… as Todd Rundgren might say.
The Washington Post on Rep. Cori Bush’s eviction protest:
Wind whipped along the steps of the U.S. Capitol on Sunday night as rain pattered, slowly soaking Rep. Cori Bush’s sleeping bag. She struggled to get warm — a familiar feeling, she said. Two decades earlier, the Missouri Democrat, who then lived in her car, spent sleepless nights shivering as she held her two young children in her arms.
This time, Bush chose to brave the elements. For three nights, she slept outside the Capitol, joining activists and fellow Democratic lawmakers protesting the lapse in the federal eviction moratorium, which had protected renters during the pandemic. The move drew national attention, forcing the White House to respond to Bush’s demands to temporarily halt evictions after Congress went on recess without addressing the issue.
On Tuesday, Bush’s campaign succeeded.
The Biden administration announced a 60-day eviction ban for U.S. counties with “substantial and high levels of community transmission,” according to a news release from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. With the virus’s delta variant quickly spreading throughout the United States, renters in about 90 percent of the country qualifyfor the new moratorium, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in a statement.
She took a stand. She made a difference. Insecurity? She’s lived it.
For those who need reminding, Bush served as a triage nurse during the protests in Ferguson, Mo. over the killing of Michael Brown (Washington Post, Dec. 22):
“We never stopped protesting because it’s always somebody else getting murdered,” she said. She’s grieved half a dozen of her fellow Ferguson activists, dead of suspected murders, suicides and a drug overdose — deaths that some in the community (though not the police) view as being connected, given the threats some involved with BLM have faced. Late one night, back in the summer, someone shot Bush’s car, putting bullets through a tire and a door handle.
Bush, 44, got sick of asking public officials to make sweeping changes, particularly regarding criminal justice. So she ranfor Congress, winning on her third try. [Not only] the first Black woman to represent Missouri in her state’s 200-year history, but also as the first day-in-and-day-out BLM protester to earn a seat in those hallowed halls.
Imagine that. Not born of privilege. Not independently wealthy. With lived experience matching many in her district. Not another white man. She came to make change.
“It hurts,” Bush said, “that . . . people who want to be leaders of this country don’t know the struggles that are happening to Black people in this country.”
She knows about struggle. Bush has been uninsured, unemployed and unhoused, forced to live in a car with her then-husband and two babies when she couldn’t pay rent. She described running from a violent abuser: “One day I remember hearing bullets whiz by my head and . . . wondering, ‘How do I make it out of this life?’” She raised her daughter Angel, 19, and son Zion, 20, largely on her own. She’s entering office with medical debt from a suspected bout with covid-19. She understands that justice is not synonymous with law enforcement; she said she was “stomped” and “kicked like a rag doll” one night in 2014 by six to eight police officers while trying to help a woman who appeared to be having a heart attack.
“The People’s House” need more common people.
We’ve been waiting so long….