Spring Edtiorial

Most of us have never lived through times like these. Even before this pandemic -- this plague of the body and spirit -- most of us were struggling. Most of our working class were a paycheck or two or an illness away from destitution. Many of us were not far from the poverty line and some of us were well below it, even working multiple jobs.

Since our last issue, we have experienced an economic collapse with mass unemployment which rivals that of the Great Depression. We've lost loved ones -- over a hundred thousand and the numbers keep growing with no end in sight.

All the festering pandemics of bigoted, corrupt, greed-driven, violence and nationalism are combined and on full display. Sparked by racist police violence and fed by class injustice we are seeing a massive uprising of progress, solidarity, and resistance against divisive, destructive corporate fascism.

The poets in this issue get to the nitty-gritty. Alan Catlin, Lyle Estill, Rick Swann, Fred Voss, normal, and others speak of the stress and desperation we feel. Ed Werstein's poem, "Dying for Capitalism" is an indictment of capitalist tyranny ready to force us back to work in cesspools of disease, purposely made more deadly, for the further enrichment of a few. We are the disposable stock upon which this system of life-destroying exploitation is built.

But our working class has a long memory, as Mary Franke's poem "2020-1919" about that "red summer" illuminates. So too, these poems speak from our knowledge of who the 1% are, and of our long history of struggle against them for rights that, until recently, many of us took for granted. History shows us that in a capitalist system nothing won is permanent. Maintaining even basic rights gained is like paddling upstream against constant efforts to push us back. As the present shows and growing voices in the streets demand, we must go further than winning shallow promises and temporary partial victories. Capitalism has outlived its usefulness and has become a deadlier pandemic than corona virus.

Even as we struggle to survive this pandemic, we are facing down fascism unmasked and brutal even as greater existential crisis metastasizes. The climate catastrophe too is driven by myopic greed and profiteering. Like COVID, efforts to address it are crippled by criminal gangsterism and the hijacking of our governments by corporations. Surviving this culmination of disasters requires us to reclaim and remake the Republic, as our closing poem "A Call to Action" makes clear.

Together we have the power. This issue would not exist without the support we have gotten, for which we are more that appreciative. Though our efforts may further inspire class- conscious progress, the struggle is happening now in streets and city halls across this nation and around the world. People have finally had enough. It will require all of us to push hard enough to end this nightmare of brutal capitalist world destruction. For older, ill activists, especially vulnerable, this is a big challenge. Together, old and young, Black and white, we have wisdom, words and a stubborn commitment. We have little left to lose and a world to reclaim and protect from those who are actively, knowingly destroying it.