The BobboSphere: Don't believe everything you think.

I  was born in DC and was a baby and toddler at 13th and Clifton NW.  We eventually moved out of inner city DC into the working class Glenmont  area of suburban Maryland. I stayed there from 1951-1961. In  the summer of 2005, I walked through my old neighborhood to see how it was doing.

My partner Estelle Carol and I emerged from the cool semi-darkness of the Glenmont, Maryland Metro station into the blazing August sun. Glenmont  sure looked different from the newly bulldozed subdivision that had been cut out of the rolling hills of the Piedmont in the early 1950's. Back then, Georgia Avenue was a two lane country road narrow enough that I could bomb commuter cars with pine cones from a tree limb that stretched over the southbound lane from the adjacent Denley farm.

The good ole USA is arguing about immigration again. Well it's not the first time. In fact people on this continent have been debating immigration since before was a USA. Just ask the Piscataway, the Pocomoke, the Accohannock, or the Nanticoke (all of them Indian nations situated in what is now the East Coast of the USA).

We drew this cartoon in reaction to the racist harassement over at West Suburban Hospital here in the Village of Oak Park IL. Black and Latin workers in the housekeeping department at West Sub have been subjected to unfair discipline and even firings to silence their protests over discriminatory treatment. Their supervisor favors the white workers with better assignments, less work and more flexible schedules.

As a kid and well into my college years, going to YMCA Camp Letts near the Chesapeake Bay was one of my central life experiences. One of those experiences was confronting Dixie style segregation. YMCA Camp Letts sits at the end of a peninsula jutting out into the Rhode River near Edgewater, Maryland. On a clear day, you can see all the way to where the South River meets the Chesapeake Bay. The camp was established in 1906 and has been in its present location since 1922. Many of the counselors came from local Maryland colleges, especially the University of Maryland at College Park. Generations of DC area kids have sailed its waters, hiked its trails, played Capture the Flag, sat around campfires, short-sheeted one another and told dirty jokes after lights out. It has also served as an adult conference center and outdoor education center for school kids. I first attended Camp Letts in 1957 at the age of 9. Then it was racially segregated, not uncommon in the Maryland of that time. The Chesapeake Bay beaches near Camp Letts where my parents took me for weekend outings were White Only as were many public acomodations and restaurants. But the Civil Rights Movement was on the march and the walls of Jim Crow were falling.

So who is this guy? Well, my name is Bob "Bobbo" Simpson. That photo was taken a few years back when I worked as a summer trail crew volunteer in New Mexico.

Workers at Chicagoland's Resurrection hospital chain have been battling management for the past several years as part of an AFSCME Council 31 effort to organize what was once a group of charity hospitals run by impoverished orders of nuns. There are still nuns on the governing board, but they are hardly impoverished: Sr. Sally Marie Kiepura earned a $317,633 annual salary in 2005. If you walk into any Resurrection hospital, one can see the religious paraphenalia from its Catholic past. If Jesus were alive today though, he would take out that whip of his and drive these moneychangers from the health care system of Illinois. Resurrection has sued poor people for hospital bills and has fired workers who have spoken up against the deteriorating working conditions that have accompanied a drop in the quality of patient care. At our local West Suburban Hospital, management has pursued a nasty racist campaign against Black and Latin housekeeping workers who have dared to speak out. This has led to several demonstrations at the hospital. As a representative of the Oak Park community, I gave a short speech at an AFSCME organized "Funeral of Racism" that included a Dixieland Jazz band and a NOLA style funeral march. My speech follows: