It appears that a big reason that this photo of an Elizabeth Warren for Senate volunteer meetup in Framingham, Massachusetts, is going viral is that the crowd is so large -- unusually large for any campaign thirteen months before the election, and in a town that's not close enough to Boston and Cambridge to draw naturally on that large urban concentration of people
But the reason it excites me is the appearance of the crowd.
College students and recent graduates are citizens. People with dreadlocks are citizens. Drum-circle participants are citizens. Everyone's vote is equal. We all know that -- but we also know that, in reality, people are pigeonholed and stereotyped by demography. The Occupy protesters don't all fit into the categories I've listed by any means, but it's easy for casual observers to see video and news photos of their gatherings and think that they do. That hasn't caused much of the country to dismiss the movement -- I think an awful lot of people are thinking, "Those hippies are saying what I'm thinking" -- but it does open the movement up to charges that it's unrepresentative of America as a whole. And some people will come to that conclusion.
I don't think those people will look at the photo above and say the same thing.
I'm just looking at the woman dead center, in pink. If you got into the typical Fox viewer's brain and could pinpoint that viewer's stereotypical image of an Occupy protester, and then could determine what kind of person would be 180 degrees different from that stereotyped Occupy protester, I think it would be the woman in pink. And there she is, coming out to volunteer for a candidate whose positions are very much in sync with Occupy's.
If there could be crowds like this turning out to back progressive causes and truly progressive candidates nationwide, this country would finally be on the road to sanity. So I love this photo.
Yesterday I was taking a bus down Fifth Avenue. And it was slow in coming, the bus stop becoming crowded. One young woman says to a senior woman "I'll bet it's due to that protest." The senior woman answers "The should just get jobs." I wasn't able to butt into the conversation but I wanted to say "What fucking jobs would those be... haven't you heard or read that the recession has killed hiring of older workers and workers just getting of college? That there are least 9 million fewer jobs in absolute terms than a few years ago and we have at least 14 million unemployed."
ReplyDeleteEither of those woman know or could be unemployed or have someone in their families who can't get a job.
Get a job, indeed.
(But the bus was boarding and they split apart. Yes, I will butt into strangers conversations on buses, while waiting for one, whatever.)
And glad to be back!
ReplyDeletePurplegirl,
YOU GO - GIRL!
And yes, a lot of the people in this photo could easily have been snapshot of a collection of Tea Party folks.
Only, with brains, and no racist or misspelled signs.
Let's hope this confuses the living shit out of those brain-dead shitheads.
For all practical purposes Boston Metro-West is a city in its own right -- it just doesn't have a city government.
ReplyDeleteThis is a very important place to do well -- very swingy.