Walking the Walk and Compassion for Campers Update for April

Look for new opportunities for action, education, community, and solidarity in and around McHenry County here every week.  

 Walking the Walk  

Warm weather and the multiple crises in our country and the world are ramping up actions and opportunities.  Indivisible McHenry County alone has a full schedule of events.

Saturday, April 25--Communities Not Cages protest rally from 11 am to 1 pm on Route 31 at McCullom Lake Road in McHenry.  Part of a nationwide day of action to oppose the Trump administration’s expansion of ICE warehouse detention centers and its attack on the due process rights of immigrants and all Americans. Registration is appreciated so we’ll know how many attendees to expect, but it’s not required. Register here: https://www.mobilize.us/disappearedinamerica/event/935375/

Friday, May 1, May Day roadside rally from 3 pm to 5 pm. on Route 31 at McCullom Lake Road in McHenry. May Day is a national day of action that includes a national strike, boycotts, and protest rallies--a virtual General Strike. No shopping! No work! No school!  Here is the registration link:

https://www.mobilize.us/mobilize/event/931824/.

Saturday, May 2, First Saturday Speaker event at 1pm at 3717 N. Main Street in McHenry. The featured speaker will be a representative from PFLAG, the first and largest organization for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) people, their parents, families, and allies. 

Sunday, June 14, Trump's Birthday protest rally from 3 pm to 5 pm on Route 31 at McCullom Lake Road in McHenry.  This is later in the day for those who want to attend the Woodstock' Pride Fest earlier.

Briefly looking ahead to a busy June:

Woodstock Pride Fest--June 13-14 Annual family-friendly events celebrating the LGBTQIA+ Community. Multiple special events.  Pride Parade and the Festival on the Square 11 am to 4 pm.

Ride/Walk to Leave a Light On--On and around  Woodstock Square, Friday, June 19 7 pm.  Benefiting Break Crystal Lake Teen Center,  Compassion for Campers, Community Connection for Youth, IMC--employment, education, health, and housing services, Jail Breakers, Lemonade & Advocate, Live4Lali, and Woodstock Pride.

The McHenry County Juneteenth Festival will be held on Saturday, June 20, from 3 to 5:30 pm on Woodstock Square Woodstock.

Compassion for Campers is at Community Resource Days at Willow Crystal Lake, 100 South Main Street on the first and third Friday of every month from 10 am to 2 pm. C4C is one of over 25 agencies at Willow.  C4C’s next distribution will be  Friday, April 17 and then on Friday, May 1.. Please come and see what we are doing.  

Yo-yo conditions and mud are the reality for those camping or sleeping in vehicles and catch-as-catch can spaces  Demand is very high for basic camping supplies and despite our best efforts cannot meet everyone’s needs.  Individual and community donations are critical to purchase our gear.   

We can always use donations of supplies like clean and serviceable tents and sleeping bags in original bags for easy transport, clean blankets, tabletop grills, wrapped toilet paper and paper towels, and non-perishable food.  Money donations are always welcome.      https://tinyurl.com/3bz96axe

We need people to share leadership tasks including shopping, transportation, acknowledging donations, coordinating with other agencies, and religious groups. These tasks can take a few hours a week.  People with flexible schedules with some day-time availability are ideal candidates.  A good way to start is to volunteer for our distribution a time or two to see if we are a good fit and stir your passion for justice and service.  Interested?  Email compassionforcampers@treeoflifeuu.org 

  

What Republicans Remember—Murfin Verse Redux—National Poetry Month 2026

                     

                                      Lincoln at his desk engraved by John Sartain from a photograph by Ferdinand Thomas Lee Boyle.                          

Six years ago now MAGA Republicans scrambled to the tune piped by the Cheeto-in-Charge to justify what became a plot to kidnap the Governor of Michigan.  A hiccup on the trail of his depredations, but shocking at the time.  Neither the mad felon in the White House or his sycophant accomplices in Congress have gotten any better 

The Old Man committed poetry. about it in 2020.

                                                            Republicans Remember

Headline:  Trump’s ‘LIBERATE MICHIGAN!’ Tweets Incite Insurrection

April 17, 2020

 

Ah yes, they remember it well—

            That time ol’ Abe sitting idly in the White House,

            his feet up on the desk petting a cat

            as Willy and Tad cavorted on the carpet

            with their goat

            scrawled a message and handed it

            to young John Hay

            to hustle over to the telegraph office

            at the War Department.

 

General Beauregard

Charleston, South Carolina

April 11, 1861

 

Sir—

            I share your outrage that the tyrannical Federal Government

            appears determined to squash your liberties stop

            Arms and reinforcements from New York for Ft. Sumter

            aboard the Star of the West were a knife

            at your noble throats stop

            Eighty-five jack booted thugs

            refuse to hand over the fortress stop

            LIBERATE SOUTH CAROLINA!

            Defend your Second Amendment Rights!

            Death to the Tyrants!

            To Arms! To Arms! stop

 

A.    A. Lincoln

The President’s House

Washington

District of Columbia

 

Yep, that’s just what happened.

            Ask any patriot.

 

—Patrick Murfin

 

The Bombardment of Ft. Sumner  by Courier and Ives.
 

Christell Victoria Roach's The Lincoln Park Memorial Cemetery—National Poetry Month 2026

 

                                             Christell Victoria Roach.

No, not the Lincoln Park in Chicago which started out as a boggy burial ground for early settlers and now contains just one neglected mausoleum and the grave of a dubiously alleged Revolutionary War veteran.  No, Christell Victoria Roach is writing a about a boneyard in her hometown of Miami, Florida which seems as neglected and abused as Burr Oak Cemetery in Chicago suburban Alsip where bodies were dug up the burial plots resold, disposing of bones in a remote area more than ten years ago.

Roach is an Emmy-nominated writer and performer from Miami. She is a 2022-2024 Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. She graduated from Emory University’s Class of 2019, with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Creative Writing and African American Studies then received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Miami in 2022. Her research interests primarily center Black women, focusing on their images and voices as a rejection of society’s historical and cultural lenses, which too often omit and obscure their contributions.  She is a poet and playwright who sees research as comprehensive storytelling. She is currently working on her first book, Bluesing.

The Lincoln Park Memorial Cemetery

The wind ain’t never been nothing but breath.

Every hurricane season—rhapsody—Black bodies

emerge from water and wake  in the trees. Somewhere,

stone cracks, and we hear: Stacy, a surname left

like a charred femur after a ritual. In search

of the Wards among a field of graves, I see the shadows

of bones and bodies. I watch as the caretaker hacks

at the plants trying to steal a grave, pull it below

the high water table—they wanted the bones. Here,

the dead swim among the living. They gather in the water

welling beneath Washington Dr. Each step swells my feet.

I stand still as the two-headed women who collect

offerings and hand out blessings on the corner.

A cold whistle moves my hair, nips my ankles,

pulls my skirt, and I watch burrs catch the hem.

I am the torn flag at the gate of Lincoln. Some say

at night the wind is as rough as a ring-shout: a chorus

of praying hands and other limbs ashen with departure.

The body calls and you cannot help but to respond,

as the feet and fingers do: a quiver of riffs caught

in the breath. Call it racial arthritis. You can hear

whispers in the shadows of buildings from NW 46th St.

to NW 27th Ave. They search for lungs who know

water. Oh, ghosts of Miami. Tonight, I lie beneath

a sheet of blues, held by a Black body.

I am drawn North; the moon is my city.

 

—Christell Victoria Roach

 

From her chapbook In the Wake (2016).

When the Tax Man Cometh--National Poetry Month 2026

 

Before ubiquitous on-line filing, many Post Offices stayed open late and even had employees outside to collect returns from cars to make sure they would be post marked before midnight.

In the U.S.A. April 15 is traditionally the date by which income taxes are due to be filed.  In the quaint days before most people filed electronically, it would be celebrated by TV coverage of long lines at urban Post Offices kept open late for the occasion as hordes of desperate last-minute filers tried to get their returns post marked before midnight.  These days when taxes are due, I am sure there is no less desperation, but much of it is hidden in homes as procrastinators stare at screens in horror when they realize that one critical document without which the return cannot be competed is missing or internet connection mysteriously fails.

Taxes stir up strong emotions—panic, loathing, rage, and self-pity.  Strong emotions evoke poetry.  A lap around web poetry sites turns up hundreds of posted poems.  Some, of course are by famous poets and others by competent published journeymen and women.  But many are by amateurs some apparently stirred to verse for the first time.  It should probably come as no surprise that most of the latter seem to be posted by MAGA types whose hatred of taxes, government, and the bloodsucking weaklings who drain fine productive citizens like themselves may be the strongest emotion they ever have.  Also not surprisingly, many of these poems have all of the poetic beauty and majesty of posts by internet trolls.  You will be grateful that we are ignoring those.

As for me, I don’t mind paying my dues to civilization.  Not that I approve of every expenditure or don’t cluck and shake my head over boondoggles and sometimes jaw dropping waste.  Sure, I’d like to pick and choose.  I don’t want my dollars paying for the drone that wipes out a village wedding party or lets some already fat cat get a second yacht.  But I am down with most of the rest of it and patently benefit from it.

If ever I forgot all of the good, useful, and critical things that Federal tax dollars have supported, the crazed mass layoffs and slashed funding for key agencies and service The Man Who Would be King, Elon Musk, and assorted lackeys and minions reminded me last year.  And I suspect many others including Trump's former supporters. 

My pain is in the way-to-complicated process of filling out the forms and filing and the angst it caused me annually until I gave up and let H&R Block figure and file them.  They usually finish with-in hours and have kept me out of jail.

Here is a sample of what I found.

My Two Cents

Generally, there are two problems

With money: 1. Getting it and 2. What

To do with it. Certainly the food bank

Needs your help. The bristled ant.

Girls’ volleyball and these days even

The water supply, even the sky.

As you may surmise by my raiment,

Drapings really, and the primitive

Medium of this message, I have little

To recommend re: 1. Whereas 2.:

Start small. Make a stack of quarters

Then knock them down like an affordable

Coup d’état. Pennies are mostly zinc

So there’s your source of zinc,

An excellent sunblock. If you crumple

A crisp, uncirculated bill then

Uncrumple it incompletely,

It’ll appear to have shrunk as vivid

Visual aid to the recession. Blame

The president. Blame Congress. Blame

Mexico. For dramatic effect

Abbie Hoffman dropped a few hundred ones

On the New York Stock Exchange floor,

The ensuing pandemonium shutting down

The world economy for a couple hours.

Vermeer-owning industrialists

Stared into the nothing-mist. Oil

Magnates and hotel highnesses stared

Into the mist. Squeak, squeak — tiny, pink

Rat-feet on the wheel. My father worked nights

Most his life then died young but we never

Lacked electricity or clothes. I hate

To suppose money makes everyone its slave

But nearly everyone I know is sleep-

Deprived and wants to send a robot-clone

Into work for them. Squeak, squeak. Often

Money, like gin, can bring out the worst

Although once, after a couple stiff ones,

My mother gave you her mother’s diamond ring.

Maybe she won’t remember a thing, we thought

But she wrote it off as a gift on her taxes.

— Dean Young

The author of Fall Higher

Difference

1

Catch us up
to where we are
today —

these pants!
this hair!

*

It’s been a good year
for unique, differentiated products.

*

I’m more interested
in quarks:

up and down,
bottom and top,

simple units
of meaning.

2

If self-love
were a mirage,

it would decorate
distance,

shimmer over
others’ eyes,

evaporate
on contact

— Rae Armantrout
The author of Money Shot

During the Vietnam War, Allen Ginsberg beat the drums for outright tax resistance.  Pete Seeger regularly recited this poem at concerts and rallys in the 1970s.

No Money, No War

        Government anarchy prolongs illegal planet war 

        Over decades in Vietnam

        Federal anarchy plunges U.S. Cities into violent chaos 

        Conscientious objection to war-tax payment 

        is a refusal to subsidize mass murder abroad 

        and consequent ecological disaster at home. 

        This refusal will save lives and labor 

        and is the gentlest means of political revolution. 

        If money talks, hundreds of thousands of 

        citizens refusing war-tax payments 

        can short circuit the nerve system 

        of our electronic bureaucracy. 

        No money, no war.

        --Allen Ginsberg 

And last but not least, my favorite, an import from the U.K.—Scotland to be exact—which evokes a pastoral past and foreboding.

Taxman

Seven scythes leaned at the wall.

Beard upon golden beard

The last barley load

Swayed through the yard.

The girls uncorked the ale.

Fiddle and feet moved together.

Then between stubble and heather

A horseman rode.

—George  Mackay Brown

from Fishermen with Ploughs