Congress needs to get these bills passed. And there are thousands of community members and many, many strong organizations, everyone from the Christian Coalition to Free Press to the Future of Music Coalition to Consumers Union and many, many other groups, are letting people know that these bills are on the table. Once these bills are passed, the FCC will announce a licensing window, when any noncommercial group, whether you’re a community church, a department of transportation, a chamber of commerce or a school, you can talk to the FCC, fill out your form and get a free license, in order to serve your community with essential information.

One of the stories I really like to tell is of WQRZ-LP in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. When Hurricane Katrina made landfall at ground zero, basically, in Waveland and in Bay St. Louis in Hancock County, of the forty-one stations lining the Mississippi and Louisiana Gulf Coast, only a handful stayed on the air, and WQRZ-LP, this low-power noncommercial station, was one of them. When this station was broadcasting about the storm, local volunteers swam across the floodwaters with batteries strapped to their back to keep the station on the air. It was the only source of local information for forty-eight hours after the storm, and because it was so essential, the Emergency Operations Center of Hancock County set up shop with that station and became the FEMA headquarters, and it got a commendation from the President.

These stations not only save lives, but are deeply relevant to their communities. If you’re a farmworker community and you speak Zapotec and Quiche as your primary languages and Spanish as a second language, you can’t rely on Clear Channel, Viacom or Infinity for your news. In order to connect to your community, to organize for rights in the fields, you need your own community radio station, like Radio Consciencia of WCTI-LP in Immokalee, Florida, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ station. These stations are tools for social justice, and if we don’t take this chance to build them now, we’ll never forgive ourselves when we turn around in twenty years and hear the same corporate drivel and the same Christian right radio that we now have to abide by in our big cities and our small communities.