Fighting for restoration of the American Dream

I had the great pleasure of meeting Dr. Margaret Flowers during Sunday’s AWOP Radio show. Dr. Flowers is a pediatrician from Maryland who has pretty much left the practice of medicine to advocate for health care for all through Physicians for a National Health Plan.

Recently, she has expanded her advocacy to include ending the war in Afghanistan, supporting a living wage for all workers, stopping the attacks on unions, fully funding education, making corporations and the nation’s wealthiest indivuduals pay their fair share in taxes and developing clean energy sources.

Of course, all these issues are connected, and they’re all about social justice.

We in America haven’t seen such a huge divide between the rich and the rest of us since the Gilded Age of the Industrial Revolution. Unless we take action, that’s where we’re going.

Dr. Flowers has a new effort, The October 2011 Movement (www.october2011.org), which will sponsor an occupation of Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC, starting on Oct. 6, the 11th anniversary of the US invasion of Afghanistan. This isn’t just about health care, which is where she stared; this is about all the places we Americans have lost ground to the huge corporations that effectively rule our nation now.

I’ve called it the We the People effort. That’s because it’s our country, and it’s time to take it back.

This won’t be easy because the corporations and their lobbyists own the media, so we have to work harder to get the truth out there. You won’t see anything about October 2011 in the media; it probably won’t get a lot of coverage as it begins.

But if We the People can muster the courage to speak up and not go away until our stories are heard, we can make a difference.

Margaret Flowers is organizing the effort, but we all have to support it. There will be local efforts in addition to the Washington event. As progressives, we all need to be involved. Go to www.october2011.org and find out what you can do to take back our country.

I joined October 2011 because health care is my passion, but it is only part of the whole. We need to unite to work together for the betterment of our country. Together, we will be heard.