The Independent Weekly / Sept. 2, 2008
Growing up in Mount Airy, N.C., 26-year-old Jeremy Miller was a preacher's son for whom "standing up for what is right" meant voting for Republican candidates. He supported President Bush and shared his parents' belief, he says, that "America is based on Christianity and the war is just."
At 22, Miller started working at a Greensboro factory, loading boxes onto trucks. When he moved into a supervisory position, he says, he heard other managers discuss speeding up the line, or penalizing employees for not making production quotas. "They were talking about how we could squeeze every little bit out of the workers," he says. "Like they were animals."
That was the beginning of Miller's political transformation. He started reading Lenin and Marx, then realized he needed to do more. "As soon as you make that break, you want to fight for what you understand is right," he says. "Immediately, I wanted to get on the horse and do as much as I could." He got involved with Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a campus-based organization that calls for "revolutionary transformation" and takes its name from the group founded by Tom Hayden in the 1960s. Miller worked with the SDS chapter at UNC-Chapel Hill before moving to the mountains and becoming the regional coordinator at UNC-Asheville. Last month he helped organize a rally after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raided Mills Manufacturing, an Asheville-area defense contractor that makes parachutes, and arrested 57 immigrants on charges of using falsified IDs.
This weekend, Miller and 17 others from Asheville drove to St. Paul, Minn., for an anti-war demonstration coinciding with the first day of the Republican National Convention. They joined a crowd estimated by the media at 10,000 people, who marched spiritedly from the Minnesota State Capitol to the Xcel Energy Center, where the GOP was getting ready to hear from Laura Bush and Cindy McCain.
Click here for the full story.
0 comments:
Post a Comment