Trains

While pondering what to write about in my first post for class, I kept coming back to the topic of trains. Everything we discussed about trains fascinated me. I think part of this fascination comes from growing up hearing my grandfather's stories about riding the rails. His favorite story to tell was about being a teenager and leaving Idaho to join his brother in California to go work in the fields. He left Idaho with 3 dimes to his name. The first dime had the misfortune of falling in a crack in a floorboard of the car he was riding in, he spent the remainder of his trip trying to pry out the dime, but never did succeed. I'm not sure what happened to the other two dimeys, but I always remember thinking how tough times must have been and how far we've come.




I also think part of my fascination with trains comes from living near some of the longest train tressels in North America. Driving by them always amazed me because of the amount of time and energy that had to go into building these.

Finally, I spent a lot of time outside of class thinking about what was said about how train transportation was more cost effective. So, I did a little bit of looking on the internet and found it is also now more eco-friendly than any other form of travel and that every freight car can hold approximately three semi loads of cargo. The most informative article I found can be found at: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=7&sqi=2&ved=0CHoQFjAG&url=http%3A%2F%2Fciteseerx.ist.psu.edu%2Fviewdoc%2Fdownload%3Bjsessionid%3D697F3108EFF1201D9E6CBF5DF768C7BA%3Fdoi%3D10.1.1.145.906%26rep%3Drep1%26type%3Dpdf&rct=j&q=cost%20of%20railroad%20transportation&ei=yyzCTYLBG6rbiAKO1qCeAw&usg=AFQjCNESYDae6ZsA0okbk6Ib-iKSHM4JkA&cad=rja

I think it would be interesting to learn and study more about the culture of those who hopped on trains and learn more about how using trains more could be improve our lives today.

Bum on the Rod

Hearing Duncan talk about riding the trains around America reminded me of one of the tracks I really like from Utah/Ani Difranco's album "The Past Didn't Go Anyway", the track Bum on the Rod. I never really understood what it was talking about until our discussion. Th song also talks about the changes that have taken place, how the people who are riding the tracks aren't like they used to be.

Perpetual Issue or Managable Memory?

In our first reading in "It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own" by Richard White he states the following concerning migrant laborers during the turn of the twentieth century (and presumably before the 20th century), "The IWW attracted the fierce loyalty of the migratory workers of the West who were in many ways the backbone of the western extractive economy...many were European immigrants...Between jobs, migratory workers were the men who rode the rails looking for work...these men were an alienated and potentially revolutionary segment of the western working class" (White 294).
What interests me in the following passage is that most of the migrants during the twentieth century that were at an economical disadvantage to the skilled-laborers were European--presently, the European migrants have been assimilated. Today the situation is the same for Mexican/Hispanic migrant laborers. They are frequently looking for work. Hungry. Leave their family just to simply make a living. Sacrificing their life for their life; making their bodies subject to unrelenting wrath of unskilled labor. How long will it take for Mexican Immigrants to be assimilated as the Europeans were during the beginning of the twentieth century? What bills have recently been passed? The Arizona Immigration bill (passed in April 2010), according to New York Times journalist Randal C. Archibold, "...would make the failure to carry immigration documents a crime and give the police broad power to detain anyone suspected of being in the country illegally...Opponents have called it an open invitation for harassment and discrimination against Hispanics regardless of their citizenship status" ("Arizona Enacts Stringent Law on Immigration"; link: http://http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/24/us/politics/24immig.html).
The first question to put to our conscience is, "Are we okay with this?" The straight conscience will then answer back robustly retorting, "No, this is absolutely wrong to enact." Well then, we put to the conscience, "Is this just a question of relativity--that it is alright for Arizonians to feel this way and we can feel against it, but nobody is right or wrong?" Obviously this is a logical error in reasoning. Leaving the present discourse, I think this is a civil injustice. We cannot go up to every legal American and ask them if they have their legal residency papers to live in the United States. So why can police go up to any Hispanic and ask them for their papers--many of which have been assimilated and are actual legal citizens already? We cannot go around supposing every Hispanic to be an illegal immigrant. Imagine being a legal Hispanic and a police officer came up to you and your family on the way to dinner and made sure you have your legal residency papers? Not only is the person embarrassed because his family is sitting in the background while he shuffles through his wallet to no avail, he is also mainly targeted for his ethic origins. Cannot we rely on employers to make sure that they hire legal workers or atleast that they hire illegal workers only seasonally as the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 proposed? This seems to avert the problem of discrimination against the hispanics that the Arizona bill faces. Either way the Arizona immigration bill is at best discrimination, and at worst, a blatant example of present racial prejudices, racism.

We can see that migrant labor rights are still a problem presently as they were at the turn of the twentieth century as described in the quote at the beginning of this post. What is also apparent is that if these issues have not yet disappeared as a problem to be dealt with, then that means that Bruce "Utah" Phillips had to deal with these same haughtily heated issues in his own day (1935-2008).

What I became aware of in typing this entry is how these issues are important to us as human beings, citizens of the United States, and undergraduate college students. In the Arizona bill it is apparent that people have not learned from the civil rights movement, most importantly some of the legislators of our country who make these bills. Do human rights have to be contested/conceived outside of race again? Need the same issue of human rights be contested again in the case of immigrants; be perpetual or continuous? Or can we manage/keep our "Long Memory" intact as Bruce Phillips suggested, and know intuitively and logically that immigrants are people deserving of our respect. I think that we are able to keep our memory of these issues exercised, and that means that we must be educated. We are being educated now, but how will you choose to live this education? Bruce Phillips lived his priciples in life, as his son Duncan said. May we all be brave enough to see our educated consciousness bring life to the principles that we learn--bring the truth of what we learn to life in the world. Vote. Attend a Protest. Pay attention to legislators and the things for which they stand. These are ways to keep the "Long Memory" intact. Our acts according to our principles concerning the protest of unjust immigration policy, health care, foreign policy, etc. are objective reminders of the power of one, of all.

We're still dying over segregated bathrooms

At the beginning of class, someone (I think it was Bob) mentioned that kids today find it hard to believe in the intensity of the civil rights movement, where people were killed for using the "white" bathroom.

But it's easy for me to believe. Less than two weeks ago, news hit that Chrissy Lee Polis was beaten for several minutes then lay convulsing on the ground before police showed up. A bystander took video of the incident and posted it on Facebook, claiming the violence was justified because she was anatomically male and tried to enter a women's bathroom in women's clothes. She survived, but other women are murdered for being trans at a bewildering rate; I can't keep up with the headlines.

Very few people believe that gender segregation is an issue: the segregated bathrooms are supposedly keeping us safe and moral. Remember the "unisex bathroom" hysteria over the Equal Rights Amendment?

Sex segregation in homeless shelters and other services, plus forced identification of one's legal sex in other contexts like education and sometimes even bus passes bites into transgendered people's access to these services. This spring in Salt Lake City a woman was humiliated and forced to scrub off her make-up at the DMV Department of Public Safety Driver License Division [Edit 4:09 5/4/2011] because the driver's license she was renewing had an 'M' on it. But those issues are off almost everyone's radar; the invisibility of an ideology often reflects its strength.

My best friend is a working class transgendered woman who lives back east. I am genderqueer, and while I don't face my MTF sisters' daily fear of violence, I do face daily awareness of a society that harshly and almost universally rejects an important part of my experience and imposes an alien identity upon me. We will not be free until we win a violent struggle in a society that currently can't comprehend or empathize with us.

Sometimes I feel guilty for being so emotionally invested in an issue that seems much smaller-scale than, say, the oppression of the working-class, exploitation of poor countries, climate change, or factory-farming. Yet how many more people would transgress gender lines if they weren't patrolled by vigilantes and overseen by psychiatric gatekeepers? How many people suffer from misplaced ideas of masculinity and femininity; how much is lost when "boys" are separated from "girls"--and by someone else's choice?

But all of that aside, it's a fight I can't choose not to fight, for all I might rather pick another battle.

(Is this too off-topic? I prepared another post about how my father helped bust a union as a warehouse manager who worked directly with the laborers who were trying to unionize; he'd listen to "Which Side Are You On?" every day as he drove into work. The post wasn't working out, though, so I went with this instead.)

Utah Phillips is a funny storyteller : )

I signed up for this class because I thought I would be awesome and was excited to learn more about folk music, hobo culture, and activism. I really had no idea who Utah Phillips is, or at least I thought I didn't, until I was talking on the phone with my dad after class today. I told him about my May term classes and mentioned Utah's name, and my dad says, "he was that storyteller right?" My dad is from upstate New York and apparently he got some of his best stories he told to my sister and I, from none other than Utah. One of my favorites was the hilarious "Moose Turd Pie," and I thought I would share with y'all how I first got acquainted with him.

I know Mr. Phillips is more than just a storyteller, and I am even more excited to hear about his life.

-Clara Jane

Thank you for inviting me into your class room. What a great time, it was nice to meet everyone and share stories with you all. I am thinking, It seems to me that when I do this sort of thing with small groups of people that may or may not who my father was, that I need to figure out a way to make the whole experience more of an interactive affair. What do you think? Do any of you have any suggestions? Normally I sit on a stage with an audience that generally knew my father and do what I do. The class room environment is a whole new ball game that I'm eager to refine. So please feel free to post your thoughts and suggestions.

Duncan

The Women's Movement

So, we (Bob, Duncan, Dave and I) were talking after class about Utah's comments to Amy Goodman about the women's movement being the most important development of the 20th century (or something like that). I wondered what you all made of that. Do you agree?

Jeff