Dear Progressive Reader,
Last night we launched this year’s virtual version of our annual Fighting Bob Fest. It featured many familiar voices, but, like this year’s political conventions, it had a very different feel than it might have had with a large assembled crowd. We thank everyone who participated in this year’s Fighting Bob Fest, and especially all of the musicians (Joan Baez, Jake Blount, The Cactus Blossoms, Meghan Dudle, Si Kahn, and Daniel Kenneth Libby) who added a great deal to the celebration of our founder and The Progressive magazine. If you missed the live streamed event on Facebook last night, it lives on as an archive on YouTube at http://tiny.cc/FightingBob2020. Please enjoy and share with your friends and colleagues.
September 11 has many meanings in different places. The people of Chile will forever remember that day as the start of a coup and a dictatorship that changed their lives forever. Here in the United States, for the past nineteen years, it is remembered as the date of a catastrophic attack on U.S. soil in which many perished, and countless frontline, essential workers stepped up to aid the trapped and injured. As EMT Mariah Clark writes this week, those essential workers, and countless others like them, continue to risk their lives everyday during the current pandemic. “Emergency personnel and health-care workers should be truly supported. In protecting frontline workers, we help protect everyone. ‘Essential’ does not mean expendable,” she writes. “Those we hail as heroes should have protections in place to prevent them from becoming names on another memorial.”
“All governments lie,” said renowned investigative journalist I.F. Stone. Donald Trump has certainly brought that to new heights. Reese Erlich looks this week at how Trump plays both sides against the middle in his claims to “end wars” while at the same time increasing them. Mark Fiore illustrates this further with his take on Trump’s newly revealed attitude toward those serving in the military. And former NPR reporter Daniel Zwerdling writes from the Canadian side of the border about Trump’s lie at the Republican Convention, when he claimed, “America is the greatest and most exceptional nation in the history of the world.” Exceptionalism in terms of the highest number of coronavirus cases is probably not a goal the United States should be proud of achieving.
Finally, this past week, the world lost the voice of radical anthropologist David Graeber, who died at the age of 59 while traveling in Venice. Graeber is known to many for his activism around the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations of 2011. His long obituary in The New York Times highlights his contributions to transformative movements: “No, I didn’t personally come up with the slogan ‘We are the 99 percent,’ ” he said on his website. “I did first suggest that we call ourselves the 99 percent. Then two Spanish indignados and a Greek anarchist added the ‘we’ and later a food-not-bombs veteran put the ‘are’ between them. And they say you can’t create something worthwhile by committee!”
This coming Thursday marks the ninth anniversary of the beginning of Occupy Wall Street. Writing in The Progressive‘s February 2012 edition, Arun Gupta and Michelle Fawcett reported, “Over two months this fall, we visited nearly thirty occupations in twenty states and discovered a movement of profound passion, diversity, and determination. . . . Their stories and viewpoints are wildly divergent, but they are drawn to the protests for similar reasons: The Occupy movement is, at heart, about democracy, empowerment, and fairness.” And, as college student and OWS participant Breanna Lembitz remembered in the same issue of the magazine, “My fellow occupiers have all had a taste of freedom, a taste of respect, and we have seen what can still be accomplished by such a small group of people. We held the attention of the world for months, and we will continue to educate and mobilize people, and the people themselves will continue to build communities. We have a power that refuses to quit.”
Keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.
Sincerely,
Norman Stockwell
Publisher
P.S – our new 2021 Hidden History of the United States calendar is now available for purchase through our website. They make great gifts and hang well on walls and refrigerators.
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