We must be pretty well organized, or we must be
forgetting something, because here we are a week
before the action with time to spend at the Life
After Capitalism conference, thinking about ideas
and theories and future visions.
So while my friends at home say, “Take care of
yourself” with that worried tone in their voices,
I’m actually having a great time in a very New
York way, listening to smart and inspiring people
talk, and having lots of interesting conversations.
And in spite of the media smear campaign and
the police’ claim to be shadowing every dangerous
anarchist in town, none of us actually seem to
be being followed. Nor are the police harassing
us. In Miami, activists were followed for weeks
beforehand, arrested on the sidewalk while going
to meetings or handing out flyers, and you could
feel the surveillance like the Red Eye of Sauron,
always watching. Here, the city seems quite normal,
and the occasional cop we pass on the street is
smiling and friendly.
Still, there’s an aura of fear that people seem
to have internalized. Martin, who is one of the
Argentines hear to present on their social revolution,
remarks on it. We’re talking in Spanish so I’m
sometimes missing the nuances, but he’s saying
how you can feel the fear, coming into the city,
and how it’s a kind of fascism, the level of control,
the media campaigns. I suggest that its internalized
fascism—not the cop snatching you off the sidewalk
but the cop inside your head who says, “Don’t
protest, don’t say anything, don’t do anything
to upset the situation.” Some people are leaving
town because they are afraid of terrorist attacks
and some because they are so afraid that Bush
will get re-elected that they fear any sort of
street disturbance will be spun toward his good.
But obviously I don’t think so. Or rather, I
can acknowledge the fear and the real possibility
that anything we do or don’t do can be spun to
his advantage, but it seems clear to me that fear
and timidity are what maintain his—or anyone’s-oppressive
power. The Democrats have been timid for years,
have avoided openly challenging him, have predicated
their whole strategy on what their pollsters tell
them somebody else thinks.
Somewhere, somehow, we have to stop adapting to
what we think someone else might think about what
might possibly happen, and just do what we think
is right. It’s not the government or the cops
on the streets or the New York Post that shut
us up, it’s the cops and the Karl Roves inside
our head who steal our will and our voices.
In the Friday panel, Michael Albert posed the
question, “What kind of movement would we have
today if everyone who was touched by it from the
sixties on had stayed in it?” And why didn’t
they—perhaps because while we talk about another
form of social relations, we didn’t always practice
them in our organizing and our institutions. Or
maybe it’s just damn hard for people to get along
with each other, and they can do it for awhile,
and begin great new things, and then they stop
being able to do it and what they try to create
falters. Or maybe we’re still just learning.
Then Naomi Klein talked about what’s really happening
in Iraq, and brought home the seriousness of the
attacks of the last weeks when I’ve hardly had
time myself to read the papers or let the horror
in. It’s as if we’ve been fighting inside the
Sistine Chapel or the Holy Mount, desecrating
the sacred city of Iraq. She told tales of soldiers
fighting among the graveyards, mortars ploughing
corpses and bodies startled out of the earth to
leap aloft in starbursts of bone and embalmed
flesh. On the graves are pictures of the dead,
and the shells shatter the pictures. I’m thinking
of a home in Jenin that we visited after the Israeli
military had shelled it, standing in the rubble
and dust that filled the living room, chips of
concrete all over the floor and sofa and twisted
rebar pushing up out of the walls, and on the
floor, a picture of the son of the house with
his little children, shot full of bullet holes.
The soldiers had shot the picture, his father
said. They had shot the son two months before,
and now, he said, it was as if they had killed
him twice.
And the soldiers in the graveyard said that sometimes,
sometimes, it didn’t seem right. We need to keep
Iraq front and center, Naomi said, to be in active
solidarity with the Iraqi resistance, who are
fighting for radical like holding actual elections
and getting the occupation out.
Then this morning Scotty and I gave our permaculture
training. Scotty brought in a worm bin and we
had people sorting the worms from their castings,
getting their hands dirty amidst all the intellectual
discourse. I showed slides of all our Green Bloc
permaculture actions and it was so good to see
images of all that green. A man came in and sat
down who had what my Vietnam Veteran friend Lawrence
calls the thousand-yard-stare, that faraway look
as if your eyes were fixed on some horror no one
else can see. He had bad teeth and his head and
his words kept jerking away as if were hard to
stay still, stay focused. He is a veteran, named
David, just back from Iraq. In four days of fighting
in Fallujah, his unit had a 67per cent casualty
rate. He was lucky, he tells me, he had a good
wound, shot in the ass, his hip broken, his wife
was sobbing and grateful after months of snatched,
hideously expensive phone calls, “I’m alive.”
“I’m alive.” “At this moment, I’m still alive.”
He used to run a business, he tells me, he’s a
plumber, electrician, now he can’t work, his mind
won’t function, but he’s organizing other veterans
in the South Bronx and he’s very excited by permaculture.
They’ve squatted a building because many of them
have no homes. They don’t get paid enough overseas
to support their families, and they come home
to no jobs or jobs they can’t do because they
have lost a limb or they’re in a wheelchair or
they simply can’t focus through the thousand yard
stare. And they’ve got the violence locked inside
them and it comes out on their wives, they’re
shooting up and drinking to dull the pain, and
they need food. They need jobs. They need to
be able to walk in the door and say, “I’m home
from work.”
I knew it was bad, but not this bad. I can say
honestly that I did everything within my power
to prevent this war, and I lost. We all lost.
But now David’s teeth are rotting from the toxins
in the Iraqi soil left over from our depleted
uranium bombs in the first Gulf War and the ones
we’ve dropped since and the awful food the army
served them and they’ve closed the Veteran’s Hospital
and they’ve got to wait months and months to even
see a social worker. And he, mind you, is one
of the victors.
He didn’t sign on to kill Iraqis, he joined the
National Guard because he wanted to fight fires
in California, and help people. Most of his guys
are Green Card soldiers, they signed up to get
a Green Card, maybe go to school, but now they’re
not going to school, they can’t think, can’t focus,
can’t see beyond the pain.
“And who are we now?” he asks. “I guess we’re
activists—what does that mean?”
There are things that are so wrong they go beyond
normal anger or rage. “I’m angry,” Naomi says
in a soft voice that doesn’t change expression.
“I’m so angry.” I’m angry, too. And anger is
healing, and powerful. Anger is the life force
responding to a threat. Anger cuts through fear.
David and his guys are not afraid. They are
dying, and know it, he tells me. They are already
in a hell beyond what most of us can imagine.
What do we owe them, and what do we owe those
on the receiving end of their firepower, the living
and the dead victims of the guns placed in their
hands by those who will meet in that convention
hall next weekend?
The very least we owe them is to not be afraid.
To not let our voices and our anger be silenced.
To speak the truth. To do what we think is right.
To donate money for the groups on the ground organizing
the actions at the Republican National Convention,
send a check earmarked ‘RNC’ to:
RANT
1405 Hillmount St.
Austin, Texas
78704
U.S.A.
Or see the donation page on Starhawk’s website.
For more information on permaculture/activism
trainings with Starhawk, see earthactivisttraining.org.
Spaces are still available for the upcoming sessions
September 8-22, 2004, and January 16-30, 2005.
Location: Northern California.