LABOR BEAT: 'Fed Up Fridays' continue as student protests organize more and more broadly...
A new Labor Beat video 'My High school's Cadaver Body, Spoke Daisy the Poet', is now available at Labor Beat. The video include a student poem "Educational Autopsy". The video is at: https://youtu.be/sX6sIC81On0. The video features the "Fred Up Friday" protest at the end of February 2016 by Chicago students.
The poet Daisy recites "Educational Autopsy". Photo: Labor Beat.A protest by Chicago public schools students at the Thompson Center on Feb. 26, 2016 (#FedUpFriday) featured a number of speeches on why students were fighting against the continued dismantling of public education.
As Chicago Students Union member Charles Kotrba (Whitney Young High School) explained, there are revenue sources, such as "to sue Bank of America and other Wall Street banks for their toxic swaps and claw back hundreds of millions of dollars in losses and termination penalties." The city and CPS could demand "a TIF surplus of as much as $100 Million, or even more, to CPS's budget by tomorrow..They could cancel plans for a new selective enrollment high school -- Obama College Prep -- and get $30 Million back in the operating budget right now. So it's very frustrating that CPS acts like they have to make these cuts because, how we see it, they don't have to."
Among several student speakers, there was a solid performance by a gifted young bard from Jones College Prep, singly named Daisy, who recited from memory her poem "Educational Autopsy", an adroit extended metaphor. With apologies for any errors in transcription, we provide here the unofficial text, and the video of her performance. It is more evidence showing that the citywide battle to save public education is represented by the finest of our youth.
Educational Autopsy, by Daisy
Today marks the end of a thousand careers for picture wordsmiths painting sounds with fingertips.
There isn't a time anymore or the money,
my school's budget anchored in a Black and Brown neighborhood
that'll be drained clear to the ground.
Old teachers will linger in the air like ghosts
sometimes hearing their voices like a breath of fresh air
tinted with the perfume of someone you used to know.
You'll be twisted back somehow into a smoking nostalgia
and realize the feeling of wanting to go to art class.
I want to make art about how we are not allowed to make art.
But these hallways are a plaque-filled vein constricted vessel
that we no longer flow through.
Classrooms packed tight with jello-dripping teenagers
oozing through cracks in doors, windows, lockers
not even enough trees in the room to provide the necessary oxygen.
My high school's cadaver body is nothing but bone and formaldehyde joint
a complex organism reduced to spare parts that no longer produces extraordinary thinking machines.
The surgeons have finally picked out enough muscle tissue
for symptoms to begin to show.
They sold the organs of our system on the black market,
never taking enough to be accused of crime and even
then their whiteness would save them.
They always threaten to grab for the heart
but it is the hardest to get to, kept directly underneath collar bone and vein but now they've cracked us open
and their cold, gloved hands are digging through the
student body cavity looking for anything worth enough to trade.
The surgeons come to us when they can't fix their own messes
with soap or peroxide they come, taking our textbooks,
talking behind our backs, stealing our lunch money.
So tell me, Rauner, where's the real bullying problem?
The Board of Ed won't leave us be. They are hornets circling the trash can leftovers of a system that was built broke. Built broke on purpose.
They want to privatize every inch of our body, expecting us
to function with twenty two percent of our hearts taken out.
The time is now for the blood to raise our voices. We have been circulating a broken system far too long,
functioning only enough to keep gasping our last dying breath.
We scream in numbers, we union-bred. We painting pictures
of eight hundred students in the streets -- whose streets, our streets.
We deadly, we lively, we here, we screaming for those who were never heard in the first place.
We are ready to take back what is ours and make ourselves whole.
Video length is 9:58
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