CARBONDALE, IL—The “Babes of Wrath” tour of the southwestern states, a 5,000 mile journey to raise community awareness of homelessness, especially its effects on children and families, is taking Diane Nilan and Pat LaMarche along the same route John Steinbeck’s Okies traveled in his novel “The Grapes of Wrath.”
Documenting as they go, they’ll also be screening Diane’s film “My Own Four Walls” in which homeless youth speak about homelessness. In 2005 while Diane was working with 305 schools in the Chicago area, she realized that school personnel didn’t understand the issues affecting homeless kids in their communities and consequently these kids were being denied entry.
So she decided to make a film. After a grant fell through, she was so committed to the issues and to getting the film made to raise awareness that she sold her townhouse and started a non-profit homeless children’s advocacy group, Hear Us, Inc., purchased a motorhome and hit the road, traveling 20,000 miles around the country to film the stories of homeless children.
She returned to northern Illinois where Professor Laura Vasquez, Northern Illinois University, worked with her to create “My Own Four Walls.” Since then they have made other films, one of which, “On the Edge: Homelessness in America,” was screened and won here at Southern Illinois University’s Big Muddy Film Festival in Feb., 2012. That is how I first heard of Diane and her quest.
Pat LaMarche is Diane’s cohort on the tour, having made two previous journeys through, in her words, the backstreets, wooded camps, and homeless shelters of America’s poor. Pat also was the Green Party’s VP candidate alongside David Cobb in the 2004 electoral race. As Pat remarks in her Jan. 22, 2013 Huffington Post article “…there’s even more need for this latest EPIC Journey than there was when I first went out in 2004…” She goes on to say if President Obama had been more “brutally honest” in his Inaugural Address, he might have stated: “Hey, I don’t know if you noticed this or not, but you aren’t supposed to be slaves anymore. Not you poor white folk any more than you poor Black folk. Not you mommas and not you babies. Not you veterans and not you elderly. You aren’t supposed to be making a substandard minimum wage, feeding yourselves with food stamps and praying the sore on the bottom of your foot isn’t a sign of something worse —something you cannot afford to have treated. And you sure as heck aren’t supposed to be living that way while the CEO of your power retail store or fast food employer makes 380 times what you do.”
Pat ends her article with the following: “One thing is certain. When anyone — even the president – speaks to “you” about being poor, at least 1 in 6 of “you” in this wealthy nation already know what he’s talking about, because “you” are the poor. And if we are the nation our ancestors fought a civil war to ensure, then “you” is “we” and we are the poor.”
Follow the dynamic duo on their Facebook page EPIC Journey, check out their blogs at www.alternet.org and Huffington Post, or contact www.hearus.us or 928-774-1103 to set up a showing in your community. View trailers for the films and travel itinerary at www.hearus.us/
Cathy Talbott is a former telephone operator, a job lost to automation. She was a homeless mother of two and fights for welfare rights. A former co-host of a weekly community radio program out of Carbondale, IL, “Occupy the Airwaves,” Cathy is the Environmental Desk for the People’s Tribune.
