US Social Forum (with kids)

After a couple of days travelling through Ontario, we spent much of the last week in Detroit for the 2010 US Social Forum.

I helped represent my union at the World Social Forums in 2002 in Porto Alegre, Brazil and 2006 in Caracas, Venezuela, and was part of a delegation of about a dozen folks from the Vermont Workers' Center who attended the first US Social Forum in Atlanta in 2007. So I was not going to miss the 2nd USSF in Detroit.

However, having largely replaced myself in both organizations, I was going in to this one with a lot fewer responsibilities, so rather than go crazy trying to visit all the workshops and be hyper-political all the time, I thought I'd integrate it into a family vacation, bring the kids, hang out, etc. We marched in the opening march (above), window-shopped at all the tables for radical posters and literature and so forth. H took the kids out into Detroit on a "work bridage" to do some work on one of Detroit's many urban gardens:


The kids even went to a couple of workshops that they enjoyed: one on writing run by the folks at Rethinking Schools and an anti-militarism fashion show.

And, of course, a bit of running through fountains: