On the morning ten years ago when we in Sacramento heard the news, I remember my dad driving me to school. Us listening to the radio. I didn’t really understand what was happening (then again, who did?), but I remember starting to cry when I realized that people in other parts of the world live in fear of bombings every day.
What does it mean to hope and pray for a better society, free from imperialist wars, patriarchy, racism, and class, without rejecting or wishing away the current reality?
To me, it means: now (the present) is the best and only time we have in which to try our hardest. To keep building toward the freedoms we wish for all beings.
We may not live to see it, but we can help create it.
Polaroid by Anastasia. More than 20 people came out to flyer under hot Oakland sun.
In a crucial step for Mel’s fight to win back his job and improve conditions at the site where he had been working as a security guard, over 20 people from the still-fledgling East Bay Solidarity Network staged an all-day fact-finding and outreaching session at the entrance to the offices of ABC Security: Mel’s former (and hopefully future) employer. Today was payday, and workers were coming to get their checks. As they entered and exited the long driveway leading to the private-property offices, we distributed our flyers explaining Mel’s fight. In a few hurried words, we tried to agitate* ABC guards by asking them how they felt about their job (most: from so-so to shitty) and what ever happened to that raise they’d been promised (three years and no sign of it). Some of the guards were hella down for what we’re doing (quote: “Yeah, the company doesn’t care if people die”), and their ire toward ABC’s owner only increased when we showed them photos of her mansion in the Oakland hills.
__
Most importantly, though, the workers aided us by providing names of sites that employ ABC guards. Now that we’ve collected this client list (ranging from apartment complexes to warehouses and a golf course), we can use it to apply economic pressure to the company, escalating the fight to serious levels.
One of the highlights of the day, for me, was seeing Mel stand up to the supervisor who got him fired, with ten of us standing there to support him. Bolsters my hope that our group is helping shift the balance of power further toward the lowest-paid workers, and away from managers and millionaire CEOs.
Waiting for workers to pass through the driveway afforded us time to connect with each other, too. These are some lovely, vibrant people with great visions of building solidarity in the East Bay and beyond. (Earlier morning conversations focused around movements in Mexico, Chile, and Argentina, and how we might ally with / extend them here in Oakland.)
Anyway, I’ll keep you posted if/when we post an official account on the EastBaySol blog, but just wanted to share some of the joy of the day! Hope you’re well, friends.
Spent today shopping for an East Bay Solidarity Network sign-making party, agonizing for an embarrassingly long time over what color (and heft) of banner fabric to get, and what color felt for the letters, and later (with William) what font to use. But now it’s finished — grommets and all — and looks F%*@IN’ SICK, if I do say so myself. :)
Between printing the letters, cutting them out, tracing them onto the white felt, and then cutting out the felt and gluing the letters onto the banner, our core organizers also called all the people on our phone tree to mobilize for the next action, coming up on Wednesday. Cooperating on mini-projects over weeks and months is cultivating a beautiful ease among us. We crack each other up; we respect each others’ opinions. We brew each other tea. (Louise, if you’re reading this: we will miss you!)
Next week, after the action, I’ll share photos of the fight-specific signs we made. Right now it’s time to sleep the deep, delicious sleep of the DIY-satisfied.
When you’re meditating, the same process [of restraint] holds. People sometimes wonder why they can’t get their minds to concentrate. It’s because they’re not willing to give up other interests, even for the time being. A thought comes and you just go right after it without checking to see where it’s going. This idea comes that sounds interesting, that looks intriguing, you’ve got a whole hour to think about whatever you want. If that’s your attitude toward the meditation period, nothing’s going to get accomplished. You have to realize that this is your opportunity to get the mind stable and still. In order to do that, you have to give up all kinds of other thoughts. Thoughts about the past, thoughts about the future, figuring this out, planning for that, whatever: you have to put them all aside. No matter how wonderful or sophisticated those thoughts are, you just say no to them.
YES! Good Lord, it always seems like my best, most nuanced ideas come when I’m trying to meditate. And all I want to do is get up from the floor and go write them down. Or else I’ll forget! And this key conceptual innovation will be lost forever! People will die and movements will perish unless I fully formulate and record this thought!
Underlying this mildly desperate grasping, for me, anyway, is the notion that my ideas, my intellectual products, are my most important features and contributions. “Features” in the sense that they might make me more admirable; “contributions” in the sense that they might make me more useful. If an idea can be articulated, recorded, and disseminated, it will be worth more to a greater number of people than my 60 minutes of calm, settled mind, which are beneficial only to me.
But what Thanissaro Bhikkhu is getting at, I think, is that ways of being — i.e. patience, restraint, generosity, and dignity — can be equally important features and contributions.
I think that in some way, this is borne out through his article itself. He’s talking about patience and dignity, he’s using well-crafted language to describe it, which is lovely and useful. But it is our experiences of beneficial patience, restraint, dignity and generosity that leave more profound impressions on us, and on the ways we engage the world. Observing, emulating, and deliberately cultivating these qualities intervenes more significantly in culture (even on the level of our friendship groups, or workplaces, or organizing committees) than an eloquent description of their beauty.
If that doesn’t grab you, and you still think good ideas are the shit, consider this: a calm mind can act as a stronger foundation for discernment and discriminating thought. So even if we have to let go of some idea-streams in the short term, in the long term we may learn to call on a broader range of faculties in determining which ideas are worthy of extended investigation. We may find that we need to ‘chase’ good ideas less, and instead allow them to arise and show themselves in our minds.
I do have one quibble with Thanissaro’s article, though. While I completely agree that much of consumer culture pushes us toward instant gratification, I also think there are a few vital exceptions to this rule: examples of toxic, twisted imperatives toward “restraint” that illustrate important truths about economics, politics, and gender.
Exception 1: The Dieting Industry
__
Each year, people in the U.S. spend $40 billion on “weight loss programs and products.” On one hand, it’s true that “restraint” does not figure too overtly into the industry vocab. On the contrary, I think, we often see a marketing strategy of “indulgence.” The health bar that tastes like a candy bar! Sumptuous weight-loss meals prepared and delivered to your door!
Hi friends. Howya been? This will be a quick thought-note, to try to get myself back in blogging mode.
Friday I attended a panel on solidarity unionism organized by the Wobblies (International Workers of the World), and it got me thinking about unconventional workplace struggles, unconventional unions, and unconventional workplace demands.
One common demand that many organizers (both worker/self-organizers and paid/professional organizing staff) mentioned during their talks was sick days. The workers’ union at Jimmy John’s in Minneapolis (a sub sandwich chain similar to Subway) plastered the whole town with these clever, zippy posters illustrating their sick days fight.
_
When the panel finished, I thought: it sucks to have to go to work sick. It also sucks to have to go to work the day after you’ve been raped, or the day after you’ve been verbally assaulted because of your gender presentation, or the day after you discover you’ve got an unplanned pregnancy, and need some time to figure out how to approach that situation. I’m pretty sure most doctors won’t write you a sick-day-verification note for these conditions? (That is, if you even have a doctor.)
Final zine, y'all! This one arrived to me in the mail as a gift (among many!), along with the usual scholarly correspondence, from my amazingly heartful, talented, and fly poet / professor / academic advisor / friend, Gale P. Jackson.
I love it because
Its content is both instructive and creative, showing “Techniques, materials, How to / Where to [of] Banners, Signs, Floats, theater, Music, songs, chants, puppets, etc.”
It was published in 1985, making it one year older than me
The illustrations and layout are incredible
Some content is time-specific and local, making it political propaganda as well as a DIY manual.
I’ll try to let this one speak for itself. With deep gratitude and appreciation to Gale! Hopefully some of the specific contents will infuse themselves into my organizing, and be reflected there.
Sorry for the late post again! Today’s zine is already a Bay Area radical classic, examining the politics around the recent wave of struggle following a caught-on-tape police murder. A white cop shot a young Black Oakland resident in the back, while the young man was lying face-down on a subway platform. (This officer, by the way, may be released from prison next month, having served less than a year of his 2-year sentence.)
Published in its original version back in mid-July of 2009, the new updated edition contains the same dope analysis of the role of nonprofits, histories of rioting, racist policing and more, plus a new preface, more art, and a supplementary article: “Moving Beyond Violence vs. Nonviolence.”
In my forthcoming guest column in make / shift magazine, I draw on A/S’s analysis of the Oscar Grant movement to illustrate my own alternatives to liberal, relativist interpretations of Buddhist teachings. You’ll have to wait til the magazine comes out to read my application of their deft explications, but in the meantime why not throw down a few dollars for a copy (just click the Donate button on the Advance the Struggle blog) and print the primary source material yourself? :)
Ink drought in your printer? No worries; you can read the web version, too. Still donate, though!
I’m not really sure why it took me so long to get into zines. Even now I’m not particularly ‘into’ them, to tell the truth — which is strange, considering that I love handmade objects, and I obviously love informal self-publishing. True zine-ophiles (ha! xenophiles!) might cringe at overly broad definitions of the form, but to a layperson like me, the essence of zines seems to be (a) self-manufacture and (b) text and images. Why wouldn’t a blog count? (Unless, of course, you’re a stickler about the handmade-object thing, which, really, I wouldn’t blame you, because as I said, I have a crush on handmade objects.)
Today’s zine captured my heart immediately, not only because it was made by one of my all-time favorite bloggers / writers, who goes by brownfemipower (or bfp for short), but also because it arrived at my home in the mail as a gift, all the way from Ypsilanti, Michigan, accompanied by a beautiful note in sky-blue ink.
Some days all I can really manage to do is make an omelet. Not that I'm fishing for compliments — I'm aware and confident that this was a fucking phenomenal omelet, filled with beet greens sautéed with garlic, lemon zest, great-tasting olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and just a touch of brown sugar, then rounded out with grape tomatoes and goat milk blue cheese, and finished with cilantro. Tremendous. One for me, one for Ryan. And our kitchen conversation during the omelet forging somehow led to me drawing the following charts about the Cycle of Productive Capital:
Both of these charts represent my still-dim comprehension of the concept, and if someone else has better charts or corrections to add, please share! Minimally, this illustration should probably be in the shape of a spiral to show how M'>M, and the extra (profit) gets re-invested? I dunno.
Some images from a 5-day strike at the Children’s Hospital just a few blocks from where Ryan, Mai and I live. The contracts that the bosses are trying to push would include so many “takeaways” (cuts to previously held benefits) that nurses who work in the hospital would no longer be able to afford to bring their own children there for treatment.
Ryan and I chatted up a lot of the workers for a while, and thanked them for setting an inspiring example by actually going out on strike and fighting back. Lots of positive energy, aided, I think by the freshness of the action (it was the first of the 5 days) and a steady stream of honks of encouragement from folks driving down Martin Luther King Jr Way.
Kloncke 