Internet stories about a statue, dedicated to the dystopian science fiction movie hero Robocop, being built to stand somewhere in Detroit, Michigan, went all the way to the city's Mayor. Despite being told there were no official plans for such a thing, a group of people raised $50,000 in less than a week (to have the thing designed and created) and pledged to continue to raise money until the end of March 2011.
Robocop: The Statue, created by a group of people with too much time (and too much access to money not-well-spent) on their hands, and not much political consciousness. The Robocop future is one where Detroit is wholly owned by a mega-corporation and the Po'Lice are a private security force that protects the corporation and its executives and nobody else.
We are so close to this "future", or we live in it already, and anyone reading these words knows what POOR Magazine poverty skolahs think. We know/feel this future in our bones, it is more true to reality than the pie-in-the-sky Gene Roddenberry fed us in the form of Star Trek, Star Trek: The Next Generation, et al.
I liked a lot of the Star Trek stories, but Roddenberry's future somehow couldn't include gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender folk in his sci-fi paradise. Star Trek fans got a few crumbs here and there, a lot like the crumbs Jerry the Gentrifier of Oakland, CA (now Jerry the Whatcha Gonna Do To Us NOW? Governor of California in 2011), licks his lips over while newspaper headlines help spread the "tough love" fear.
The truth of our reality is trumpeted from the offices of Congress and the Obama Oval Office in the Blight House. The newspapers and on-line news dispensers can only ask the questions Who Will Blink First? Who Will Lose If There's Another Government Shut-Down like back in the Bill Clinton Era. "They say" the Elder Voters of the nation will be unhappy with the Republicans and Tea Baggers they voted for.
The Elder Poverty Skolahs of the Nation, and the Poverty Skolahs too, stand to lose a lot more than any political party or pol will, but, as POOR Magazine poverty skolah Gioioia Von Disterlo, stuck in the Akkkdemic Kampus of the University of Washington in Seattle is often told, the poor must be led by the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, which knows better than we do how to fix the problems we have.
Among other things, whither the Ten Year Plot To End Homelessness? That is well more than half-way through its tenure in public policy of rat-racing many houseless and semi-houseless people into Poor People Housing that will cease to exist if the Federal Government goes all $100-billion-postal on us and the State of CA dances the Tango with them while the Robocop future becomes ever so much more painfully real.
The Robocop statue belongs to us. It is a symbol that can't speak to any well-fed tourist who makes it merely a bullet-point on their Bucket List of Things To Do And See Before They Die. "The Boss", Bruce Springsteen, wrote and sang "Born In The USA" as an indictment of Amerikkka, and had it's meaning culture-jacked by happy disco dancers and Ronald Raygun.
"They've Been Bought, We've Been Sold" is a slogan on a protest poster I used as an image attached to a recent article about Stage Three Child Care for poor mamaz in California. The slogan has long legs, we get sold every day to corporations like Lennar (that own big chunks of San Francisco and are part of the dance of gentrification continuing to make this place less economically diverse), that write their own grafitti tags all over us.
This is our task--to make it harder for Them to steal things like Robocop and Slumdog Millionaire from Us. Robocop belongs to the Poor. Say it LOUD!