Host: Dame Wilburn
Dame: [00:00:00] Welcome to The Moth Podcast. I'm your host, Dame Wilburn. Election day, believe it or not, is a month away and we want to remind you that your voice and your vote matter. This week, we have two stories for you about what happens when you go above and beyond your civic duty. The good, the bad and the ugly.
First up, Matty Struski. Matty told this story at an LA GrandSLAM, where the theme of the night was The Tipping Point. Here's Matty, live at The Moth.
[applause]
Matty: [00:00:345] My daughter, Rain, is about to turn five years old next month. When she was about two years old, she was diagnosed with cerebral palsy. And in most ways, Rain's just like every other kid her age, but the CP has affected her ability to walk, so she needs a wheelchair to get around. When she was first born, I was hit with this wave of world changing optimism where I was like, “I'm going to do my part to make the world a better place for everybody. I'm going to become an avid recycler, and I'm going to start cleaning up beaches and I'm going to single handedly curb global warming.”
But raising a child is exhausting. And very quickly, I realized I was not going to do any of those things and I needed to just focus on raising my daughter as best I could and spend as much time as I could with her. And so, Rain and I have been going on adventures around Los Angeles since she was a baby. We go to the museums or the parks or the observatory or wherever. And bringing Rain around the city in a wheelchair has made me hyperaware of all the obstacles that are out there blocking her access to things.
I'm not a really confrontational guy by nature, so when we first started bumping into these things, I didn't see the point in making a really big deal out of it. I didn't think it would make a difference or change anything. I'd see a car blocking the sidewalk and I'd be like, “No big deal, I can wheel her into the street and we can go around it.” Or, I'd see an able-bodied person parking in a disabled person spot and I'd say, “That's frustrating, but they're probably just running in real quick. We can wait.” Or, I'd be in a building and I'd say, “Oh, there's no elevator or ramp in this building. She's little, and she's light and I can carry her up the stairs.”
So, one day our adventuring took us to Grand Park right here in downtown Los Angeles. And the motto for Grand Park is The Park for Everyone. We get there, and it's an amazing park. It's got this great set of ramps, and Rain loves to go bombing down it in her chair. It's got these really smooth, flat, concrete services that she could cruise around on. We're chasing each other around playing tag. And best of all, it's got this really great splash pad. It's this big area with a quarter inch of water, and it's got little fountains that bubble up, and it's a hot day and Rain's having a great time just rolling around there, letting the water splash her in her chair. We're just having a great day.
And all of a sudden, I see the security guard motioning me over to him at the side of the water. I just get this pit in my stomach, because I know what's about to happen. I walk over, and he says, “Oh, I'm sorry. We have a no wheelchairs policy in the splash pad. She's going to have to get out.” And I'm saying, “No wheelchair policy? Seriously?” And he says, “Well, I mean, it's not just wheelchairs. It's bicycles or skateboards or rollerblades or anything like that.” And all of a sudden, I just get this flash of all the obstacles that Rain has to work around every day just to get to a place like this. And now, somebody's telling her that she can't play here.
I just don't think it's fair at all, and I start to get really emotional and I say, “You know what? We're actually not going anywhere, because she's not riding a bike or a skateboard or rollerblades. Her wheelchair is her means of mobility. It's not a toy.” I start to get even more worked up, and I say, “You know, you can't just discriminate against people with disabilities. There's laws against that. So, no, we are not going anywhere until she is ready to go.” And the security guard just has this look on his face, like, I am ruining his day. And he says, “I'm only doing what my supervisor told me to come over here and do. Let me make a phone call to him.”
He steps away to make this phone call, and I start silently psyching myself up for this argument that I know I'm about to have with these people and I'm like, “Yeah, you go ahead. You call your supervisor. Call all the supervisors. [audience laughter] We're not going anywhere. She has every right to be here. You're going to have to spray me with tear gas and fire hose to get me to go.” [audience laughter]
And as I'm reaching, sort of the pinnacle of my righteous anger, Rain wheels over to me and she said, “Daddy, I'm hungry. Can we go get some tacos?” [audience laughter] I'm torn, because on the one hand I really want to dig my feel and fight this. [audience laughter] But on the other hand, I do not want to have to deal with a hungry four-year-old, and I really do love tacos. So, I walk over to security guard who's wrapping up his phone call and I say, “Hey, we are going to go, but I need you to know that we are leaving because she is hungry and she is ready to go, not because you told us we have to go. [audience laughter] And I need to make sure that you understand the difference here.” And he's just like, “Oh, okay, that's great.” He's just very excited that we're leaving without causing a scene. [audience laughter]
So, a short time later, we're eating our tacos and I'm replaying the incident in my head and it's eating at me. I'm getting madder and madder, and I'm not enjoying my tacos at all, which is making me even madder, because I just don't want to ignore what happened. So, I don't really know what to do. So, I pick up my phone and I anger tweet at Grand Park this photo of Rain playing in the splash pad and I say, “Why did the park for everybody just tell my daughter she wasn't welcome because she's in a wheelchair?” And amazingly, within about five minutes, a spokesperson from the park got back to me via Twitter with an email and they said, “Please tell us everything that happened. We are very concerned about this.”
So, I did. I told them everything that happened and I said a big part of me wanted to tell that security guard to call the police and have them come and drag a four-year-old in a wheelchair out of a splash pad and see how that went for everybody. But truthfully, a much bigger part of me just wants to be able to go to a park with my daughter like every other father gets to do and not have to explain to her why she's not allowed to play where all these other kids are playing.
And they sent back this incredible response, where they apologized to Rain and they admitted that they handled everything poorly and they said as a result they were going to start holding training sessions, where they told everybody there that people in wheelchairs were not only welcome, but they should feel encouraged to use the space. And I felt incredible after I got this response, because it made me realize that speaking up and saying things can actually help change things.
And now, when I see things blocking Rain's access, I speak up all the time. I know it's worth the effort, because when I get to see her acting like every other kid her age, I feel like I made the world just a little bit better place for her. And now, that's helped me recapture some of that enthusiasm that I had when she was first born. We are, we're avid recyclers and we've gone to beach cleanups and we're probably not going to single handedly stop global warming. But as the temperatures rise and the days get hotter, I know I can take her to that splash pad at Grand Park and cool off for a little bit.
[cheers and applause]
Dame: [00:06:36] That was Matty Strutsky. Matty is a full time stay at home dad, way to go, Dad, who moved from Boston to LA in 1996. Just when he thought he knew LA inside and out, he learned to move through it in new ways when his daughter was given a cerebral palsy diagnosis.
Matty says Rain is now in kindergarten, but they still find plenty of time to go adventuring around the city. And they've been back to Grand Park several times since the story took place. And thankfully, everyone has been very welcoming. To see photos of Matty and his family, head to themoth.org.
Our second story is from Javier Morillo. Javier told this story at a Mainstage event in St. Paul, his first time ever on a Moth stage. Here's Javier.
[cheers and applause]
Javier: [00:07:27] So, I was not six months into my first job as a political organizer, when my boss pulled me aside and started talking to me about one of our local unions here in Minnesota, the Union of Janitors. The president was this sort of Minnesota-German grandpa type, but the membership was about 4,000 janitors at the time, overwhelmingly immigrant, the vast majority from Latin America. Most of the members spoke little to no English and he, the president, spoke no Spanish.
So, my boss tells me that the German grandpa wants to retire and that he had not really developed anyone to lead the union after him, either from members or staff. He says, “We're looking for someone and it needs to be someone who speaks Spanish, preferably someone who's Latino.” I'm thinking that he's asking me to help him find someone. But instead he says, “And we think you can do it.” And I think you are crazy. [audience laughter] I don't know anything about janitors. [audience laughter] My partner will tell you I'm not crazy about cleaning the house. [audience laughter]
And just a little over a year before that conversation with my boss, I was teaching history at a college here in St. Paul. I was an academic until the death of a hero of mine, Senator Paul Wellstone, who had left his life as an academic to become an activist and politician, his death, really, it rattled me and tore me apart, but then it energized me to do something different.
When I started this job, I thought it was a first job in politics, not a path to becoming a union president. I didn't think it was right. It didn't seem right for me to become the leader of a union where I had not been a member. I do speak Spanish. I am indeed Latino, but my life history is very different than that of so many of the janitors. They are recent immigrants. Many of them crossed treacherous deserts to get to the United States in search of a better life.
I am Puerto Rican. We are born American citizens. I came to the US years ago as a financial aid kid to go to college at Yale University. They work long hours, late at night, invisible to many of the office workers who populate skyscrapers during the day. I, after Yale, spent my life not laboring with my hands, but reading books and writing papers on Latin American history. I had never negotiated a contract before, but I love to argue [audience laughter] and I hate to lose. [audience laughter] Although I had never organized protests or marches before, I learned very quickly that you cannot make the invisible visible without starting a bit of a ruckus.
And so, not two years since the last time I was in the classroom, I became president of this very quiet union that we worked and have worked very hard to turn into a very loud and fighting union. And the work immediately seemed right. There was one thing that despite any differences between us has always connected me to the janitors, is if you come to any of our member meetings, there are always lots of children around, lots of running around and there's a lot of joy in the room. When members and janitors talk about their decision to come to the US, many will say that they did so to search for a better life for their kids. And that I see in my own life. I see my parents in their eyes.
I was the third of four kids born to a couple that escape poverty, taking one of the few paths that was available to them in 1961, in Puerto Rico, my dad joined the army. My dad did two tours in Vietnam, and he was a frontline infantryman. Growing up in Puerto Rico, my parents were strict. They wanted us to study. And I did. I was a good boy. I did my homework, did extracurriculars and they were so proud when I got into Yale, which my mother and tias pronounced jail, [audience laughter] as in, “Javi got into Jail.” [audience laughter]
Well, they were very, very proud. But I know that the many years that followed as a poor graduate student after I was released from jail, [audience laughter] I think they found that confusing. And if that was confusing, this new career was certainly, I think, downright baffling. My mother was not one for disobedience. And though we never really came up, civil disobedience was probably included. So, she probably would not like some of the places that this job would take me. Like, for example, Houston. [audience laughter] Lovely City.
In 2006, the janitors in Houston were on strike. They'd been on strike for months, a very big public fight. At the time, they were making minimum wage, $5.15 an hour. They were capped at working four hours a night. While they were taking $20 home a day to feed their families, they were cleaning the corporate headquarters of some of the largest, richest corporations in the world, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, Halliburton.
Their strike had gone on for a while. It was not going well. Employers had left the table. They were refusing to bargain. And so, they put out a national call to folks in the union across the country asking for people to come to Houston to do support work for the strike. So, 11 of us from our formerly quiet union of janitors here in Minnesota went down, along with people from across the country, to do support work for the strike. We were going to take part in an act of civil disobedience where we would block traffic at an intersection in front of one of these large corporations.
When we were getting the orientation about this, I was scared out of my mind. I had never done anything like this. And in the veterans of the justice for Janitors movement within the union, they all have all these stories of battle scars like, “I remember the time that cop punch me in the face,” and I'd be like, “I taught history.” [audience laughter] So, I was scared, but I did it. That is how I ended up sitting, legs crossed, in the middle of a busy intersection of Houston arms linked with two Puerto Rican janitors from New York. We are staring up the nostrils of a horse, and the policeman on that horse's back looks down on us and barks, “You are going to be trampled.” And he was right. [audience chuckles] They dispersed us very violently. They brought eventually this big bus, grated windows and put us all in handcuffs.
I will never forget being in that bus with about 45 people handcuffed. They had blocked off the intersection and the janitors of Houston had by then gathered around. There were hundreds of people and protesters from across the country gathered around the intersection. There was a lot of chanting for us and drums, and it was just beautiful. The night, it was dusk. The colors in the sky, there was reds and oranges. I just looked out there, and it was so intense. The janitors of Houston had risked a lot by going on strike, but unlike me, many of them could not risk arrest, because for many, risking arrest could mean risking deportation. I remember sitting in that bus and just thinking, wow, I guess this work is just going to be that hard. And then, I thought, mommy can never find out about this. [audience laughter]
So, they take us all and we go to jail, the other kind. [audience laughter] And so, I get fingerprinted and a mug shot. It's just like TV only takes a lot longer. And so, it took about two hours to run through that gauntlet. I was the first of the protesters to get to the holding cell. When they opened the gates and I go in, I was scared out of my mind, because everyone in there looked like they had just gotten back from a knife fight. I've never been in a fight. The first thing I notice is that everyone, but everyone being held were young black and Latino men.
The guards, like the police outside, were not too fond of these outsiders who'd come to cause a ruckus in their city. There was this one guard in particular who I came to nickname Abu Ghraib, [audience chuckles] because he could not stop reminding us that he had just come back from Iraq. At one point, he got into it with one of my jail mates, this young black guy. They're across the bars from each other, and he starts screaming at him. He says, “You think I'm scared of you? You think I'm scared of you? I did two tours in Iraq as a grunt. I kill people,” to which my jail mate responds, “I kill people too. I'm in jail.” [audience laughter]
Jail mate is one, Abu Ghraib’s zero. [audience laughter] I don't know if he actually had killed anyone. And in fact, the guys in there, they'd not come from any knife fights. They were there for very minor infractions like not having ID on them while walking down the sidewalk. The district attorney of Houston was like the cops and the guards, not too thrilled about these outsiders agitating, and so he set bail for us at $888,888 each. The crazy eights bail. This same district attorney had before set bail for a guy who killed his own mother at $35,000. [audience chuckles] But what we had done was really bad.
So, it took to get out of jail. We were arrested Thursday evening, I got out 05:30 in the morning on Saturday. But when I got out, we all learned that the employers had been embarrassed by the violence that was shown on television and had come back to the table. And by Monday, all of us from Minnesota were back here. And on my way to work, I get a call on my cell phone with the news that the janitors of Houston had won their very first union contract with wage increases and healthcare for the first time. [audience cheers and applause]
When I think back to that time in that bus, I remember something that Paul Wellstone used to say, “Sometimes you have to pick a fight to win a fight.” And what I learned there is sometimes going to jail really does teach you a lesson. Thank you.
[cheers and applause]
Dame: [00:20:06] That was Javier Morillo. Javier led the Union of Janitors, SEIU Local 26 for 14 years before stepping down this past June. He's still an organizer and social justice advocate. He's also a writer and podcaster too. To see some photos of Javier in his early days as an organizer, including his mug shot from this story, head to themoth.org.
Remember, the issues that matter to you are important, no matter how big or small they are. When I was in third grade, I led a walk out, so that we could have ice cream at lunch. It only took 20 minutes, but we won our ice cream and our freedom. And if third grade Dame can do it, so can you. It's not too late to register to vote. And if you need information on how to do that, head to themoth.org.
That's all for us this week. Until next time, from all of us here at The Moth, have a story-worthy week.
Julia: [00:20:59] Dame Wilburn is a longtime storyteller and host at The Moth. He's also the chief marketing director for Twisted Willow Soap Company and host of the podcast Dame's Eclectic Brain.
Dame: [00:21:09] Podcast production by Julia Purcell, with help from Rowan Niemisto at WDET. The Moth Podcast is presented by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange, helping make public radio more public at prx.org.