We learned in Flint that it is necessary to engage. The powers that be are perfectly happy to have people like Wes and I drop out and pursue our artisanal, utopian dreams. Our disengagement with the economic system does absolutely nothing to disrupt the "raping and scraping" ways of modern capitalism. I learned that there is a class system in this country (how did I not know that?) I learned that there is no justice without economic justice. (how could I have called myself a progressive and not know that?---I would come to know that it is planned that way. Our ignorance is necessary for the system to work.)
I also learned that every act of voice is a political act. All art is political, whether it is conscious or not. I also learned that when art is used to shape reality, it can be a hot and powerful tool, which can burn both the wielders and those closest to them. I am only now understanding the limits and destructiveness of that powerful tool. It has taken 25 years to learn this. I am still learning this.
When I moved to Flint, I was shocked. At first the shock was how damn cold the place was. Having been raised in Wyoming, where winter runs from October to April, I thought I was winter tough. I was wrong. I landed in Flint on January 2, 1986. That night, the temperature dropped to -15F. -15F in Flint is about 1000 times colder than -15F in Wyoming. The wet cold with ice knocked me out. I was unprepared in everyway for Flint...and not just for its temperature.
Getting the job in Flint was so unexpected. Out of the blue, on the basis of interview which veered off the topic and onto my specialty of collective playwriting, a job was created for me at the University of Michigan-Flint. When it was offered, we had to go to an atlas and find Flint on the map. Even more unknown was the topic to be discussed by the new play--the birth of the United Auto Workers during the Flint Sit Down Strike.
My ignorance of the location of Flint was dwarfed by my ignorance of the UAW and the Sitdown Strike. I had never given one thought to the union and had never heard of the strike. To land there, on that frigid January morning, was to begin a journey which would radically reshape my life, my work, and my beliefs.
One thing to remember is that 1986-7 was both the 50th anniversary of the SitDown Strike and the year that General Motors laid off 40,000 people in a town of 100,000. At the moment when the town wanted to celebrate its great victory which led to the establishment of the American middle class, the world's largest corporation who controlled this company town, in one fell swoop, wiped out the middle class of this town, the first and worst of the bloodletting that has not stopped to this day.
In the course of creating this play, I met the 70 and 80 year olds like Victor Reuther, who against enormous odds in the middle of the Great Depression, changed the whole game for American workers. This was a straight up tale of victory....but it was held against the brutal backdrop of layoffs and disinvestment. You couldn't see the one without the other.
I worked with a hodge-podge of theatre students, mostly the children and grandchildren of autoworkers, who did not know this history and could see no future for themselves in the auto industry. They and I learned together, were changed together, and were radicalized together. We saw the injustice of a system which uses people as pawns and can easily and callously destroy lives in the name of private profit. We saw how systems were devised to ensure the benefit of the few against the security of the many.
Like so many neophytes and converts, we, and particularly I, went too far. My mental and physical health was damaged, my marriage nearly destroyed, and relationships within the school and in the program stretched to breaking point. We...all the participants of the Collective Playwrights Workshop...(I was not old enough or mature enough to be anything but a peer)...became revolutionaries. As so often happens, the revolution first burned those nearest and dearest.
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