2003-03-24 - 10:36 p.m.
I wrote this in an email to my friend Ariel, who is doing graduate work in human rights law in the UK right now (check out her diary at ariel-uk.diaryland.com). She and I were best friends in high school and worked on our first zine, Random, together. It is important to share words of hope about organizing right now and so I let you all in on one half of a conversation (I hope she doesn't mind me sharing these words):
these are really shitty, hard, scary, difficult, demoralising times. But there are rays of hope. On Saturday there was a huge march in NYC, 250,000 or around that many. SO amazing. It was a beautiful spring day. Lauren and I made bright signs, pink, black, purple and light blue, that said "Bitter Spinsters Against Imperialist War" (mine) and "Cranky Queers Vs. War" (hers), plus our friend Rana had one that said "Brahms Not Bombs". It got people to laugh and engage in conversation with us (especially on the subway going to the demo). What is so important to me is to be out in a community, in my city, to know there are as many protesters in NYC as there are in the persian gulf right now, to publically express what we are feeling, to celebrate the beautiful spring day, to express pain and to find ways to live values that are not about power, greed, death and empire expansion, values that affirm life and are positive, about creation and empathy and love. It sounds cheesy, but this system has been building its self up for centures, we can't topple it alone, but we can constuct "alternate hegemonies" (if you will), we can reach out and we can say that even as the mainstream media broadcasts more and more pro-war garbage (where are they getting these statistics that the country stands behind GWB, I mean, really), and maybe our voices arn't heard in that way, but we can hear each other's voices and empatheize. I don't know how capitalism will crumble. I don't want to cut myself off from the world, but also, the revolution is not right around the corner and so we must take care of ourselves, or else we won't be good for it or each other. I have been very inspired by my teacher Komozi Woodard, who was in SNCC, SDS, the Newark Black Nationalist movements, and has done so much community organizing since then, in addition to becoming an "academic", it is so good to talk to him about what we are feeling (despair, confusion, outrage, burnout) and have him offer encouragement. Where does this passion and outrage in our hearts go? How do we sustain it? I am still struggling to answer this too.
Cry your tears of frustration, dear, and don't feel guilty about it. I have not cried. I did not cry until november 2001 about september 2001. On thursday I came so close when my classmate Alex simply said "I'm pretty sad" when I asked him how we was doing when I ran into him at a small vigil in the cold rain in union square.
Tonight i went to a poetry reading by Jen Benka, who wrote a poem for every word in the preamble of the constitution. Mark Wagner, of Booklyn, who I intern for, made the books. I usually hate poetry, but this was amazing. Before she read she talked abotu how hypocritical the constitution (and its framers, the "founding fathers") is, how we are not the people of "we the people", about how we need to take apart this idea of "liberty" as the US commits atrocities abroad and here. And it was and is creative resistance, it was creating something positive out of all this shit. And sure, maybe it is such a drop in a huge ocean, maybe we are deleuding ourselves, but if everything is so post-modern and nothing is solid and everything is constructed, we need to find positivity in our communities, we can't let all this bullshit our governments are doing take away all the different ways we can find and express our voices (while staying very aware about who can "find their voice", in terms of who has resources).
Remember, many of the soliders are poor people, people of color, people for whom this army is the only opportunity offered to them.
I have been wanting to grab onto solid ideas, answers, things that I know will "make a difference" to "Challenge the system". But we are so of the system, we are complicit in all sorts of ways and instead of feeling like we will never be doing "enough", we need to pick our battles, choose and aknowledge complicity carefully. As Komozi said to our class, "You can work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for "the revolution" and still feel like you're not doing enough".
