By: Will Copeland

We’re growing our organic activists

No Propaganda and No preservatives

We’re growing with the weeds and cabbages

Taking out the Neo-conservatives

We grow what’s healing like chamomile and nettles
b/c we keep cool like the handle on a kettle
when the soup’s hot. A dew drops, evaporates, and cools off
and falls on a corn stalk—the drop that the Roots caught.
We live in days of New Talk and Propaganda.
I ain’t a Pollyanna but I kick the proper grammar.
We know that field planters get sprayed like Raid by Tropicana
And get their Visas denied with no reason for why.
How many people will die for this piece of the pie?

So we’re growing our organic activists

No Propaganda and No preservatives

We’re growing with the weeds and cabbages

Taking out the Neo-conservatives

We come in many shapes & packages.
We come from the muck and dirt of this
United States of America.,
But dirt is where you find the nutrients.
And shit is just a name for compost.
But we will never bullshit ya
For a Pulitzer
Or a primary
Or Election Day
Or erection’s sake
Or a foundation grant
Or a brand new plant
With a knife in your back
Cause we know better than that

Cause we’re growing organic activists

In the D we grow organic activists

Cause my soul is the sun
And our pain is the rain
And the struggle is the soil
So we’re growing good grain
With organic flavor
Putting neighbor in the hood, man.
Well polished like the varnish
On your window wood pane.
Sean Bell’s widow would claim
That we need a peace zone
So when the beef’s on
We leave pork alone.
We can settle it, without the heavy metal
Mediate it
Like a mushroom, we get the lead out.
No need to bust fools—talk it out
Like Dre Three Thous Remix to walk it out.
You know what I’m talking about:
Let’s get Banana splits and not Banana Clips.

Community will handle it—the definition
Of organic activist.

By: Rich Feldman

I have read about half of the book: “Blessed Unrest” by Paul Hawken.

Thanks, Grace and Shea, for pushing this book. It is the first book that begins to explain to me why so many of the young people in and around Detroit Summer have moved beyond the thinking of the New and Old Left. They have been raised in the closing decades of the epoch in human history that began with the destruction of indigenous people and the slave trade through industrialization (or the beginning of the destruction of the environment). They are coming of age at the beginning of the new era, moving beyond imperialism and the nation-state to corporate globalization, resistance to which entered a new era with the Zapatistas and the Battle of Seattle in 1999.

It is a book that should be read along with Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine and the book, THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE FUNDED: BEYOND THE NON-PROFIT INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX! edited by INCITE! Women of Color.

Blessed Unrest raises tremendous questions about concepts of movement building and, for me, raised the issue of the uniqueness of movement building in the 21 century. In Revolution and Evolution in the 20th Century, James and Grace Lee Boggs clearly emphasized the uniqueness and particularity of each revolution, based on the unique history of the country.

The history of the U. S. is very different from the history of Europe. Europe emerged from feudalism; the U. S. did not. The U.S. was founded at the beginning of the epoch when the main goal of western societies was economic growth and increasing productivity. The fundamental contradiction within our nation’s founding is the struggle to advance economically and technologically at the expense of those at the bottom: Native Americans, African Americans, small farmers and the working class. Simply said, Slavery advances the economy while destroying our humanity and our political and social consciousness.

As I was reading the book, it became clearer to me that the work around the
Beloved Communities Network and the concept of organizing, discovering and creating communities that forms the basis of Cities of Hope is the Boggs Center contribution to these amazing times.

How do we create new relationships on a local, regional, national and international basis as we empower, transform & heal ourselves, and deepen our concepts of Work, Education, Politics, Security and Citizenship?

This leads me to the discussion of Hillary Clinton & Bill Clinton who are
encouraging people to go backwards in time by blaming others for the fears, bitterness and insecurities of the white working & middle classes. When Sean Hannity praises Bill Clinton for speaking out against Obama (claiming that Obama “used the race card against Clinton”), we see a significant deepening and expansion of the right-wing to openly include a growing sector of the Democratic party.

We can and must intervene at this time if we recognize that growing numbers of the white working class are also supportive and respectful of Obama. They want a positive change. These are very fluid times. At the same time, a substantial number of white workers are moving beyond George Wallace/Reagan Democrats to the Clinton Democrats who are drifting toward the ideas of counter-revolution. The Clinton democrats are a natural extension of the Reagan democrats. – from Reagan’s trickle down economics to Clinton’s war on poor women via welfare reform among other things.

Hillary Clinton recently was quoted in the NYT as saying:
“They came for the steel companies and nobody said anything. They came for the auto companies and nobody said anything. They came for the office companies, people who did white-collar service jobs, and no one said anything. And they came for the professional jobs that could be outsourced, and nobody said anything.”

This is a great formulation but the alternative to silence is not solutions from the past or empty rhetoric about solidarity. Resistance without vision is doomed to failure. Our silence is more complicated than self-centeredness or selfishness.

We are silent because we think and act like consumers. We are silent because our only solutions are past solutions based upon the myth that a higher standard of living is inevitable and desirable for future generations. We ignore the fact that our standard of living is a result of our post-World War II empire status and the global domination of U. S. corporations. We are silent because we think and care about only about ourselves We have built our society on this kind of self-righteous individualism and we have internalized the values of our society., not about the environment or about the billions of others in the world who are dying of hunger and disease while we care only about maintaining or raising our standard of living. We have traded principles and values and our sacred honor for an ever-higher standard of living, for the Almighty Dollar.

Unless they were involved in the movements of the 60s and 70s. large numbers of workers have no memory of collective caring. Most industrial workers and white collar workers were involved in the labor movement only for higher wages and their own economic security; not to bring about social change and a new non-exploitative society.. The white working class and middle class believed they had reached security because they had made it into the American Dream of jobs, overtime, credit cards, larger houses, social status. They have no memory, no concept, no vision of security coming from a social movement to advance our humanity and the well-being of everyone. The attempt to equate union membership with the union movement of solidarity continues to fail because we see success as $$$ and security as $$$.

We need to acknowledge the fear of workers on the picket line at the American Axle plant in Detroit who have been on strike for more than 2 months, or the workers who have lost their jobs in the steel mills and textile mills, or who are currently losing their jobs to telemarketers overseas. Their fears are very real. They want answers from their government, but too often they want simple answers like Fair Trade and stop corporations from leaving this country. They want to protect their past. They believe that it is their right to be on the top of the ladder because they are Americans. They want their fair share as compared to a CEO earning hundreds of millions of dollars per year. BUT

• They blame African Americans for “taking” their jobs because of Affirmative Action.
• They blame Mexican Americans for coming to this country and Mexicans in Mexico for taking the jobs that relocate to their country
• Previously, men blamed women but since in the past 30 years women often work an the same sites as men this argument has decreased.
• They blame the union for not stopping the outsourcing of the jobs or for accepting concessions.
• They blame the government. Some blame the liberals for backing higher wages that drive employers overseas and growing numbers also blame Republicans and Bush for not challenging windfall profits and failure to create jobs from subsidies.
• They also blame the greed of the CEOs and the corporations.

They want security for themselves but they are not concerned about the security of those left behind. For some, there was security in the 1990s during the technology boom - and they credit Clinton for this economic security. The people losing today and being thrown overboard by technology, sourcing and globalization have short memories. They don’t remember the 1980s when another layer was displaced as the US economic empire weakened and global competition expanded. In the 1980s it was competition from Japan. Today it is from China and India. Today’s economic crash is the natural result of Clinton’s policies that they thought brought them prosperity in the 1990s – the housing crash is the result of his bank deregulation and facilitating predatory lending, etc)

In the U.S. we don’t look at those left behind until it happens to us. For the first time in human history every human being is not necessary to the economic system of production and consumption.

The challenge for activists, progressives, union folks is to learn to listen to the fears and despair so we can then engage in conversations about hope . This is the first step to becoming citizens who take control of our local economies and our communities.

We have to rely on each other and give meaning to solidarity. A solidarity not only of mobilization but of transformation. A solidarity of hope, not of fear.

Too many white workers and middle class people believe that:

• Obama is not patriotic enough?
• Michelle Obama is not proud of her country?

While this is taking place Hillary Clinton’s campaign ties Obama to Farrakhan, Ayers and Wright and she is eager to express her commitment to bomb and obliterate Iran. As she plays on fear and with international security issues, she is trying to out -McCain McCain

The strength of the counter-revolution can be challenged if we recognize that our fears and our insecurity (economic and international) can only be reduced if we recognize that workers and all American voters are human beings searching for security and they/we will either go backwards or forwards.

For them to go forward, we need to engage honestly with them and explain that we have reached the end of the epoch when increasing productivity and economic growth can be the goal of any society, any nation.

At the same time, because of the information revolution, there is now a potential for a new dream and a new quality of life that is defined by the principles and values that pervaded the vision and sermons of MLK.

• We need a radical revolution in values;
• We need to struggle against the triplets of racism, militarism and materialism.
• We need to recognize that there will not be any jobs unless we create a new local economy based upon new principles of sustainability.

There will not be any reduction in the global threat from terrorists until we join the community of nations and become global citizens.

As Americans,
our communities can be the basis of Love rather than Hate, and
our communities can be communities of Inclusion rather than Exclusion. We can create a new American Dream that involves new kinds of Health care, New kinds of Education, Work, food security and personal security - IF we recognize that we have reached the end of the old economic dream and therefore can and must create a new dream that provides security and dignity for all. But we must be willing to imagine this dream and then work for it and make it happen.

If, instead, we act like victims, blaming others and refusing to become the makers of change and history. we will be left behind, whining, complaining and ultimately at the mercy of demagogues.

Those Americans with various measures of privilege who also claim to care about racism, sexism, classism, and materialism DO have the responsibility to explore/reject unearned privilege, identify the ways in which our privilege draws on exploitation of others and in the process inherently dehumanizes us, etc.

We can longer separate the transformation of our values from the transformation of our institutions as we become global citizens and local citizens in our commitment to the next American Revolution.

Obama is giving us the opportunity to move the conversation forward on Race, Class and National Security

It is up to us to engage in this conversation, learn to listen and leave behind the categories, the labels and the solutions from another era in our nation’s history. In the 1930s Germany continued to live in the past and ended up with Hitler. In 2008 we can go forwards or we can go backwards. The future is in our hands.

The 10th annual Allied Media Conference, entitled Evolution Beyond Survival: Media Strategies for the Next Ten Years, will be held in Detroit from June 20-22. If you don’t know about this conference, and you are interested in Detroit, movement building and/or your role in the future of media, it’s time to do your research.

Register now to attend the AMC 2008.

By: Evan Major

Everyone knows Hamtramck is a contemporary melting pot. Some ingredients mingle in the bowels of the pot to form an exquisite and passionate flavor never before tasted. Some rise to the top as the proverbial cream, allowing the best elements of the cacophony to influence their ascendance. Yet some, despite the chef’s good intentions, remain an antagonistic pairing, thwarting each other’s potential to revel in the greatness of their surroundings.

Nowhere is the melting pot metaphor more evident than Hamtramck High School. At the emotional and physical center of the city lies the place where we have put faith in the assemblance of our community’s most precious ingredients, our young people. Affectionately known as Ham High, and truly unique in its composition, this school is frequently cast in the same lot of many of its brother and sister districts deemed failing to meet Annual Yearly Progress (AYP), per the requisites of the flawed No Child Left Behind legislation. Flawed as it may be, the accountability for an equally apparent and dually unmet criterion does not simply fall on the shoulders of Bush’s cronies, but on us and our greater community.

We have such high expectations for young people to enter the rapidly changing world with a positive trajectory, though we continue to rely on antiquated ideas of what it means to be educated. “We keep sticking to the formula of 30 kids in a room with a chalkboard and a teacher,” an anonymous teacher at the high school recently commented to me. The world they are presented with inside the confines of school isn’t always in stark contrast to the realities outside the doors of their supposed educational benefactors, but it definitely lacks a personal touch to say the least.

District budget woes can contribute to hurried policy decisions, such as the school board vote to open up enrollment at the High School. Increasing inter-racial violence on the street and in the hallways seems an obvious example of resulting disharmony, where perceived differences are more evident than commonalities. One glimpse across the mosaic that is the student body, and most onlookers are left in disbelief. Bengali, Polish, African-American, Yemeni, Bosnian, Albanian, Pakistani, Russian, and on it goes. Many beautiful relationships and perspectives are born out of this cultural collision. The students of Hamtramck High, and by extension their parents, have the ingredients for a 21st Century model of cultural inter-dependence, yet the challenge lies in creating more legitimate spaces for them to meet each other as students, without the perceived implications of residency status, skin color, gender, or religion.

We concede that tougher standards and higher accountability are somehow part and parcel to standardizing academic success, and that this in fact is a laudable goal to begin with. We accept a system that discourages human emotion and connection, and produces passionate young people unsure of where to direct their love, fear, rage, or compassion. This, despite the dedicated professionals who work there, is endemic not just of Ham High, but of a greater delusion we have towards finding the answers to the state of American education at large.

The poet Gwendolyn Brooks wrote, “I shall create. If not a note, a hole. If not an overture, a desecration.” If we fail to incorporate essential elements of community and identity into the education process, then we aren’t giving them the tools to make real and life sustaining connections when they leave, and so diminishing the chances for overtures, as Brooks might say.

The construction of companies and communities alike are in need of creative young minds to populate their growing ranks, yet we fight the tide, somehow expecting the industrial high school model to not only meet these needs, but to remedy the greater ills of an aging society growing ever more dependent on the emerging leaders. Though they exist. Their talent is real and palpable. So why is it so hard for us to shift the way we think about education to deal with these realities? When will we embrace an alternative model that combines academic achievement with experiential learning and human development? And when will policy makers at large see the inherent inequalities in the school funding structure that expects some communities to do more with less?

These questions, and more, remind me it is time to stir the pot.

by Grace Lee Boggs

[This article first appeared in the Michigan Citizen, Jan. 20-26, 2008. Then it was published on Saturday, April 5, 2008 by YES! Magazine and appeared on commondreams.org]

The new energies being unleashed by Barack Obama hold great promise. In his person and prose Obama embodies the achievements of the movements of the 20th century and the hope that we can become the change we want to see in the 21st century.

To build the movement for change will not be easy. The challenges we face demand profound changes not only in our institutions but in ourselves. To become part of the solution, we must recognize that we are a large part of the problem.

That means we can’t leave it all to Obama. Instead of being followers of a charismatic leader, we must be the leaders we’ve been looking for. This is the best way to make Obama less vulnerable to corporate funders and lobbyists. It is also the best way to protect him from the assassins who gunned down so many charismatic leaders in the 1960s.

We don’t have to start from scratch. As we commemorate the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination this year, we can look to the vision that he was creating at the height of his awareness before he was taken from us. In the last three years of his life Dr. King recognized that “the war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit. We are on the wrong side of a world revolution because we refuse to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment.”

“We have come to value things more than people. Our technological development has outrun our spiritual development. We have lost our sense of community, of interconnection and participation.”

In order to get on the right side of that revolution, he said, we must undergo a radical revolution of values against the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism.

“A true revolution of values will look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth…It will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: ‘This is not just.’ The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach and nothing to learn is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: “This way of settling differences is not just.’ A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

The urban rebellions had also made King acutely aware of the needs of young people. “This generation,” he said, “is engaged in a cold war with the earlier generation. It is not the normal hostility of the young groping for independence. It has a new quality of bitter antagonism and confused anger which suggests basic values are being contested.” “The source of this alienation is that our society has made material growth and technological advance an end in itself, robbing people of participation.”

To overcome this alienation we need to change our priorities. Instead of pursuing economic productivity, we need to expand our uniquely human powers, especially our capacity for the Love that is ready to go to any length to restore community.

This Love, King insisted, is not some sentimental weakness. “We can learn its practical meaning from the young people who joined the civil rights movement,… putting on overalls to work in the isolated rural South because they felt the need for more direct ways of learning that would strengthen both society and themselves.”

What we need now “in our dying cities,” King said, are ways to provide young people with similar opportunities to engage in self-transforming and structure-transforming direct action. King was assassinated before he could discover and implement ways to nurture this two-sided transformation. Forty years later, that is the mission of a new generation.

We have to create the momentum for these changes at the grassroots level. Instead of being seduced by Walmart’s low prices, refusing to acknowledge that these bargains exist because multinational corporations outsource U.S. jobs to Chinese sweatshops, we need to create local sustainable economies that not only reduce carbon emissions but provide more opportunities for our young people to be of use. Instead of viewing success in terms of more consumer goods, we need to devise ways to live more simply and cooperatively, thereby not only making it possible for others to simply live but also discovering positive and even joyful ways to grapple with our own increasing economic hardships.

Because Detroit has been so devastated by deindustrialization, we have embarked on a five year Detroit City of Hope campaign. Out of necessity we are becoming the kind of leadership by example which is now needed.

Obama can become a great President only if we become a great people. We must grow together.

Grace Boggs has been an activist for more than 60 years and is the author of the autobiography Living for Change. She will celebrate her 93rd birthday in June. This article first appeared in the Michigan Citizen, Jan. 20-26, 2008, and was reproduced by YES! Magazine with the kind permission of the author.

By Matt Birkhold

[giantmag.com originally featured this article on March 27, 2008]

My father has been a “Jesse Jackson is a pain in the ass” Republican since at least the Carter years. I was shocked to hear that he plans on voting for Barack Obama.

Up until very recently I’ve felt like I pretty much had my people figured out. Throughout college and graduate school, my father and I argued endlessly about the ethics of racial equality. He never supported race-based preferences because he believed they unfairly privileged black people. My father is not unique. His position is deeply rooted in a common belief among white men that they have been victimized by black gains over the last fifty years.

We see black folks as mere things that take jobs from us and threaten our chances of getting into the best schools. As a result, white communities resent Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and others who resist racism. For that reason, among others, I believed that white people would never vote for Barack Obama. My father changed that.

About six weeks ago, my father told me that he liked Obama. “I don’t know much about his politics, and I don’t give a damn,” he said. “All I know is that Obama’s different from these damn zealots who have been in office for the last sixteen years and who won’t support you if, on a checklist of forty-seven items, you disagree on two.”

Wow, I thought, white people are so tired of the direction the country is headed in that they’re willing to support a black man. How the hell did that happen? Then I realized, the country’s decline was too simple an explanation.

White people, including my father, are supporting Obama because he has completely detached himself from the Civil Rights establishment. Activists like Jesse and Al represent what white people believe we’ve lost. While Civil Rights leaders attack us, Obama empathizes with us.

Barack Obama’s speech in Philadelphia opened the door to a new racial politics for white people. Obama clearly and courageously confronted white racism when he said that the real culprits behind white job losses were US corporate culture and Washington lobbyists–not black people.

When he said, “to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns–this too widens the racial divide,” he showed white people he understands us, and more importantly, that he cares. In a world where white people commonly think that any mention of race will get them called racist, a black man who empathizes with whites, yet calls us on our racism, provides white people with the opportunity to change.

Obama did the most important thing an educator can to change minds. He met people where they are, offered a critique of that place, and then gave them a way to move forward. He played to white people’s beloved notion of racial progress when he said that Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s mistake was not that he talked about race, but that he talked about race and the nation as if they were unchanging and static.

He brought us together when he said that white resentment of nonwhites for job competition and growing black resentment of immigrants for the same reason are backward. He moved us forward when he said, “the real problem is not that someone who doesn’t look like you might take your job; it’s that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.”

Obama’s analysis of the problem is virtually the same as that of the Communist Party USA’s in the 1920s–while offering a vastly different solution. If the millions of whites who share my father’s position on race-based preferences also share his despair at the direction the country is heading, Obama’s new approach to race may be what gets him elected. This is not because white people want to talk about race. Rather, Obama’s speech shows that he understands us—and our problems.

Matt Birkhold is a Brooklyn based independent scholar and educator. His work appears regularly in Wiretap and he has also written for The Nation and Mother Jones. He is founder of Political Education Outreach Collective and editor of the forthcoming National Hip Hop Political Convention publication, Elements. He can be reached at birkhold@gmail.com.

By: Timothy A Peoples Jr.

Why do I play when it hurts me so badly to perform?
I imagine this dark room filled with an audience of distinguished gentlemen,
In collard shirts and middle aged wives fantasizing about the color,
Of which I represent while moving my fingers across keys,
Designing a brilliant melody, her mind sets on internal secretion,
Rather than my endowments, and my fluent utterance
In tune I have established, Even So,
I play with the striking desire of wanting to eliminate,
My Audience…

For which the language that I’m speaking is very instrumental,
To the point that it’s foreign to my listeners,
And those who try to understand the language,
Only mock me while being in the audience as a critic,
Guessing that my language would be heard if only,
Spoken by someone more “Culturally Advanced”,
As if I can’t speak it, but is in need of an
Interpreter…
So I play and even when the tune should be sweet,
It’s over powered by anguish of their misconception,
And this Thought of not understanding
Makes me Inferior to them where I am disdained
Still Speaking…

And understanding my thoughts,
And why I hate those who’ve oppressed me,
And encouraged this message for which I’m portraying,
Through a series of episodes of struggle,
But I can never stop these Black n White levers going up n down,
Imagining this world as a tune controlled by,
The little boy who supposedly didn’t understand his existence,
Performing for “The Distinguished Gentlemen”, and their,
“Middle Aged Wives”, asking myself,
“CAN MY PEOPLE HEAR ME”, I’m
Speaking to them subliminally through a,
Language…
That those who are listening but not hearing,
This language that wasn’t designed for them to understand,
That is Foreign to them even STILL,
I am frustrated at “Them” who’ve taught us,
Not to listen to each other when we are communicating,
Instrumentally!
Simply because they fear the message of Transformation,
So they try to understand what I’ve spoke when it’s clear,
That they will never understand the intellect of a musician,
Or the language designed for my people,
Yet still I play after I bow in the mist of wanting,
To be heard by those who are trained not to listen,
MY PEOPLE…

By: Julie Rosier

I am seeking to develop a performance activism project, where a group of people will tell their own stories on stage through a collage performance. This collective storytelling extravaganza will portray under-told personal stories about the intersections of identity, exploring relationships between categories such as class, race, gender, sexuality and the place where each of us is from, with the ultimate intention of spurring grassroots organizing and social change.

The group cycle will begin with a collective writing process, each person delving into past experiences to uncover significant stories from their personal, ancestral and communal pasts. This initial mining process will generate written material, which will eventually serve as the substance from which to form the structure of our performance piece. In addition to generating performance material, the group work will also have a parallel goal of providing a forum for personal introspection and group dialogue, while simultaneously growing the larger socio-cultural-political consciousness of all group members. Eventually the group will find a way to intertwine our stories into a performance piece, layering artistic expression, in the form of dialogue/spoken word, dance/experimental movement, sound textures/music, on top of each other to create a visceral full-body performance experience.

The goal will then be to show the work to the public, in community settings. Our real stories will hopefully have the potential to break down and ultimately transform false descriptions of reality created by mainstream media/hegemonic power structures to support stereotypes and biases that keep oppressed communities caged in the status quo and leads to debilitating victim mentalities. The process will therefore focus on documenting history from the ground up, instead of accepting the lopsided and misleading picture often recorded by historians who are often blinded by their own privilege.

Discovering and seeing one’s own story up on stage can have a tremendous empowering effect and fuel personal leadership development. Through self-confrontation, we begin to see our specific role in creating more expansive notions of humanity and realize that we must lead by example, becoming the change that we want to see. Building this group will be a practice in creating the beloved community. There is something magical that happens between people who are creating together and telling a larger collective story that can generate strong emotional bonds. It might be this the type of empowered community, with its new forms of leadership, that will able to move towards an American Revolution of Values that Martin Luther King called for during the last years of his life.

~~~

Please join in this performing activism conversation by leaving a comment. Specifically be in touch, if you know of similar projects that already exist or live in the Detroit area and are interested in joining such a group. If you know of someone who might be interested, please pass this information along.

Contact Julie directly for more information.
By email: jrosier06@gmail.com
On: facebook or myspace

By: Larry Gabriel

[This article was featured in the MetroTimes, Detroit's free weekly alternative, on 3/26/08. Grace Lee Boggs and Ron Scott, both members of the Detroit City of Hope campaign, take an alternative position on the resolution of the Detroit's mayoral scandal.]

May you live in interesting times. Things are so interesting in Detroit right now I’m wondering if someone with cosmic pull has laid the oft-quoted Chinese curse on Detroit. Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and his former chief of staff Christine Beatty have been indicted on a combined 12 felony counts of conspiracy, misconduct, obstruction and perjury.

County Prosecutor Kym Worthy hinted that more indictments will be coming down for others involved in the whistleblower suits.

It will probably be more than a year before this is settled. In the meantime the city and its inhabitants need to move beyond this crisis. There are a plethora of long-term problems plaguing the city and the region — the economy, the mortgage crisis, crime, bad schools — to name a few. Detroit even came in at the ugly end of a recently released list of the country’s dirtiest cities. Not that it’s earth-shaking news, but the ranking does follow a trend of distinctions embarrassing to the city.

And when all this Kwame crap is over, those other ills will still be there gnawing on our bones. Detroiters, and that includes people who live in the suburbs, will be left eyeing each other suspiciously as usual. Everything we’ve seen from Kilpatrick in the past says he will use every divisive ploy he can in the effort to save himself from going to jail. He’ll pit city against suburb, the administration against the City Council, supporters against haters. There will be factions and power-grabbers. Once it’s all over, our psyches will be bruised and battered, unable to ignore what we’ve just been through.

We’re wounded. The lost promise of one Kwame Kilpatrick, a young man so many of us had so much hope in just a few years ago, will aggravate our long-standing pains. Picking up the pieces will be that much harder than it was before all the ugly revelations.

We need transformation. We need trust. We need to change our discourse, dynamics and destiny. We need truth and reconciliation.

I must admit that I was in the mob with torches and pitchforks ready to descend on Manoogian Mansion. I’m not recanting my last few columns, but a friend who is active in the Detroit City of Hope campaign changed the course of my thinking. He asked me to think about how the Kilpatrick scandal presented opportunities for reconciliation in Detroit. City of Hope endorsers, community organizations that share the vision of hope, look at the bigger picture of community healing rather than just throwing the rascal out.

“No matter which way the legal process goes, that is a process that has to happen. It’s too bad that couldn’t have happened a lot earlier,” says activist Ron Scott, spokesperson for the Detroit Coalition Against Police Brutality and producer for the public access television program For My People. “You have to start in on a community level and have the support of a number of disparate factions. People who have worked with the mayor need to go to him and various factions. It has to be a combination of people who come together and have an honest dialogue about what they want their community to be. If it doesn’t transform the community then it misses its mark.”

The concept is rooted in the truth and reconciliation process that Bishop Desmond Tutu led in South Africa after the fall of apartheid. Also used in Rwanda and other countries, it involves bringing together the perpetrator and the perpetrated upon outside of the justice system to speak about the effect wrongdoing had on each of them. It’s about understanding what happened, why it happened and the thoughts of those involved in order to come to terms with past events.

That process was repeated from 2004 to 2006 when the Greensboro (N.C.) Truth and Reconciliation Commission held hearings surrounding events on Nov. 3, 1979, when five demonstrators were killed by Ku Klux Klan members as they prepared for an anti-Klan rally. The process impressed Grace Lee Boggs, an author and progressive activist who runs the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center, to Nurture Community Leadership from her east side Detroit home.

“I began to see the potential for truth and reconciliation in the city, creating a means by which we go beyond punitive justice,” says Boggs. “If Kilpatrick could see himself going through the truth and reconciliation process, it would allow him to examine himself. It goes beyond the leadership he thinks he has brought to the city. As long as he does not examine the arrogance which allowed him to behave the way he did, he cannot become the leader he wants to be. He could help a generation of blacks swept up in the opposing sides. He could help Detroit’s development enormously. It would unite people in the city.”

It’s about restorative justice, not punishment. That’s a stretch to go beyond laying the hammer on someone who you believe has done some wrong. What it really does is take a giant step in social evolution. Truth and reconciliation does not throw away people who have erred, but looks for ways to bring them back into the community and find the good in them that they can contribute. Much of the effort focuses on juvenile offenders, but proponents see needs around the Kilpatrick situation.

“Kwame needs to be brought before the public and talk about what he has done to aggrieve others,” says Scott, although there has been no official activity in that direction. “There has been no coming together around the issue. It’s been factionalized. We try to desensationalize and find a place where people can come together. Kwame is a very interesting person. Everything about anyone is not all bad. There are situations where Kwame has really done some things that have reached out in a number of unique ways, like when he started recruiting African-American males to work with young men. That was significant and very unique.”

The entire situation is significant and unique. Why not create a unique response to it? Restorative justice would do us all well — if not now, when the trial is over. It would necessitate discussions among members of community groups, churches and even between the city and suburbs. One part of this has already brought us together. It’s hard to find someone who didn’t tune in to hear Worthy’s press conference to announce the indictments. We need to do something positive with all that focus.

It would be amazing if this negative situation were the catalyst that led to a dialogue that transformed southeast Michigan. Sure, it sounds a little pie in the sky, but we can always have hope.

Talk about transformation: How about Barack Obama’s speech last week in response to his membership in the church led by the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., whose controversial statements about America and race raised a firestorm in Obama’s primary campaign. Rather than merely denounce the minister, as is usual in political backside covering, Obama rose above it all. He discussed American racial politics with understanding and sympathy for all sides. His attempt to uplift the discussion of race was a breath of fresh air. Obama called on us to transform our way of thinking. Just like the situation in Detroit, it’s up to us to rise up and make a difference.

Larry Gabriel is a writer, musician and former editor of Metro Times. Send comments to letters@metrotimes.com.

This month Oprah’s Magazine highlighted the burgeoning urban agricultural movement here in Detroit. O Magazine reported on the innovative educational practices of Catherine Ferguson High School, a school for teenage mothers, which also is the site of a “most unlikely and inspiring sight….an urban farm that is almost breathtaking in its scope.”

Read the full Emerald City article, as it appeared in the April 2008 issue of O Magazine.