Green Party VP Cheri Honkala: “We Need Young People to Go Forward”

Green Party VP candidate Cheri Honkala visited Detroit this past Sunday, giving a multi-platform speech that called for movement building, whatever the outcome on Nov. 6. She raised, amongst other issues, the missing links in the Democrat and Republican presidential campaigns: the war on youth, the war on the poor, the wealth inequality, the environmental crisis, and the exclusion of alternative voices in the official debates. “We don’t have to participate in that box anymore,” she said. “There’s enough to go around for everybody—they just don’t mean us.” She also described being arrested and shackled for 8 hours with party nominee Jill Stein while attempting to enter the 2nd presidential debate at Hofstra University.

The event began as a potluck, hosted at the International Institute of Metro Detroit by the Green Party of Michigan, and coalesced into a night of stump speeches from several local Green Party candidates before Honkala took the stage.

Before driving back to Philadelphia, Honkala spent a few minutes talking to Truthout on her Detroit background as a welfare mother. “When you’re poor,” she said, “about the only thing that you have is your morale. And once you lose that, you’re done.” She also spoke on developing an international class identity, resisting the non-profit industrial complex, and building the inter-generational youth struggle for a dignified future, concluding: “It’s young people’s future that’s at stake, and so at the end of the day only the people inside the boxing ring should determine how to throw the punches.”