I wanted to thank Ms. Flanagan for having the courage to tell a great story and not be encumbered by the need to be politically correct. My only complaint is that she did not finish her heroic tale of that little Latino boy forced to be a indentured servant for the eco-elite. I was so inspired, I felt compelled to finish the boy’s story…

Imagine the boy bends down to pick the lettuce in the school garden as he realizes he is more knowledgeable about earth science and all other matters that comprise the political, scientific, aesthetic, environmental, and economic aspects of food production than his Anglo counterparts.

Despite being told by Lou Dobbs-loving people like Ms Flanagan that he is defined by the denigrated treatment he gets at the hands of Big Ag, which withholds decent wages and working conditions from his father, he realizes his father and he are in fact learned people in earth science and that he can teach the children of the racist class, represented by Ms. Flanagan as his Anglo/Shakespeare-loving superiors, about science, nutrition, self-sustained learning, and the realities of capitalist exploitation of all children via the food industry. Like Shakespeare, he can use his prose and spoken word to bring together children across class and ethnic lines and promote the truths of the human condition, like the maltreatment they receive at the hands of the powerful, for example, the food industry that promotes their malnutrition, brain-washing by advertisement, and food and nutrition illiteracy.

In the garden, the Latino boy, not Ms. Flanagan’s children, is the leader,  and in the garden, he shows Ms Flanagan he is so much more than she can imagine him to be. Of course as he does, Ms Flanagan is there to ensure that the garden is “really” and “always” the place of his oppression. He is not believed to be the leader he becomes in the garden. For as Ms. Flanagan’s inferior farmer,  the boy knows nothing of Cesar Chavez, and is in need of her Anglo salvation, conversion to Shakespeare (which must never had been translated to the Spanish language because it must not speak to/be valued by cultures besides those who are “English-speaking”).

I want to thank Ms. Flanagan for being entirely predictable. I am sure that she will be quoted on Fox news as a legitimate media persona and that her op-ed, which has no requirement to be coherent, accurate and informed by facts on any level, will be represented in the exploitive circles in which she runs as a “news” story that runs counter to the efforts of poor and working-class people who make up the urban agricultural movement in such “bourgeois” establishments as Sustainable South Bronx, Growing Power in Milwaukee, The Ella Baker Center in her beloved California and The Common Ground Collective in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward.

Absent in her paranoid rant is the reality that people of color originated farming as a means to education, liberation, and transformation of the white oppression that so wickedly annihilated history in Ms. Flanagan’s piece. For, in fact, Latinos and Americans of African decent and farmers from all parts of the world, are the real founders of the American Urban Garden movement, not Alice Waters. In fact, urban gardeners in today’s America stand on the work of the likes of George Washington Carver, Ella Baker and Benjamin Banneker, who must have undergone a reverse time warp exploitation by that 1990s slave-maker, Waters. In Flanagan’s racist worldview, people of color could not have originated and utilized in a self-determined way, the education-agriculture nexus  as a way of instructing children in the United States.

Bruno Oriti
Highland Park, NJ