05/01/07 May Day & immigration

Today is the first of May. May Day to many of us that remember the tradition of making and sending May Baskets. A bit of colored paper rolled into a cone stuffed with a few pieces of candy and some lilacs or jonquils and placed on someone specials door step. What happened to that lovely innocence? I'd love to hear your May Day memories. Email me at gmartin@aginfo.net. May Day has more recently become a day to raise awareness over the need for fair and balanced reform of federal immigration laws. Immigration March's will take place nationwide. Matt Adams, Interim Director with Northwest Immigrant Rights Project says the marches are about awareness. ADAMS: The basic mission of our organization is to advance the rights of our immigrant community here in the United States. A big part of this march is to try to bring more attention and more awareness that there's a lot of pressing needs out there for the immigrant community that need to be addressed. Marches are planned in Seattle, Portland and Yakima, Washington with smaller marches planned in other local communities. Now with today's Food Forethought, here's Susan Allen. Remember the Keep America Beautiful campaigns? Back in the 70's, Keep America Beautiful became our mantra symbolized by the famous "Crying Indian" ads. Today, we can't even utter the word "Indian" for fear of being labeled "politically incorrect" and the Keep America Beautiful slogan seems as archaic as the ozone layer. Yet apparently this non profit group is still reported to be our nation's largest volunteer community action and education organization. Last Tuesday they launched a new campaign at Times Square using a geeky superman type character called the KABman. I wasn't impressed after visiting him at kabman.org., but I admit, I am not their target. The campaign is geared towards 20 something's supposedly overwhelmed with big bad environmental issues like global warming, so according to the ad agency that designed KABman, 20 something's will visit this "semi competent" cartoon man online to learn how to they can make America beautiful. I think the old Indian, oops Native American, would be shedding another tear over this new campaign. Thanks Susan. That's today's Northwest Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.