Published: On The Line, Number 1, n.d.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
Copyright: This work is in the Public Domain under the Creative Commons Common Deed. You can freely copy, distribute and display this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit the Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line as your source, include the url to this work, and note any of the transcribers, editors & proofreaders above.
Since this is the first issue of ON THE LINE we want to share with you our reasons for putting out this paper.
When we look around we see that most people are unhappy with their personal lives, their jobs, their schools, and their government. Except for a small group of businessmen from rich corporations who have all the power in this country, most people feel that their lives are being wasted and that they don’t have any power to change things.
We don’t think that it’s surprising that most people feel that way. We are living in a country that has a lot of wealth, but the men who control that wealth make sure that everyone else works for them. They use their schools, their factories, their TV stations, and their courts to make sure that they keep their wealth and power and keep everyone else powerless.
Under the present system nearly everybody loses. While some people get cheated worse than others, they all get the short end of so that the corporations can make more money.
People in poor countries like Vietnam and the Dominican Republic are cheated when American corporations steal their natural resources.
Black people in this country are cheated when they are kept from getting good jobs, good houses, and good health care, because it is profitable for capitalists to have an oversupply of unskilled desperate labor.
Women are cheated when they are trained their whole lives to view themselves only as prospective wives and mothers with no minds or judgments of their own so that they will do for free all the work of child raising and housework and still be available as low-paid part time labor.
People who work in factories and offices are cheated when they work long hours at boring jobs (sometimes very dangerous) which dull their senses and make them feel as if they were machines, and then find that only the people at the top benefit from their labor.
While power now rests in the hands of a very few people, the real power in any country rests in the hands of all its people.
Of course it isn’t easy to unite. All our lives we’ve been told that we’re separate and different from everyone else. When we have a problem, we’re told it’s our problem and taught to view people in other groups suspiciously. For these reasons people who should be uniting keep fighting and opposing each other. The people who run this country want it that way: they tell us that the only way we can be worth anything is to be better than someone else. In order to get us to accept the fact that they have power and we don’t, they encourage divisions among us to make us feel as if we weren’t deprived, as long as there is someone worse off.
Newspapers like the Post and the Globe serve the interests of the corporations by encouraging people to fight each other and not to blame the powerful men who are really responsible for the suffering in this country. By ignoring the real causes of our problems, these newspapers try to fool us into believing their picture of the world – a picture we know is a lie.
They try to hide what the corporations do by telling us to blame workers for inflation, students for the war, people on welfare for high taxes, black people for crime, etc. In their eyes we are the “little people”, who have no interests of our own, which are in conflict with the interests of the rich. As a result we get an image of ourselves as basically invisible and unimportant; except when they try to get us against each other by calling black people “militants”, workers “hardhats”, students “hippies”, women “bra-burners”, and everyone else “the silent majority”.
In this way, newspapers never give us a true picture of the society or of our lives. Instead of being a voice for the people, for the way we seek things, newspapers translate our lives into the terms which benefit the corporations.
We want to focus in this newspaper on problems that are not distant from everybody’s life – problems that we face every day, like health care, housing conditions, welfare, and the way government decisions are made. We hope this paper will be part of a growing movement of women and men in St. Louis, beginning to find our own solutions to these problems.
Contributions from many different groups are needed in order to reflect these kinds of changes.
And we need to hear from you about what information in this newspaper you feel is or isn’t relevant to your life. Only with your comments, contributions, and criticisms can this paper begin to express the needs and struggles of the people of St. Louis.