May Day brings yet another national day of protest which will spawn local actions in our listening area. KDNK’s Marilyn Gleason spoke with George Wear of Mountain Action Indivisible to learn where, when and why.
George Wear: Mayday, May 1st is International Workers' Day. And so there's a national group called Mayday Strong, a coalition of different organizations. Uh, they have a motto, no work, no school, no shopping. And so some cities and towns, the bigger places, are doing more of a walkout on Friday. But locally, you know, small towns and rural areas like ourselves, we're not really doing a walkout thing. We're just trying to highlight people over profits and focusing on what the rest of, the population, besides the billionaires are looking for in this country.
Marilyn Gleason: George, can you describe for me where these protests are gonna be happening in the Roaring Fork Valley and if there's anything going on in the, you know, Grand Valley I- 70 corridor as well?
GW: Mountain Action Indivisible, we try to represent from Parachute to Aspen. So yeah, it looks like five or six different things [are] going on. We have what we call visibility brigades, and that will be happening on Friday in Parachute at 10:00 AM, in Newcastle at 10:00 AM, and in Glenwood Springs from 4:00 to 5:00 PM.
MG: The visibility brigades will gather on highway overpasses in Parachute and Newcastle in those morning hours. In Glenwood, they'll show solidarity in Sayre Park to the honking of horns at rush hour. The premier May Day protest will be here in Carbondale.
GW: There's another event happening in Carbondale at the project shop. Locally it's called the Fall of Freedom. Reina Katzenberger runs the project shop and she's doing a community art day from 2:00 to 5:00 PM where people can come in and do all kinds of whatever different art projects they want to do that support the community. And then kind of our flagship event happens at the roundabout from five to six.
MG: Sign waving, horn honking, costumes and community will be on display in the roundabout. This will naturally transition to downtown, where all the usual pomp and festivities of First Friday in Carbondale will be underway.
"Okay. Do you wanna tell me a little bit more about people over profits, what that means to you and what that means to this protest?"
GW: Well, we just see the way the country's going, where lots of families around the country are just facing economic issues with housing, healthcare, and groceries. And at the same time, we have a government that seems to be supporting billionaires instead. Our government is spending so much on military conflicts and on ICE... an ICE budget that's just outrageously huge and sort of terrorizing our community. At the same time, our communities really need help financially. So we just see a real mismatch there of the way things happen coming out of Washington, both from the government and from large corporations, from the fact that they're not paying taxes and so many regular families are struggling.
