MICHIGAN SEEMS LIKE A METAPHOR NOW

MICHIGAN SEEMS LIKE A METAPHOR NOW
Why the mitten matters…

My dad used to get mad at the family car. It wasn’t working right. It wasn’t as fast or as efficient as when he bought it and he was going to ‘fix’ it. He began by taking it apart and in the end, he rendered it completely useless. In the end it cost more to ‘fix’ it then to repair or rebuild it. In the end, the driveway was littered by ‘extra parts’. Things that he believed weren’t important. The car was dead. It wasn’t his fault.  He blamed Detroit. The Union. The Japs… He had successfully reinvented our family car. In the process, he destroyed it.

Then he sold off the parts…

Poor Michigan.

In the last few years it seems like every time the news comes on, something horrible is happening to my mitten shaped state. Auto industry bailouts, double digit unemployment, abysmal education rankings, Kwame Kilpatrick, Eagle Rock, are just a few of the headline makers that have landed us in the National News over the last few years. So it was understandable when Rick Snyder was elected promising to ‘reinvent government’ that many hoped for the best. No one expected the worst.

The first hundred days of reinvention have plastered our state all over the headlines again and it couldn’t be more embarrassing, disappointing or dangerous. ‘Reinvention’ apparently means ‘dismantling’. This isn’t hypothetical. Poor and primarily black Benton Harbor and the Detroit Public Schools have already lost their representative form of government and over twenty more are on the list.

A privatized Emergency Financial Manager has replaced the elected board of Education of the Detroit Public Schools and all executive decision makers. The Benton Harbor elected City Commission, Mayor, City Manager and all other administrative positions have absolutely no power. He is also dismantling the Unions. Governor Rick Snyder is dismantling representative government. Democracy.

There’s a lot of other bad stuff going on in Michigan but let’s stick to Democracy. The Emergency Financial Manager Law that was passed here in March, gives a single individual, hired by the governor, the power to dismantle any locally elected school board or city council if he deems it necessary. No vote. No appeal. No democracy.

Most people who watch the news from FOX to MSNBC may all come away with different but similar feelings. It is something akin to, “Too bad, so sad…” and then some version of, “They deserve it…” on the right; a resigned leftish “it was bound to happen1” and, in the middle, a “something had to be done” meme rationalizes while it justifies. Underneath it all is a belief or a prayer that Poor Michigan is somehow different. Michigan is not the Coasts. Michigan is not the Beltway. Michigan is the opposite of the South, the antithesis of the booming Southwest. Michigan is a past pleasant peninsula far, far from us out here in ‘Fortunate World’. Michigan must have made a mistake….

When I was growing up in my little town there were more movie screens here per-capita than anywhere in the country. Why? My Michigan town was a perfect cross section of America. If it played here it would play anywhere. What is happening here is happening because we are the most vulnerable, be it due to socio-economics, race or both, as in Benton Harbor. But this is just a test and a template. It is a deliberate laboratory using the convenient excuse of emergency and the present political climate of fear. If it works in Michigan it will work in your state; is working in your state. Ask Arizona. Ask Ohio. Ask South Dakota, Rhode Island, Minnesota. Ask your legislators and governor. Ask. Ask them if they write the laws or does someone else. Someone unelected. Michigan seems like a metaphor now…

The think tanks that are coming up with this legislation intend to test it here and they are taking their show on the road; to your state. This is not a threat. This is happening. They aren’t even hiding it. It isn’t a conspiracy theory. These groups even call it a template and your elected officials are members of these groups. Nearly 2000 of our legislators are members. That is about a third of all state legislators. Many are paying their steep membership and ‘conference’ fees with your tax dollars. Many get corporate ‘scholarships’. The remainder is being funded by the ever present Koch brothers and their ilk.

Check and see how many Legislators and Governors are preparing budgets that target collective bargaining. See how many are planning to gut public schools with voucher plans. See how many are planning to de-fund public arts or eliminate them altogether. Check and see if your state is planning on defunding health care, specifically for women. Most of all, check to see if there are Emergency Managers being planned in your state. See if the language all seems eerily alike.

It is happening here and it is happening all at once. The spare parts left on the driveway are human lives. Foreclosed homes. Broken dreams. We are no longer an asset but the overhead, the problem. We are now merely obstacles to a corporatized, privatized, homogenized and democracy free Pure Michigan. The biggest piece being left out of our ‘reinvented’ Engine of the State is democracy. Our democracy is no different, here in Michigan, than the democracy that runs the engine of your state except your vote still means something. For now.

Then he sold off the parts…

Here in my beautiful mitten state, one can find a type of tree that looks like many trees all clumped together They look different and they look separate but if you were to dig them up, you would find they are really ‘shoots’ that all share a single root system. They are really one tree and if you were to poison the weakest shoot they would all die.