Everywhere we go
People want to know
Who we are
So we tell them
We are the people
Rural people
We are the workers
PCUN workers
We walk for truth
We walk for justice
Started in Salem
Walking to Portland
Spoke to the Governor
Spoke the truth
Bring the Guard home
Don’t waste our youth
Went to Canby
The people did say
We got emergencies
Here today
Got to Portland
Hundreds strong
Marched on Gordon
Gordon’s wrong
Crossed the bridge
We’re on our way
Building the movement
It’s a brand new day
Si se puede
Si se puede
We are the people
Rural people
We are the workers
PCUN workers
We walk for truth
We walk for justice
Lyrics by Dan Leahy, composed and belted out by marchers on the Walk for Truth, Justice, and Community, June 2005
When I first met Dan it was through an email offering to bring students from his Marching class at Evergreen down to join us on our Walk for Truth, Justice, and Community. And that is what he did, joining small town and rural organizers from the Rural Organizing Project and PCUN en route from Salem to Portland, Oregon during the summer of 2005. To my knowledge, the March was the beginning of his time supporting and engaging with our organizing in rural Oregon, which led to a speaking tour on lessons from Populist rural organizing in the 1920s, a keynote address at our annual Rural Caucus and Strategy Session on the lessons from the Gulf Coast post Hurricane Katrina, and many board meeting discussions imaging a West Coast training center and other ideas to strengthen our movement building and advance economic justice.
What I watched Dan do, as a younger organizer, that I appreciate even more today, was humbly enter a space with curiosity and encouragement, and then continue to show up and bring his ideas, connections, insightful research, and creativity into the conversations that were being had, or needed to be had. Sometimes they were well received and uplifted, other times not as much, but regardless he stayed present and gave freely what he had to offer. He listened deeply in order to understand, his filter was the community and movement, not his personal stake, and his rudder seemed to follow his own compass, and that led him in the more interesting and genuine direction.
For me, Dan was an important connection to the kind of movement building I want to be part of, a bridge between earlier organizing history and strategy to movements close to home and around the world today. I think he built that bridge with his humanity and compassion. He knew so much, and shared that knowledge, but he seemed to understand that it mattered because each of us are important; whether our lives are full and happy and healthy is the ultimate measure of whether our liberation movements are winning. So how we do what we do, with love and joy and kindness, is truly important.
Being Dan’s friend, getting to share time with he and Bethany, gather in community with hopes and plans for the better world we are building, receiving Dan’s emails with his latest research and updates, reflections and poems, travel notes and the occasional postcard was a gift, an invitation to dig deeper and map the connections, to follow the money and follow our hearts, to live with as much humanity as we can. I will miss Dan, and hear his laugh when I think about him. It really was the best laugh.
