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ROP Spring 2006 Newsletter

People's Convention

For years, people have said that America was going to hell in a handbasket. Now we know exactly what that hell and that handbasket look like.  It looks like a gaping hole in the middle of Manhattan, a molar ripped out of a jaw.  Like an entire region and a major city flooded, people drowning and clamoring for rescue on shrinking islands of safety. A government that dithers and holds photo ops.  Like a US army suffering ‘death by one thousand cuts’, killing and dying in a desert that has swallowed up empires since the days of the Babylon.  Like the most vulnerable Americans suffering another ‘death by one thousand cuts’ as the social safety net is ripped apart.  Like a government morphing into Big Brother, tapping phones, subverting the Bill of Rights, torturing prisoners, targeting ever larger portions of the population - Muslims, dissenters, immigrants.

Despair is the real danger for people of conscience in this situation.  This is why the Old Testament prophet said that ‘without a vision, the people perish’.  It’s important to fight the injustices that are falling on us like snowflakes, but without a vision of what we want for America, despair will paralyze us.

The advantage of the Rural Organizing Project, a network of local, grassroots groups, is that we can hold a collective conversation. We can bring the voices and experiences of many human rights activists from around the state together to create a vision and a practical plan for what we would like our nation, our state, our communities to look like. In the last year, human dignity groups across the state have held such discussions. Four key points of a vision have emerged, based on where we are at today and the change of course we would like to see:

1. Create Real Security: Close the gap between the rich and poor by putting people to work rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure and decaying services and pay for this with fair tax contributions from corporations and the super-rich.

2.  Withdraw from Iraq: The US occupation is a threat to security in America and in Iraq.

3.  Protect the Rights of All: The Constitution, Bill of Rights, and Geneva Conventions are the foundations of true security and safe communities.  Protect the basic rights of all people regardless of citizenship status or nationality. 

4.  Conserve Energy:  Public investments in energy efficiency and conservation will put people to work, protect our security, economy, and environment.

This vision can be used a political platform - designed to tell people what we want and what we believe. In the democratic tradition, people gather in conventions to hammer out platforms.  On May 6-7, representatives of ROP human dignity groups will gather  for the annual Rural Caucus. We will use this occasion to hold a People’s Convention where we will debate the four points of the ReBuild America vision and create a working platform for social activists. How can these points be used to hold politicians accountable? How can they guide our political direction in state and federal politics? And perhaps most importantly, can we implement this program locally, through volunteer efforts and city councils and county commissions? Can we link these local efforts together to create a counter weight to big state and federal government that has been subverted by money, corporate power, and right-wing ideology?                             

Sometimes, conventions are alienating stage-managed shows without debate and democratic discussion. However, sometimes, in periods of great national peril, people at the grassroots gather for a People’s Convention, with the goal of ensuring liberty and survival. Let’s remember one such convention, held in Philadelphia, July, 1776, when the people gathered together and made revolutionary history.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness - That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”