Besides lopping off hundreds of millions of dollars in school funding, handicapping schools across the state, also included provisions to punish the teachers who had protested against said cuts. If the range of punishable offenses in the new immigration law were not enough to convince you that the White power structure of AZ intends to punish those who challenge it, note that at the same time as the immigration bill, the AZ legislature has also passed a law banning Ethnic Studies as not American enough.
Once again the AZ GOP has decided there is not time enough to make life better for its residents, but there is time enough to restrict their freedoms and frighten their children; that there is not money enough for schools and traditional forms of public safety, but there is enough money to marshal all law enforcement throughout the state to investigate a person because his shoes might look foreign. In their public speech and even in the lines of SB 1070 itself, every sentence from those guys is built to be an affront. Jeez. If they are going to argue from that kind of a hostile disrespecting position I say, no kowtowing to that crap. That is the same kind of Bush-league attitude that always gets this country in trouble.
But there is hope. You know in the Tea Party, demographics suggest that about a third of those who participated were newly politically active for the first time in their lives. Which, paradoxically is a good thing for the left; because the more the novices learn about the difference between the reality of America and O'Reilly/Hannity/Beck's twist of it, the sooner they will fall away and scorn the whole bogus enterprise as a boondoggle and then, if the hardcore Tea Partiers haven't already killed us all, the left will gain, when the right finally earn their inevitable backlash.
Like i say, if we live long enough. Certainly hope for that change led many to the capitol that day. Judging from the spontaneous crowds of more than 20,000 who also showed up in Phoenix and joined the million or more around the country who marched that day, it seems i am not alone.
*
V: The First-Timers
That May Day morning, as the crowds began to gather at the state capitol to protest SB1070, the crying woman stood off to one side, some distance from the main rally. Though i had come for the bombast and high theater of speakers and posers who typically standout at such an event, the crying woman caught my attention early on. I had seen her there sobbing for quite a while before going over to check on her.
She laid her head against a capitol courtyard palm tree, hiding herself in its noontime shadow as she sobbed. She asked me not to take her name. She said, "I'm better off over here. I don't need to be around the others. It gets me too upset. This whole thing is very emotional for me," she waved at the air in her face to try and stop her tears. "All the hatefulness, all those sheep following along," she waved her hand off towards the city of Phoenix somewhere.
"Like they needed another reason to hate us. All those politicians are doing is serving up hate. They're ruining it and for what? This isn't trying to make the state any better. It's all they know to get votes. They will do anything to get votes. They don't care who gets hurt. They"re supposed to make things better but they"re going backward."
She spoke with one hand across her face and the other hung and/or twitched at her side. At her well-manicured fingertips stood her poster. Though many people circulated the ready-made factory printed posters of Phoenix activists Puente!, or the California-based "Mexica Movement," the May Day March was telling as to the wide assortment of handmade signs created by people who had obviously never protested before. In fact, based on the sheer number of original signs, i would guess more than half of the protesters there that morning were heart-felt novices.
Much like the crying woman and the sign she had made for that day. It was obvious that when she was younger, she was the kind of student who earned extra credit on their class reports because of their sincere and elaborate posters. As meticulous as her polished nails, her heavily decorated foam backed poster board had hand shaded printed text and enlarged color- copies of family photos of generations of clearly Hispanic soldiers --her grandfather, her father, and her brother, she explained, who gave their lives for a country that now attacked her. She was not young and a couple of the pics were older still, men in uniform, frozen forever with their young earnestness. There were also pics of period era military campaign pins, slogans men died by: a red-white-and-blue "Land of the Free," a cross-stitched sampler, "I Serve My Country," and a more recent star and stripe bordered, "United We Stand."
"We fought for this." She wiped at her face. "They died for this, for this? The way they treat us, pressing for hate just to get vote. They're going backward."
*
Sergio the marble-mason had a hard hat to die for. Red, White and Blue to the bone, Sergio's scuffed but bizarrely grime-free shiny white hard plastic hardhat was festooned with US flags, along with his name, "Sergio" in vinyl letters and a couple of judiciously placed Mexican banderas as well. He was dressed in a hyper-neat and ironed near-parody of a construction worker's day labor clothes, so clean it was more like a costume: long sleeve white shirt, loose dark pants, and polished but battered work boots.
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