"right now across this country there are more than five thousand May Day protests, strikes, walkouts and rallies happening!"
Cook Field,
we are gathered here today
workers and students and student workers and worker learners
to say goodbye to you.
You are a flat green place
with wind.
Today is May Day
Mayday means maypoles, sensuality, flowers
workers dancing, worker power blooming
but it’s cold.
But under your monoculture grass, under the fake turf,
you are alive
because bacteria can sleep for 100,000 years.
Your diversity is alive under your plastic blanket
it’s alive under the expensive petroleum fertilizer
that passed through the Gulf of Hormuz
and washes into Four Mile Creek and makes algae blooms
it’s alive under the pesticides that kill the weeds.
(A weed is a plant that the people in charge don’t want.)
Cook Field,
three hundred years ago, you were covered with giant sycamores and beeches.
In the eighteenth century, the Ohio Valley was perhaps the most diverse place in the world
with fish called gar six feet long in the creeks, with multiple kinds of mussels,
with Shawnee people and with Miami and Kaskaskia
and Piankeshaw and Wyandot and Potawatomi and Lenape people,
with French and Spanish people, with African people born free in this country
or escaped from their enslavers,
with baby-faced working-class veterans
alive but unpaid and furious
after the colonizer war,
who were finally compensated with stolen Ohio Valley land.
They plowed up rich biotic soil
tended for centuries by myaamia women farmers
who’d bred and planted maize in hundreds of colorful varieties.
Then came big ag
and with big ag came monoculture,
biohacked corn and soy mass deforestation
land grabs for some broadax for others
petroleum fertilizer for some pesticide for others
subsidies and tax cuts for some sundown laws, redlining, gerrymandering and ICE for others.
Cook Field, you’ve seen how the people in charge
are helping to turn Miami University into monoculture
into a flat rich place
where everyone wears the same safe sweatshirts
and dyes their hair the same color
and increasingly
how the people in charge are closing the majors
where you can learn how the world works.
Instead they want you to learn
how to shut up and work
for a world that doesn’t work for you.
But even before the antidiversity laws,
before the censorship, before Trump, before SB 1
higher ed was under attack.
The amount of the state budget that goes to higher ed
is less than half what it was in the 1970s
and guess what
taxes on the rich are at record low levels too.
This famine is a constructed famine.
The programs that are shutting, it’s not that people don’t want to study those things
what’s happening is,
the public good that is higher ed is too expensive for almost anybody
because the banks want to make bank off of you.
What’s happening is, the billionaires have already immiserated
people who work with their hands
— they have exploited them until their towns are dying
and they can’t sell them any more opioids
so now they have to drive down middle class wages too
and that is what we are experiencing, through AI,
through the destruction of higher education
through ensuring that the majors we offer
are all career tracks that serve the bosses
and do not promote thinking creatively together
blue collar white collar migrant and scholar
about how we could build economic democracy.
But Cook Field, even in your sad state
trapped under your plastic blanket and the monoculture grass
about to feel the claws of giant yellow machines
you show us a pathway—
Cook Field, in the nineteenth century,
there was an asylum for addicted and mentally ill people here,
because it isn’t just in the twenty-first century
that this culture made us nutso.
You helped us be less nutso,
you gave us a gathering place,
a place to stretch and stand and move our bodies together joyfully,
a place to sing and shout.
Right now across this country
there are more than five thousand May Day protests, strikes, walkouts and rallies happening.
In Minneapolis recently, our own federal government occupied the city
but a grass-roots community effort
led to so many thousands on the streets making noise
to so many businesses refusing to work with ICE
that the illegal occupying force retreated.
That happened not out of nowhere —
it took years of people meeting, talking, learning
to trust one another, knowing who to call
who could call on others,
building a mesh that is so much stronger
than anything they can do to break us.
They cannot break us.
The microbial life, the mycelium, under Cook Field,
it’s still there,
it’s diverse, it’s under our feet
under the concrete everywhere —
it’s nourishing the stand of corn
tended by myaamia students
next to Boyd Hall —
all we need to do is stand together
and open our faces to the sky
and the blooming happens —
that’s why the people in charge
don’t want us to stand together
because they know that when enough of us do,
we win.
Dear Cook Field —
in the civil rights protest era,
a great poet named Gwendolyn Brooks wrote a poem
about how we need to stand in the wild weed and live,
and “conduct our blooming
in the noise and whip of the whirlwind.”
Brooks was talking about the renaissance of people power
that won Civil Rights victories
like the Voting Rights Act,
which some cowardly, foolish supreme court justices yesterday canceled
and which we will win back.
Brooks called that fight,
that glorious, powerful blooming,
a “furious flowering.”
Cook Field, you are alive, and you will stay alive.
We promise to bloom for you
because we are furious,
and together we will flower.
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