Protest and Pride—A Busy Weekend in McHenry County

The streets call activists and lovers of justice and inclusion this weekend in McHenry County.  On Saturday there will be a local opportunity to participate in nation-wide March for Our Lives demonstrations.  All weekend Woodstock Pride has a full schedule of events culminating with the Pride Fest and the Pride Parade in Woodstock.

Hundreds crowded Woodstock Square for the first local March for Our Lives event following the mass school shooting in Parkland Florida.  It was a raw March day in 2018.  Seen above is part of the the Tree of Life U.U. Congregation contingent. 

March for Our Lives, the student-led gun control advocacy group founded by Parkland school shooting survivors, is planning nationwide protests on Saturday June 11 including a mass march in Washington, D.C. which will begin at noon Eastern Daylight Time.  In Chicago the event will be held beginning at 12 pm at the Federal Plaza.  Locally there will be an event in Crystal Lake on June from 1 am to 3 pm at Exchange Drive and Route 14.  It will be a sidewalk vigil lining Rt. 14 outside Binney’s Beverage Depot.  Parking available in shop lots.  The event is co-sponsored by Standing up Against Racism Woodstock, McHenry County NOW, and Together We Stand McHenry County.  Members of the Tree of Life Unitarian Universalist Congregation in McHenry will be glad to lend their voices.   You are invited to personalize your gun violence message on your own signs and placards.

The Woodstock Pride Fest  schedule. 

After the Coronavirus pandemic subdued celebrations for the last two years Woodstock Pride Fest has come roaring back with a full schedule of events all weekend including the Rainbow Color Run beginning Saturday, June 11 at 10 a.m. starting at Emricson Park and a new Pride Fest Pub Crawl to many of Woodstock fine watering holes on and around the Square beginning at 6 p.m.  On both Saturday and Sunday walkers, cyclists, and drivers can follow a map to view and visit homes, businesses, churches, and agencies that are creatively decorated.

The Pride Parade route map for 2022.

The crowning events of course are the gala Pride Parade will start at 11 a.m. come down Dean Street to loop the Square to kick-of the Fest at noon.  The program from the Gazebo will include the opening featuring Grand Marshals Theo Dice, Michael Meredith of Iron and Ivory, and Shannon Mingalone, Congressman Bill Foster, other guests, and Theatre 121 ensemble; 1 p.m. Donna & Alma Brooks; 2 pm Woodstock PrideFest superstar Jayleigh; 3 p.m. Rain Bow Sinthesky. There will be an extended set every hour by a featured performer with Queens throughout and local favorite, DJ Tim Hicks of Music in Motion. 

Pride Fest on the square will feature not only the stage program but also food trucks and concessions; venders; information booths for supportive non-profit organizations, social service agencies, activist groups, and religious supporters. 

The Tree of Life info booth at the inaugural 2019 Woodstock Pride Fest.

Tree of Life UU Congregation with our long, close association with the LGBTQ community will be sharing booth space with our old friends and allies from PFLAG McHenry County.  Look for us at booth #40.

Pride Fest is co-sponsored by Woodstock Pride and the Woodstock Chamber of Commerce and several other businesses and organizations.

 

A Month of Verse to Call our Own—National Poetry Month 2018

It’s National Poetry Month Again!  If you have been visiting here for a while, you know what that means—it’s our eighty annual round-up of daily doses of verse!  If you are new, here’s the scoop.  Every day all month I will feature poets and their poems.  I aim to be as broad and inclusive as possible to style, subject, period, gender, race, and neglected voices.  I don’t want just a parade of the usual dead white men, but a lot of them did write some damn fine poetry, so they have their place here too.  As always, selections follow my own tastes and whims.  Yours may be different.  But I am open to—eager for—suggestions, especially for contemporary writers.  I do not subscribe to dozens of little magazines or prowl the internet for poetry posts.  I often only stumble on new and unknown poets and I am sure I miss some great stuff.  Please feel free to turn me on to some—or be bold and submit your own.  I don’t and can’t promise to use everything.

This year Easter delayed this introductory post, but I did get it started with a short poem of my own.  But now on to better stuff!

Although I try not to be one note, current events often influence choices, particularly from contemporary poets and those often excluded or neglected.  Two years ago we featured poems by and about refugees, and it included some dazzling stuff.  Last year we highlighted Poems of Resistance.  This year we will hear voices of our young people and their inspiring movement to save their own lives by challenging America’s gun culture.  And we will listen to women who have barred their souls with #MeToo and shaken ugly patriarchy as well at the continuing declaration the #BlackLivesMatter.

Let’s begin with a poem that circulated on Facebook in early March just days after the mass murder at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.  Katie Houde is a student at Rockland High School in Massachusetts.

Today's poet Katie Houde, a student at Rockland High School in Massechusetswith an accademic award.

Bulletproof Teen

Run, if you can

Hide, if you can’t

If neither, fight

The fighting won’t save you

It’s to save the next class, the next hall

It’s to give them a couple of more seconds

To get there, to stop it

I am a child, a teenager

But, I am also a bulletproof vest

A diversion

Alighting chance for the others

Home in the form of a distraction

I am blood and flesh

But I need to be Kevlar and fabric

Minimal casualties

Minimal children dead

Minimal little girls and boys

Minimal college applicants

Minimal honors students

And minimal teachers and coaches

But not none.

The Constitution doesn’t allow for none.

That document is living

But will I be?

—Katie Houde

Woodstock Rocked the March for Our Lives

The crowd gathers around the Gazebo at the March for Life rally on Woodstock Square.  Photo by Missy Funk.

While 800,000 or more flooded Washington to in a movement built and carefully shepherded by those remarkable survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School mass murder in Parkland, Florida millions more lent their voices and shoe leather over 800 events across the United States and around the world.  One of them was held on the Square in Woodstock, Illinois where hundreds braved a raw and blustery day.  And believe me, they frightened the gun protecting local politicos every bit as much as those Parkland kids struck terror in Congress, the White House, and in the plush boardroom of the National Rifle Association.

Survivor/organizer Emma Gonzalez in the most power silence ever at the  Washington DC March for Our  Lives

When I got home from Woodstock I found social media abuzz with clips of remarkable speech after remarkable speech made in the shadow of the Capitol dome.  I watched and wept shamelessly when Emma Gonzalez stood for “the most powerful six minutes and twenty seconds of silence in history.  I was inspired when young people from and affluent community made sure that children of color, who often face even more pervasive gun violence only to find their lives and deaths undervalued and underreported, were brought in to speak for themselves.  And I was roused to an even firmer commitment to action and a determination to #NeverAgain allow discouragement reinforce the bloody status quo.

The Old Man uniformed up.

In its own way Woodstock was just as affecting.  Although a group of Democratic women helped pull together the McHenry County event, they were always respectful of the focus and message of the March for Our Lives as envisioned by the Parkland students and to keep the voice of youth front and center. 

McHenry Count Democrats Vice Chair Kristina Zahorik was the skillful host of the one hour long pre-march rally.  She introduced a parade of young people who brilliantly spoke for themselves or read from the heartbreaking accounts of the Florida shooting and its aftermath. The program also included Kathleen Larimer, the Crystal Lake mom whose sailor son John was shot to death sheltering his girlfriend in the Aurora, Colorado movie theater massacre and Kayla Borton who was a freshman at Northern Illinois University who survived another mass shooting ten years to the day before Parkland.

Kathleen Larimer, mother of a victim of the Aurora, Colorado movie theater massacre, singer Cassandra Vos-Demann, and event host Kristina Zahorik.  Photo by Beth Hoover.

Zahorik closed the speaking part of the program with clarion call to hold enabling politicians responsible.  She was not shy about naming name or laying the blame at the feet of local Republicans in thrall to the NRA and called for the miscreants to be voted out of office.   But this was not mere partisanship, but a call for a necessary political revolution to put lives ahead of guns and fetishes.

The program concluded with the powerful voice of Cassandra Vohs-Demann leading the crowd in singing not some old protest song or other hoary chestnut but 4 Non Blondes brilliant What’s Up.  Its lyrics and catchy hook were perfect:

25 years of my life and still

I’m trying to get up that great big hill of hope

For a destination

I realized quickly when I knew I should

That the world was made up of this brotherhood of man

For whatever that means

And so I cry sometimes

When I’m lying in bed

Just to get it all out

What's in my head’

And I, I am feeling... a little peculiar.

I’m trying to get up that great big hill of hope

For a destination

I realized quickly when I knew I should

That the world was made up of this brotherhood of man

For whatever that means

And so I cry sometimes

When I’m lying in bed

Just to get it all out

What’s in my head

And I, I am feeling... a little peculiar.

And so I wake in the morning

And I step outside

And I take a deep breath and I get real high

And I scream from the top of my lungs

What’s going on?

And I say:
Hey yeah yeaaah!
Hey yeah yeah.
I said hey
What’s going on?

And I say:
Hey yeah yeaaah!
Hey yeah yeah.
I said hey
What’s going on?

Uhh, uh, uhuhuh uhuhuh
Uhh, uh, uhuhuh uhuhuh

And I try
Oh my God do I try
I try all the time
In this institution.

And I pray

Oh my God do I pray

I pray every single day

For a revolution.

 

Photo  by Carol Alfus.

The March set off to lap the perimeter of the Square with high energy and enthusiasm despite a biting cold wind.  I am told that Woodstock Police estimated that over 1000 people, young and old, took part.  There were enough of us to completely surround the Square.  Last March a counter protest to an anti-immigrant and pro-Trump rally did the same and it had a verified participation of over 2000, gauged by the number of Hate Has No Home in Woodstock buttons were passed out.

Most folks did a couple of laps of the Square before the cold sent them scurrying for hot chocolate, a stiff drink, or a fireplace.  But if you listen carefully you can still hear the message.  I know the NRA and their bought and paid for politicians can.