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Thursday, March 24, 2011

Marching with Farmworkers


STH students marching on Huntington Ave, Boston, MA. From left: Molly Nason;
Meredith Hoxie; Allison Bovell; and Ashley Anderson.
The snow fell throughout the night on Saturday and into Sunday morning. By the time we gathered in Copley Square on Sunday afternoon, four new inches of snow lined every tree branch and sidewalk. The cold set in, and we found ourselves surrounded by hundreds of activists from cities throughout the Northeast, united in support of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ campaign to get Stop N’ Shop grocery stores to pay one penny more per pound of tomatoes harvested by farmworkers in South Florida. As Christian Activists working to be aware of and active in social and economic justice in our school, city, country, and world, we decided to embody our belief that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” and we hit the streets of Boston alongside the workers who harvest the tomatoes we eat. Actually recognizing and embodying our fundamental connectedness with the human beings in South Florida by walking with them to the corporation (Stop N’ Shop - Brigham Circle) that benefits from their labor is the work of an activist: a person who combines the thinking work of the academy with the activity of an agitator. It is the theory of the theologian that must be constantly checked by the realities of human relationships, both in our very own school community, in our city, in our country, and in our world. Indeed, the only possibility for change/ justice is in the coming together of theory and practice in our actual relations with one another. As we all know, thousands of people around the world--Boston, Wisconsin, Egypt--are trying to do something about the situations in which they find themselves. As students, it is often difficult to reconcile the academic lifestyle with the social and economic injustice that grieves us. Sunday with the farmworkers felt like a step in that direction.
Alex Froom - frooma@bu.edu

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