BY ERIC SMITH

There has been some trepidation and in some cases vocal reservations on the part of those who are opposed to the Republican Party & its racist reactionary agenda to take our struggle against the GOP (or as I prefer to call it the POG-Party of Genocide) to the next level by getting our message out to a much larger audience via Google Plus, Unite Blue, and OFA. These reservations are understandable to a point and on a personal level they remind me of that time in January of 1987 when in the second & final semester of my senior year at Morehouse College I was driving around with some friends through downtown Atlanta when we stopped to observe a parade in what was the second observance of the King Holiday.

Now I had been a youth leader as a teenager in New York and had never missed voting in a major election (I still haven't) and I thought I was politically engaged. However, as I leaned out the window and observed the passing parade one of my classmates saw me and rather than wave back at me as I waved at him, looked at the driver of the car in which I was a passenger and while pointing in my direction "He!" meaning me. "Should be out here marching with us!" Needless to say I jumped out of that car mighty quick and joined the procession. That evening on the news I saw horrifying images of the late Hosea Williams, a lieutenant of Dr. King being literally stoned by angry residents of Cummings GA as they attempted to march through a part of Georgia that had not had an African American resident since 1912 and who had driven out every person of color who had entered into that county since with the rope and the gun.

BY ROBERT BARKER

I have a picture of myself standing in front of a National Guard tank in DC in 1967 at an anti war protest. I was in Berkley when the Peoples Park thing happened. I wrote articles for a left wing paper called the Minority Report in my university years. We stood up for Civil rights, peoples rights, environmental rights, and our right to make peace. We protested and screamed about the Vietnam war and brought world attention to the wrongs and injustice of the war and the world.

Then and now I stand for the American workers, poor, middle class and the generally held down. 

Many of my old friends sold out, became corporate whores and allowed their success to become a badge of honor.  Instead of showing appreciation for the social structure that made them rich they started to look down on all but those like themselves. Once they allowed their conscientious right and wrongs rule, but self interest ruled them when they made some cash. They grew bitter, learned to play Golf (as I did too) and hang out with people that looked down their noses at the working class.  They grew more conservative and abandoned the left and what's right for what was selfish and isolated. Bigotry grew in their minds and hearts as they saw themselves better than the crowd. Now I did as economically well as most of them. I have made and lost millions in my life, but never abandoned the cause of the people..