Bridgeheads
Direct Action at the Rock Island Arsenal
Not so long ago, more of us gave a shit. Even young people, who seem much more content with i-phone activism these days than street theater or walking picket lines. I’m not trying to be hippie-nostalgic, nor am I wagging a proverbial finger at today’s “apathetic youth.” We had our reasons for doing what we did back in the ’80s. Remember Reagan’s “Star Wars” and “first-strike nukes?” Iran-Contra and the criminal activities of Ollie North, et.al.? How about nuns murdered and even archbishops assassinated in Central America? Or C.I.A.-trained death squads, the “disappearing” of thousands of so-called “communists,” and covert action?
The evils still lurk. And maybe because a presumed-liberal black man with a “progressive”-sounding name occupies the Oval Office, some of the state-sponsored criminal activity is hidden a little better. And maybe, for the same reason, some isn’t. It doesn’t take much effort, however, to find a reason to get off one’s ass and take to the streets. You just need to decide that it’s worth it.
Did you ever consider that perhaps Big Brother would like us all to think he’s much bigger, much more omniscient and omnipresent than he truly is? After all, doesn’t it serve his interests for us to presume so? That way, we self-censor, we self-check any potential thought crimes that might lead to lifting a picket sign, hoisting a banner, or — God forbid — participating in a form of direct action that challenges the walking dead around us to think, to recalibrate what Thoreau referred to as their “lives of quiet desperation?”
The Machine still stands, still clicking along full-throttle. The raging has been reduced to a whimper. Even punks seem content with being heard and not seen.
But it need not be so; and it wasn’t so. Even here in the Midwest. I was a witness. I was a participant. I risked arrest, losing my job, and being alienated from my family. Mistakes were made but regrets were not. It was a matter of not letting history “make” me. It was a matter of choosing to make history myself. With others. Out of love. For others.
Here’s a piece of history being made. I’ll blog more on the subject in the future.
