Rally

Tomorrow I’ll rally with other school employees, families, and concerned community members about safe school re-openings.

Florida is a Covid hotspot. Among many in the U.S. right now. We currently have the 2nd most cases with only California having more. Yet our Governor and Commissioner of Education say schools must be opened five days a week.

The DMV is still working remotely. Our School Board meetings are still being held remotely.

A whole lot of other businesses are open now, and some ask why are teachers so special? Shouldn’t they have to go back to work too?

My reply? We aren’t special. We’re part of the working class too. And we’re sorry we didn’t rally with you when your boss made you go back to unsafe working conditions. Because the reality is, aside from workers whose jobs directly contribute to human survival, no one should be working.

But what about rent? Mortgage payments? Groceries cost money, don’t you know?

Oh, I know. And I know that we live in the 7th richest country in the world, with a per capita GDP of $64,906. Considering we spend as much on the military as 10 other countries, couldn’t we shave a little off of that and use it for keeping folks healthy? Couldn’t we use some of it to make sure folks in our country have their basic needs met with affordable housing, universal healthcare, excellent free public education, healthy food? Couldn’t we use some of it to repay Black and Indigenous people via reparations considering we stole their land, lives, and labor to build the United States?

But maybe you think we shouldn’t touch the military budget. Perhaps you think having that big military is what keeps us safe from other countries. You’d be wrong, but maybe you think that.

How about we shift our focus to billionaires instead. There are 630 billionaires in the United States. Billionaires. Buh – billionaires, with a ‘b.’ That’s having 630 people having at least $1,000,000,000. This means those people have a total of at least $630,000,000,000.

To be clear, I make around $50,000. One billion dollars is 20,000 times that.

And I don’t think it’s happened yet, but Elon Musk may become the world’s first trillionaire. That’s $1,000,000,000,000. That’s 20,000,000 times what I make in a year.

The fun thing is these folks pay a tax rate just a bit more than what I pay. My average tax rate is ~16%. In 2018, the top 400 billionaires paid around 23%. Maybe those other 230 paid more. Or maybe we’ve added 230 since 2018? I’ll have to do more digging.

Couldn’t we tax those folks more so the rest of us could have nice things too? Because, let’s face it you can’t spend a billion or trillion dollars. Those folks are dragons laying on their hoard of wealth. But what they are truly withholding isn’t just pretty trinkets. It’s life or death to many, even when a pandemic isn’t going on. But especially since one is.

They want us to keep working so they can keep making more, and more, and more, and more, and more money.

And there are a lot of systems in place to help them realize that goal.

They don’t care if we work long hours in harsh conditions. They don’t care of folks are going hungry. They don’t care that black folks are killed by the police. They don’t care there are kids in cages They don’t care if a few folks die, as long as the capitalist machine keeps moving and making the folks at the top more money.

So what can we do? We can get together. We can organize. We can stand up together and demand a world that serves the many instead of the few.

Tomorrow I will rally with other school employees, families, and concerned community members about safe school reopenings.

We will be one group standing up to oppression in one form. We will be one group among many others across the nation standing up to oppression. Some focus on education. Some focus on #BlackLivesMatter. Some focus on immigration. Some focus on LGBTQ rights. Some focus on labor and working conditions. But our collective actions and voices ringing out across the nation echo a common them: We are powerful together. We will work to stop oppression in all of its forms.

The only question is will you join us? And if you won’t, what are values do you align with?