March 2008 Archives

We in the United States believe that nothing is more important than democracy. We don't understand how a country like Iraq could get so lost.  What are the steps to wind up in a state of tyranny, we wonder?  Because, proudly, though our nation isn't perfect it has always been a democracy, moving towards more freedom for greater numbers of voters.  We wonder: how did the German people allow the atrocities of WWII?  Its an excellent question, one that sociologists and psychologist spent much of the 1950s trying to answer.  Because, while their were plenty of Nazis, most German citizens didn't have a stake in Hitler's agenda.  Most were ordinary citizens just going about their day to day business.  And you look back at those people and you wonder, why didn't they do something?  Why didn't they tear down the walls?  Why didn't they march out of their jobs and onto the streets and say, "We're not putting any more money into this economy as long as it represents injustice and murder?"  And I'm not trying to make a comparison between this administration and that one.  No, I am simply putting forth the question---how does a nation of people know when the line has been crossed?  Because history proves that people don't always act on their conscience.  History proves that all manner of tyranny can soil us before we will wake up and sweep clean injustice.  I only bring up the question of WWII to point out: it has happened.  It can happen again. 

So these are the questions we must ask ourself:

Do you believe that "President" George W. Bush won the election fair and square in Florida?  Because I was in Tallahassee in 2000.  I spoke to people who were turned away from the polls, whole neighborhoods with barricades, preventing them from voting.  And then we get the same stories coming out of Ohio in the election after.  And if you believe that the last two elections were stolen, then do we still live in a democracy?  How many rigged elections will it take before you are ready to dump all your tea into the Bay?  Doesn't have to be two.  That's not what I'm saying.  I'm asking this question seriously so that you can set a standard. So that you will know when it is time to stand up for what you believe in.  So that, three, four rigged elections down the line you don't forget the promises our Constitution have made.

I have another question.  Let's set the election aside.  Let's talk about what it means to trust the government.  Our constitution was founded on the principle that the government you can trust today could turn on you tomorrow.  That's why we have the Bill of Rights.  That's why we have the fourth Amendment, the one that protects us from unlawful search and seizure.  A lot of people think its about privacy.  It's not.  Thomas Jefferson didn't care about your right to privacy.  The fourth amendment is about revolution.  Here's why:  if you live in a country where the government can keep tabs on everyone, get into their business, then you can't have a revolution.  If you live in a place where the government is taking notes about who goes where and who knows whom, then they can lock up anyone who doesn't like the way things are going down.  Or you can put them all in a line and put a bullet in their heads.  So when the government has all that information they can do whatever they want.  And we have seen it happen.  It happened in Iran.  It happened in Italy.  Yes, it happened in WWII in Germany.  And it has happened in this country.  It happened when the government went after the Black Panthers in the seventies.  It happened in the eighteen hundreds when private militias shot Union workers speaking their mind, as I am now.  But not to the extent that it took place in these other regimes.  Most of us still feel safe speaking our minds.  So again, I want you to ask yourself a very simple question:  Where is the line?  How many people does a country have to spy on before you, personally, will take to the streets?  Right now many of us are comfortable but we are also a people that believes in liberty.  And we believe that, at some point, free people will prove they are free by disposing of bad government. If you believe in the Constitution, you must believe that.  So where is the line?  What will it take for you to question how safe it is for you to write a letter or make a phone call?  What is your limit? 

This is a question I want you to seriously ponder. One hundred?  One thousand?  One million?  Is it only one?  Here's something else to ponder.  Something we haven't pondered enough.  Have you really pondered this whole business with AT&T?  I've been thinking about it a lot lately.  Can anyone even remember what happened there?  It is hard to pick apart the news from the celebrity gossip these days.  I'll remind you because it has been plaguing my conscience. 

The government was asking AT&T for a whole lot of information about its customers.  Potential terrorists, supposedly.  And AT&T thought it was pretty inconvenient.  Do we really need a warrant for every last one of these people?  That's a lot of work. So they decided to just let Uncle Sam put his ear up to the wall and have access to every single email and  phone call made on AT&T's service.  Apparently, if you are a customer of AT&T the fourth Amendment doesn't apply to you.  I can't believe that company is still in business!  Why isn't there an international boycott against this AT&T?  Where is the outrage?  And what makes you think that if the government was reading our email and listening in on our phone calls in 2000, that they aren't doing it now?  If we don't make it crystal clear that it won't be tolerated, why shouldn't they continue to take away our rights, one by one?  So again, I ask you: What is your limit?  Know it.  Know when it has been crossed.  Be ready to act.  Because if we wait until they are recording every email and phone call we make, it will be too late.  I pray it isn't too late now. 

But I know what some of you are thinking.  You're thinking: Sure, that happened in other places, in little tropical countries where the heat drives people mad.  Long ago, in Europe before the spread of almighty capitalism.  That can't happen here.  We are still safe.  And I guarantee that's what they thought in Iran, too, before their government put everyone who doesn't think like them in front of a firing squad.  But that was Iran.  Not here. 

 I see only two reasons one might argue that that can't happen here.  Either we can trust the government or we can trust the people of democracy to revolt against tyranny.  Well, can we trust this government?  Sure, they might be spying on us, but they wouldn't hurt us.  They wouldn't lock us up in internment camps, we learned our lesson after we locked up all those innocent Japanese-Americans in WWII.  It is a totally different thing to lock people up in Guantanamo Bay.  Those people are "unlawful combatants." 

That's a funny phrase, isn't it?  We have all the leaders of all these nations sit down together and draft a document on what is and isn't ethical to do in a time of war.  That every single human being, regardless of who's side they're on, has these rights.  And to go against this document is, therefore, a war crime.  You know I'm talking about the Geneva Convention.  Its not a controversial thing.  The U.S. has been backing it since 1842. 

So basically this administration is arguing that "unlawful combatants" aren't human.  Because they don't get human rights.  Don't tell me that they're all guilty, because they haven't been to trial.  "Innocent until proven guilty."  Innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.  Not six guys in a room with a baseball bat.  That is not justice.  But it is easiest to believe that they are all bad people.  So we go on believing that.  Because we trust the government.  We trust that a government that steals two elections, spies on its citizens and locks people up and tortures them. 

Of course we don't.  We're not fools.  I don't need to tell you this.  You know all this.  You know you can think of a hundred other wrongs.  Lying about weapons of mass destruction.  Turning against members of their own CIA for telling the truth.  Shabby investigation into 9-11.  Of course we don't trust this government. 

So that leaves only one possibility.  There's only one other possible way we can be sure that the atrocities of tyranny don't happen here:  we can trust that the  people of a democracy will revolt against tyranny, as they did when they founded this nation.  That's why I'm asking you these questions today.  That's why I want you to think about  what it would take for you to rise up.  What would it take for you to become a revolutionary?  What would it take for you to stand on a soapbox?  What would it take for you to organize meetings?  What would it take for your water cooler conversation to turn seditious?  Because you cannot wait for the firing squads.  You cannot wait until ordinary citizens are afraid of being rounded up and taken away.  Then it will be too late. 

I hear a lot of folks talking about change.  They're talking about the democratic primary.  They have a lot of hope for turning this country around. And that's a beautiful thing.  But that's not enough.  Because no matter how great the next president is, that doesn't mean the one following it can't pick up where this administration has left off.  The American people are setting a precedent.  We are telling those that would deny us our freedoms that it is an easy thing to do.  We are telling them that we can be placated.  We can be distracted. 

Please, tell me it isn't true.  Tell me that we are a people that will defend the freedoms it took so long to establish.  Tell me you will go home tonight and think about where that line is, your personal line in the sand.  What you are willing to do to defend your freedom.  And I'm not talking about going to some other country and killing people because you believe their government is a threat to you.  Hypothetically, what rights does this government have to take away before it no longer represents you?  And what are you willing to do about it?  Until each and every one of you is sure of the answer to that question we aren't really free.  This Constitution is just a piece of paper.  It takes a nation full of conviction to give it meaning.

Virginia Woolf's  A Room of One's Own poignantly captures the uphill battle women face when trying to compete in a male-established field.  She promoted the idea that women had to carve out a space of their own instead of trying to do what men did--in essence, don't fight for the space, work around it.

Unfortunately for me, my fight for space is not an academic, theoretical space, but actual physical space.  Every day, I have to fight for a seat on the subway.  I know, it's just a seat.  After all, it's not as if I have to fight for land or natural resources.  However, it is still a space that I have a fight for.

Every morning on the train I see the same thing: seat after seat after seat of men sitting with their legs spread apart, sometimes taking up to three seats with their body.  Essentially their body language is saying this:  this train is MY space.  Mine!  I have complete disregard for the fact that the train is overcrowded and some people were not able to get onto the train because I am taking up the space of two additional people.  I don't care about them and I don't care about you--this is mine.  

There have actually been times when I am already sitting and a guy sits next to me, only to spread his legs further and further apart, literally forcing me to sit in a more narrow space.  At first I thought men might just be trying to hit on me.  Then I came to realize that it was not a method of touching my body, but the idea that they felt entitled to the space.  The space I was sitting in was not mine--it belonged to them.

It is such a patriarchal notion to think you are entitled to space.  When I mean patriarchal, I mean a system that has cultured men and women to behave in certain ways that are deemed just or proper for their gender.   Although I have seen a few women take up space with their bodies on the subway, the majority has been men.  However, the big difference is that as the train becomes more crowded, it is the women on the train who move their bodies to accommodate for more space. Men rarely feel the need to move.  This observation is why I categorize the act of entitlement to space as patriarchal--it has nothing to do with what men and women do, but how men and women do things differently because of how they have been cultured to act.  Women, as a whole, are not conditioned to exercise power or entitlement, thus women's spaces are always vulnerable to being thwarted and limited.

I even started an experiment regarding entitlement to space.  I began to sit with my legs spread out as far as I could, actively occupying my seat and half of each adjacent seat.  As the train became more crowded, both men and women asked me to move my legs.  However, the men who were also seated as I was were never bothered.  What does this tell you?  Women are not expected to take up space with their bodies--and they can be corrected when they do take up more room than they are expected to.  

While some feminists may take the stance that women should fight for as much space as men take up, I wish to do the opposite.  I would like to minimize the space all of us occupy.  This idea extends to other aspects of life as well--don't consume more than you have to, stop producing trash so that we do not occupy more land, end globalization and the unwelcome interference of foreign nations--the list goes on.

What I have also come to realize is the assertion I feel comfortable with when trying to reclaim my space.  In the above example where I was already sitting and the guy next to me spread his legs further and further apart forcing me to have less space to sit in, it would seem obvious for me to say, "Excuse me, but you are taking up my seat."  However, this feels rude.  It feels rude (and bitchy, as most assertive women are coined to be) to draw attention to another's lack of social grace.  Yet, when a country invades another, it is not considered to be rude to fight back, but a sign of gumption, pride and ownership.  Why, then, did I not feel the same way about an invasion into my personal space?  

Oh, that's right, because I've been cultured not to.  I can be irritated or even feel slighted, but get political?  Isn't that taking it to the extreme?  After all, it is just a seat.  However, it is not just a seat.  It's the very idea that I should not receive the rights to space as much as men, and that people in this country, in general, feel entitled to space that is not theirs.

I am reclaiming my space. I am making it part of my daily routine to tell men on the train to put their legs together and stop occupying unneeded space.  After all, I shouldn't have to carve out a room of my own--I should be able to utilize the room that has already been reserved for me.

It's hard when you are nineteen or twenty-year old radical to understand how older lefties "settle down" and get pulled into the system.  You swear that will never happen to you.  But the system has many ways of wrapping around you, like the vines that suffocated Sleeping Beauty's castle. 

One of these ways is home-ownership.  An absolute radical would never pay rent.  They would find an abandoned building and fix it up and make it home.  When the supposed "owners" come to kick you out you would wage a battle of wills and ideas.  You would point out that as you are actually using and improving the land, it is truly yours, regardless of whatever piece of paper they carry that grants them the right to leave it abandoned.  You would refuse to pay rent to any person because as soon as we agree that the land under your feet belongs to someone else you become a slave. 

But at some point you have to pick your battles.  Most folks by the age of 25 decide that they have goals beyond lengthy arrest-records for squatting.  It seems difficult to imagine balancing living in a squat with pursuing your noble dreams of becoming a writer/artist/feminist lawyer/eco-terrorist.   No matter how radical, most of us don't end up living as squatters.

This leaves two options: rent or buy. 

Renting is odious.  It is ludicrous to pay a third to half our income to some person just to have a place to lay our weary heads.  And what does this landlord do for us?  They hire someone to mow the lawn, if they are decent they hire someone to fix the stove when it breaks.  And otherwise, we never see them.  We can at best feel sorry for those people forced to piss and sleep in the alley because they have not paid, as we have, to have access to a toilet or a shower.  When a homeless woman lays down her head to sleep she is a thief because every square inch of land in the city is "owned" by a person or a state and she has not paid for her right to sleep there.  If every doorway and underpass is someone's property, it would seem that those who don't pay have no right to exist at all. Rent is like paying a capitalist tax to let us be part of the system.  No other species of animal in the universe can understand why humans would allow themselves to be beholden to other humans for shelter. But we endure it. 

For this reason, I would like very much to own my own home.  Of course, property has become so expensive that one cannot just outright buy it.  You must make an agreement with a bank that they will buy the house for you and you will pay them off for damn near eternity.  This is equally absurd.  Why should one of the fundamental requirements of life be so expensive that it takes a lifetime to pay for it?  If this is ethical, why not a lifetime of debt for every piece of fruit we eat?  Why not charge us for the air we breathe?  We like to think we would never allow such a miscarriage of justice. Yet somehow we have come to agree that having a place to stack our books and make our bed should involve a lifetime of sacrifice.

But this arrangement with the bank is preferable to renting because at some far-off point you can hypothetically own your own home, which means living in peace without the burden of rent collection hanging at your back til the day you die.  Many aging radicals eventually come to this same conclusion.  To achieve this coveted relationship with the bank, one must prove themselves a fine and worthy borrower through the concept of "Good Credit."  

It is insufficient to merely pay your bills.  To establish Good Credit, you must have several charge cards.  I did not have a charge card until I was 26 because they so terrify me.  Most radicals don't want any part of a system that makes its money off of  indentured servitude of the young and naive.  However, in pursuit of Good Credit, I recently received my second credit card in the mail.  It came with a blank check that encouraged me to "Make a purchase I've been putting off," or to "remodel one of the rooms of your home."  Because if I can't afford that new sewing machine and granite counters in the kitchen today, surely next month I will be able to afford it plus 15% compound interest!  Of course I can't.  But everyone knows that the companies make all there money from debt, those who pay are leechers on the credit system (and how strange is it that a business model is set up that holds in highest regard those that lead it to no profit at all and denigrates the group that provides their billions in wealth?). 

I have decided I need a second charge card because when my sweetie recently went to apply for a home loan, the bank told him he didn't have enough credit.  He has very good credit---he uses a credit card and has never been late on any bill or payment of any kind, yet this is not enough.  So it seems that to buy a home one must have a stamp of approval from not just Visa or Mastercard, but both.

The pursuit of Good Credit is just one way that well-meaning radicals become entrenched in the system.  It recently occurred to me that a positive consequence of having a significant amount of money I may have to pay to Uncle Sam in taxes this year will be the opportunity to be a war tax resister.  I don't know a lot about this but it seems like a small way to make a statement.  There is no risk of arrest and it is a subtle form of direct action---I don't want Uncle Sam to spend it so I won't give it to him.  But then I was told that becoming a war tax resister would destroy my Good Credit.  When the government is unable to collect the three dollars I withhold for the war tax, they will turn me over to a collection agency who will relentlessly chase me down in pursuit of that three dollars.  They will notify Visa and Mastercard that I am not to be trusted.  All dreams of picket fences will be dashed. 

Pehaps the person who told me this was incorrect.  Perhaps the government is efficient enough to ignore a debt of three dollars.  To some extent, it doesn't matter.  As long as this argument is widespread, it will influence many people.  There are many people who hate the war and hate the idea that they are paying the government to continue the war.  But there are few people who would be willing to withhold that money if it means they may never be able to buy a home.  So Uncle Sam becomes a troll at the bridge, demanding tribute so that citizens can cross the bridge into the middle-class world they were promised as part of the American Dream.  We pay not because we agree but because we must, to get this other thing. 

So where does that leave us?  Paying our taxes, worrying about the opinion of Visa and Mastercard, buying stocks and bonds in the hope that they will produce enough money that we will somehow, some day, be able to afford something that should go without saying is part of life---shelter.  May the youth forgive us.

In college, there was a firebrand preacher that would come speak in the "free speech zone" on my campus.   He was truly old school.   He wore a suit.   He could point to the earth like a disco-dancing John Travolta when he shouted the word "Damnation!".   He preached on the evils of short skirts and the neccessity of stoning gays. His crew of offspring and his timid wife watched silently.

The lefties all hated him.   The atheists hated him.   The Jews and the Muslims hated him.   And because he made loving Jesus look like following Hitler, the Christians hated him too.   Finally something united the campus!

But secretly, I thought he was great.

People that would usually go home and play Dance Dance Revolution before getting drunk and cramming for an exam  were driven to their sacred texts.   The Muslims would pop open the Koran.   The atheists would turn to Mark Twain.   The Christians would dig into their Little Black Book.   And fueled with fresh evidence, they would throw fresh facts at the Firebrand Preacher, fueling long, heated debates.   The LGBT group would hold hands and wear a rainbow flag.   The Christians would pass out candies assuring us that Jesus loves us after all.   Five days a week and this guy never failed to draw a crowd.   It was beautiful.

But standing on a soapbox and giving a speech hasn't always been the sole purview of the religious fanatic.   The U.S. labor movement was built by immigrants  standing on a platform and shouting, "Fellow workers..!"   How freeing it must have been to announce at the top of your lungs: This is what I know to be true!   Join me!   We will change the world!    

But these are not revolutionary times.   These are times when the words "liberal" and "progressive" are used as slurs.   And anarchist, communist, socialist?   Forget it!   You may as well be wearing a straight jacket.

Many people in our country (the U.S.) still support these ideas but are afraid to stand by them.   They think they may as well pack their bags for Guantanamo.   And still others think, what's the point?   They slog on year after year, voting for the Democratic nominee and writing a yearly check to P.E.T.A.   But in their hearts there is a stirring, a desparate rage and a yearning for utopian visions.

Thus, we do not want to be a "liberal" soapbox or a "moderately left-leaning" soapbox.   Hell no!   We chose the name "Subversive" to be shamelessly, unabashadly radical.   We believe that the time has come for lefties to step up to the soapbox and raise their voices.   This is what we believe and we are not afraid to shout it.