The World Is Yours!
Issue #7
The Elders Issue
December 1997

This issue of the 'zine is dedicated to the memory of Pat Sumi, Activist, Mother. 1944-1997.

"Past, Present, and Future"

"I think that part of the problem goes back to the fact that we were so busy trying to choose a model to follow that we weren't paying attention to what the United States was or studying the United States as closely as we should have. I think that was the real problem, so you could argue forever about minute ideological points with no empirical evidence to back up one point of view or another."

-Pat Sumi, on some of the problems in the American Left during the Sixties and Seventies

A few months ago, we in the Asian American Movement lost a great friend and activist, when Pat Sumi died after a long battle with cancer. Most people in the current generation of activists didn't know her, but she was a powerful player in the movement of the sixties and seventies with some amazing lessons and stories about those times. From her early years in the civil rights movement to her years organizing active duty soldiers in Camp Pendleton against the Vietnam War, she made a strong commitment to the principles of equality and anti-imperialism a living reality, actualized through her work. Later in the movement she had an opportunity to visit North Korea, China, and North Vietnam, as members of an antiwar delegation organized by Eldridge Cleaver, of the Black Panther Party. Even further, she was one of the original people to help develop Asian American Studies, and to put in the work necessary to help the discipline to gain legitimacy.

With her passing, it has become absolutely clear how necessary it is for us in the community to learn the lessons that we need to learn about ourselves and our struggles from those elders in the community who have fought before us. We need to learn these lessons in order to place our current work in the context of the larger Asian American Movement. Even further, we need to talk with our elders in order to see what things worked in their struggles, and which questions we will need answer in the coming years in relation to our movements for change in America. In this way, we can hopefully learn from the past in order to build from what has already been done instead of having to reinvent the wheel every generation.

In the current situation, we have to look at our elderly community here in Amerika and recognize that if we do not do anything to look after them, than no one else will. With the government's newly placed restrictions on immigrants' benefits and its' attacks on welfare, our senior citizens will be the most hard hit by these cutbacks, and will have the fewest resources available to them. Many of our elderly already are surviving solely on social security checks and whatever benefits they can eke out. With these impending cuts, we can only anticipate greater hardships for our elderly.

So whether we are fighting for bilingual rights, for immigrants' rights, for the rights of Filipino Veterans, or for a stop to the attacks on welfare, we must firmly keep in mind the people who we are working for. They are the elderly in our communities. They are the ones who made it possible for us to be here today. They are the people.

All Power to the People!

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