Content from a letter to Sarah #4

Where was I... oh yes, activism. So, Brown SDS(Students for a democratic Society) started out as a vehicle to unite the left. We had long talks about it, and the fall of 06 we had a network formed which started having regular potlucks. We had a diso guide produced, which we distributed to the freshmen at the beginning of spring semester. We had held several anti-war protests and we were toying around with student rights issues. We held several solidarity events for things that were happening nationally. We collected signatures when that Arab American student was tazed like 8 times at UCLA. We did lots of solidarity stuff with other groups, we went to a Democracy Matters event at the state capitol (a half an hour walk from campus) and helped push for reform of the disenfranchisement of felons law. We tried to storm a corporation meeting with SLA (Student Labor Alliance), but only managed to get onto the balcony. We threw leaflets over the dinner tables. SLA was pushing for food services to stop labor squeezing part time workers, and give them full employment and benefits. I will talk more about what I did with SDS in a little bit.

With OIF (the anti-war group), we attended a bunch of protests, and brought some speakers to campus. We held several protests ourselves, and some of our group, including Bucky, got arrested at a Senator's office for refusing to leave until he signed a statement giving his support for ending the war. It was an action organized by the American Friends Service Committee. I love Quakers. One of the cooler things we did was we managed to get an art grant from the art department so we could buy steaks to put into the ground. We bought enough wood for 655 steaks, and the cold night of March 18th (or 19th) we hammered them into the ground. Some of the ground was frozen, which made it difficult. Let me tell you, even with 6 people there, it took us a few hours to hammer that many stakes into the ground. It took up a half acre, i would guess. Each stake represented a thousand people who had died. (There was a big report that estimated that 655,000 Iraqis died, and had pretty good science behind it) Three stakes represented American fatalities at the time. People said it was one of the most powerful anti-war things they had seen, that it really brought it home.

Spring of 07 SDS started looking at Brown's dealings with war profiteering companies. We found out that Raytheon (makes missiles, among other things) was going to be at the career fair about 4 days before it happened. So, impromptu protest! It was actually surprisingly well-planned. We had about 20 people with signs make a soft picket in front of the Raytheon booth. It was alot of fun. The career fair people called the campus police on us, so we had a nice battle of words with the cops. They brought 5 people up on charges of some bs rule, and dragged out the proceedings all semester. But we won, every charge was dropped, cause we had the right to be there. They did not bother the protest that happened in fall of 07 (I had left by this point, but I heard through word of mouth).

But the Raytheon protest turned into a big media spectacle in the college paper. We won lots of coverage and some sympathetic press. It really got the war issue to be talked about on campus. Amazing how something as simple as that can get people talking.

After the success with the Raytheon protest, we looked into other local war profiteers that we could target. We found Textron. Textron seems much less scrupulous than Raytheon, they make cluster bombs. Cluster bombs are nasty, if you dont know what they are, you should look them up... but they kill way too many civilians. Textron also gets like 90% of its business from the DoD (Department of Defense), and most of the rest from the IDF(Israeli Defense Force). So, we had a die-in in front of their international headquarters which happens to be in Providence. It was so much fun. About 40 of us marched down to downtown Providence, took the street in front of their building, and all lay down and wailed. We had fake blood (raspberry jam, I believe) (also, i just realized that you spell raspberries with a "p". I always thought it was just rasberry cause it is always pronounced "raz-berry") and it was alot of fun. The police showed up and formed a line in front of the building. I was video-tapping the whole thing, staying mostly on the police to make sure they stayed within the law. After we had died for awhile, everyone got together, put jam on their hands, and rushed the building, plastering it with reddish handprints. It is quite amazing to see people non-violently rush through a police line. There are a bunch of pictures I will have to show you.

We got alot of media attention for this. Even a one line reference from Good Morning America. National Media! So exciting. And we were just like 20 committed kids, who managed to get some friends together to do this. Who knew it could be so simple.
But, as we were leaving the protest, we didn't realize that one of our number was staying behind to talk to reporters. Because he was out of the group, the cops were able to arrest him for "disorderly conduct." The charges were eventually dropped. But it just goes to show how there is safety in numbers.

Another project SDS worked on was the creation of a student union. It got off the ground pretty well, we managed to sign up one fifth of the school in the matter of a month. We held a general assembly and talked about tuition hikes and how we wanted to organize ourselves. I hear that the organizing around this got too connected to sds to get off the ground, but it was still pretty awe-inspiring. It did contribute, though, to some significant reforms in the student government, which was essentially entirely undemocratic and worthless.

The student union was also part of an overarching accessibility campaign to lower the cost of tuition so that the school could be more economically diverse. We started off pretty well with this campaign. We got alot of signatures on a petition. We formed the student union. We really managed to build support and make it publicly noticeable that we had a ton of support. And perhaps my greatest college activist accomplishment was that I helped start this campaign. After a year of organizing for this, sds won. In spring of 08, Brown announced that students whose families make under 60,000 will not have to take out loans. So amazing. When I started being an activist, I didn't think it would be this easy. Apparently all you have to do is make a big enough stink about something and it will happen. I feel soooo good about helping start this. It seems to be in the tradition of activists at Brown. The only reason I was able to go was because of needs-blind admission. And that was an initiative of the Young Communist League, who managed to get a big coalition on the left together and push for it. So I continued the tradition, by getting better financial aid for those who come after me, just as those who came before me did for me.

Activism has kind of calmed down for me, since I came to Cali. Sadly. I haven't been able to find a large group of people to work with. Plus, my job takes up so much of my time, it is really hard. I do have a few activist friends who I do stuff with, but it feels like there is no time and too few people.

I have always been on a path toward being an activist and raising a stink about injustice. I may try to be polite all the time, probably too often, but I have a very powerful urge to confront what I consider wrong. My friends from high school were not surprised that I was near the center of the re-invigoration of the left on Brown's campus.

I would credit alot of this reinvigoration to the intentional way I went about building community in the group and how other people took up the task. I tried to set a tone of caring, fun, joy and just general support. Most lefty groups do not have that, and they suffer greatly for it. When there is big trouble, they attack each other. Not the groups I helped build. When they have difficulties, they stick together and support each other. They don't blame each other for mistakes and are ready to forgive each other. At the 2008 national convention that I went to, there was a workshop on group emotional support and caring (yeah, sds is fucking awesome like that!), and the 5 members of Brown's chapter that were in attendance went to that one. Cause they know how important it is. And I feel greatly responsible for setting that tone. I am so proud of what Brown's sds chapter did after I left.
Now I just wish I could get the whole organization to understand it. And get them to use it against injustices, not just for good internal dynamics. Love is a far more powerful weapon than anything hate can throw at you. Love will win over enemies, hate has no such power. I really love Harry Potter's portrayal of this fact. Anyone who had any smidgen of love in their hearts could not be a true follower of Voldemort.

I still do stuff with sds. I would have gone to the national convention if it had not fallen on the same weekend as my cousin Jodi's wedding. Lets see, what do I do. I welcome new sign-ups to sds in the western half of the country. I work to try to maintain communication between chapters out here, which is tough cause they are few and far between. And I maintain a news archive of everything that gets reported on sds nationally (google alerts are amazing for this!). I am constantly amazed at how much news we get. On average, during school semesters, we get about 3 news stories mentioning us every day. Utterly fantastic. (I have stepped back from most of these in mid-2010)

One of the reasons I have remained so committed to sds is because of its willingness to approach things like emotional support. And because it is the only group I have seen where people of differing ideologies come together and manage to get along somehow (how the Maoists and the Anarchists get along in sds, I still don't know, but they do it, somewhat). This is not a common thing on the left. Plus my job does not provide me with the organizing fix that I crave, so I help out sds the little bit that I can all by my lonesome out here.
In case this hasn't become apparent, I will be an activist for the rest of my life. It is my career, so to speak. The life path that has seemed apparent to me ever since I discovered my purpose. I know I will never be defeated by any momentary burnout I feel. I have survived years in the wilderness in KY, and years of overwork at Brown. Those two extremes are often the cause of burnout. I have survived unpleasant organizing environments and managed to convert them into good ones. That is also a prime burnout causer, bad social environments.

Just so you know, i didn't used to be so confident about all this stuff. It has taken me years of self-reflection to really KNOW all this, and understand it, even if my intuition has pointed me in this direction since I can remember.

Democracy and Violence Part 1

Well, I am concretely defeating Bucky when it comes to keeping up with my blog. He can consider that a challenge to try and catch up.

So, this is my first stab at trying to articulate why violence is anti-democratic.
Democracy, by its very nature, is supposed to uplift and equalize, to empower and enhance communication. To facilitate understanding and to bring about consensus. Violence is the opposite of this. It is forced disempowerment, a diminishing and isolating means that tends to breed hatred and more violence. In fact, it often destroys power through death. It attempts to undermine the power of a nation not through turning that power to a different mindset, as with democracy, but through the physical act of destroying people and the inherent power they have. Indeed, it undermines power by both destroying it and by forcing consent through fear.

Violence, in our culture, is believed to be an effective way to force someone to do something. I interpret this as forced consent. The person believes they have no choice, even though they do. They can refuse to be coerced and allow themselves to be harmed... indeed, to force the attacker to use violence out of their own desperation to control other people.

So, violence is used in two ways to try to consolidate control: 1. destroy power through removing number of supporters. The worst examples of this are genocides. 2. Forced consent through the threat of violence; most notable emotions involved are fear, a feeling of helplessness and hopelessness.

Democracy can not be created through a process of destroying power and/or forcing the consent of others. The whole point of democracy is for everyone to be able to affect and/or make the decisions that impact their lives. A system such as that depends on people's trust of each other and willing consent to be a part of the system. You can't get people to participate, I mean REALLY participate in the way we want them to, by threatening them. Nor will killing them get them to participate... for obvious reasons.

Now, that that basic argument is kind of out there... many people will rebut with the argument: There are people out there who are oppressing others and exerting coercion and forced consent over them. How do we deal with them? Would it not be prudant to force these people to consent to stop oppressing? And sometimes people will even take it as far as "Isn't a violent revolution necessary to overthrow such an oppressive system as this, it is so violent that it will respond to nothing but violence."
My answer to this is: That is a false situation. When one group oppresses another, they are forcing the other group to consent. All the oppressed group need to do is stop consenting, and they will, with sacrifice (sacrifice that is required for any kind of fighting, whether it is violent of non-violent), be able to end the oppression. The power is truly in the hands of the oppressed, since they are always more numerous. They could (and have in many historical instances) easily and non-violently thrown off the shackles binding them. This is how you build a democratic society, you create democratic institutions in the effort to overthrow oppressors. Using democratic means will create a democratic system, while using violent means will create a violent system. But I digress... violence will only serve to undermine democracy, because it will make the group who were the oppressors not want to participate in a new government, which would probably not be democratic if it were built out of the flames of a violent revolution. So already there is a problem of a (probably) large minority of people who do not want to participate, and are willing to actively oppose whatever democratic institutions had come about. This creates a situation where the people trying to build a democracy start to believe they need to actively take control, or force consent to the democracy from the actively opposing minority. And that is just plain anti-democratic. We come back to the problem of the impossibility of building a participatory democracy by forcing people to agree to democracy. That is just not how democracy works.

So far in this brainstorming session, I have explored what the means of violence produces (i.e. destroying power, forced consent) and how these products are incompatible with the project of democracy. Violence, as a means, simply seems to be ineffective at producing democratic outcomes.

I want to explore this more, but it is late. So I will put off further discussion for another post. I still need to explore the impact of forced consent on people more, and the products that non-violent means produce. I should also explore the chaos factor from both violence and democracy.

In other news, I got my California License!