Editor’s note: This commentary is by Jules Rabin, who came to Vermont in 1968 to teach at Goddard College and 10 years later shifted to baking bread in a wood-fired oven. He lives in Plainfield.
Today I marched – ambled, really — happily and socially with a great cohort of adults, behind a thousand school kids from Montpelier and elsewhere around the state, who, with a wink from the school authorities at their unauthorized exit from the classroom on an actual school day, were protesting on the public street and under a clear autumn sky the growing danger of being riddled and brought down by the effects of the climate changes that are right now seizing control of all life on the planet, and in an already alarming number of places, decimating it.
It seems to me that they — the kids — have between a glimmering and a full-blown understanding of the idea that their lives are in process of being irremediably curtailed — cut short and cut off — by the industrial age’s intense carbonization of the earth’s atmosphere: two centuries of “what the hell” and “let-‘er-rip;” tearing into and burning up great parts of the earth’s outer skin. Literally as though there was to be, yes, no tomorrow.
Biting hard and for too long … shredding … the teats of the Mother Earth that sustains us all.
The demonstration today was for some kids their first experience of taking to the streets.
Of grandfather and great-grandfather age myself, I’d like to describe my first demonstration, 85 years ago, that I think has had a lifelong effect on me.
This was in the early 1930s, when the case of the Scottsboro Boys was vividly on the nation’s mind. They were nine black boys and almost-men, who were arrested on a framed-up charge of raping/molesting a white girl as they rode the freight trains of that impoverished time, where everywhere turned out to be just another nowhere, no matter where you went. Up from the North (some little parts of it, anyhow) there rose a cry, “The Scottsboro Boys shall not die!” And that cry became a clamor, and it worked. The Scottsboro Boys were neither executed nor lynched, though they didn’t escape a succession of judicial hells.
Now transfer that scene to Angelo Herndon, a very young black labor organizer of those same years, who risked his life by working at that trade, labor organizing, in the Deep South, in the early 1930s. Brave man! He was nabbed for that subversive action, of organizing among his fellow blacks, and mauled, too, by the Southern justice of the day.
I was 8 or 9 years old when my Uncle Harry, who was Red as a rose and neither bright nor deep, asked my mother’s permission to take me to a demonstration in support of Herndon, along old Tremont Street in a fringe of downtown Boston. My memory of the demonstration, the first in my life, is simple and stark. We numbered about 40 people: men, and me the only child. It was a gray, chill day, and every man present wore a sober fedora hat and a sober dark overcoat that reached below the knees. The day was overcast, and marching on cobblestones, as my memory tells me we did, we presented a picture of old-time Depression somberness, stark and isolated as we were on the cobbled streets. A scene and subject suited to a Masereel woodcut of the era.
And we cried out at intervals, as we plodded along the street, a phrase, an invocation that rattles still in my memory, 85 years later: “Angelo Herndon shall not die! Angelo Herndon shall not die!”
Today’s march against our government’s inertia regarding the lethal effects of global warming was by contrast with that demonstration of 1932 or ’33 a joyous experience. How good we felt about what we were doing, under a fresh sun and blue sky in the clear good city of Montpelier! We were buoyed up and elevated by the sheer perfection of the day, and our numbers, and the absolute rightness of our cause, certified massively and direly by the best science of the day.
Reckoning back, I think that “Saving Angelo Herndon” on that long-ago day of my own boyhood started me off on my habit of occasional public protest.
Free speech in America? If you don’t own a press or can’t write a book, say your say, I say, in the public street. Samuel Adams, with winter snot dripping from his nose, as I imagine him, did that in the months before the American Revolution, buttonholing his fellow Bostonians, delivering himself of facts and opinion.
“Listen! Listen to me for just a minute, will you?” in old Boston accents.
May one or two or five or 10 of the kids who joined today’s confident and brimming protest date today’s event as the beginning of their readiness, when other modes and venues fail, to take their advocacy and protest to the central streets of their towns?
Kids: Addressing your fellow citizens on the public street is as good and true of America as your citizenly right to vote.
Kids: if you don’t own a press, be one: body, feet, and placard together.
Don’t just simmer and grouse. Speak out or suffocate.
Once in a while, anyhow. That could be enough.
