Gulf Coast Peace Train
By Stan at 9:04 pm, 3/20/06 <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/images/misc/060318c.jpg> 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. < KATRINA SHOCK: Therapy for Black America <http://stangoff.com/?p=267> 5 Comments > <http://stangoff.com/?p=268#postcomment> 1. 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? (-: Comment by Stan <http://stangoff.com/> - 3/20/2006 @ 9:49 pm <http://stangoff.com/?p=268#comment-10489> 2. 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 <http://www.eurotrib.com/story/2006/3/17/21156/7804> 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? Comment by DeAnander - 3/20/2006 @ 10:09 pm <http://stangoff.com/?p=268#comment-10491> 3. 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! Comment by James M (documentarian) <http://jamesminton.com/> - 3/21/2006 @ 12:21 am <http://stangoff.com/?p=268#comment-10495> 4. Your stuff here keeps making me cry, Stan. In a good way, though. Keep it coming. Comment by elaina - 3/21/2006 @ 6:02 am <http://stangoff.com/?p=268#comment-10515> 5. Pics and blog journals at http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/ <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> . Minnie Bruce Pratt with WWP came and did a series of podcasts that can be found at www.workers.org <http://www.workers.org/> Video at http://www.neworleansvfp.org/taxonomy/term/63 <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. Comment by Stan <http://stangoff.com/> - 3/21/2006 @ 9:02 am <http://stangoff.com/?p=268#comment-10524> Filed under: General <http://stangoff.com/index.php?cat=1> , Imperialism <http://stangoff.com/index.php?cat=2> , Military <http://stangoff.com/index.php?cat=3> , Gender <http://stangoff.com/index.php?cat=4> , Race & Nation <http://stangoff.com/index.php?cat=5> , Ecology & Env Justice <http://stangoff.com/index.php?cat=6> , Energy War <http://stangoff.com/index.php?cat=7> , The Chickenshit Press <http://stangoff.com/index.php?cat=8> , Repression & Resistance <http://stangoff.com/index.php?cat=9> , Class <http://stangoff.com/index.php?cat=13> _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [email protected] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
