Time for a change
409 views · Published 29 January 2012 · 2:41 · Indexed 29 September 2026
Channel: eurydicejones · 2012 · Nonprofits & Activism
Come see me on facebook at Nicholas Pierotti for President 2012 http://www.facebook.com/pages/Nicholas-Pierotti-for-President-2012/294324130581411?skip_nax_wizard=true It's about time. I think that what is happening all across this country is overdue. I've been scrambling to do what I can for the Occupiers in Santa Cruz and San Francisco. I talk to these folks all the time. It's time to rise up. On September 10 of this year, I announced my candidacy for President. All the folks who occupy, along with all the folks who struggle and work each day to put food on their tables and make that next rent check, YOU are my constituency. I myself live paycheck to paycheck. I am not a rich man, like Obama or the Bushes. My Dad grew up in the little western Pennsylvania town of Greenville, and when we would visit in the Summer when I was a kid, I used to wander the banks of the river Shenango, wading knee-deep among tiger-lilies, catching fireflies in a jar. My Grandfather came back wounded from the trenches of World War I, and worked at Greenville Steel Car, building railroad cars. During the Great Depression, he grew potatoes and tomatoes in his gardens to help feed his neighbors and his community. I didn't know that hardship, but that is where I learned to love and respect Roosevelt and the New Deal, and that is why I can't stand the idea of anyone tearing down what FDR built up to get this country out of the Great Depression that the Republicans (yes, even then) had gotten us into. My dad laid railroad track in the Summers to pay for his college education in the big smoky industrial city of Pittsburgh. I remember other hardship personally though. I remember going with my Mom to the grocery store during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and seeing the shelves empty, because the people had bought and stockpiled all the food, against the real possibility that we would all be visited within days by Nuclear annihilation. I remember JFK being gunned down in Texas by the same folks that now back Rick Perry and the Republicans and the right-wing Democrats in Congress, and who back the wars that are continued by Obama. I worked as a child with the Diggers in the Panhandle in San Francisco, during the Summer of Love in 1967, handing out free soup to the hungry Flower Children. I was 11 years old, but I believed in those values of Peace and peaceful change. And then I saw those innocent and idealistic folks gunned down by the National Guard at Kent State. I saw America galvanized, outraged. I saw Watergate happen, and then I saw Watergate forgotten. Then years and years of broken promises to the Working People, and Wars, and more Wars, and Wall Street bailed out, and the American People forgotten. In 1999, I was in Seattle to demonstrate against the World Trade Organization, and I got my head split open by the nightsticks of the riot police. Just as they are now splitting open heads in Oakland, and will be in your hometown tomorrow. We knew about struggle back in the Sixties, and about how the proper response to tyranny was to battle it with the moral force of a Great nation, built up out of great citizens. We knew that when the boots of oppression and of the robber barons came down to stomp on the aspirations and the Freedoms of the American working people, that the proper response was to rise up and say NO! Now I see the People rising up again, and yelling NO to oppression and standing up for those same values that I stood up for in the Sixties and the Nineties, or that FDR stood up for in the Thirties: The right of every citizen to grow up healthy and happy and safe in a green land, The right to catch fireflies in a jar.
