This August, it will be 18 years since I moved to Chicago from my hometown of New York City. I can hardly believe that I’ve been here this long. I moved here for graduate school and never expected to stay. But Chicago is a city that grows on you. I’ve come to love this place. Not as much as I love New York where I was born and where much of my family still lives. But it’s a close second in my heart now.

When Rahm Emanuel announced that he would run for Mayor of Chicago. I had a viscerally negative reaction. I ranted to anyone and everyone that he was a corporatist who would seek to further privatize the commons. I supported his opponent Miguel Del Valle in the primary. I believe that the city would be in much better shape had Del Valle won but the truth is that I would have voted for almost anyone besides Emanuel.

Now we find ourselves under constant and coordinated assault by Emanuel and his allies in the business community. He closed down six mental health clinics last year with a promise to target more. The Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) decided to increase its fares and Emanuel responded that riders who were unhappy should consider driving instead. In just a few weeks, the CTA will close all red line stops from Cermak to 95th street for 5 months effectively cutting off much of the Southside from the rest of the city. Emanuel is pushing a new mandatory minimum gun bill (HB2265/SB1003) designed to spike the prison population by nearly 4,000 in the next decade and costing us nearly $1 billion more in state prison funding. And the coup de grace is his recently announced decision to close 54 Chicago Public schools on the West and South sides of the city. He has been called the “Murder Mayor.” The title is earned and well-deserved.

Today, I took to the streets with thousands of other Chicagoans to protest the announced school closures and to demand a quality public education for all of our children. As we marched, I looked around and saw a multi-ethnic, multi-generational, and multi-everything crowd saying with one voice that we will not passively accept this decision. It was a group of people who clearly understood that we are being priced out of living in this city. We are superfluous and the elite of Chicago would like to see us gone.

This is a city where churches are doing the bidding of Walmart rather than tending to the needs of least among us. It’s a city where Democrats act as the hand maidens of the banks to foreclose on poor and working people’s dreams. This is a city so corrupt that alderpeople work furiously to install their family members as successors to ensure that corporate interests remain undisturbed.

We are being boiled in progressively hotter water and the question is whether some of us will recognize what is happening before we are all fully cooked. Today’s protest suggests that many in Chicago have our eyes wide open. What’s happening in this city is not a conspiracy. It’s racial and class war being waged by the powerful in plain view.

My adopted city lies in ruins; bulldozed by elites who are engaged in a land grab and conducting experiments in social engineering on live subjects. This isn’t occasion for despair though. There is resistance here too. There are people who refuse to be run over. There are people who might be slow to come together in other circumstances but are in this instance standing as a wall to say that we will not allow anyone to destroy our communities without a fight. Only we can ensure our own survival; we are all that we’ve got.

Chicagoans protesting school closings (LaSalle Street, 3/27/13)

In 1965, our forbears took to the streets to protest “Willis Wagons” and to demand a quality public education for all of our children. I thought of those people again today as I walked and talked with my friends and new allies.

Newswire photograph from my collection. Demonstrator is removed by two police officers during a protest in Chicago at State & Madison (6/13/1965)

In 2013, there is continuity in our demands. We still want a quality public education for our children and we want an end to the criminalization of our youth too. We know that their lives depend on these things.

Page holds up a sign at today’s protest (3/27/13)

There are moments in one’s life when you have to plant your feet and fight. We are in such a moment here in Chicago…