Saturday coffee.

I’m in DC this Saturday morning. Coffee at the Wardman Park Hotel.

A plaque by my hotel elevator says that one day in 1925 the poet Vachel Lindsay was dining in the hotel restaurant. An African-American working as a bus boy handed him some copies of his poems. Lindsay, impressed with the quality of the work, passed the work on. The African-American working as a bus boy was Langston Hughes.

I’m attending and speaking on a panel for Save Our Schools, an organization of teachers, educators, parents and education activists. No deep pocket corporations or foundations are footing the bill. Everyone, including me, is here on their own dime.

This morning I spoke on a panel on unions along with Dr. Michael Walker Jones, Executive Director of the Louisiana Association of Educators and Xian Barrett a teacher and CTU activist.

The breakout room was full of union leaders, union activists and rank-and-file members.

The topic was union voice and teacher voice within the union.

I would be less than frank if I didn’t say that SOS, which drew several thousand to Washington for a demonstration last summer, has not been very inclusive in the past when it came to the issue of unions and the defense and expansion of collective bargaining rights.

I came this year because it appears that lack of inclusiveness has changed. The interest in our panel was a clear indication of that.

Tomorrow there will be a continuation of the discussion leading to an action statement.

It may very well focus on support for the current Battle of Chicago, between the Chicago Teachers Union and Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s hand-picked board of education.

As I said in my presentation, everybody claims to be ground zero in the fight against corporate reform, privatization and the assault on collective bargaining rights.

And perhaps everyone is.

Yet, certainly all eyes are on Chicago.

Friends from all over the country are talking to me about coming to Chicago to support the teachers if it comes to a strike.

Won’t that be an interesting picture on the front page of newspapers right in the middle of a national election? Tens of thousands of teachers in the streets of Chicago from all over the country in a city with a Democratic Mayor, former Chief of Staff for the incumbent President.