By PETER MOLENAAR
For almost two decades, “Raise Your Voice” has paid tribute to the melting pot of peoples which has formed the Phillips Community. Presently, the members of the Franklin Avenue tent encampment would appreciate your prayers. We are witness to an oppressed population which has bonded together in order to cling to life.
A note: In honor of Eugene V. Debs, leader of the original Socialist Party of this land, my grandparents invoked Eugene as my father”'s middle name.
Ancestral ties”¦.
For hundreds of thousands of years, a rather diminutive species of human kind, referred to as Homo heidelbergensis, successfully occupied Europe before evolving the Neanderthal form, under the impact of the Ice Ages. Then about 40,000 years ago, Homo sapiens invaded from their African origins, to live and make love.
I was to learn, only just recently at a family gathering in Cannon Falls, that our father”'s genealogy has revealed a significant strain of Neanderthal within. He also carries a touch of Melanesian, passed on to us as wavy curls via the seafaring Dutch, it seems.
Then, on the Highway 52 return trip, I caught a glimpse of yet another species variation. Actually, it was a blown-up image of Donald Trump. Remarkably, the caption reads: “What Every American Should Not Become!”
Reminder:
As most of us were much of the time out hunting and gathering, for all those hundreds of thousands of years, we took our guidance from the matriarchal circle which deliberated around the fire. It was only a few thousand years ago that patriarchy and oppression emerged. Truthfully, then, for most of human existence, men like Trump were banished from the camp.
But for now, in this period of the Popular Front, we are compelled to maximize the vote against the party of “entitled” chauvinism. We remain in the quantitative phase of the revolutionary process. The great qualitative leap is yet to come.
