It was January 20, 2001.
I was 18 years old and had just moved back to Charlottesville VA even as my parents moved out west – my father to Corvallis Oregon, my mom to Santa Barbara California. They sold their house, and I left town, headed on an airplane to Guatemala City.
I had just moved back from Los Angeles. My friend Jay and I headed back to Virigina, mostly because life in LA was tough when you are working without a college degree with no family and broke. I worked at Jamba Juice and filing papers in the back room of a sales office for temp contractor Manpower Inc. When the bus drivers went on strike, I walked halfway to work. I was almost kidnapped once or twice by gay men running late to work trying to hitchhike.
I took a greyhound across country from D.C. to LA to get out there. I stopped in Ypsilanti Michigan on the way. There I attended a week-long socialist solidarity summer school that I don’t remember much. Well, now that I think about it, it was part of a multi-tendency membership-based organization that was multiracial, explicitly feminist, and anti-racist, rooted in the working class, with committed cadre in labor unions seeking to turn these reformists structures into revolutionary forces of mass social change. There was a black led group in Raleigh Durham North Carolina that sought to organize the south. The Detroit based white side of the organization’s base had roots in the rust belt north as well.
Before I headed west, I took a two-week bicycle trip across the Appalachian mountains, from Charlottesville VA through the coal mining regions of southern West Virigina, to Huntington WV, Athens OH, past the Alcoa aluminum plant then on strike along the Ohio River, and finally to western Pennsylvania, and Maryland. I saw the environmental degradation, rural poverty, and lack of safe workplaces and clean drinking water in coal country Appalachia. I camped on the side of the road and bought food and kerosene at the country stores I passed on my way, traversing ridgelines and oak and maple lined roads, valleys of cow pastures, bales of hay, and the rumbling coal truck roads I tried to avoid on my way. A bike shop in west Virigina fixed my bicycle for free beat up along the road. I slept in a tepee in Ohio and found shelter from the rain in Pennsylvania.
When Bush got inaugurated, after I voted for Ralph Nader, I left the country. In the spring and summer of 2000, I spent time on Charlottesville’s downtown mall collecting over 1000 signatures to get Nader on the ballot in Virigina. I was in Los Angeles at the DNC when Al Gore spoke and Rage Against the Machine played at a demonstration prior to a police riot that cleared concert goers from the grounds near the city’s Staples Center.
I spent a month in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala studying at a Spanish language school. I met a UNITE organizer who was sent to the same Spanish language school when I was there. He mentioned the various tactics they used in those days before universal surveillance cameras and cell phone tracking to win a strike at Cintas, an industrial laundry that supplied linens to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. I didn’t end up working in a plant they wanted to organize in Philadelphia when I got back, but we hung out a bit in North Philly.
I also spent a month traveling Mexico via bus, mostly with the EZLN caravan for peace, a civil society social movement where leaders of the Chiapas indigenous guerilla organization traveled throughout Mexico raising the issues of indigenous Mexican civil rights and calling for peace and demilitarization of Chiapas after 6 years of low intensity conflict. They Mexican Revolution inscribed the phrase,” La Tierra Es De Quien La Trabaja,” or the land should be owned by those who work it, as a fundamental human right. The North American Free Trade Agreement invalidated this core tenant, and the Zapatistas, whose communities increasingly were displaced by cattle farmers, engaged in an insurrection starting in a surprise invasion of San Cristobal de Las Casas in 1994. I saw a lot of poverty, the beauty of nature, and organic agriculture throughout southern and central Mexico, and the warmth and comradery of a people on the march, with protests morning, day, and night as a 1000 bus caravan snaked through city town and village. I met a Tzotzil college age woman named maria who worked at a feminist bookstore in San Cristobal de Las Casas. The romance of innocent youth is magic.
When I returned, I went to work as an electrician’s helper; it wasn’t an apprenticeship program because I worked non-union. I worked in Gainesville, Virginia for several months, living with my aunt and grandmother in D.C. The northern Virigina construction industry was an increasingly immigrant workforce; I earned less than the income requirements of the condos and apartments we labored that summer to construct. The carpenters were Salvadoran, the vinyl siders Korean, the plumbers Mexican. When black and white electricians couldn’t keep up with the general contractor’s production schedule, the electrical firm hired three subcontractors, one a Mexican family traveling the US south with a child as young as 14 laboring competing with us. The global workforce kept wages down and production up to build the structures for northern Virigina’s government and contractor workforce housing, and the service sector that supported them. This was neoliberalism at its finest, and working in a racist and hierarchical heavily supervised construction industry after traveling back from accompanying the Zapatista peace caravan really opened my eyes to the global nature of neoliberalism.
Then the twin towers fell. I went to Chicago to go to college. Before the rally was canceled due to the September 11th terrorist attacks, I volunteered for a march on Washington against free trade, a follow up to a prior national convergence. We had protested corporate globalization on April 16, 2000, after hearing about the fall 1999 “battle in Seattle” against the World Trade Organization. In DC, I spent a week in jail in nonviolent civil disobedience protesting the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. I heard about union summer from a bald-headed new union organizer who left jail early to get back to work. I said my name was John Doe, and participated in jail solidarity, including part of a hunger strike to get us all out of jail without charges. In jail I shared a cell with an environmentalist involved in efforts to save redwood trees in the pacific northwest and we discussed the protest against free trade and corporate globalization that drove migration north from the global south while offshoring factories and union jobs here at home in a race to the bottom in wages and working conditions.
I missed my 25th high school reunion. I haven’t been back to Charlottesville but for a handful of times since 2000. When I lived in northern Virginia in 2009 and 2010, I sometimes visited a friend I met as a teenager Noah Chomorovski. He was a line cook but died of what I suspect was a drug overdose in 2020. Charlottesville, for us townies, was a small town with bad smack, no future but low wage jobs, and dreams of escape to big city colleges and better lives. The world is violent and cruel. I migrated to Los Angeles, then northern Virigina. In Chicago for college, I got involved in United Students Against Sweatshops, support for the Teamsters for a Democratic Union, and the student walkouts against the war in Iraq. After college I got a job with the National Nurses Organizing Committee fighting clinic closures and nurse layoffs as a push to win universal healthcare before the election of President Barak Obama. I migrated from Chicago to Los Angeles and then back and forth working for SEIU’s public sector big city unions. Now I’m in Minnesota. Life Goes on. We live and learn and ride the waves.