Editor: This is the text of a speech at a rally in solidarity with the Wisconsin workers at Courthouse Square in Santa Rosa, March 15th.
“Brothers and Sisters, welcome to Tahrir Square, California! This is our Egypt moment. You have braved the weather to take your place in history, the place where we as a people stand up for our rights and our identity, and mark the turning point at which we say: the tyranny of our Mubaraks and their bought and paid for puppets stops here!
The root frame story of Western civilization is the Passover/Exodus story, celebrated every spring, which chronicled a popular uprising and led to the freedom of an entire people from cruel oppression by wealthy and arrogant rulers. Moses stood up to the Pharoah, just as the Egyptian people stood up to Mubarak. We are here in solidarity with the workers of Wisconsin, who are standing up to the corporate overlords and their political mouthpieces.
Our Mubaraks are veiled: we usually only see their puppets in public. The Koch Brothers are Wisconsin’s Mubaraks: Scott Walker is their puppet. We need to pull back the curtain on the Mubaraks in our midst. We see them represented by their corporate masks: Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, General Electric. They are willing to pay nothing of their vast fortunes to sustain the common good, yet demand that we sacrifice our children’s future to their unholy lust for wealth without limits.
Our strength in this historic struggle is our solidarity. This sense of shared destiny and common purpose is the antidote to the toxic culture of empire, which is cynical and alienated by design. We are the cure. We are the ones that we have been waiting for.”
Ben Boyce
Sonoma
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