MARCH AS WE MOURN! HONOR MANDELA TODAY!
There is no sound bite for suffering…except maybe the outcries and wailings of one’s soul that can’t be interpreted or are often misinterpreted….The cries of the soul what do they mean? In this current housing crisis in San Francisco, there’s not a 140-character tweet explanation for the pain many are suffering and will suffer, if there’s not a "change coming.” Ellis Act Evictions, Foreclosures, Corporations who throw pennies to communities for public relations while they rout communities wholesale, small time greed inspired speculators trying to get in the game…fought by ACCE, Our Mission No Eviction, Eviction Defense Collaborative, SF Labor Council, Close the Gap Coalition and a few others are a thin line of defense against San Francisco’s unseen ubiquitous greed with its very visible results of artists, seniors, disabled, working class, working poor, families, people of color being pushed out and shut out of San Francisco.
President and Mrs. Obama are on their way to South Africa for Tuesday's memorial to pay tribute to world hero, former activist, former prisoner and former South African President, Nelson Mandela. We have a moral imperative to do so as well.
Today, December 9, "Happy Holidays,” you can push away from your computer, take your ear buds out, get your smart phone and head to Market and 9th to find out WTF is going on, if you don’t have a clue cause you haven’t tried to get a place to live in San Francisco, where I was quoted $2,700 for a studio in the Tenderloin. The March and rally begins at 4:30 p.m. Take a late lunch and leave the office for the day!
No the flyer doesn’t say… "In Tribute and Honor of Nelson Mandela”…but folks if there was ever an event that was in spirit of this great leader who is now resting with the ancestors, this is it!
As I march today, it’s also because of my own personal hero...
My father Sp5 Wyley Wright Jr., an only son, was an impressionable 10 years old attending St. Pius Catholic Church School in Jacksonville, Florida when Pearl Harbor was attacked on his birthday, December 7, 1941. He enlisted in the U.S. Army early as a 17 year-old teenager, served honorably in the Korean War and died serving his country in the Viet Nam War, March 9, 1964 in a helicopter crash in the Mekong River.
Sp5 Wyley Wright Jr., a helicopter crew chief serving in the 114th Airmobile Company, Knights of the Air, out of Fort Knox, Kentucky, was two weeks from returning home to his wife Ouida Fay McLendon Wright, and their four children, 10, 8, 5, and six months old, when he was chosen to serve in his last added mission as honor guard for Secretary of Defense, Roberts S. McNamara and U.S. Army General Maxwell Taylor (the man ordered by President Eisenhower to deploy 1,000 troops from the 101st Airborne to Little Rock, Arkansas to desegregate Central High School in 1957). That viewing of the troops in Vietnam by McNamara and Taylor, kept Sp5 Wyley Wright from his wife, from holding his baby girl for the first time and from embracing again his two sons and eldest daughter.
Wyley Wright was sent to Viet Nam under the Kennedy Administration and within three months of his Commander in Chief John F. Kennedy’s assassination, he died serving his country along with a young man from Wilmantic, Connecticut (a little more than an hour and a half from Boston) John Francis Shea, who was twenty days away from his 21st birthday.
Thousands of soldiers marching to serve the United States of America in Vietnam marched under the banner of my father’s name at the "Shannon Wright” compound in Vinh Long, South Viet Nam.
I, as the eldest daughter of Wright, who raised two of my three siblings due to the subsequent death of my mother when I was 15, having achieved two degrees from the University of Georgia while raising my teenage sister and my elementary age daughter, now facing corporate giants to survive in San Francisco, I am determined that my father’s death in Viet Nam for democracy and the American way –"life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” will not be in vain.
There’s something wrong in America when billion dollar companies will not find the dollars to come up with a humanitarian solution to the foreclosure and housing crisis in America that they helped create.
Facing uncertainty, I do know that it is the courts of heaven that bring true change. We can say what we will or may as we fight evil on earth, but I cry out to the Judge of the Universe, "My Father Who Art In Heaven,” with a prayer of David… "Do not let arrogant men overtake me or evil men make me homeless,” Psalm 36:11.
Thanks to Archbishop Franzo King pastor of the St. John Coltrane African Orthodox Church for bringing out in the ACCE meeting on Saturday that the Spirit is calling for us to honor Nelson Mandela with action by marching today.
Sincerely,
Jackie Wright
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Refund public education and invest in our City College! Stop displacement and create affordable housing! Demand corporations pay their fair share!
It's time to fight back against corporate fat cats who are starving our public schools and colleges and driving up the cost of living. They don't pay their fair share of taxes but instead spend money to influence laws to keep money from going to our schools, vital services and housing. Join students, teachers, parents and community as we march to demand a city for the 99%.
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