It's a Long Way from Bunker Hill By Michael Moore

Subject: It's a Long Way from Bunker Hill By Michael Moore

 
Michael Moore is an Academy-Award winning filmmaker and best-selling author

September 16th, 2011 6:17 PM
It's a Long Way from Bunker Hill
 
 

By Michael Moore

Last night, on the 3rd anniversary of the start of the Wall Street Heist of
2008, I spoke at Bunker Hill Community College in the Charlestown section of
Boston. It is not, to say the least, a wealthy neighborhood. It is
roughscrabble and working class, a place where there are few magic doors
that open to the Promised Land. (If you saw Ben Affleck's movie, "The Town,"
or the exceptional Broadway play this year, "Good People," then you have an
idea of what the area is like.)

The college is, of course, named after one of the first battles of the
American Revolution. And Charlestown looks like it could use a new
Revolution these days. They, like so many millions in so many towns, have
been sealed into a lockout of the American Dream. It is sad and scary to
wander through it.

As I waited backstage for the college administrator to introduce me, he
launched into something I, in all my years of speaking at hundreds of
American colleges, have never witnessed. He began begging the crowd for
money. Money for their student body's "Emergency Fund." The student body
consists of many who are single parents and live below the poverty line. He
didn't ask for tuition money or money for books. He begged the crowd for gas
money. Babysitting money. Money to fix a car that's broken down, or for
electricity that's been turned off. He listed all the things that cause a
student to miss a class -- or drop out. Students (79% of them) who work
near-minimum wage jobs AND try to be full time students at the same time.
Community college is the only escape hatch they have, and even that is a
crap shoot in this 21st century kleptocracy we live in.

He then told the crowd that he would hand out some envelopes and he asked
them to put whatever they could in them.

Welcome to America! Where schools are turned into beggars as the rich on the
other side of town post record profits and bonuses and the top corporations
get away with paying no tax at all. I took the stage and began a 20 minute
howl rejecting the America I just witnessed. A country that puts the
education of its young dead last. DEAD LAST. A country that has purposefully
abandoned the human right to an education in favor of sending millions of
ignorant, uneducated, lost young people out into this world. This is no
accident. Those in power cannot stay in power UNLESS the population they
rule over are stupid and ignorant. To be smart is dangerous -- and they know
that. If the ignorant were to know anything about civics (no longer taught
in most schools), that could be nothing short of explosive. Because, if you
are taught how to have a say, how to fight city hall, how to run for office
and WIN -- well, look out, 'cause you will then have democratic change. The
people who would make up a smart, educated majority would then start calling
the shots. And we certainly don't want that because you know what those
people from south Boston, from Toledo, from Pittsburgh, from Raleigh, from
Flint are going to do? They're going to stop the wars. They're going to
spend the money on their kids' schools, on their parents' health care, on
laying down some railroad tracks so they can get from Chicago to Milwaukee
in a half hour. That and dozens of other things that benefit the many, not
the few.

So last night, I just couldn't take it, folks. I turned away from this
Dickensian "alms for the poor" scene and screamed "Enough!" I asked how many
in the audience had come from the "other" sections of Boston to be here
tonight. About half the crowd raised its hand. I then asked them to please
put as much as they could afford into those envelopes and I would match it,
dollar for dollar. By the end of the night I think we raised about ten grand
for the Bunker Hill Community College Student Emergency fund (and with my
match, it became a total of $20,000).

And then I asked all who were in the arena to make a pledge with me to
reject this vision of America that has been thrust upon us. Reject it, fight
it, fix it -- and to fix it, it will require a rumble. But hey, I was in
south Boston, and if there's anyone who knows how to rumble ...! What I
asked for was a nonviolent rumble of citizen participation.

The crowd spontaneously got up and clapped and shouted. I asked them if they
would raise a ruckus in the months to come. The crowd shouted yes. And I
believe they will. Here comes trouble? Ha! The kleptocracy had better brace
themselves. It won't be long before they wish that had been just a cute
title on an overpriced book.

(Speaking of ruckus, tomorrow on Wall Street, many brave souls have declared
their intention to occupy it with a tent city and turn it into an American
Tahir Square. They will be crushed within minutes. But they won't be the
last ones to rise up. You can only foreclose on so many millions of homes,
bankrupt just so many millions of the former middle class, and deny just so
many millions access to health care (59 million now go without insurance at
least part of year and Harvard Medical School researchers estimate that
44,000 died this year because they couldn't afford to go to the doctor or
hospital.))

How long, Mr. Goldman, Mr. Sachs, Mr. Merrill, Mr. Lynch, how long? How high
can you build the gates? I know you didn't receive a beggar's education, so
that means you know the historical answer: You can't build them high enough.