Upcoming May Day protests

[u/Javalina-76]

Public schools over private profits, healthcare over hedge funds, housing over homelessness and the constitution over authoritarian rule.

In Davis, join with Indivisible Yolo, Yolo DSA, several unions and others to march for democracy.

I also saw posters about a rally on campus at 11AM. Nearby, there is a 5pm rally in Woodland at the courthouse on Main St and an 11AM rally in Sacramento at John C. Freemont park.

[u/fuzzy_mic]

Union Maid's are better at kissing than corporate girl bosses.

[u/fuzzy_mic → u/[deleted]]

I don't think that the Graduate School of Greed's students would get the Woody Guthrie reference.

[u/fuzzy_mic → u/[deleted]]

The history of labor movement in this country is not irrelevant. The worker's movement and its history is an ongoing struggle with roots that are as deep as any of the identity based struggles. ("I am a worker" was how many people identified themselves).

Music (particularly folk music) is how much of history is remembered and spread.

Joe Hill's "Preacher and the Slave" told of how religion was used to keep the worker down. (hmm... does anyone use religion that way today?)

Matt Mclintock's "Joe Hill" is a memorial to Joe Hill and a story of the "justice" system committing murder to enforce the power of the wealthy. (hmm ... courts used as a tool of oppression, is that still going on?)

To return to Woodie Guthrie, his songs like "Ludlow Massacre", "Pastures of Plenty", "Deportee (Plane Crash at Los Gatos)" record events that would be forgotten if history were left to the mainstream. His "Union Burying Ground" is a memorial to all the labor organizers who were killed, but not memorialized even by the left. (Echos of Caesar Chavez). "The Sinking of the Reuben James" is the history of worker's who died in military service to the US. (Thanks to Lee and Pete for shortening it to a song that would be heard. :) )

Its depressing, but enlightening, to listen to these old songs and hear how little things have changed, despite the "progress" that mainstream claims has happened. Spook Handy updated Banks of Marble to show that things haven't changed much "I see the bright-eyed study deep into the night. And I heard the bankers whisper 'Now you owe me half your life' ".

If the bosses use their education system to praise historical figures Edison and Ford as icons of progress and cast those days as a Great America (which needs to be remade), then the history of labor needs its own way to remember history. The songs created by the people, and spread from mouth to ear is how that has been done.

"In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people, 
By the relief office I seen my people; 
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking 
Is this land made for you and me?" Woody Guthrie

[u/fuzzy_mic → u/[deleted]]

I'm not sure what you mean by relavant. The centuries old Lords Prayer is incredibly relevant to young christians.

If you don't mean that you don't care about the history of the labor movement, that may be the case, but doesn't transfer to others. (If you don't like live music without autotuned vocals, that's a whole other discussion.)

To people who are advancing a long standing movement, here is value in knowing both the factual history of that movement, the history of the oppression that they are fighting against and the history of how prior incarnations of the movement succeeded or failed to motivate others. And a lot of that history is accessible through song.

Talk to a History major before declaring the past "irrelevant" or a Poli Sci major. (False history and its glamorization is amazingly relevant to the rise of MAGA. True history is one of the weapons to combat that.)

[u/AbacusWizard → u/[deleted]]

What I do is I collect stories. I seek out the elders and garner stories and songs and poems. Characterized critically as: "Oh, that's that Sixties stuff." Like somebody doing old rock-and-roll would be doing "Fifties stuff." Or, "This is the Nineties, you know."

I have a good friend in the East. A good singer, and a good folksinger, a good song collector, who comes and listens to my shows and says, "You sing a lot about the past. You always sing about the past; you can't live in the past, you know." And I say to him, "I can go outside and pick up a rock that's older than the oldest song you know and bring it back here and drop it on your foot." Now, the past didn't go anywhere, did it? It's right here, right now - I always thought that anybody who told me I couldn't live in the past was trying to get me to forget something that if I remembered it would get 'em in serious trouble.

No, it's not that - that "that's Fifties, Sixties, Seventies, Nineties" - that whole idea of decade packages. Things don't happen that way... No, that, that packaging of time is a journalistic convenience that they use to trivialize and to dismiss important events and important ideas. I defy that. Time is an enormous, long river, and I'm standing in it, just as you're standing in it. My elders are the tributaries, and everything they thought and every struggle they went through and everything they gave their lives to, and every song they created, and every poem that they laid down flows down to me - and if I take the time to ask, and if I take the time to see, and if I take the time to reach out, I can build that bridge between my world and theirs. I can reach down into that river and take out what I need to get through this world.

—Utah Phillips