Drawing Power From the People

Before I formally threw my hat into the 8th Congressional District race, an old friend from my labor organizing days sent some words of advice. I had to look in the mirror each morning, she wrote, and remember who I am and the experiences that have shaped me.

Remember the Raybestos Corporation that built our neighborhood baseball field out of a mix of soil and asbestos--a toxic concoction that caused cancer in many of my friends. Remember my shock when I learned years later that Raybestos had known the dangers all along yet never warned us as we were grabbing our gloves for a pick-up game. Remember the outrage which prompted me to dedicate my life to protecting working families from irresponsible institutions. Remember who I am.

This advice sounds basic, but it is very important. As I meet voters around the district, I am constantly being told it is quite difficult to distinguish among the candidates in this race. It is an understandable dilemma. In the Democratic primary, voters are being presented with 10 capable candidates who share many of the same views on the major issues. In fact, most of us have worked with one another on various efforts throughout the years.

But there are substantial differences. While most candidates are pitching themselves as "fighters," I have actually gone to Washington and fought to get a piece of legislation through Congress--the landmark Superfund law which paid for the clean-up of toxic waste sites all across the nation.

While many claim that they care about labor issues, I am the only candidate who was selected by the AFL-CIO to investigate the impact of so-called "maquiladores"--cross-border factories set up by American corporations to exploit low-cost Mexican labor and lax environmental enforcement. I am also the only candidate in the race who has officially refused to take money from political action committees.

If you attend any of the public forums being held throughout the district, you will probably hear someone say they "want to be your voice in Congress." I look at it a bit differently. Too many politicians begin to believe their own hype, begin to believe they can "own" an issue which a community has been dealing with for years. It is one thing to be a strong advocate but quite another to try to become the issue itself.

I want Washington to hear from my friends in Eastie who have spent decades dealing with near-deafening noise from Logan Airport. Let them see the inhalers of those children in Roxbury and Dorchester whose chance of getting asthma is five times greater than those living elsewhere in the state.

I have lived in Central Square for almost 20 years and want the powers-that-be to hear my neighbors explain the difficulties they face due to sky-rocketing housing costs. I want Congress to be accountable to those students who want to teach after graduation but cannot because of a combination of huge college loans and low starting salaries for teachers.

To pass the Superfund legislation in the 1980s, we had to organize a national grass-roots coalition of more than 1,000 organizations to overcome the objections of Ronald Reagan and a Republican Senate. The primary lesson I learned from that battle was that power comes from the exercise of collective action. It is this belief in what people can do when they work together, and my personal experiences mobilizing and organizing, which I hope to bring to Washington.

I know that progressive change is possible if we can shake up Washington with a little grass-roots spirit. Together, we can achieve health care for all, establish positive "town-gown" relationships, protect Social Security from those who wish to sell it off to Wall Street and let right-wing Republicans know that we consider our children's education to be quite a bit more important than a dozen F-10 fighter jets.

John O'Connor, a Cambridge resident, is a community and environmental activist. The Democratic primary will be held Sept. 15.