Occupy Elgin will gather on Saturday, November 26th at the corner of Kimball Street and Grove Avenue in Elgin from 1 PM till 2 PM. Our message will be

WE WILL NOT BE SILENCED!

Below is the text of the flyer we will distribute.
We are shocked and saddened by the recent election. But we will continue to stand up for peace and diplomacy along with racial, economic, gender, social, and environmental justice. These are moral commitments, and we will not back down from them.

We celebrate the greatness of America in the enormous diversity of our population, in our constitution and bill of rights which gave citizens protections against tyranny, and in the proud history of the social movements which fought to expand that citizenship and those protections to groups that had previously been excluded, oppressed and even enslaved.

We reject the notion that America’s greatness requires machismo leadership or a sneering rejection of people whose ethnic background or religion is different. We stand in solidarity with immigrant communities, Muslims, and LGBT people as well as with those in the Movement for Black Lives. We call for comprehensive immigration reform.

We anticipate attacks on first amendment rights like freedom of speech and the press, and attacks on specific religions. These rights were already deeply compromised because of the “war on terrorism” but must now be even more fiercely defended.
We anticipate attacks on our already minimal social safety net, including on Social Security and Medicare. We call for expanding that safety net with a Single Payer health care system, and a Guaranteed Annual Income. We support the rights of working people to organize unions, and to strike for a living wage. We support reproductive rights for women.

We anticipate attacks on the EPA, the Clean Power Act, and the Paris Climate Accords. We will not only defend those measures but call for a WW II scale effort to keep fossil fuels in the ground, slash greenhouse gas emissions, retrofit our buildings and our cities, and build a smart grid, high speed rail and abundant renewable energy. In the face of the climate crisis we will continue to fight for a livable world for coming generations.

We anticipate a call to spend more on our already bloated military, and a further militarization of both our foreign policy and domestic policing. We call for a sharp reduction in military spending. We already spend more than any other country, more than the next seven countries combined. All that spending has not made us safer. The Patriot Act has made us less free. The militarization of domestic policing has been counter-productive and done terrible damage to our social fabric. We need a complete reversal of those policies.

We will a meeting to discuss the implications of the election and how we can constructively respond to it.  That’s on Saturday, December 10th, 2016, 1 PM till 3 PM.  Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren, 783 W. Highland Avenue, Elgin, 60123.