In what has become a tradition for progressives during the Rick Scott era, the Awake the State movement once again held rallies across Florida on the opening day of the regular legislative session.
"We started because Rick Scott came into office and he had a lot of radical proposals," said Kofi Hunt of Awake Pinellas. He said the key issues uniting progressives this year include felons' rights restoration, raising the minimum wage and expanding health care, all issues that were pointedly not mentioned by Governor Scott during his State of the State address.
Awake rallies were held in more than a dozen cities across the Sunshine State on Tuesday, including in Centennial Park in Ybor City.
"I was at several Tea Party rallies about three years ago, and this is a much better-looking crowd than at the Tea Party rallies," quipped WMNF News & Public Affairs Director Rob Lorei, who began his speech with a brief history of the labor movement in Ybor City before segueing into the failure of the media to tell it like it really is.
"The media is failing us!" raged Lorei, sounding like a modern-day Howard Beale. "When it comes to issues, they're largely missing from television news. The working people, the teachers, the firefighters, the small business people, the artists, the cab drivers, the musicians, the scientists, the carpenters, the plumbers. The people who make our economy work. They're working longer hours for less. They're invisible to the mainstream media."
Lorei then suggested the way the people could get back at the media would be to turn off the television.
The keynote speaker was Clair Connor, a retired teacher whose 2013 memoir, Wrapped in the Flag:A Personal History of America's Radical Right, details her childhood growing up in the home of parents who were leaders of the John Birch Society. She blasted the conservative movement, and said if Floridians thought they were in a particularly unique conservative state because of Rick Scott, they should think again.
But in what sounded like an attack on Pinellas Congressional candidate Alex Sink, Connor said, "If we sit here as Democrats or non-radicals and say, 'Oh, let's work together '… How? How! I listen to people say, 'I'm going to work with people across the aisle.' And I say, with whom? With whom are you working? Give me a list. Are you going to work for John Boehner? Eric Cantor? Go down the leadership, hit one you'd work with and put up your hand. This is the problem. We think we're going to have consensus government. That is not what the radical right is all about. They don't believe in it. They never believed in it."
There were around 150-200 people in Centennial Park, a good crowd for activism in Tampa, but an audience that paled in comparison to Awake the State rallies in Lykes Gaslight Park in 2011 and 2012. Virtually every progressive activist in Tampa was present, however, including Susan Smith, the chair of the Florida Democratic Progressive Caucus and a fierce supporter of public education. She said that bills in the Legislature aiming to expand both school vouchers and charter schools were on her radar.
Smith has found herself in sync with some of her usual opponents when it comes to disdain for the Common Core, the set of educational standards being introduced in Florida schools.
Activists from groups like Mi Familia Vota were on hand to say that they haven't given up on the idea of comprehensive immigration reform. "I don't think we have time to be discouraged," Perla Hinojosa said, adding that her group is working on getting Latinos registered to vote in this fall's midterm elections.
Mellissa Mann is with the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal Campaign and the Sunshine State Clean Coalition. She said her groups are working to put pressure on Duke Energy CEO Lynn Good to move beyond fossil fuels and toward a renewable energy future featuring energy efficiency and solar power.
A group of Walmart workers took the stage. A young woman named Crystal said she stood in solidarity "in the struggle against poverty wages. We stand for change because we are change. So awake the state, awake the people. Awake our voices so we can fight the good fight against poverty wages and demand as daughters, as students, as fathers, as human beings … so if you are a pawn or if you a king, you are needed out on the battlefield. So please fight for higher wages."
This article appears in Feb 27 – Mar 5, 2014.