2003-05-16 - 11:48 a.m.
Rage is still keeping me awake. I have been devoting my days to be more stressed and cranky than anything else. I go into panics, hands shaking, breathing too fast. I forget to eat and get angry when I'm hungry. Again, too much caffeine in my bloodstream and a lack of real spice in my life. The Smiths help, Galaxie 500 helps, my friends help, but I keep returning to anger, frustration and a feeling that I am so sick of negotiating power everyday. Everyday reports of more injsutice and oppression just pile up. I find myself screaming at night, "I can't take it anymore!"
"What?" Lauren asks.
"This! All of this!"
I am sick of kid revolution, I am sick of DIY, but I am even sicker of power, snobbery, exclusion, oppression, surveillance, violence, repression. But I am tired of people who are "activists" or part of the "underground community" not accounting for the fact that power exists. Power exists. Oppression exists. It sucks, it's frightening, its overwhelming, I know. We all have a stake in perpetuating and resisting it. I feel like to not recognize what we stand in opposition to, to not recognize what we structure our lives to challenge takes away from our struggles. And the struggles are many- for day to day survival, for emotional and physical health, for larger (and so ambiguously worded) struggles for freedom, justice and against oppression in all its forms.
On Tuesday night I saw Arundhati Roy (author of Power Politics, War Talk and the God of Small Things) deliver a smart, eloquent, funny and very pointed talk about democracy, resistance to imperialism and the necessity of taking action. She talked about the relentless propaganda Americans must survive from their own government- even consciousness and questioning is a struggle these days. She also talked about the power of proximity to "empire's chambers" Americans have. I'd never thought about it in those terms- what opportunities for activism and challenge do we have here in the US- the country that George Bush, empire's cowboy, is supposedly president of. So how do we infiltrate those chamber's of power and say "No!" loud and clear so our voices resonate within them? I don't know.
I've been thinking a lot about what it means to make a zine, to publish a school newspaper, to organize a zine symposium- basically, to support "free" expression in these times- post the USA patriot act, with the Patriot Act II coming right up. In times of increased surveillance by the government, increased violence against people who disagree, especially people who are immigrants and people of color. I think it is really important right now to recognize the ways in which these acts can and much challenge encroachments on speech, even if, say, publishing a zine doesn't intend to. I guess I'm just saying a very Eleanor type addage that everything exists in a political context and it's our responsibility to recognize what that context is and how our projects and our lives fits into it.
