John ran for attorney general just a few years back. As the top cop for the State of Minnesota he could have arrested Charles and David Koch for endangering the lives of Minnesotans with their criminal hoarding of wealth and their monopoly on the distribution of oil. Would he have put them in protective custody so they couldn’t harm themselves or their neighbors?
The second thing Papa John talked about was a Princeton-Northwestern Study of 20 years of legislation that passed through Congress: 95% of it benefited the 1%. The conclusion to the study states:
“Despite the seemingly strong empirical support in previous studies for theories of majoritarian democracy, our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts. Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association, and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.”
Papa John ended by reminding the audience what Benjamin Franklin said when he was asked by someone, at the conclusion of the Constitutional Congress, what sort of government they had made. “A republic … ” Franklin answered, “If you can keep it.”
“Well, we didn’t keep it. We lost it.” Papa John said.
The afternoon ended with Eskit singing a song about himself and 1,400 other people being arrested protesting construction of the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant in New Hampshire in 1977.
Dave Garland did a wonderful job setting up the sound system. If we do it again next year, we should move it into the shade and set up some chairs. Also, it would be nice to have a refreshment stand nearby selling lemonade.
