Gulf Coast Peace Train
As I begin, I am exhausted. The tops of my ears are peeling from sunburn. Sitting here at this keyboard, one wonders if it was real. We just did something along the Gulf Coast with this march we spent the last two months coordinating, but I haven’t had time to reflect enough on it to see the different facets of what just happened. I just know something did. I hope others who participated, will read this and post comments to say what they think happened, because I wasn’t alone in thinking that something did.
We did not suddenly catalyze anything, but we also did not engage in some kind of action where each person’s responsbility was just to show up to enlarge a protest, then go home. Something with a longer lifespan than than has taken an embryonic form, and it feels tangible even when I haven’t had time to sort out exactly what it is. I already miss the people who were there.
We came to life each morning like a flower opening to the sun, steadily and gradually. Grumble’s cowboy-coffee container was a gravitational field that drew us in like particles from the multilucent peaks and domes of our tent-towns. With the first hot sips, people holding their bodies tightly against the chill shared their little experiences with fire ants, cold, heat, or something dislocative they might have seen the day before, and healed each other with laughter.
Then there was food and the resumption of conversations from the day before. More laughter. Occasionally, some tears, whereupon one, two, even three people might embrace. When one of the Iraq vets shed a tear, six, seven, or eight would fold around him… or her… as if their combined hearbeats and heat would drive out sadness and distress.
And the walking. There is nothing that compares to walking, in my opinion, for stimulating the circuits in one’s head; something about spinning the earth along under your feet like a log roller that creates a kind of muscular background music and the scenery that goes past becomes a spiritual setting. After a while, when the blisters and sore metatarsals and general fatigue take form, anything gradiose that might have contaminated one’s consciousness is trimmed away with the knowledge that in the end, it all comes down to bodies — to the limitations of bodies, the capacities of bodies, the caring for bodies, the recognition of bodies.
In a large group like this, from 120 to 300, pick you day — it fluctuated — one talks while s/he walks, listens, collects and offers little scraps of acquaintence that accumulate into nascent friendships… contextualized by that body-knowledge, by the rhythm of walking, by the rolling of the earth under our feet in the same direction, and by the steady stream of change that flows past us.
Even when that scenery is of loss and disorder.
Especially when that scenery is of loss and disorder.
And there was dancing. We danced down the Gulf Coast. Ask anyone who was there. We danced in Prichard. We danced along the highway during breaks when the Iraq vets would pull out their drums. We danced in a relief worker camp and in a soccer field. We danced down the streets of Slidell to drums, a tuba, and a tenor sax. We danced in Congo Square. We swayed and clapped to the sounds of church choirs.
We laid flowers below old photographs of the dead. We juggled. We ate gumbo and peanut-butter-jelly sandwiches. We talked to people with cameras and camcorders.
At one point, we had fifty vehicles in tandem, with two buses up front that made the queue look like a train. Each vehicle had its emergency flashers on, and other people passing in atomized cars would gawk and wave and honk horns and flash two-finger peace sings. Traffic management and preparation to simply move became monstrously complex.
But even that “glitch” suddenly revelaed itself as strength. I hated directing that traffic, but when I looked back down the shoulder of the road one day, and all those cars were lined up, it was apparent that we were showing our strength. We were a train, a peace train, and we started taking towns by simply moving in… cops were stunned and baffled, struggling to retain some semblence of control and authority, and we let them have it.
Did you get that? We LET them have it. Where was the power then, eh?
Every glitch, every last minute change, every late decision to follow some suggestion from a marcher, or a local survivor became something surprising and wonderful. We knoew where we wanted to begin and end, but the route was pure jazz… improvisation, with every marcher playing her or his part.
I haven’t sorted this out yet, but I will say this as I prepare to close and rest. We scared people. We publicized this event in ways that caused people to decide NOT to come. We warned about contamination, about austerity and physical effort, about weather and insects, and we said it would last for six days.
So those that came were young and old and everything in between, and black and white and everything in between, and rural and urban and everything in between, and northern and southern and everything in between, and even male and female identified along multiple continua. Buyt there was a common demographic… a personality demographic, or maybe a character demographic, held in common.
Everyone who came was willing to try something none of us completely understood. Everyone who came was willing to drop everything to do something they sensed might be important. Everyone who came was willing to accept risk. And everyone who came was willing to accept responsibility.
That’s what none of us who organized this could see clearly until it happened, because the phenomenon we just experienced was a collective dynamic that was the qualitative offspring of the quantity of people who have this common character.
I don’t know what we just did… except to put a couple hundred people outside their familiar surroundings, onto the margins of the grid, and move them cross country like a mechanized battalion through this incredibly strategic place.
I know this. We are not done yet.
Stan:
I was just re-reading Robert Biel’s “The New Imperialism – Crisis and Contradictions in North/South Relations” on the plane today; and he wrote about how the system is now divesting of so man social responsibilities that grassroots efforts are being forced to fill the gaps.
That about describes the Gulf Coast. But with the provision of services in those realms abandoned by the state, there is an opportunity to do more than merely respond to an emergency… and this is what Paul Robinson emphasized during the planning for this march.
“We can do this better than the government.”
It is in those activities that are not so thoroughly integrated into the conventional grids that we can gain footholds of political power. There are alternative cultures being built in New Orleans and elsewhere right now within the volunteer reconstruction efforts.
Service provision becomes community-building. The fight to defend the community, and to prevent its co-optation, gives the community a political character… because politics is the struggle for the acquisition and preservation of power.
The crisis-ridden world system we now see is not escaping from its own crises, it is exporting those crises to the less powerful. It is in the very genetic code of capital accumulation to articulate these crises. So in the sum of things, the dominant class will not push back these crises — for which the abandonment of social responsibility is symptomatic — but merely shift the increasing number and intensity of crises around. We have to begin to see this as an opportunity to occupy and establish popular democratic power within those voids as the basis for mounting a struggle for the total transformation of society.
The other thing I sensed from the march action itself was the spirit of going on the offense. This is incredibly important. Our movement must quit thinking defensively. There is something about going all that way that instills a certain confidence… like, if we can do this, why are we afraid of THEM?!
Who was it who said, “Don’t whine, organize!”? Mother Jones? (-:
20 March 2006, 9:49 pmDeAnander:
Welcome back Stan!
it is exporting those crises to the less powerful — of course it is, ducks, that’s what its core ideology requires, the “externalisation of costs” and the pretense that physics can be made a positive-sum game.
but the point I glean from your posting here is one to which I return again and again: there are two ways to conduct a revolution. one is to bulldoze the existing order and build anew on top of the rubble. historically this has not worked so well. the other is to grow new structures on the rusting armature of the old: to grow parallel and displacing structures. every revolutionary effort needs to supplant not only state control but state beneficence (such as it may be), and construct a parallel org chart; this was true of the Nazis, of the Cheney apparat with its “Office of Special Projects” and its thinktanks outflanking slightly more accountable institutional limbs. but what I suggest is not the plugnplay replacement of existing systems but growing something organic and complex in the interstices where the fabric of the dominant system has frayed away.
I have not thought this through but the half-bakery inside my head is using as yeast the TAZ concept, Amish communities, communes and the Mondragon movement, self-help urban projects like the LA people’s farm, the vast improvement in Cuban agriculture when the gov’t stopped trying to micromanage and Taylorise and gigantise production.
and John Ralston Saul’s recent cogent summary of the 30 year run of neolib theory and the conditions that gave it birth, breath, and traction. cf discussion over at ET on this article
I was in SF for demo 3/18, will try to put up a web page w/comments this week. the usual sectarian crowd, the usual wide range of dissidents from yuppies to Quakers to vets4peace… but a strong Pilipino/a youth presence — quite noticeable.
welcome back, you’ve been missed, is there a photo album page from the march yet?
20 March 2006, 10:09 pmJames M (documentarian):
I can’t say yet what the march accomplished in the external world, but in my own subjective realm, I can say it has been one of the most catalyzing events of my life.
I liked what you said about the reconnection, through the act of walking, to bodily awareness. In my own mind that extends to a new emphasis on primary, lived experience, on visceral understanding versus philosophical musing. Both have their place, but sometimes we put the cart before the horse and forget that observation must necessarily precede orientation in the OODA Loop of life, especially if we want the outcomes of our actions to conform to our goals.
One change that has come about in me as a result of this march is that henceforth, I won’t waste time in stagnant, polluted, airy realms of debate, far removed from the earthly realities we marchers observed and experienced, futilely responding to inane slogans parroted by propagandized drones.
“Better to fight them over there than here.†“Only cowards cut and run.†Et cetera, et cetera.
Those words are without meaning. They have no connection to reality. They are weightless compared to the gravity of what I heard from the vets, these people who have been too overwhelmed by the realities of trauma and grief and guilt and survival to enjoy the comfort afforded by rhetorical defense mechanisms. The Hannitys and Limbaughs who churn out such mass-broadcast memetic drivel live in fantasy castles in the clouds, built out of sophistry and conjecture. The veterans live in, and are haunted by, an earthly reality they know from direct experience.
What this portends is a shift from talking to doing, from facile commiseration among dispirited leftists to hard but rewarding work by a positively energized community. From talk-radio debates with right-wing ideologues to defiant displays of our long-latent power. Because as you said, Stan, we are in the majority!
21 March 2006, 12:21 amelaina:
Your stuff here keeps making me cry, Stan. In a good way, though. Keep it coming.
21 March 2006, 6:02 amStan:
Pics and blog journals at http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/ .
Minnie Bruce Pratt with WWP came and did a series of podcasts that can be found at http://www.workers.org
Video at http://www.neworleansvfp.org/taxonomy/term/63 .
The BBC will boradcast a 60-minutes-style 20-minute profile on this in the next day or so. Both the BBC people had tears in their eyes when they left, so closely had they come to identify with our people, the vets, families, and survivors.
We are going to start gathering more images and re-do the vetgulfmarch website to give folks an idea what happened, and we will be doing something soon on lessons learned.
James is right about that sense of defiance. Every time I announced that we were moving through an area WITHOUT permits, our people were not anxiously murmuring… they would whoop and cheer.
Off the defense and on the offense!
Very nice.
There is also a quality/quantity something-or-other about this… again, how we pulled in a character-demographic, and didn’t aim for raw numbers as a show of strength that could be declared hollow the next day. The ruling circles have discovered that in this period they can ignore even millions of demonstrators without much trouble… that they go home and behave themselves, or scratch their heads after each demo and ask themselves… what now? We have been asking ourselves for three years now how to break through that ability to ignore us on the one hand, and the inability and unwillingness of the broad masses to engage in what we conceive of as open rebellion and politico-economic disruption.
We need our own institutions… as De says, in the interstices abandoned by both the state and ruling-class civil society, and they have to be organic. Time to look over that Gramsci again, folks. Our own service provision, our own education, our own media, our own conflict resolution, our own juridical norms, our own medicine, our own logistics… beginning in those places that are most massively abandoned, like the Gulf Coast. CGC, PHRF and others are already establishing a new CULTURE that has staked out actual territory in NOLA, and the relationships that constitute the germ of community are being built. Once that community is built, we have already won in a real sense.
A sister on the march said that she sees the same circumstance writ small in Detroit… we can begin building these communities of support and resistance locally, everywhere. There is much to be said for mounting a nationwide struggle with local foci against gentrification (Google it). NOLA and the coast are now the grandest gentrification project in the history of the US. The struggle AGAINST gentrification is a DIRECT strruggle for self-determination right here in the US. This, along with counter-recruitment, puts us directly in the neighborhoods. The People’s Organization for Progress in Newark is a great example of what we can use.
Anyway, there are some thoughts.
21 March 2006, 9:02 amJuIian Real:
Dear Stan.
I am happy for your safe return, in a world that is anything but safe for most of us.
I am glad you were heartened by what you experienced, and energised, and “spirited” for lack of a better word.
I feel like screaming every day, every day: “the gross inhumanity and institutionalised atrocities we call Western civilisation is killing us all”, often slowly, often quickly”. I deal every day with real, suffering people. Nothing about this is abstract to me. My own PTS let’s me know what others are going through. I feel for the vet-victims, and civilian-victims of patriarchal-imperialist wars, and the survivors of rape, child molestation, incest, and the most dispossessed and silenced in the spirit-heart-mind-body destroying systems of sexxxual use and abuse called prostitution and pornography, sex tourism, sex trafficking, and sexual slavery.
Just last week I heard a story on CBS news that I thought I could bear but couldn’t/can’t: a child sex abuse/pornography ring was busted. (That’s the good part.) The perps were a network of adults sharing files of children being sexually assaulted, including a child under the age of two. I know this exists, that it is going on right now as I type this. But what I didn’t know was that they have been doing this “live-feed” to one another, through file-sharing, so they can watch each other sexually abusing children LIVE, in real time. And, of course, women are raped this way too, instantly made into pornography for “live” viewers online. How inhumane can the world become? We are witnessing it, if not participating in it.
I agree with Stan that the time for pontificating, sloganising, and over-analysing is over. Theory lives in our real-life stories. It is time to tell them. Men need to tell what they do to women and children. Women, too, need to tell what they do to children. They/we know what is done, we simply won’t talk about it. Women have been telling their truths for some time about what men have done to them, only to have their real life stories be fictionalised and dismissed by patriarchal theories and power. But if men told their own stories: yes, I raped her in this way, and raped that other woman in that way; yes, I fondled this child and got him to suck my dick (a male friend of mine just told me the details of his male babysitter sexually abusing him when he was six). I hear stories of women glared at in violating ways, spoken to in dehumanising ways, touched in assaultive ways, raped by “friends”, every week. Every week. No “freedom from harm” weeks are on the patriarchal calendar. Women cannot pass through the social world without being seen as being for sex, or too unattractive to be for sex. No woman I know can pass through one day without being sized up (by men) in terms of her capacity to give heterosexual men boners. (And yes, many gay men do this same “sizing up” of women, misogynistically.)
I was part of a discussion yesterday about the Nazi Holocaust, about how to make such atrocity real to school children. There is a film called “Paper Clips” which attempts to do this: a largely white, Christian town’s school system collected over the needed 11 million paper clips, each one symbolising one Jew, homosexual, Gypsy, or other targeted group member killed in the Nazi Holocaust.
As a Jew, a feminist, and an anti-racism activist-writer, I asked the moderator: “Are there also films being made about the 75 million Native Americans killed (not by that very bad man Hitler, but by U.S. presidents and other imperialist Americans?) Is there a film being made about the millions of women burned as witches in Europe and the U.S.? She answered me that yes, there were plans to do something about the “American” genocide, and to include the African slave trade/U.S. slavery history too. No mention about the gynocide, of course. But I was in a room of many dozens of 12-14 year old kids, and I thought I’d plant the seed: this happens to people in the U.S. too, folks, not just by that dead bad man called Hitler who lived “not here”. This happens to women every day, folks, all over the world. This happens to children too: they are worked, raped, and starved to death, globally.
There is no abstract theory needed to comprehend this. Just move out of denial, and believe those who speak of such atrocities, and speak out about those we have committed ourselves, against others, honestly.
There are bartering economies emerging in various towns and cities; rural folks have often worked things out that way: I give you eggs, you give me milk. There are alternative systems rising up out of dire necessity, due to governmental neglect and abuse. I applaud these efforts.
What horrifies me is that for all the talk about what needs to change, women are still invisibilised as a class of people being harmed systematically and atrociously. “The woman problem” is always placed on the back burner–to yet again simmer until evaporated in the body-minds of the masses, as if it was ever in those body-minds to begin with–named as such, responded to as such. I think all these matters need to be front burner. All of them, together.
21 March 2006, 2:32 pmMargaret Hayes:
Stan thank you for your hoarse throat and sweat and tears and sore feet. Thanks you for making this dream a reality. Thanks for they long exhausting days of directing fify zillion cars down the destroyed highway 90. We love you and I love you and I am so glad you did what you did and so glad that you are now home safe and sound in the living arms of your friends and family.
Hugs from Margaret
21 March 2006, 3:21 pmginni:
Stan,thank You for this.You said it~I also felt WE rolled the Earth,as we marched,and the Earth danced under our dancing feet.
FEARLESS~ WE don’t want the world they’re sellin’,and WE are not afraid to Create Our OWN..& WE did/will.Personally,I need to process Our adventures,overwhelmed, blissed OUT..
This IS truly a beginning place,& so,like the Creator,take the 7th day off, to reflect, renew, recuperate..it is important to debrief,decompress,& I know YOU know that. Please take some Time for YOU..drink hot peppermint tea,eat some ginger,put aloe on Your ears & wait for Spirit.;) Our Work is just beginning,& I am thrilled to be a part of it.
THIS is too big for me to wrap my head around,so I am just percolating on it,awhile. I don’t even want to unpack..might have to GO Somewheres! THIS was Precious, & Powerful stuff.
21 March 2006, 3:51 pmSweet Medicine,I’d say.~gin
Jeri L. Reed:
Well, I give up, I have so much to say but am just too exhausted still to write, so just wanted to check in and more later. Some people obviously have a lot more energy than I do.
But I do want to say that what was important about this march was the building of the human connection between us, which has been my own personal rampage for months and have been very frustrated as it seemed to fall on deaf ears. Movements are made up of human connections and don’t have any relationship to how much TV time you are able to get or how profound and important you think you are. Sometimes I think man, I am so lucky to have been part of real movements in my life, and am so glad to be part of this now. Sometimes I think, well, I’m almost glad Cody was in Iraq so that we have this place to be, but of course I am not really willing to go that far.
I do think it was the situation, but until now I think the focus has been off, real movements reach out to other people and draw them in and we just have not been doing that in my opinion. We live in a sick society, if the war in Iraq ended tomorrow it would be as sick as it is, and when you live in a sick society, you don’t adopt the methods they use, you don’t talk to people in scripted sound bytes. I thought one of the main points in all of the things on the website was that no one would be left behind, this might have been an unintentional comment, but it is very important. A real movement doesn’t leave anyone behind.
I have always heard all this talk about “different methods of protest”, but then have always wondered why the ones that didn’t work dominated. I have harped on this to no avail, as if I am just some kind of troublemaker, which probably I am but somebody’s got to do it. As soon as I read the intent of this march I knew I had to go, mainly because I believed that the situation on the Gulf was reviving what I would have to call the SNCC tradition, that is what I come from, and that is what I have thought needed to be happening all along. I told my son that if we drove down there, 800 miles, and it turned out to be a bunch of paid professional protestors and consultants ordering us around and giving us sound bytes, we would just turn around and come home. Sorry for the lack of faith, it was wonderful, you did a wonderful job organizing what seemed like the impossible, and the love and respect among everyone was paramount.
People are dying for the human connection in a sick society that discounts humanity. It is our strength. It is what we need, perhaps something that can’t be defined by science or written down in any book. It is going against the grain and it is what we need to keep doing. People feel bleak and hopeless, it seems that nothing we do will make any difference, that the people in power are just too powerful. We need hope and faith, and we can only get that from eachother. Despite the value of his work, I think that Karl Marx wrote in the 19th century, was basically Eurocentric, and sprung from the same conditions as modern capitalist theory, and just shouldn’t be taken as a Bible or roadmap absolutely, but I have always been astounded at his insight into the future of capitalist societies for those who live in them, the disconnection and isolation and individualism of our culture. It’s what we have to fight against.
Anyways, I am fading fast, but two more important things I have to mention, because I don’t think I really thanked all the organizers of all this march for killing themselves to make it happen, not only for their work, but for the respect that they treated everyone with. Hope you all can get some rest this week. I also want to thank the vets always, they have sustained me through all of these past three years, their example, the idea that there could be hope for my son for the future. But also in particular, I want to thank all the men who listened to my opinions with respect over the last week. Despite the many things I have done in my life, I am still basically just some little old Okie girl from Long Beach, trying to make my way through life with a lot of kids and no money, and like other women like me, don’t receive much respect for our ideas or experience. We don’t usually have a voice in anything. I usually don’t even bother to talk. So it meant a lot to me, I just kept thinking, boy, this really is a bizarre experience.
So, All Power to the People, an old saying that perhaps needs to be revived, I heard someone yell it out in the crowd sometime this week, and all my love and respect,
Jeri
21 March 2006, 5:19 pmDeAnander:
Demo March 18 2006 SF CA
ordinary people making their dissent known. it isn’t much, and the tameness of these events is disturbing (though I am glad no one gets hurt, that the cops stay cool, etc). but it’s something. public dissent is not flatlined yet.
21 March 2006, 5:22 pmStan:
Here is the site for a news video clip from BBC that uses our folks’ footage in a very disturbing story:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4827424.stm
21 March 2006, 11:00 pmr graves:
hey stan,
congrats on what sounds like and inspiring effort.
i’m intrigued by your mention of gentrification– i agree that it’s a huge issue, especially here in brooklyn. i’m curious what you see as the strategic basis for a response to gentrification– community land trusts? legislating rent control?
it’s a tough nut to crack because really US cities are unique in the world in having had our rich people live in the suburbs for the last half-century. everywhere else, it’s the rich at the center, where all the benefits of city life are close to hand, with the poor on the outskirts, either in shantytowns as in the third world, or in brutalist public highrise projects in europe.
the rich moved out of the cities after ww2 largely due to public subsidies to infrastructure and mortgages (see david harvey’s work for a penetrating analysis of how this was a massive ‘spatial fix’ for the crisis of accumulation represented by the depression).
point is, under capitalism it’s only natural that the rich gravitate towards the neighborhoods convenient to jobs and amenities. what are we gonna do about it? do you see some clear intermediate steps that can be taken to stem gentrification? or do you see the issue as simply a chance to agitate and open people’s eyes to the system? i ask because an anarchist group that’s just starting up here in nyc is thinking about ways to help fight this, and we haven’t come up with any particularly hot ideas…
22 March 2006, 1:36 pmJulian Real:
Hi folks.
I was going to write this privately to Stan, and realised how silly that would be, not because it wouldn’t be nice to privately correspond with Stan, but more because he is still, I’m sure, recuperating and assessing what just happened with this action he organised.
In this discussion here, in this topic thread, I see signs of something I too have been concerned about for some time. Are we activists too attached to our identity-lingo to actually speak to people: regular folks out there, the ones doing the surviving, like us, with more or less grace? The ones, like us, doing more or less harm to others and themselves/ourselves? Are we capable of listening, and learning, about the lives of others and the various ways we suffer and survive, or not, that do not fit our political ways of understanding suffering.
I have been reflecting on the language I use, and realise it is most effective in my feminist discussion group. In a few short weeks I have moved several young women from a solidly or ambivalently “liberal” stance, to a more or less solidly radical feminist stance, on matters of harm against women. But my “discursive style”, as PoMos like to call it, is moderately effective, at best, outside that group, and is not terribly effective at making the points. By this I mean, making the points of connection, to bond those of us who are so tremendously isolated, and so miserably desperate. Can we reach out to one another, in earnestness and sincerity and honesty, with some level of recognition that there are larger forces at work, choreographing and orchestrating our pain. I know we do this, each one of us, but can we collectively do this in ways that really move the masses to feel the horror, to feel the desperation, while being able to bear it. That is the trick, one of many tricks in this relatively treatless world of suffering and despair.
I want a discourse the real people, “political” or not, “religious” or not, “Leftist”, “Rightist”, “Centrist”, or none of the above, that really speaks to the heart in us, the spirit of us, about inhumanity and the need for radical humanitarianism and functional, sustainable, diverse community. That’s the only term I’ve been able to come up with (“radical humanitarianism”), that would include radical feminism, radical anti-racism projects and efforts, radical pro-environmental efforts that are not “white” and “Eurocentric”, alternate economic survival systems that also are not “white” and “Eurocentric”. The language of the Marxist/post-Marxist Left does not speak to my heart. It speaks, sometimes incoherently, to my head. Radical feminist discourse, when intellectualised enough, no longer speaks from or to the heart, although, I must say, I find most radical feminist work deeply moving and empowering, but I may hold some biases here.
Andrea Dworkin wrote not just from her “mind”‘s intellect, but from her body’s knowledge base, from her soul’s wisdom. Real effective humanitarians do this, I think. But her work only reached so far, perhaps because the deeply misogynist world could not bear to hear her, for fear too much would have to change too quickly.
Stan, you do this. You write with all your being about what is fucked up, about atrocities, about normalised harm.
Maybe “humanitarian” is enough. Radical is one of them scary words, and perhaps rightly so. It is also Eurocentric in some regards. As Winona Laduke astutely notes in the book Talking About a Revolution, what Bush is doing to the planet is “radical”. She names herself “conservative” by comparison. This is an important insight about what words we use to describe what we are trying to do.
I am a humanitarian. (And I care deeply about most but not all of the other creatures and the Earth, which struggle to maintain balance in a deeply unbalanced world. I despise fleas. I want them all dead. I’m not fond of biting flies and tics either. There, I’ve said it.)
Can we, the few we that are here, come up with a way of engaging others that WORKS? That speaks to hearts in need of love and attention, that speaks to fading spirits in need of rejuvenation? The Right is better at this than the Left, I believe, which partly explains their success; also, they offer the illusion of order and control (albeit patriarchal and racist and imperialist), and the Left seems to offer change and chaos, and most people are just trying to hold it together, so chaos seems like the worst choice possible. That the Organised Right is, for the most part, so corrupt as to make calling them “morality leaders” ridiculous, insulting to humanity, and oxymoronic, neglects the fact that they do address people’s spiritual needs, even while not really coming through with the goods.
I have spent HOURS upon HOURS of my time engaging Charles B. in conversation elsewhere on Stan’s blog, and to what end? Has it really accomplished a goddamned thing? Are he and I closer now than we were? Are we more united in our efforts than we were before? (I think he and I have maintained civility, whatever that means, but is that enough? The answer, for me, is no.)
Can we do this? Can we reach out, for real, to one another, in every manner possible, in languages, dialects, styles, and “discourses” that are really USEFUL in building humane community that has the spiritual-material strength to build (or, rebuild) humane, ethnically and culturally diverse civilizations?
From what I have read above this ranting post of mine, I get the feeling I am not alone in wishing this would manifest in the world ASAP, if not sooner.
22 March 2006, 3:01 pmR.S. Morris:
Still processing…
All I can say at this time is that this was the single most multi-layered, multi-faceted experience I have ever had. Up until two days ago my time in the service haunted me in that capacity–but now I am no longer haunted. I feel like the contorted years since I left the Army were leading me to this action all along. For the first time in my ENTIRE LIFE I felt at home for all of six days.
I’m not trying to be grandiose, this is just the most honest way I can come up with to express the effect participating in the March has had on me. And I know for a fact that I am not the only participant to feel this way.
It was truly an honor for me to be able to walk beside all the giants–EVERYONE who was there–and to listen, and to speak and be listened to. So many marvelous human beings in one place, at one time…
I remain honored to my core.
23 March 2006, 3:49 amDaniel Reed:
I agree with those at the march who said that it was only the beginning. Those people are right. This IS only the beginning. We have to keep going, We have to keep fighting. I’m tired of all the apathy that I see when I walk around. I know that there are people out there who think to themselves, “Gee Golly, I wish someone would do something about all that.” Hopefully, demonstartions like these will help them realize that THEY are that someone. We must keep going. This is by no means and end, but it is definitely a new beginning.
23 March 2006, 12:50 pmElaina:
Julian, you are absolutely right about the language thing.
The kind of language that Stan uses makes me feel engaged with his work and not apart from it, simply studying it.
And I’ll add that the observation- WE CAN DO THIS BETTER than the government– absolutely bloody brilliant—needs to be expanded into the realm of looking at all kinds of places, from the epicenter of tragedy in the gulf to it’s outlying tentacles in the rest of the community, and seeing where we indeed ALREADY are doing this better than the government. I brought this idea up at work and man, were the folks I talked to jazzed. Big time. It gives a person the needed breath to go on working a thankless job for one more day, to get up out of bed and get back into their daily jam of doing whatever it is that they do; it deligitimizes the symbolic power of illusion and it helps us look at our everyday lives and see the three-dimensional reality of what we do IN SPITE of the powers that fight against us.
Thanks, to everyone who participated in this March, and thanks to Julian and Stan, and thanks to everybody here.
23 March 2006, 3:23 pmStan:
Territory: from terra, meaning soil or land.
They love it when we struggle over policy, because abstraction always works in their favor.
But what they are doing in Iraq and the Gulf Coast is taking away other peoples’ territory… which is the geographic basis of sovereignty… and that sense we name “home.” The basis of the struggle for social transformation is the struggle to assert POPULAR sovereignty against elite sovereignty.
Soldiers fight for territory, taking it from others, defending their own, or defending the territory of others. We just struck the first of our blows to defend the sovereignty of both Iraq and the residents of the Gulf Coast. We have adopted non-violence as a strategy, but that doesn’t mean we don’t understand that we are at war with war, that we seek to take the power of the powerful, or that we are coming off the defense and onto the offense.
We walked, and that is why we know the land, the homes — many shattered by wind and flood — that we are helping people defend. We have to understand the implications of this. We have become a Department of Homeland Security for the oppressed, only we are talking about real homes and not some national-fascist abstraction.
This movement has struggled for some time with several questions. Why are we so white? Why do we have such minimal participation from black and brown? How do we reach out? How can we stop those in power from ignoring us?
We may have stumbled upon the answers to some of those questions by doing what we just did.
Those with some social privilege are always — historically — the people who have the educational, financial, socio-cultural, and organizational advantages available to them to be more effective when they are politically radicalized. When movements are organized around issues like the war and foreign policy, those in the best position to struggle around these global issues are those who are less preoccupied with more immediate issues of survival for themselves and their families. So the privileges of class, race-nationality, and gender are reflected in the very movements that have declared themelves against expolitative power.
In many cases, these movements also reflect a kind of myopia. We have missed the struggles that are going on all around us, precisely because we have a degree of citizenship… we are listened to and taken seriously by the establishment. The struggles we have missed are those that affect those who are treated as less-than-citizens… be they African Americans, Hispano-Latinas, or Indigenous Nations… women, LGBT, young people.
We went to the Gulf Coast and we connected the war aborad with a war at home. Let’s think about what we mean when we say “war at home.” What does it look like, this war? Who is this war aimed against? How is it fought? These are the things we need to know in order to fight back.
In both Iraq and the Gulf Coast, dark people and poor people have been subjected to at least two perfectly similar assaults: the attempt to take their territory, and the attempt to impose control over them as a population.
In our trip across the Gulf Coast, we took a couple of important first steps to deal with the questions raised above. We went to the heart of the nation’s Black Belt. We accepted Black leadership, male and female. We shared resources with African American organizers on THEIR home bases. We met with and formed relationships with everyday Black and poor people in the region. We collaborated with Black folk through the only institution over which they still retain control — the Black church — which is also the locus of African American community organizing. We prioritized THEIR issue, and committed to follow through. And now we have the potential to contest with those in power, in solidarity with the people with whom we have met and to whom we have committed, to defend their homes against the encroachments of what promises to be the most massive gentirifcation project in American history.
We have positioned ourselves for a fight to defend the homes — the territory — of our allies. This could become a new kind of fight, and making the issues land, popular sovereignty, and the fight against militarized population control (especially against the prison-industrial complex and felony disfranchisement), we have taken on a new quality of struggle… and one that applies equally to the occupation of Iraq and the occupation of the Gulf Coast.
Not only does the fight against gentrification and lockdown in the Gulf Coast go straight to the heart of the oppression unmaksed there by the hurricane and the government’s response, these two issues can be linked to the issue of the war nationwide, and thereby centralize the immediate and emergency concerns of black, brown, and poor people all over the country.
These are talking points that can be developed and popularized, linked to ongoing struggles around the country, and that we can carry as a battle standard to the Gulf Coast as follow up.
Some folks at IVAW already want to organize a 2006 Summer Reconstruction Collective for the Gulf Coast. We find the funds for them. They stay at Slidell. They work in one community to build strong local relationships there throughout the summer — June through August. Over Labor Day weekend, with a few days fore and aft to total a week, the same IVAW Summer Reconstruction Collective organizes and runs a weeklong reconstruction blitz, with Vets for Peace, especially Vietnam Vets, coming down to work UNDER THE SUPERVISION OF IVAW.
Dave and I were talking today, and he is suggesting a parallel, two-step campaign… one I want to endorse in its general outlines. “Home by Christmas” as part of the Bring Them Home Now! campaign, that whips the living hell out of Congress — followed by a build up of marches similar to the one we just did, but across individual states, culminating in state capitols across the country. Detroit to Lansing. Fayetteville to Raleigh. Bay Area to Sacramento. Albuquerque to Santa Fe. Portland to Salem. Newark to Trenton. And on and on. Four or five day walks and caravans, camping again, landing each night in some community under assault by thuggish police, by gentrifiers, or economic crisis. Linking with African Americans, Hispano-Latinas, Native Nations. Joining their issues, accepting their leadership, and sharing our resources. Converging in state capitols on the fourth anniversary of the war, with our motley marchers, led by vets, especially Iraq vets, and our peace-train convoys of cars… a new popular democracy struggle on the move.
A program that is not trapped in policy, but tied to territory. A revolution that knows how to dance (we did that well, didn’t we, in the street and in the camps?). A movement that is coming off the defensive and taking it to them, one day’s march at a time. Let’s teach people how we learned to love and lose our fear.
Just a riff in my head. I’m still padding down Highway 90, drinking Grumble’s coffee, hearing your drums, huggin’ y’all goodnight.
Cross country, like a fuken justice army… still can’t believe we did it. (-:
More pics:
http://gbb.smugmug.com/gallery/1290305/1
23 March 2006, 7:37 pmhttp://homepage.mac.com/union_county_labor/Veterans_for_Peace/PhotoAlbum89.html
Jeri L. Reed:
I really like Stan’s last ideas posted. I had so many reservations about this march, none of which proved to be true, and I have harped all along, all along, since before they even set foot in Iraq, that we need to get connected with the right people and this is truthfully the first step I have seen toward that.
Still tired, but still keep thinking about all this over and over. One thing that I have thought of was the size of the march, the form of it and just the way it looked (I guess you would have had to have been riding on the bus in back for at least a while to see this). I guess I am a visual person, but I liked the way it looked and tried to figure out why. When I first read the early things written about the march, some things like we would be joined by thousands and thousands along the way, which I was not sure would happen. Everybody thinks that if you move thousands and thousands of bodies around for an event it must mean success, but it doesn’t. I’m tired of being a body to be moved around by the important few and I resent it and I have a bad attitude. I don’t think anyone really cares how many thousands of people end up in NYC or DC. There were millions of people out all over the world before the war, and we failed, it didn’t make any difference, and people still have that message.
But our scraggly band of desparate people with a few vehicles trailing behind looked really good. It was a good message. If there had only been four or five people doing this, others could have wrote us off as some kind of nuts. As it was, it was a good number, and I think what I liked was that it looked like something that people could replicate. Something that other people could imagine themselves doing.
I have a lot to say about the gentrification end of things, but can tell I am already out of steam, I can think a lot faster than I can write. Just as someone who spent most of her life being gentrified out of one neighborhood or another, I think that the on the ground experience is very complicated, there is a lot of shooting and race wars, and a lot of young people die. But it is not a clear cut case of the rich and the powerful being able to move poor people out and replace them with nice stable white wealthy communities. Gentrification, despite the political intent which was and is to break up large black and brown and poor voting blocs, is based on land speculation, and like any other speculation, this creates instability. Land speculators don’t really care where their money comes from as long as they get it. Capitalism is inherently unstable, that is the whole point. Land speculation is at the heart of the history of America, and I see a clear connection between my family being displaced from the cotton fields of Texas early in the 20th century and urban displacement today. Especially in terms of family and social problems that ensue when they are displaced and their communities are broken up. But the results end up being complicated and do not necessarily match the original vision of those who thought gentrification would be a good idea. But they still make buckets of money. And along the way replace what were poor but somewhat stable communities, meaning that people had lived together for years and knew eachother and had built connections and organizations together, with unstable communities. So, say for example in Chicago which is really the only place I can talk about, there might be a large black community today, a neighborhood that is historically black, but it may not be the same people who lived there ten years ago, or it may be a new area that people moved to when they were displaced from elsewhere in the city. And then there are the areas of black gentrification which are legion…..They have not managed to dislodge black people from Chicago, or poor people, but they have managed to scramble people up and break up power bases that were built among people over many year, bases that could be used to resist. Many people think, including myself, that this is part of the explanation for the dramatic increase in youth violence, I mean young men taking up guns and going after eachother, since about 1990, this scrambling, young people being moved from neighborhood to neighborhood with community ties–and sanctions–dissolved. I have no doubt about this, and being in the middle of this, especially if you have boys, is hellified. On top of this, it is just not a black-white issue, or even black-brown issue or a white-brown issue, but layers and layers of people from all over the world. You have to be able to fit the Syrian Kings into the picture, a youth gang of young Syrians. And a whole lot of people who were displaced through the gentrification process, which remember is based on land speculation, were upper-working class and middle class white home owners who could no longer pay their property taxes, especially older retired people whose homes suddenly are assessed at hundreds of thousands of dollars, or even a million dollars this is not an exaggeration. The result of land speculation run amok. Capitalism creates chaos and disruption. They may have an elaborate plan for stability that they try to sell people, just like they do in Iraq, but its just a bunch of words. They may be rich and powerful, but they got that way because they were willing to let everyone else live in chaos while they take off out of it on their private planes. It’s not because they know what they are doing, that’s all bluff.
I am really happy about this direction, I guess I’m just saying we need to really look deep before we leap, because this is all a complicated mess that we are in.
Jeri
23 March 2006, 9:28 pmginni:
Stan..BELIEVE it~===]
23 March 2006, 10:14 pmJanet W:
Very moved and interested as I prepare for a long train journey across North America to DC for the Code Pink Mother’s Day action. It’s my first trip to DC. I’m not really sure what Code Pink will be doing or what I am doing, committing to this, but I just feel in my heart that I have to move out of my home, my garden, my comfortable, familiar surroundings and raise my voice in one of the key places (DC) where evil is decided on, funded, “spun” and thrust upon a largely defenseless world. Yes, I mean Iraq, and also Afghanistan, and Guantanamo, and Haiti, but also what happens all over the world and in our own country, not only from the wars we can name but the economic atrocities we usually can’t name (or don’t).
I knew this march would be amazing and powerful, and it was, and now it is a role model, a possibility, a foreshadowing of our future. I keep coming back in my own mind to the power of acting as if ending the war in Iraq, and so many other things, are *inevitable*, they are happening already incrementally, mostly invisibly, and we need to act from our trust in ourselves and each other (as indeed happened in Walkin’ to New Orleans).
Very hard sometimes when the news is so bleak, when suffering is so predominant, when the crises are so acute, I know. Somehow my own often depressive thinking has shifted, and this march and everything connected with that is part of it. I will spread the word, and I thank all who made this happen from the bottom of my heart.
24 March 2006, 3:24 amthomas brinson:
Right & left on, Bro’ Stan. We don’t need no more mass marches in D.C. or in NYC. We need to take our message to the people, out in the boonies, down in the country, like we did Marchin’ to New Orleans, out with the people, the common people, who supported us 20 to 1 in the Reddest of all Red States, Mississippi. We need to connect our message with action, healing action, restorative action, like your suggestion for an IVAW Collective made up of vets across the generations to work in the damaged areas of the Gulf Coast, to rebuild the destroyed areas, to heal ourselves from the wars we have participated in, not through talk, talk, talk, but through restorative action.
The movement can build on this to create similar collectives in other areas of the country, to do better than government historically has, to feed the poor, provide shelter to the homeless — To build a people’s army for peace and justice.
Power to the Peaceful !~!~!
24 March 2006, 3:16 pmStan:
More blogs, pix & vids:
http://grantsurf.com/March%20to%20New%20Orleans/index.html
25 March 2006, 8:42 amhttp://www.veteransforpeaceny.org/vfpmarchpics.htm
http://homepage.mac.com/nateg/files/Veterans%20Gulf%20Coast%20March.mp4
http://homepage.mac.com/saaseng/PhotoAlbum3.html
http://peacechicago.blogspot.com/
Morgan Wheeler:
Many thanks to all who have set this process into motion. I truly feel that what Stan and others have articulated shows us that we are at an historic crossroad. If we can become a vital part in the saving and rebuilding of these poor working class communities along the Gulf Coast then we can begin to build an army of the poor. Our weapons will be tools of construction,organisation, and our ability to reach the national and international community.
I’m a member of Local Union #24 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers out of Baltimore Md. Its imperative that if the labor movement is to survive that it becomes engaged in this type of work that Stan and Dave are talking about, (2006 Summer Construction Collective). I’ve been well received by my union and community and by two constuction contracters regarding this idea.
I’ve been so frustrated and angry for so long at feeling helpless now for the first time I feel like I can be a part of a fight back effort.
love and peace, Morgan Wheeler
25 March 2006, 10:45 amStan:
This is very encouraging, Morgan. Thanks so much. I just connected your surname up, and if I had earlier on the march, I’d have told you to say hi to your dad. I’m very fond of him, and you all have good reason to be proud of each other.
In solidarity,
Stan
25 March 2006, 3:58 pmJVB:
Stan et al!
25 March 2006, 8:38 pmBy all reports the march was a powerful bonding experience. Congratulations! The pics looks great — and there is now talk about organizing a cross-country march. What do you think?
Jennifer
R.S. Morris:
A cross-country version of what we just did? I’m there.
All I ask is a few weeks to get rid of these darn blisters.
Actually, I do think that is a great idea, but my immediate concern is bringing some relevance from what just happened and applying it to my local politico-social situation. I know Stan and others are severe advocates for utterly demolishing the Democratic Party, but that is the only point of reference I have to engage with anyone who is even moderately progressive in this area. I find myself ill-equipped to lead a grassroots revolution in this isolated place, and I have NEVER been someone who felt comfortable being the center of attention. So the role of Dem Party gadfly and radical grassroots reformer falls on me solely because nobody else will take the job.
I desperately need input from y’all on how I might finesse this situation to help with “growing something organic and complex in the interstices where the fabric of the dominant system has frayed away,” as DeAnander so eloquently put it. Wyoming doesn’t do ACTIVISM, Wyoming doesn’t do GREEN, yada, yada. I’m trying to pass this experience on, but, while all I want to do is sell everything and move to N.O. to muck houses, everyone here still puts “American Idol” far in advance of activist politics. But the fear is always that if I relieve myself of this cross, then the people I call my community will be sucked down the whirlpool without a chance to fight back.
Words of wisdom will be accepted as they are offered. Thanks in advance.
25 March 2006, 10:36 pmConsumer:
What an inspiring action. This step towards recovery of our power really kindles hope. I’ve enjoyed reading about the march and looking at the pictures.
I couldn’t participate so I took a more modest action. I wrote the following to Feingold, the guy proposing censure of Bush.
Dear Mr. Feingold,
Thank you for taking a stand and proposing the censure of President Bush. Your proposal is an important first step towards recovering the long lost checks and balances of our system. Nonetheless, it is important to note that you compromise the integrity of your movement if you do not push for full impeachment.
Illegality and Hypocrisy
The hubris exhibited by the U.S. government has been mind-boggling. The hypocrisy in ignoring the UN in order to attack a sovereign nation for ignoring the UN is clear.
President Bush also stated recently that he had to attack Iraq because Saddam Hussein was refusing to disarm. Stop and think about that for a second. How could Saddam Hussein disarm seeing as there were no WMDs to begin with? Someone might ask this of the President, if all his speech venues were not carefully picked and controlled. In this case, the only failed intelligence lies with those who fail to see this lie for what it is.
Lies
President Bush recently stated that it was a difficult decision to go to war. This despicable lie has been thoroughly debunked by numerous sources, from Paul O’Neill to the Downing Street memos. It is clear that this cabal of statist reactionaries wanted war from the very beginning. Failing to take issue with this point is unethical, not to mention foolhardy. Americans are waking up to the wrongness of the war.
Support
As you are doubtlessly aware, Americans are finally turning against the heinous crime that our country committed against the Iraqi people. More and more Americans are stating that they will vote for the anti-war candidate, regardless of political affiliation. Personally, I would choose a right-wing anti-war Republican over a spineless Democrat anyday. The sycophantic cowardice exhibited by the “liberal” Democrats is truly sickening.
Survival
So much is at stake here. Of course there is the political survival of those who foolishly handed the power to wage war over to this madman. There is also the image of the U.S. to consider, not to mention the resentment against Americans festering all over the world.
But more than these, it is clear that the survival of the planet is at stake here. Humanity is inching closer and closer to nuclear annihilation. Bush and his sociopathic regime are killing us. He needs to be removed, not just for the sake of American integrity but also for the sake of the human species.
Thank you for providing this opportunity to communicate with you. As an American, I hope you will do what is needed to bring our country back from the precipice. As a human being, I pray that you do it before it’s too late.
(In terms of damage against the war elephant, it doesn’t even amount to a paper cut. But if we initiate actions like the march and combine them with thousands of other paper cuts, maybe we’ll cause them more pain.)
26 March 2006, 3:38 amStan:
There was an internal and external aspect to this march; and what becme apparent early on was that this was different from mass actions like a demo on the DC Mall because, while garnering press and causing ripples all out of proportion to our small size (externally), the really powerful piece was the internal dynamic. The night we were in Slidell, I looked around the camp and realized we had come together in a way that created what some might call a powerful spiritual bond between the participants. We had created embeddedness — in the sense Polanyi uses to describe kinship and place — in a mobile formation… in a group that was demonstrating not merely what it believed, but what it could DO. That’s why, for me given my background, the only thing I could think of was that we were showing ourselves, AND the ruling class, that if we wanted to move overland like an army…. we could. And we could do so in a way that combined collective discipline with love and joy. Anyone who gets a whiff of what we had would be right to envy it. We were putting a new possibility in the face of a reified society… showing people that all they have lost in this alienated world is available without a hot shower, a television, or a strip mall.
A tentative plan is not to march cross country, but to reproduce this experience more locally, at the state level, marching next year — if the war is still on — from outlying cities to state capitols, and using this method of roughing it through march and caravan — building affectively powerful events that combine the symbolic with the materially helpful — to consolidate relationships between the most advanced activists in each state.
Every niche that the ruling-state abandons to deal with its little crisis of accumulation, we can then use these political cadres to fill, staking out footholds — as Robert Biel has suggested — upon which to expand platforms of resistance.
We are small now, but we ain’t playin’. And like I said before… this revolution dances. (-:
26 March 2006, 8:23 amAudrey:
A thousand reasons why Detroit to Lansing won’t work
1000. No pre-existing network of organizations across the state to host us
999. Afraid to ask for a week off work again next year
998. I’m the kind of person that gets lost in thought on the way home from Lansing, snaps out of it, and suddenly realizes – shit, I’m in Ohio. That’s fine when it’s just me and my car, but not so cool when 200 people with blisters following me want to know why they’re sitting at a road sign that says “Toledo, next exit.â€
997. No clue how to use a bullhorn
I could keep going. Actually, I had a thousand reasons why I couldn’t go down to Mobile. Claire agreed with them all, then said “let’s worry about that once we’re down there.â€
I brought the idea up at the local VFP meeting, so they could nod their heads and agree it’s not doable here. Their immediate reaction was they’d all pitch in. I emailed Nick a link to your blog in the hopes that he would explain why it can’t be done, and he responded “no problem.â€
To make matters worse, I’ve accidentally acquired a group of students from various schools that want me to take them to Slidell this summer.
You talk into the small end of the bullhorn, right?
26 March 2006, 5:53 pmR.S. Morris:
By the way, my entry for Best Line Heard During the March:
“Tonight’s Zen meditation group has been cancelled because this band is just too darn good.”–Doc Jose on the PA, during the Bayou Liberty Relief Cajun gumbo and rock party.
26 March 2006, 7:12 pmthomas brinson:
Most definitely, Stan. What we saw and experienced in our walk were local communities gathering together around their local centers of power, the churches, a beneficent landowner in Bayou Liberty, the MLK School/Community Center in the 9th Ward to manifest from their own resources, their own energy, their own initiative cells of growth, seeds of change, better doing from within what the government and traditional agencies failed to do from without. They manifest they reality of what real democracy is — from the people, not the minions of the corporations.
26 March 2006, 7:17 pmStan:
Hey Audrey,
If we don’t need permits to march, why would we need a bullhorn? (-:
And I agree that Jose had the best line. That is a true classic.
26 March 2006, 9:05 pmAudrey:
One small bit of business, for those who pledged money to SOS when the hat was passed around, but didn’t have extra cash on them at the time. They’ve just added some paypal donation buttons to their website at http://www.savinourself.org/donate.htm – let’s make sure we take care of them, amidst all the backslapping and rabble-rousing.
26 March 2006, 11:52 pmDar:
I don’t know how to say thank you to all those that worked so hard to make this march work. But I do know that we are still on the road, moving forward to a time when all our loved ones are back home where they belong. Not only from Iraq, but back to their homes along the Gulf Coast. I have spent my life in the shadows of wars. My father died from exposure to Atomic testing. My grandfather was in the Navy, and it started in generations back to when a young man was left on the shore somewhere in America and he became a scout for the Army.
My son spent a year in Iraq. He still doesn’t talk about it. He in time I hope will come home mentally from that place that he shouldn’t have been in.
Again thanks for all the things your doing to stop the insanity.
Sincerely
27 March 2006, 2:40 pmDar
Scott Aaseng (AFSC):
I’ll pitch in a few thoughts to this lively discussion:
Service provision and reconstruction efforts (community development?) remind me of Gandhi’s “constructive program†which he always said was primary in any nonviolent campaign. Integral to any effort to undo injustice is people envisioning and implementing their own just society. That’s what was so powerful about this march—we were living out (in a small way) the beloved community.
And community-building is neat because it creates both peace (within the community itself) and power (leverage within the larger society). It’s both the means and the end of what we are trying to do.
Thank you all for helping me see how gentrification breaks up (land-based) community power and destroys peace/engenders social chaos. Now I get it.
On the advocacy side, I’m wondering if people have some effective counter-messages to the argument that we dare not abandon the field to fundamentalist neo-fascists in the Middle East (anymore than in the US). Perhaps in both cases part of the answer lies in the constructive program.
I’m hearing how a lot of people were really tired after the march. I know for me it wasn’t just exhaustion, but the deflation of coming back to the so-called real world after living a more real reality for a week. Just as coming back from overseas is as much about culture shock as it is about jet lag.
I’ve struggled with the same thing since coming back from two years of living another more real reality in an intentional community in the mountains of Washington state. I came back pretty jazzed about seeing what I could do to help turn the tide in our country. Walkin’ to New Orleans has shown me again that it’s all about building community.
By the way, another variation on the theme here in Chicago lately has been Camp Bring ‘Em Home, camping out for a week at a time in front of the offices of two Congresspeople. You can read about it at anti-warmajority.org/blog.
Peace.
28 March 2006, 1:41 amScott Aaseng (AFSC):
Responding to R.S. Morris:
Sounds like Wyoming could be a tough nut to crack. Just a thought: I’m working on bringing the Eyes Wide Open boots that we had at the beginning of the march in Mobile out west this summer, and there’s a chance we could swing through at least northeast Wyoming. It’s an exhibit with cross-over appeal because it truly honors fallen soldiers while pointing out the cost to both sides. It has potential as a means of gathering and mobilizing peace-minded folks in your area. Contact me at saaseng@afsc.org if you’re interested.
Peace.
28 March 2006, 3:47 pmR.S. Morris:
Thanks Scott, great idea. I dropped you a line.
28 March 2006, 8:34 pmstephen_in_tochigi:
There’s a piece in this morning’s Guardian (UK) about the march.
It is pre-publicity for the screening of a documentary about the march on BBC2′s Newsnignt programme this evening.
‘If you start looking at them as humans, then how are you gonna kill them?’
29 March 2006, 6:16 amTimothy R. Anderson:
To Stan Goff and the readers here :
Please consider buying and viewing ” I Know I’m
Not Alone “, a documentary about Iraq and Israel,
starring songwriter Michael Franti .
For more info, please visit the Spearhead
site …….. http://www.spearheadvibrations.com
Thanks, Timothy R. Anderson
http://www.warisaracket.org
29 March 2006, 2:24 pmI am at # 102 on the petition.
R.S. Morris:
Anyone in this group know of an anti-war radiation biologist? I have some info I’d like to get their professional perspective on.
If you do, please have them email me at theritz@tribcsp.com
Thanks.
29 March 2006, 5:49 pmStan:
Try the Union of Concerned Scientists.
http://www.ucsusa.org/
29 March 2006, 6:33 pmR.S. Morris:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/default.stm
for the BBC documentary (Thanks Inigo and Theresa!)
30 March 2006, 1:30 amCraig:
This link is more direct and you may want to make a copy as it will only bo online for a week:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/nolavconsole/ukfs_news/hi/newsid_4670000/newsid_4679900/bb_wm_4679986.stm
30 March 2006, 11:28 amDan:
I’ve read your books numerous times. I buy them for others. And I thank you for your continued efforts in deed and word.
1 April 2006, 11:25 pm