April 2007 | From the Editor
The Long Road to Chicago
When the Green Festival hits town later this month it will represent the culmination of a personal and professional odyssey that began back in 2001, shortly after the events of September 11th. I was then a newly-unemployed writer who had just moved back to Chicago after a stint in LA penning political segments for “Reality Checks with Harrison,” a nationally syndicated radio program that had just suffered an unceremonious cancellation.
It wasn’t so much the 9/11 attacks that changed me as it was our nation’s response to them. Think back to how things were for the next year or so, with “you are with us or you are with the terrorists,” the Axis of Evil, Patriot Act, Department of Homeland Security, no-fly lists, war porn and flag frenzy. Every “God Bless America” sung had Deutschland über Alles faintly echoing in the wind. It was Orwellian, it was terrifying and it was happening right in front of our faces. Yet, we were all seemingly cowed into submission. If not submission, then most definitely silence.
But while the bombs were raining down on the Afghani people in the Fall of 2001 and most Americans were engaged in their Two-Minutes Hate against Muslims, I found myself a gadfly asking, Isn’t there more to the story than this? Of course, we would later learn that our military efforts were not so much geared towards rooting out terrorists as they were towards making a certain part of the world safe for poppies, pipelines and Popeye’s Chicken. My breaking point came when a government commercial, broadcast during the first post-9/11 Super Bowl (the one the “Patriots” won, how rigged was that?), claimed that marijuana sales supported Al Qaeda! At that point, as the saying goes, perception had gotten ahead of reality. It became crystal clear to me what was really going on. This stuff was about everything but Al Qaeda.
I would spend the next four years immersed in direct action. In that time I would create Newtopia Magazine and organize for the Green Party. It was during the planning stages for the 2004 RNC protests in New York City that I first worked with Van Jones (this month’s cover story, “Eco-Apartheid”), Medea Benjamin of Global Exchange, and a number of other key people you will meet at the Festival.
After the disillusionment and despair of the 2004 election, it was Medea who first invited me to the ’04 Festival in San Francisco. There she introduced me to her husband, Festival co-founder Kevin Danaher (“Building the Green Economy” in this issue), a man who would play a large role in redefining for me what a change agent could be. After meeting Danaher, I finally understood what being an activist was really all about.
It couldn’t have come at a better time. We had seen protest fail and hope escape into a touch screen, before the tragedy of Katrina awakened a global consciousness and unleashed all the possibilities of a new paradigm. Medea claimed the Festival was the perfect antidote to hopelessness, and she was right. It is the new model we’ve been waiting for, showcasing the transformative potential of human creativity and innovation when applied to global stewardship. More than that, it’s a hell of a lot of fun.
The founding principles of the Green Festival are sustainable economy, ecological balance and social justice. Each of these things I sought individually over the years, never really understanding until that weekend in 2004 how they could all be brought together into one world-changing concept. It was a long road to get there, but from then on things were different.
Welcome to the Big City on the Lake, Green Festival. It has been my pleasure helping you get here. Now, the real work begins. Let’s build a green economy, and show them all that Chicago really is the City that Works.
— Charles Shaw
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