It was a beautiful Saturday. We loaded up and headed for the Progressive Coalition's annual meeting. It was a better than ever social event. However as usual it was very hard for the working person to find.

There was no table talk of the train wreck of the Democratic Party nor the need for alternative organizations to set up and look after the people's rights, health and the cultural life that is being stolen from everyone.

Present were the usual process oriented people but there was also a new force in attendance: at last the cyber people are beginning to appear.

As a person who works the web, I notice a lot of insecurity out there among the pencil necks and cyber geeks. They manufacture image rather than substance; their content is either cheese or spam depending on how one reads it.

Also the web is an expensive trip for those who are supporting news gathering ( an expensive habit to begin with; ask any independent publisher.) We have found our trip to web world to be frustrating and expensive with lots of time wasted as well as skills gained; that we are still evaluating.

But I found at the meeting another person, representing a collective, looking for the truth and we talked and will dialogue, hopefully on these pages.

The rest of the room was occupied with the bugaboo of fund raising and the need for poor people to raise a few more dollars so that the process of processing might continue. My youth units cut short my presence at the meeting which was having problems with the mechanics of the size of the area they service. Colorado is huge and getting around, expensive. When in doubt E-mail.

There is a genuine concern about education and these people are mainly educators. Not being revolutionaries but rather progressives, they want to fix the public system with the whine of more money. As a parent I discovered that the public education system does its best to uneducate children and drive them away from the careers of their dreams. To defend the debilitating, degraded, racist school system is the same as defending Jim Crow. Our children are prisoners sentenced to unrelenting pap and brain washing: leaving a child in there is like sending a Jew to the camps for weight loss. Sorry, been there, done that.

Not to say that the private sector offers much better, there are people still trying to give their kids real tools to do real jobs and be real people: that requires a whole lot of work. Not being an absentee mother or father might be a good start. The system is against this but sometimes one can get around it sometimes not. Until we treat our children like our partners in life, we will be the monster boomer parents raising scorpions rather than humans. The American Way raises children that the parents ought to fear. American children are kids with exoskeletons and guns...

Free your children and they can learn something. Imprison them and they will learn to break out.

There were no kids there besides mine, ages three and thirteen; the toddler and the webmaster wanted a trip to the library rather than listen to old teachers tales... I, being an ex teacher, had go to along with their vote.

One thing that I didn't hear is what they think will happen when the Theocrats take power after the elections. Clinton's behavior has assured that democrats might see office in five or ten years after the godly have screwed up worse than he did (look at welfare reform, China, Free trade and casual slaughter of Blacks and Muslims in the name of peace). No one remembers the coked out Bush boys bullying their way to power on money, drugs and sex ; we are progressives and if we are quiet the jack booted thugs will not hurt us when we squeak about race and gender.

The Progressive Coalition is a very important and useful group of people. They are dealing with the sins of the nineteenth century while looking down the gun barrel of the corporate state. What they do that is good is bring people together and host meetings well. Big thanks to organizers who as usual work miracles with tiny budgets.

We, to remain human, need to go through the experience of social activism, doing what is needed to help ourselves and others. The Progressive Coalition is a step in the right direction, it is a very safe place to come from...

©Cordley Coit

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