This Week is Women’s Week. When I mentioned this at the Daily one day, someone else asked, “When’s men’s week?”

“Men’s week is the whole year,” I replied. I mean, look at inequality in pay as just one example.

A woman who works full time, year round, still earns only 72 cents for every dollar earned by a man. Now, they don’t pay 72 cents on the dollar for rent, food, child care, tuition, or anything else.

Female-headed households are poorer because women are generally paid less, yet in poverty policy discussions this is taken as a given. It’s as if pay equity is some kind of pie in the sky pipe dream not even worth mentioning.

Women and minorities are increasingly being scapegoated overtly and through innuendo as a way to camouflage the upward redistribution of wealth.

The mythology tells us that poverty is for the most part growing among minority and single-parent families. The reality is something different.

According to the Children’s Defense Fund, “Since 1973, most of the fastest increases in poverty rates occurred among white families with children, those headed by married couples, and those headed by high school graduates.

For all three groups, POVERTY RATES MORE THAN DOUBLED IN A SINGLE GENERATION, reaching levels that most Americans commonly assume afflict only minority and single-parent families.” The same was true for college graduates.

We’re asked to believe Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) is a major drain on public money. Thus far, the propaganda has been pretty successful.

Reality, however, reveals that AFDC spending since 1964 has amounted to less than 1.5 percent of federal outlays. In 1994, it was one percent. All the means tested poverty entitlement programs added together only account for 3.4 percent of federal outlays.

Aid to Dependent Corporations (ADC or corporate welfare), by comparison, is about 14 percent of the budget (over $200 billion). But the low-interest or forgivable loans, tax abatements, grants and subsidies that the Pioneer Hi-Breds, the IBPs and the AT&Ts receive is a subject for a future column (if not a whole series of columns), because for some odd reason it’s a taboo subject in mainstream media.

Anyway, poverty welfare rollbackers demand strict time limits for “moving from welfare to work.” If there are not enough jobs available — tough. Never mind that it’s the policy of The Federal Reserve Board to keep millions of Americans unemployed. Your “work ethic” doesn’t matter to the board when it raises interest rates to slow down the economy.

Stock and bond investors are what matter. They want a slow growth economy to maintain low inflation, low wages, and high unemployment and underemployment (all the better to keep those pesky workers who have the nerve to demand living wages in line).

This week is also National Coming Out Week, which makes me recall a powerful statement I once read about showing solidarity with the oppressed in the struggles against the oppressors.

Subcommandante Marcos is the leader of the 1994 Chiapas rebellion in Mexico. Marcos leads the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), which is fighting back against the powers of militarism and multinational finance capital in the mountains of southern Mexico.

Marcos once responded to rumors that he was gay by issuing the following statement:

“Marcos is gay in San Francisco, Black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, a Mayan Indian in the streets of San Cristobal, a gang member in Neza (a huge Mexico City slum), a rocker in the National University (where leftist folk music holds sway), a Jew in Germany, an ombudsman in the Defense Ministry, a communist in the post-Cold War era, an artist without gallery or portfolio, a pacifist in Bosnia, a housewife alone on Saturday night in any neighborhood in any city in Mexico, a striker in the CTMC (the pro-government labor federation that virtually opposes strikes), a reporter writing filler stories for the back pages, a single woman on the metro at 10 p.m., a peasant without land, an unemployed worker…an unhappy student, a dissident amid free-market economics, a writer without books or readers, and, of course, a Zapatista in the mountains of southern Mexico.”

So Marcos could be you and me. Marcos is a human being, who could be any human being, in our world.

Marcos is all the exploited, marginalized, dehumanized and oppressed minorities of the world who resist and say, “Enough!”

A strong woman who has been a leader in the struggle for justice will be speaking tonight. She’s Angela Davis, a distinguished scholar who will be speaking on issues of race, class, and gender. So put down that beer and that blunt, come on out to a lecture, and feed your mind some good food for thought.

You can either get involved or choose to remain marginalized and apathetic about the great issues of our times. If you do the latter, you’re doing just what those in power want you to do, for they would like nothing more than to rule without interference.

After all, happy hour is the opiate of the masses. To resist apathy is to become empowered.

---

Drew Chebuhar is a senior in journalism and mass communication from Muscatine.