Power Shift

By Mansfield Frazier

In November 2007, more than 6,000 young people from all 50 states gathered at the University of Maryland on the outskirts of Washington, DC for a weekend of training, action and inspiration. The first national youth climate summit was dubbed Power Shift 2007. Former White House “green” adviser Van Jones, founder of Green For All, and other environmental justice leaders captivated a generation with a vision of creating millions of green jobs for our country and restoring economic, social and environmental justice.

Two years later, 12,000 young people from every state and Congressional District in the country descended on Washington, DC for Power Shift 2009. Over 6,000 of them went to Capitol Hill for the largest citizen lobby day in history, and thousands more participated in the Capitol Climate Action, a successful demonstration to shut down the Capitol’s coal-fired power plant.

Power Shift 2011 took place in Washington in mid-April, and was followed up this past weekend in Cleveland, where Midwest Power Shift, which brought young people from nearby states, was held at Cleveland State University (CSU). The organization’s statement of purpose reads in part: “We will use Power Shift 2011 as an opportunity to issue a real challenge to the powers that decide the destiny of our nation. The Millennial Generation will be screaming from the rooftops, wind turbines and solar manufacturing facilities across our country that we demand nothing less than real solutions to our nation’s most pressing challenges.”

I’m proud to have been asked to be one of the keynote speakers at the event. Following is a truncated version of my remarks.

After welcoming them to Cleveland I said, “You young people should be furious at me, at us, at my generation. While humankind has been seriously despoiling the planet since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, in 1962 Rachel Carson, in her groundbreaking book Silent Spring sounded an apocalyptic warning that we by and large elected to ignore… and we did so at our own peril… and at yours.

After her book we could no longer feign ignorance, we could no longer claim we didn’t know what we were doing to the planet… yet to this very day, almost 50 years later we still have not stopped, but instead we’ve come up with new ways to pollute our environment, kill off species, cause global warming… and we do so all in the name of the great god profit, who also goes by the name of ‘Greed.’

Seven years after Silent Spring’s release, the Cuyahoga River, which is one mile from where we are, caught fire. Why? Greed worship. It saved companies money to turn the river into a chemical sewer and environmental nightmare rather than properly disposing of the waste.

In 1978 news broke that schools and homes had been built on a toxic waste site, which became widely known as Love Canal. Why was the material buried instead of being properly disposed of? Loving Greed.

In 1989 the Exxon Valdez struck a reef and untold millions of gallons of crude oil spilled into Prince William Sound. Why, because one of the richest companies on the planet was too cheap to fix the radar equipment on the oil tanker. Greed.

In 2000 The Martin County sludge spill inundated rivers and streams in rural Kentucky. The cause: Greed. Greed on the part of Massey Energy, perhaps one of the worst corporate citizens on the entire planet.

On April 5 of 2010 the Upper Big Branch mine collapsed killing 29 miners. The reason? Unsafe working conditions… attributed to Greed.

It was immediately followed on April 20 by the Deepwater Horizon disaster that killed another 11 workers and injured 17 others, and became the largest oil spill in U.S. history. The reason, safety regulations were ignored. Why? To increase production and profits… in other words, to worship at the alter of the great god Greed.

And unless you young folks are successful, more people will die and the planet will be further despoiled in the process of extracting and shipping oil from the tar sands of Canada. And those things will happen because of corporate greed.

This is the same greed, the same power the Occupy Wall Street protestors are fighting against. Their issues might be home foreclosures and bank bailouts, but at heart they’re fighting the same things you’re fighting: Corporate greed and power. And at some point they’re going to have to turn to young people like you for answers… young people who have done the work, who know the science, who can provide the answers to the pressing problems impacting our planet.

But it’s going to take young people all over the country coming together to demand change. Why?

Allow me tell you what Fredrick Douglass said: ‘Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.’

And make no mistake, we in America are an oppressed people, but most don’t realize it. We’re being suffocated with dirty air, poisoned with polluted water, all the while increasingly being fed genetically-modified franken foods… all the while being told we’re in control of our lives and future — we’re not.

As F. William Engdahl wrote in Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation… “Control the food and you control the people.” And like it or admit it or not, we are under the control of capitalists too greedy to stop and realize their own children and grandchildren have to breathe the same air as the rest of us, even if they are so wealthy they don’t have to eat the same food and drink the same water.

Victor Hugo wrote, ‘Nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come.’ And the time has come for us to take back the planet from those who despoil and pollute it. But this taking back is not going to be a cake walk: those in power are not going to roll over and play dead because a bunch of well-meaning young people get together on college campuses. Indeed, I wish it were going to be that easy. No one likes turmoil and upheaval.

But what all serious-mined groups have to do is look within themselves to determine beforehand how far they are willing to go to achieve their goals. If friendly persuasion works, fine… always use the least amount of force and confrontation necessary to achieve your goals. But what if that doesn’t work? What if they listen to your outcries and view your efforts as just a bunch of kids letting off youthful steam?

I get it, you’re attempting to shame the Masters of the Universe into changing their ways, but the problem is… you can’t shame the shameless, you can’t awaken the conscious of those who have no conscious, and you can’t create empathy or sympathy in the cruel and heartless, and you can’t remake those who worship nothing but money into moral sentient human beings… it simply can’t be done. They will only respond to coercion.

And like it or not, most of the decisions that impact negatively on the plant, the bad decisions that corporations make, are signed onto by politicians who’ve sold out the citizenry, the very people who put them in office; change the politicians and you have a chance to change the rules, change the rules and you change outcomes. As it now stands lobbyists from every group… big coal, big oil, big ag, big pharm, you name it… are virtually paying politicians off so they, the lobbyists, can write the rules and legislation that govern the industries they represent. Folks, this is the fox guarding the hen house.

The only way I know of to bring about change is to elect decent people to represent us at all levels of government; folks who won’t put profit over people. But to do that the citizenry has to be roused out of its comfortable sleep. They have to be educated on the issues… that’s you young people’s job. They have to be alerted to the fact something is wrong and it’s going to affect them if it’s not made right. That’s when societies are open for change: by large numbers of people becoming afraid the future will be even more uncomfortable than the present.

And, similar to the Wall Street Occupiers, you might have to engage in civil disobedience that could lead to being jailed. It is said that when Ralph Waldo Emerson went to visit Henry David Thoreau while the latter was in jail, he asked: ‘Henry, why are you in here?’ To which Thoreau replied, ‘The question is, why aren’t you in here with me?’

Decades from now what stories will you be able to tell your grandchildren about the great uprising of 2012? When they ask you what you did what will you be able to say? What heroic deeds will you be able to recount?

Your cause is just. Your mission is clear. You’re on the side of the angels on this… and as Margaret Mead wrote: ‘Never doubt that a small group of dedicated people can change the world, indeed it’s the only thing that has.’

I want to leave you with an ancient Chinese proverb, some call it a curse: ‘May you live in interesting times… may you come to the attention of those in authority… and may you find what you are looking for.’ God bless all of you as you go about the business of saving the planet.”

From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available again in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author by visiting http://www.neighborhoodsolutionsinc.com.

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