corrente

Alive as you and me. Well, not quite.

I have vivid memories of my father playing that song on his concertina, which always made me cry, and occasionally on his flute, which required rigorous suppression of the giggles.

It memorilizes Joe Hill, a songwriting labor organizer, from whom we have received that profound wisdom, (what Joe is said to have said to followers who might become disheartened upon Joe's execution the next day, by firing squad, no less,) "Don't mourn, organize." My father was an artist/labor organizer, (the Screen Cartoonist Guild, his union, a tough, progressive little independent, that managed to keep its spirit even when forced to join the I.A) so when the time came, my brother and I decided it was a fitting epitaph for my father's headstone.

Here's what did happen last night. I opened an email from MoveOn.org. One of the reasons I was immediately drawn to join MoveOn and then to work in various capacities with them was precisely because they'd found an entirely contemporary way to make real and viable the choice of organizing over giving way to despair, and there is no better example of that than their "Leave No Voter Behind." Here's how the email put it:

Next week, 500 talented organizers will hit the ground in battleground states, and our ambitious $5 million Leave No Voter Behind field program will begin in earnest. We're aiming to turn out over 440,000 unlikely voters for John Kerry in the battleground neighborhoods where it matters most. Polling shows that this race is still neck-and-neck, which means that these hundreds of thousands of voters could easily tip the election. (More on the poll numbers below.)

So far, tens of thousands of MoveOn members have generously given over $2.6 million to make this program happen. But to launch the program, we need to raise the remaining $2.4 million this week. Whether you can give $1,000, $100, or even $10, we need your help today to win back the White House.

Though you'd never know it from the TV news, a close look at the polls shows that the Republican convention was actually a bust for the President. According to the Gallup polling agency, Bush's bounce was "one of the smallest registered in Gallup polling history, along with Hubert Humphrey's two-point bounce following the 1968 Democratic convention [and] George McGovern's zero-point bounce following the 1972 Democratic convention . . . Bush's bounce is the smallest an incumbent president has received." Bush's speech received slightly worse ratings from voters than John Kerry's, and according to the same Gallup poll, a remarkable 38% of voters said the convention made them less likely to vote for Bush.

The truth is that after hundreds of millions of dollars in negative advertising, after the "Swift Boat Veterans for Bush" attacks, after four nights of prime-time convention TV, and after four years in the bully pulpit of the White House, George Bush is still just neck-and-neck with John Kerry in the race for the Presidency.
When the MoveOn.org Voter Fund polled likely voters in battleground states last week, Kerry was only two percentage points behind George Bush -- within the margin of error, and within reach of victory.[3] Together, we can close that gap by reaching out to millions of these swing-state voters and convincing hundreds of thousands of them to come out for Kerry on November 2nd. Karl Rove has taken his best shot. Now it's time for us to take ours.

Do it. There is no better return you'll get on any investment you make to get John Kerry elected.

Here's the URL: https://www.moveonpac.org/donate/leavenovoterbehind.html, just in case the clickable link doesn't work.

MoveOn makes it easy and safe to contribute by credit card or check. Even ten dollars will help.

Do it for Joe, and Mother Jones, and Woodie Gutherie, and this land really being your land, and Jeffersonian Democracy, and the Democratic Republic that the Founders like Washington, Adams, Madison, Franklin, and other great Americans too numerous to inumerate had in mind, Click it and give, for Lincoln and Frederick Douglas, and Dr. King, both of them, and Fannie Lou Hammer, and Medgar and Bob Moses, Bobby Kennedy, and President Kennedy too, click it for Harry Truman, and yes, for Bill Clinton, oh whatthehell, add to the list of who we should be inspied by in comments and I'll post them but , because this money has to be raised this week to get those organizers on the road.