inauguration doubletakes

Did anyone else catch Rick Warren dropping in the Shema and then, immediately after, breezing over a quote from the Holy Qur'an? (I'd chapter-and-verse it, but it's in there 114 times, last I checked.) Thoughts about the supposed inclusivity of simply saying "Jesus" in English, Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic and then still identifying Him as, y'know, the one source of true teaching--plus tacking on the Lord's Prayer for no apparent reason?

How about Feinstein's dis of Malcolm X? I gasped, I admit.

And, for that matter--who else fell over laughing at Warren's...exotic...enunciation of "Malia and Sasha"? Was anyone else tempted to periodically hold up a sign that said "EXCEPT THE QUEERS" during his invocation?

...how many times can white newscasters breathlessly expound on how racism is over?

And Obama, well...hell of a speech, sir. Some nice shoutouts, some truly elegantly brutal digs at the outgoing administration, and some interesting reference choices. And a conscious avoidance of gendered language--"Our forebears," "All are equal"--through variation of traditionally epicene-masculine phrases. Nicely done and much appreciated. For that matter? I actually thought it was sweet, that he was nervous enough to stumble on the oath of office. Michelle gave him a great look when he did.

On the other other hand? Get we please, please stop with the notion that every American came from immigrants, settling this untamed land, bravely marching toward the horizon and striking out into unmapped territory to make new homes and hopes? I know it's a great image to work with, y'all, but some people were here already. For Pete's sake, can we stop erasing everyone whose ancestors managed to handle this continent just fine for a good 12,000 years before--how shall I put this--colonialist genocide reared its head? 'Cause they're still here, y'all. And some had to sit in that amazing crowd and listen, once again, and they got conveniently cut out of the picture.

Anyway. That said, I'm glad I got to see most of it, adorably-snappily-dressed Obama kids and all.

shall not perish

Today is the tenth annual International Trans Day of Remembrance.
Yesterday was the one hundred and forty-fifth anniversary of some of the most influential five minutes I know of, five minutes and ten sentences that mattered and continue to matter and, I think, apply on this dark day, as well.
They came from a depressed, disabled person who was probably queer and certainly haunted, looking out over a community in mourning, crushed by loss, divided by rage and blood-grudges and barely holding back from another round of vengeance. They came from a hated, mocked leader who looked out on a people undergoing tumultuous change, some free for the first time in memory, some having to deal with it. They came from bereavement and fear and the understanding that sometimes, there's just nothing you can say that will make it better, make it go away, but there is always--always--the kind of hope that says, what we can do? We can work to keep this from ever happening again. We can't do this loss and these lives honor by anything else: we just need to put our shoulders to the wheel and do the hard work of hope.
I'd change the gendered pronouns, myself, were it my speech, but they were the conventions of the time, and it is not.

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government, of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." --A. Lincoln in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, U.S.A., 19 November, 1863

the quick and the dead

EDITED TO ADD--IMPORTANT: It has come further to my attention that HRC is not in fact doing any of the planning for Portland's Trans Day of Remembrance, which is, of course, a glaring error. I am retaining the current text to preserve my inaccuracy rather than pretend it never happened.
Having checked with one of this year's organizers--someone who did work I admired a great deal for last year's event--I had it confirmed to me that while HRC lobbied hard to have involvement and control over Portland's Trans Day of Remembrance and in fact announced to their listserv and on their website that they were so involved, the organizers from Portland State University took a stand and chose to limit HRC's involvement to a display table.
I find this news both heartening and reassuring. At the same time, I also think it remains important and disturbing that HRC tried to run the Day of Remembrance, and is doing so in many other cities and towns across the country. Additionally, I think it remains important that HRC continues to claim their heavy involvement in Portland's commemoration even though they were not invited to do so--they are supposedly presenting the commemoration "in conjunction" with the people who have actually put it together.
This information indicates that while my point regarding Portland specifically can be set in part aside, to my great comfort, it still stands in all the places where organizers were not able to stand up to HRC as Portland's did. I commend PSU's organizers and chosen speakers, and again apologize for repeating HRC's inaccurate publicity in this piece.


It has come to my attention that the Human Rights Campaign has got its hands on Portland's Trans Day of Remembrance.
Yes, that Human Rights Campaign.

It's being touted, along with many events across the U.S. this year, as a change of emphasis from "Trans Day of Remembrance" to "Trans Awareness Day," something much more upbeat, much more focused on feel-good celebration of the community, something much more acceptable to upper-class, culturally-normative assimilationists you can put in the newspaper without making anyone feel threatened.

Last year's Day of Remembrance in Portland featured a young, poor, politically-radical trans woman of color (hi!) as an invited speaker and was organized, grassroots, by a multiracial, cross-class, cross-generational group of locals, largely students. This year it's HRC, a Democratic Party flack, a local therapist, and the executive director of an advocacy organization, two of the three white, all binary-identified, middle-class, and middle-aged--all acceptably-photogenic Spokespeople For The Community. This is not to disparage those speakers, some of whom I've worked alongside personally--I just find the choices telling. They may all be good people who do good work, but the diversity seems to have gone away in who we're presenting as our community's face, at the same time that we're supposed to be de-emphasizing commemoration of the dead and trying to re-focus on the sunshiny bits. I cannot imagine that has nothing to do with our inviting a national GLb organization in, one whose goals have largely been assimilationist, white, middle-class, and yes, anti-trans--to "present" us.

The Day of Remembrance is not about being photogenic. It is not about fundraising or lobbying or recruitment. It does not need the HRC.

The Day of Remembrance is ours, and it is sacred. It is the one day we set aside to honor those in our community, overwhelmingly poor trans women of color, who were killed due to bigotry and hatred. It is a single day in the year where we make certain that the names of the murdered are heard and held up, so we can all remember that these people mattered, were real, were loved, and are missed. It's a day to gather the community together and call attention to the violence directed against us and the caring we have for each other. It came from us. It was built by us. It was never supposed to be flashy or glitzy. It is a solemn mourning for the dead, a place to hold hands, and a promise to those who violence took away from us that we who are still living will hold together, take care of each other, and push forward together into a world where that violence is only a painful memory.

We can do better than this, for our sacred dead. We can do better for ourselves.
We need better than this.

Our community is constantly looking down a gun-barrel, and organizations that don't honor or support us continually ask for more of our money, our time, our hope, and now, even our events so they can push their own agenda--one that often leaves us behind. It doesn't just leave us behind deliberately, as in the ENDA fiasco. It also leaves us behind by prioritizing goals that many of us simply don't have on the radar because we're too busy surviving. An inclusive ENDA would have helped guarantee jobs and homes for the most marginalized in the queer community, a bare chance to just have a table to put food on, let alone the food. Instead, we're focusing all of the queer community's resources on what, marriage equality? That's a worthy goal. It's just not on the docket for many of us--working-class queers, queer people of color, trans people--who're often more worried about keeping our families alive than having full legal equality for those families. That equality would be wonderful, as would the public affirmation of us as full citizens. But those of us who aren't even considered citizens--those of us who aren't even considered human, or important enough for an organization that purports to speak for us to advocate for--those of us who are denied votes, livelihoods, and more--we have a much more basic agenda. Make it till tomorrow. Make it till next week. We're dying out here, this year at a rate of more-than-twice monthly, and we are not such a large community we can afford that. This month alone, as many as six trans people--again, almost exclusively poor trans women of color--were reported murdered, and the month isn't even over.

Where are our priorities? Where are the priorities of our so-called allies? You were all out on the street, in the hundreds of thousands, protesting Proposition 8. Where will you be on Thursday night?

HRC just recently put out a new line of designer wear. (Hey, look, it's Christian Siriano, who made his fame spitting on trans people and encouraging the public to use bigoted slurs!) As a young, queer trans woman of color with a white-collar education and a blue-collar job, I can't afford new shoes, and I'm one of the more privileged in my community. Do you get it yet? Do you get why this is such an obscenity?

I am all for marriage equality, believe me. I proudly wear the ring that displays my engagement to my partner, another queer woman, and I look forward to our wedding, whether or not it's legalized. I want those legal protections for my family, and I want the security of knowing that my society places equal responsibility, honor, obligation, and sacred meaning on my marriage as anyone else's. As the law currently stands--and until we achieve marriage equality in the United States--as a trans person with mismatched government ID, I can't legally marry anyone.
But I have to live long enough to get married, and I have to know that my partner won't come to harm for loving me, and I would like to no longer have to carry the knowledge that as marriage is for people, until my society considers me fully human, it will never consider me "marriage material."

Listen, I know marriage is important, but it is not the only issue, here, okay? Because, per the studies even HRC cites, as a trans woman I have a 1 in 12 chance of being murdered. 1 in 12. To put that in perspective, as a member of the general population I have an approximately 1 in 100 chance of dying in a car crash. I am almost ten times likelier to die of murder than a car crash! How many people do you know who've been in traffic accidents? How many of you know someone who's lost someone to a car wreck? Because they're extraordinarily common. And they're accidents. Murder is not. A population ten times likelier to be victim to violent crime as the general population, with a more than fifty percent sexual assault rate and a 1 in 12 chance of being murdered, is not an accident. It is a pattern. It is an epidemic. It is an all-out war. And marriage won't protect us from that. Neither will cocktail-party fundraisers.

You know what else won't protect us from that? Mainstream queer organizations. Not "GLBTQ" newspapers that purport to serve a whole community but list themselves, when not being called out, as "Gay and Lesbian News"--and give the Trans Day of Remembrance an almost two-inch blurb, a whole page to a gay men's drag show, and half a page to a gardening column. Not the Human Rights Campaign with its consistent pattern of taking trans people's money, time, and hope only to cut the legs out from under us when they think it'll make them a buck, who're keen on replacing our in-community, vital Day of Remembrance with an upbeat "Trans Awareness Day" that's easier for cissexual and straight people to swallow without feeling guilty about that long, long list of names, easier to organize parties with keynote speakers around, easier to pass the collection plate during. We need more of that, after all; the greater community only has Pride Festivals and a couple of TV channels to work with, right? All those dead people are such a downer. We should focus on our accomplishments and what makes us feel good, not dwell so much on the overwhelming epidemic of violence directed at our community and what to do about it, not take a whole two hours of a whole day in the autumn to solemnly commemorate the passing of hundreds of people who often never even got a decent funeral, to honor those so disparaged and degraded as sacred, missed, and important--
Where's the champagne in that?

You know what else won't keep you and you and me off that crack-of-doom, heartbreaking list? Hiding the freaks, sweeping the genderqueers under the rug, putting only our most privileged out front, bowing and scraping, and constantly apologizing for existing in a way that might make someone uncomfortable. That won't save my life. That won't save the lives of my friends. Trusting cissexual organizations to represent us and choose who represent us because they have money--that won't save our lives. Considering ourselves less than the cissexual people around us--that won't save our lives.

This isn't a matter of "reasonable people can disagree" or "it's just politics."
This is life and death.
This is whether or not you and I find a world where my fiancée has a 1 in 12 chance of being a widow due to murder alone acceptable, and whether or not watering down the one chance to honor those our community has lost to violent crime, the one chance to call attention to the constant violence aimed at my trans family and especially young, poor trans women of color, is the way to change such a world.
This is a matter of "allies" who turn out in the hundreds of thousands to protest for civil marriage equality staying home and dead silent, a week later, when it comes to advocating for and honoring murdered trans people and the great loss to all of us now that those beautiful people are gone. You want us on the street for your "Day Without Gays" or cheering for a group screening of "Milk"? Show up. Just once. For us. We're not just getting made fun of out here, and it's not just our relationships being invalidated--it's our basic humanity and right to live another day. Hundreds of thousands were in the street for marriage equality last week. Last year, at the Day of Remembrance in Portland, I saw fewer than forty attendees.

I would love to get married. As a trans woman, especially a queer trans woman in a same-sex relationship, I have just as much hurt and yearning about marriage equality as anyone. I plan on living that long, and I plan on living long enough to grow old with my partner and, heaven willing, children. Whether or not that happens may just be up to you.

My right to stay alive is more of a priority than my right to get legally married. And right now, as this society and its culture and its legal system stand, I'm one of many people who don't have either right. You want to fight for my right to marry? Wonderful. Thank you. But those hours protesting, those donations, all that outrage and community support and work--I'd prefer they went, for a start, to keeping me alive out here. And I think the "GLBTQ" community in the United States, such as it is, needs to take a long, hard look at why they have money and time to fight Measure 8, but nothing to give but silence, co-opting, and more requests for us to pipe down and lighten up when it comes to the more than monthly murder of trans people. Show us our lives and deaths matter to you. Show us you acknowledge that the violence against us is worth paying attention to, that our dead were real people who deserved far better, and that our living shouldn't have to live in fear.

See you in the street.

"I was crying...why were they doing this to me?"

I got more updates from RNC today. And this is at least as serious as anything I've already posted.

There has been a lot of talk about prisoner abuse in Minneapolis-St. Paul directed at arrested protesters. Indymedia's open publishing wire is reporting multiple instances confirming these accounts, and if verified, they do constitute actual, honest-to-gods torture.




(video transcript: a young white American man, badly bruised and with many stitches above his eye, speaking at a press conference and describing extensive beatings and torture while in custody after his arrest at the RNC protests. His experiences also included verbal abuse, denial of food, and being forced to keep his head in a bag full of his own vomit.)
This? This is torture of a civilian citizen on US soil for expressing political views and without being charged with a crime. He fell off his bicycle and bumped into a cop, who said there was no harm done before the guy was rushed and arrested. You can't make excuses now that it's just for foreigners, or immigrants of dubious documentation, or criminal terrorist types that we just know did something. This here is a grade-A white cissexual able-bodied male citizen who fell off his bike and got nabbed, with enough evidence to press charges regarding his allegations. And those of you who have been saying that torture won't be directed at you, it's okay, it's excusable, it might even be a good idea when it's thrown at brown people from other countries? Queers you don't know? Trans women of color who're probably whores anyway? "Enemy combatants?" Now you're seeing its fruition. Now you're seeing what the rest of us already know: they test what they do on us, and when they think they've got it down and nobody's complaining, they'll aim it right at you the moment you step out of line.

There is a direct connection with the use of Raytheon maser weapons in US occupations overseas and their deployment on domestic crowds considered to be trouble. There is a direct connection between use of Tasers in covert torture in other countries and their overzealous, sometimes lethal application in the States. You cannot sensibly separate the same technique being used by the same government in two different places. You say sonic crowd-control weapons are only going to show up in Iraq and whammo, they're making folks vomit uncontrollably right here at home.

And we keep pretending! We keep arguing that we can sanction our government to train and deploy torturers unapologetically on some people, and then we express shock that the techniques bleed right on back into our domestic law enforcement. And once we're putting military personnel into the equation, too--including units fresh back from military occupation in Iraq, primed to see a civilian population as a crowd of strangers full of possible threats, always to be suspected and controlled and if necessary taken out--how are we expecting the violence we export not to land on our doorsteps? How are we deluding ourselves into believing we can tell our soldiers and police that torture is okay when the prisoner's someone we don't like--say, a suspected terrorist--and not expect that the same techniques won't be used on someone they don't like--like an unarmed, handcuffed, helpless protester in custody who dared to call them a name? How can we continue to pretend that our willingness to dehumanize and abuse our supposed enemies has nothing to do with authorizing the dehumanization and abuse of people a little closer to home? How can we continue to pretend that this infection of inhumanity and wanton cruelty doesn't spread when we feed it, no matter where we think we're pointing it at first?

Some of us see this treatment every day. Some of us see it at routine traffic stops. And we've tried to warn you that every chip you cut away from our civil rights is eroding the base of yours. But some of you didn't want to listen, did you? It's just gonna be bad guys. It's just gonna be criminals. Well, it sure isn't gonna be American citizens, we've got rights.

You allow the rights to be taken from other human beings, sanction or look the other way when it happens because they must have done something to deserve it, you're contributing to a wider trend, a deep current eroding away at human dignity and the rule of law. And then we're all shocked when it comes right on home and hits people usually exempt. "But he didn't do anything!" Of course he didn't. That's the point. Guess who else hasn't.

We've got people in charge of this country right now who think this is perfectly acceptable, that someone arguing with their ideas is an enemy just as much as the guy shooting a gun, and that anyone marked an enemy forfeits all human rights. They've spit on the Geneva Conventions and even the US military manuals of conduct. Here they are, asking for another four years, another eight, another sixteen. Except it's not "asking." It's jailing and torturing anyone brave enough to be in the street to argue about it.

This is only the beginning. The guy in the clip above didn't die, praise be, nor did the detainees allegedly beaten, teargassed, burned, harassed, and raped. If we let this go on, it is only a matter of time. If we don't fight back at this madness with all we have, this is only the beginning. They have a whole new world planned out for us to live in. Someone else has already described it far better than I can:

"...imagine a boot stamping on a human face--forever."

more breaking medic news

This is a press release from one of our Portland Street Medics, now released from custody. Please read all of it, and understand exactly what's going on here. This is evidence of medics--medics in negotiations with police who know who they are and what they do--being specifically targeted and abused. Please consider donating to the medics' legal fund. --ll.


Press Release
by R. Westlund

Portland Street Medics Victims of Police Brutality and Unjustified Arrests at RNC

Four members of the Portland Street Medic Collective who had travelled to the RNC to provide medical care to the radical community were arrested on 9-1-2008. All are now released pending court dates in October.

Before the arrest, the medics were following an unpermitted march around the outskirts of the boundaries of the Excel Center. The march stayed mostly to sidewalks and utilized several pedestrian trails.

After heading nearly a mile down a bike trail with a river on one side and an unpassable bank on the other side of the road, protesters found themselves under fire from police chemical weapons, having never received an order to disperse. The protestors and the medics fled back up the bike path while the onslaught of chemical weapons and differently-lethal weapons continued behind and next to the fleeing crowd. Police in riot gear ran past the tail end of the running group, continuing to launch weapons into the crowd, forcing those at the back to run through the already dispensed weapons.

The four medics helped with the evacuation of at least five patients, including one with a broken hand from being hit with police weaponry, one with an injured ankle from being hit with police weaponry who needed physical support to walk, and one who was blinded by pepper spray. This assistance left the medics at the very back of the crowd and among the worst victims of chemical weapons as they fled the scene.

At the corner of Ontario and Shepard the crowd was trapped in a park by lines of riot police and all people in the park, including those holding tickets to a concert and attempting to utilize the pedestrian bridges to get to the concert, were arrested. Those with misdemeanors were released later that night, while those being held on felonies were in jail for 48 hours.

Three of the Portland Medics, David Drew, Jr, Tracy Maier, and R. Westlund are charged with Misdemeanors in the 1st degree of "presence at an unlawful assembly and refusing to leave." They face 90 days in jail and fines up to $1,000. The fourth, A. Oliver Hayes, is charged with a Gross Misdemeanor in the 3rd degree of rioting, and faces one year in jail and a fine of $1,000.


Later in the week, a group of six medics, three of them from Portland, were again the targets of police misconduct. A group of 350 people were being detained and preparing to be arrested on a bridge. The group included some legal observers from the NLG and 12 Street Medics. Medic Dispatch received news that the legal observers in the group had been released prior to the arrest, so the six medics headed out to see if they could negotiate with the police for the release of the medics.

Upon arrival at the scene one of the Portland Medics spoke with an officer and received a phone number for "Watch Command" to begin negotiations. On the first phone call, the medic explained the job of the medics and explained that they were asking for the release of the medics detained on the bridge. The medic gave WC their full legal name and offered to provide proof of credentials as an EMT. WC offered to give the request to the commander at the scene and then call the medics back.

After a reasonable amount of time, the medic called WC back to check on the status. WC questioned the location of the medics, and the medic confirmed that they were at the scene of the arrest before ending the phone call to wait for further news.

The medic attempted to speak with two officers on scene, but neither would produce a supervisor to do the negotiations. Moments after the second attempt, while the Medic Liaison was making another call to WC, one of the Portland Medics was pulled out of the crowd of observers and drug into the street by four police officers. The medic's pockets were searched while the medic stated, "I do not consent to this search." While still searching this medic, the commanding officer led four more officers into the crowd and pulled out the Medic Liaison, who had been on the phone moments before. The first medic was released back into the crowd after their pockets were searched.

The second medic was questioned as to why they were carrying a backpack and hip pack. The medic explained their status as an EMT and allowed officers to take their registration card as proof. Officers explained, "You reached your hands in your pockets, and that makes us nervous, so now we have to check what you're up to." The medic repeatedly denied consent for the search but officers began opening the medic kits regardless. An officer asked, "Where did you get all this stuff? Did you steal it off the ambulance?" The medic responded, "I'm not going to answer any more of your questions until I speak to my lawyer." The officer replied, "In that case, you can pick your own shit up off the ground," and began opening ziplock bags and dumping medical supplies on the ground.

During the search, officers repeatedly made threats about possible criminal charges against the medic, including "medical terrorism." Officers dumped the entire contents of both medical kits on the ground, purposefully stepped on the equipment, read all the aftercare flyers and made threats about "testing the pepper spray" on this medic, and searched the medic's body and clothing three separate times in an extremely rough and inappropriate manner. After running the medic's ID through the system, the officers ordered to medic to clean up all the supplies, and accused the medic of littering when a small packet of vitamins was overlooked on the ground. Once the supplies were repacked, the medic was free to go.

These police actions were not based on any reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing. The police were targeting the medics who were attempting to liaise with commanding officers and harassing them in order to reduce their power and prevent further negotiating tactics.

R. Westlund
Friday, September 5, 2008

street medics, update

I have a few updates on the street medic situation.
Word is that all of the Portland street medics have been released, though other medics, as well as journalists and many others, are still incarcerated. They're nominally okay, but facing the theft of their equipment and possessions, including medical supplies, plus a mound of legal and travel expenses.
It isn't pretty over there. Report is they actually have mercenaries on the streets--even making raids. That's Blackwater--the same mercenary company under fire for their war crimes and murder of unarmed civilians in Iraq, the same mercenary company deployed after Hurricane Katrina and caught playing target practice with civilians.
Add Blackwater to the National Guard deployed in Minneapolis-St. Paul this week, and what you have is a government deploying military personnel--including mercenaries with little to no legal oversight and a history of brutal, trigger-happy tactics--against their own citizens.
If you've been accepting this as normal, as a status quo you weren't thinking about, please sit back and drink that up for a moment. Think of the more than 300 citizens dragged off by these soldiers on their own streets, for participating in a largely peaceful, nonviolent political protest. And if you're an American, think about how you feel when you read stories of that sort of thing happening somewhere else, and what you're willing to say about those countries, those governments, those people.
Now let's add more into the mix. They're by all accounts specifically targeting journalists--even journalists with high-level credentials--people who are paying attention to what they're doing and reporting on it. They're targeting medics--nonviolent volunteers out there to deliver medical aid to people and keep the crowds safe. They're raiding community centers, community kitchens, homes. They're pressuring independent media to shut down. They are kicking the legs out from under people's ability to know what's going on, stay safe, and protect themselves.
Are you seeing it on the news? Are you seeing it in your local paper? My paper ran a story on the dangerous, destructive protesters, with a picture of a beleaguered lone policeman firing pepper spray at frightening masked anarchists. That was their coverage. And then they went back to stories about a baby elephant at the zoo.
Military personnel performing police actions on US soil and arresting nonviolent protesters. No, not just that--preemptively arresting people they think might be protesters in a few days. And going directly after nonviolent people providing food, medicine, and information.
It looks like this. And this. And this.
Pay attention.

Street medics are trying to keep everyone safe in all this, trying to make sure as many as possible make it out in one piece. Many of them have traveled hundreds of miles on their own dime to do so, and are putting themselves in direct physical danger to serve others.
They're being thanked for it with violence, brutal arrests, incarceration, theft of equipment, felony charges, homophobic and transphobic abuse, and massive expenses both for legal support, new first aid gear to get back out there and keep helping, and to cover their travel.
Please, if you can, donate.
They're out there doing first aid for democracy, and now they're bleeding for it. Return the favor.

street medics targeted and arrested at RNC

REPOSTED IN FULL. PLEASE DISTRIBUTE AND DO WHAT YOU CAN. I know I haven't covered street medic stuff lately, but a bunch of street medic folks are operating at the Twin Cities RNC, and have been specifically targeted. I believe arrestees include this awesome activist you've met before, and there are some very ugly rumors going around about mistreatment of trans and queer people currently detained which worry the hell out of me. Keep it in mind: it's not just journalists being targeted and arrested--it's those braving those dangerous streets as volunteers to provide medical care. --ll.

Update - Portland Street Medics Arrested at the Republican National Convention
by street.medix@portland-or.net
Weds, Sep. 3rd, 2008

In between explosions of concussion grenades and teargas clouds in
Minneapolis-St. Paul, volunteer Street Medics from all over the country
who have assembled there are continuing to provide much needed first aid
and medical care to injured and frightened people everywhere in the city
where lawful and peaceful assemblies, passersby, journalists and
bystanders are getting attacked indiscriminately and without provocation
by Police, National Guard and teams of unidentified Federal Agencies
without badges or numbers.

Two raw, unedited video items that were just published provide an
excellent documentation of the level of unprovoked and indiscriminate
violence targeted against peaceful non-violent assemblies, against
Street Medics, against legal observers and journalists:

o- Rubber bullets fired directly into a small crowd of peaceful people;
Street Medics attacked:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OnnUTK7QjI

o- Independent journalist caught in the middle of panic and mayhem
during an attack with concussion grenades and teargas against a peaceful
march:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6L8J3L-2Kw


Starting at dawn on Tuesday, Portland Street Medics who were arrested
while treating injured people at the RNC were being released one by one
by the illegitimate authorities who had seized them. One of our
colleagues is still in jail and has not yet been charged with anything.
All of the arrests of Portland Street Medics are entirely illegal.

We have confirmed information that additional unidentified Street Medics
have been seen in jail by other people, but no details about who they
are or why they are being held.

The Portland Street Medics who were released are well, except for
tiredness. We are not able to communicate with the one of our members
who is still in jail to ascertain wellness - our colleague is being held
in a situation where legal observers have repeatedly confirmed that
people are being denied access to medical care and targeted with
selective abuse. {Please see the statement from our lawyers below,
titled "Over 300 Protesters, Bystanders, Medics and Media Arrested:
Update from Coldsnap Legal Collective".}


All of the arrested Street Medics' personal items, money, medical
supplies and tools were confiscated and are still not being released by
Police despite repeated requests, even though the items in question are
not relevant to any legal proceedings (they are not being held as
evidence, nor are they proscribed materials). Seizure of these materials
is an illegal tactic to prevent our members from providing first aid and
medical care to the people who are now in the streets and parks in
Minneapolis-St. Paul. This is in direct violation of the US Constitution
which in the Fourth Amendment provides protection against unreasonable
searches and seizures. {Please see the Constitutional reference from the
Cornell Law School below.}


We are still in need of funds for bail, and for replacing lost medical
supplies and tools for our volunteers. If you are able to give, please
consider donating through this page (every little bit counts!):
http://www.portland-or.net/street-medics/Donations-Portland-Street-Medics.html
or, please write to us about making alternative donation arrangements here:
street.medix@portland-or.net

Some details
The Portland Street Medics who were arrested include a long-time Queer
liberation and radical performance artist; two trained Emergency Medical
Technicians (EMTs), one of whom is also a Wilderness First Responder;
and a Nurse Practitioner in training, who is also an Herbalist with more
than fifteen years clinical experience.

It's plainly obvious to everyone that our members, sworn to the primary
directive of all healthcare workers to "First, Do No Harm", should have
never been arrested and must be allowed and supported to return to their
duties immediately without any interference whatsoever.

Contacting the authorities
..has proven to be very difficult. As one of our supporters reports here,
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2008/09/379093.shtml#315129
phonecalls to the Ramsey County Jail, the Sheriff, and Mayor Coleman,
are being redirected through a maze of sometimes incompetent, sometimes
purposefully dysfunctional routes and individuals who are making the
process of leaving messages and official complaints nearly impossible.

Still, we are asking people to please call these (new) numbers and to
politely ask that:
o- all Street Medics be released immediately and allowed to resume duties;
o- all people who were arrested and are not being charged, to be
released immediately;
o- all personal items and medical supplies and tools that were
confiscated from Street Medics to be returned immediately so that our
teams can provide much needed care for injured and ill people in the
streets and first aid stations all over Minneapolis-St. Paul.

Please call these numbers:
St. Paul Police chief:
651-266-5588

Help line:
651-266-9333

Please send letters to:
St. Paul Police Department
Chief John Harrington
367 Grove Street
St. Paul, Minnesota 55101

Ramsey County Jail
Sheriff Bob Fletcher
425 Grove Street
St. Paul, Minnesota 55101


Please keep distributing and re-publishing our updates

We really are grateful for all of your letters and phonecalls of
support. Without your love and care, none of our work would have been
possible.

Portland Street Medics
http://portland-or.net/street-medics/


Resources and Related Materials

"Over 300 Protesters, Bystanders, Medics and Media Arrested: Update from
Coldsnap Legal Collective"
http://twincities.indymedia.org/2008/sep/over-300-protesters-bystanders-medics-and-media-arrested-update-coldsnap-legal-collective

" US Constitution - Amendment IV:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers,
and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be
violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause,
supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place
to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitution.billofrights.html

Our previous Communique:
http://seattle.indymedia.org/en/2008/09/268617.shtml

essential analysis

Go and read this post. Right now. Trust me, you need to hear it.
Thank God for you, BFP.

did someone whistle? I couldn't hear it.

It's amazing how many layers of meaning you can pack into a little sermon if you know what you're doing. I know: sermons are my stock in trade. And they're also the primary arsenal for aw-shucks just-plain-folks evangelical Republican Mike Huckabee, who stumped for John McCain at the Republican National Convention with a speech that made my jaw drop.

Let me explain why. Excerpts of Huckabee's homily follow, in fine sermon style; toward the end of his speech, he pulled out a seemingly-unrelated story, then called forth a moral and a theme, and then wove that theme back into his prior subject matter, the imperative to vote for the McCain-Palin ticket. The first parts of his oration are basically irrelevant boilerplate about how Barack Obama hugs terrorists and blushingly gives them boxes of candy. And then he gets into the oft-told tale of McCain's capture and torture, following with remarks about McCain's efforts to lift his arms and how he gave for us, so we should all be grateful. That's when Huckabee slides smoothly into Sermontown:

Allow me to tell you about someone who understands this type of sacrifice better than anyone.

McCain? No, not yet: a schoolteacher who is in no way a stand-in for Sarah Palin, a young woman who overcomes doubt and skepticism to teach people about how we ought to be more grateful to veterans like a certain J.M.

On the first day of school in 2005, Martha Cothren, a teacher at Joe T. Robinson High School in Little Rock, was determined that her students would not take their education or their privilege as Americans for granted. With the principal's permission, she removed all the desks from her classroom. The students entered the empty room and asked, "Mrs. Cothren, where are our desks?" "You get a desk when you tell me how you earn it," she replied.

And this is where, reading this aloud, I said suddenly to my partner, Oh, I hope this doesn't go where I think it's about to go. If you've spent much time in evangelical circles or surrounded by them, you'll know what I'm talking about any moment. The golden question of the moment is: how, Teacher? How do we earn our place in...the classroom?

"Making good grades?" asked one student.
"You ought to make good grades, but that won't get you a desk," Martha responded.
"I guess we have to behave," offered another.
"You WILL behave in my class," Mrs. Cothren retorted, "but that won't get you a desk either."

Being good won't earn it for you, see. You're required to work hard and succeed and follow the rules in order to show you're among the people who have a right to a desk, but there's nothing you can do--no action, no works--that can earn the desk for you. Listen to the Teacher--there's a price for the desks you can't pay. They'll be apportioned according to some other criterion. Getting warmer?

No one in first period guessed right. Same for second period. By lunch, the buzz was all over campus... Mrs. Cothren had flipped out ....wouldn't let her students have a desk. Kids had used their cell phones and called their parents. By early afternoon, all 4 of the local network TV affiliates had camera crews at the school to report on the teacher who wouldn't let her students have a desk unless they could tell her how they earned it. By the final period, no one had guessed correctly. As the students filed in, Martha Cothren said, "Well, I didn't think you would figure it out, so I'll have to tell you."

Now, this is sermon-ese for "I am about to use this character as a stand-in for a moment while she (I) hammers home the big arrow-shaped sign toward my point--her point--you know." I'm a preacher at heart, you may have noticed, and I know these things. It helps that the character is beleaguered by parents and media who don't understand, sort of like teachers who push Creationism in schools, or like unpopular political leaders we know are really misunderstood maverick heroes doing what they have to to get a message across. She'll try novel things, that teacher who isn't Sarah Palin, in order to show you the light. Nobody can comprehend the answer on their own, after all. They need someone to spell it out for them, because there's no way any of these lowly mortal students can think their way to a desk, either. It's almost like those desks stand for something all metaphor-like.

Martha opened the door of her classroom. In walked 27 veterans, some wearing uniforms from years gone by, but each one carrying a school desk. As they carefully and quietly arranged the desks in neat rows, Martha said, "You don't have to earn your desks...these guys already did. They went halfway around the world, giving up their education and interrupting their careers and families so you could have the freedom you have. No one charged you for your desk. But it wasn't really free. These guys bought it for you. And I hope you never forget it. " I wish we all would remember that being American is not just about the freedom we have. It's about those who gave it to us.

Okay, so this seems pretty straightforward, a repeat of the earlier message: freedom is dearly bought, and everything you will ever have in this country is due to our military, and you should be grateful to them for all of it. And hey! One's running for President!

Ladies and Gentlemen, John McCain is one of those people who helped buy the freedom that we enjoy and the school desks we had.

Wait, wait, hold the phone, though. That was the theme before. What were all those metaphors and allegories? Let's back up and review. Why should we be grateful to these military veterans?

"You don't have to earn your desks...these guys already did."

Your desk, your place in the room, can't be earned. You can't behave well enough to get one, work enough to get one, think enough to get one. It is impossible for you to deserve a place to sit before your teacher, see. Looks pretty hopeless, doesn't it? But wait! You don't have to earn Grace--I mean, a desk--someone else has already earned it for you. And you can have it, for free! Someone else bought the desks by sacrifice, by spilling their blood on foreign soil, so that even though you can't earn a desk, it can be given to you by your benevolent authority figure because a heroic intermediary bled to provide it for you.
Are we getting some clarity yet? Shall we break it down? Good sermons come in layers, and Huckabee is good at sermons. Here's the first layer of the story:

An innovative teacher chooses an offbeat way to illustrate to her young students that everything they have is owed to soldiers, who should be honored for their sacrifice and given deference.

Okay. Check. Here's the second layer:

Standing in front of you is a military veteran John McCain, who is like the soldiers in this story. He sacrificed a lot to provide to you, the people, your luxuries and your very way of life. He, like these soldiers, is being presented to you by a younger woman who wants to use innovative methods to showcase his worth. Honor his service by voting for him.

But we're still missing a layer. Let's back it up--who else are these soldiers like? Allow me, gentle reader, to sum up:

There's something you need, a right to be in a particular place, that you can't earn by any kind of exertion, virtue, or intelligence. It has to be given to you, but you don't actually deserve it, and left alone, you will never figure out how to get it. Luckily, someone's showed up to tell you how to get it for free. It's already been purchased by someone else, someone better, who spilled their blood in order to secure the blessing of this thing for you even though you don't deserve and can't earn it. And all you need to do is honor them in order to benefit.

Sound familiar yet? Please tell me it does. This is the doctrine of "Grace, Not Works" or "Grace Alone," a theological position expounded during the Reformation, cuddled by Calvin, and popular among evangelical Christians. It's not a desk, it's a place in Heaven. And it's not soldiers we're talking about, it's Jesus Christ. Don't buy the connection of this story as an allegory for the doctrine of Grace Alone? Here's a few ways to put it. And the guy talking is clergy in a denomination that holds this doctrine dear, so he knows what he's doing and who his audience is. Let's plug this little revelation back in to Huckabee's sermon at RNC and see what happens:

Let me tell you about a guy who can't lift his arms because he was tortured by enemy soldiers and sacrificed for your freedom. Think about it like desks in a classroom, where you can't earn or deserve a place to sit--but someone better than you or me went out there and sacrificed himself, spilled his own blood in order to dearly purchase for you your place at the table. His sacrifice redeems you when you wouldn't have been able to make it there on your own, and now you can have a desk, a place, a spot in Heaven if you just believe in and honor him.

Who's that man who sacrificed for you, who could have bought his own freedom by simply renouncing his creed, but stayed to be tortured in order to free you?

Allow me to tell you about someone who understands this type of sacrifice better than anyone.

Ladies and Gentlemen, John McCain is one of those people who helped buy the freedom that we enjoy and the school desks we had.

Has your jaw dropped to where mine was yet? Because I'm pretty sure, in this campaign where they're already painted the opposition as the Antichrist, they just labeled their candidate Jesus Christ.

to be heard

Well, I finally put my money where my mouth is, and made a membership pledge to my local NPR affiliate.
I'm in the red--not horrifically, but not so's I have money to throw around. When I do charity, it's mostly with my hands and feet and throat, because it's just not been long since I was living on $35 a month for groceries and begging for loans from friends, but here it is:

Public media is vital for a democracy like ours to function. Public, non-corporate-owned, non-advertising-dominated, non-government-censored media. Media that's free to investigate what it can and say what it wants and do things I disagree with and people much bigger than me disagree with, too. "This American Life" could never exist on a corporate station--where's the ad revenue? Where's the hook? Where's the guarantee that the single male 18-34 demographic will tune in? If it's not profitable, it's not worth funding, not viable as an investment--this is what happens with media-as-business-for-profit. Why is Howard Stern the free-speech radio icon, and not Garrison Keillor? Well, what's good for business?
It goes further: if one large company owns both the radio station and the grocery store, you probably won't hear favorable stories about the farm-labor strike, for instance. It's bad for business. Leaving entirely aside the political-party loyalties of the owners of these conglomerates for the moment, biting stories and investigation are just as impossible as meandering, idealistic storytelling in this format. Corporate media outlets can't stomach it because it cuts their revenue. For the sort of animal they are, this is a rational decision. Lots of things are bad for profit margins--political upheaval, too. Competition. So on.

So there's that. Then there's advertisements dressed up as news stories, already a problem, right under our noses. Advertisements for medicines, for politicians, for neighborhoods, for movies, whatever. It's all one branch of the conglomerate feeding another. It's natural for the nature of the beast. And it will never, ever give us cultural nutrition the way we need it, never furnish us the ideas and stories we need to live on and to act as informed members of society and so on. Corporate media profits best by dividing people, making them lonelier, and then selling them things. If public media doesn't build communities, it dies in the crib.

And what are our other options? Indymedia sites? They have their advantages, but they're also flooded with conspiracy theories, bad research, calls to take out "the pigs," every crackpot with a keyboard and no filters. That has its place. I use Indymedia, too. It's just not, in its current form, up to the task.
The rest of the Internet? Great, sure, but sure as hell not free. All you need's a broken clock-radio to get at NPR. No monthly fees. No costly equipment. No variation on download speed based on class or income, and far fewer regional limits to access. Anyone can get at public radio, with very little upfront investment and no subsequent costs.

The US doesn't even have the BBC. We don't have the Beeb--and look what that's meant for quality. With no budget worth speaking of, the BBC has turned out some of the best TV any conoisseur can name. Comedy that actually pushes limits. Science fiction that people still watch, allowed to go on for multiple seasons. And their reporting, while veering now and then into the ridiculous, is much more reliably nonpartisan, these days, than anything you can get out of the Americas.

The US has PBS and NPR. And it's no coincidence that the Bush Administration has tried desperately to cut all funding for those. Educational shows for children that don't prime them as nationalists and consumers? Ballet? Political commentary that's not pre-vetted by stooges? It's either a waste of money, in an industry that these people understand as profit-driven (is there anything they don't understand as profit-driven?) or seditious. And they don't get to control it. So they tried to stomp instead.

Public media is the beginning of what will save us. No other movement, in this day and age, can survive without media coverage. The religious Left, most people I meet have never heard of. And they tell me so. Why? Not an exciting for-ad-revenue news story, and it doesn't make for good cable, either. Not sexy, nothing blowing up, and bad for business. Lot of socialists anyway, right? Any number of movements worth knowing about and fighting for labor in silence. Hell, I'll never forget March of 2003, standing in a sea of tens of thousands of people shutting down my city in protest of the incipient invasion of Iraq, and hearing a man with a cell phone bellow, for the crowd, "The news says there's only eight hundred of us!" The roar was deafening. The folks at home never heard it. More public media would have given us a chance. More public media might also have prevented the police brutality later that night.

I don't have much money, but I sent my donation in, and proudly, and it made me feel like a real adult.

A half hour later, listening to "This American Life," I heard a story so real and human and cutting and true that I had to pull my car over and cry. And I knew, right there, I'd made the right decision.

I hope you will, too.


edit: It's come to my attention that I have a number of non-American readers coming through, which is amazing and exciting, but may call for some clarification of acronyms. NPR is National Public Radio, and I've linked their website below. OPB is Oregon Public Broadcasting, my state's affiliate. You probably know the BBC, I imagine. And while it might not be appropriate for me to pressure you to support American public radio, I urge you to support your local equivalent. Also, drop a comment and say hi, especially if you're a returning reader. I'd love to know who you are.

against the dying of the light

In late 2003, I had dinner with a man who had spent his life fighting the apartheid government in South Africa. He said a lot of things that night that I took to heart, but one chilled everyone at the table:
"In all my years running from the government of my homeland, hiding from the police, in jail, in the streets, standing against that oppression, I was never so frightened as I am travelling in America today."
We asked him why, of course, being Americans, and being shocked.
"Because in apartheid South Africa, if the police kicked down your door and locked you up on trumped-up charges, your family and friends would protest, they would know it was wrong, they would fight for your freedom, even if they failed. In America, if you were locked up and the government levied false charges or held you without trial, your family--your family--would say, well, maybe we didn't know him so well. Maybe the government knows something we don't."
It was quiet for a little while.

I'm sorry I didn't tell enough people, Farid. Thank you for trying.

what matters more than this?

I am an enemy combatant.

Right now is a tipping point. It is one of those Moments in history that will, God willing, be in textbooks someday, if there remain textbooks, as a great marker of the dimming and crumbling of our age. It will be remembered with horror, if not by our neighbor's children, by their children, and its echoes have already shaken the globe.

It is the moment when the world's only superpower declared to the world, without hedging or subterfuge or shame, that they approve of the torture of other human beings as a standard practice; that they are not bound by international law; that, once and for all, no begging or decency or bargaining will sway them, and that the only ones left to stand against them are those without the immediate power to do anything about it. It is the moment that the supposed Great Hope Of Democracy gave up on pretending that things were all right and said, right out, in clear words, that it would not be morally bound to treat others as human beings, and that no-one would define their others but themselves; the moment that the world knew of secret prisons and manual-approved tortures and the suspension of fair or represented trial perpetrated by those who promised to protect these things, and that those with the power to end it shrugged, and smirked, and said try and stop me.
It is the day the United States shod itself in iron, once and for all and without sugarcoating, and deemed itself proud to do so.
It is the midnight when the Shining City on the Hill let its lights go out, and all that was heard in the dark was the cocking of many guns.


Some of us saw it coming, yes. We saw the clouds on the horizon, and were roundly mocked for it. We called out at staged photo-ops and Potemkin villages. We cried out at laws rescinding basic civil rights that would surely, surely be suspended as soon as the need was gone. We called out when protestors were called terrorists on Senate floors, when dissenters were called traitors and enemies of the state, when the wretched specters of our past were hauled out, spit-shined, and called glorious victories, from the camps on our Pacific coasts to the slaughterhouses on that ocean's other side. We cried out when our neighbors disappeared, only to turn up nameless and orange-clad in Cuba. We called out at the abandonment of the International Criminal Court, at the laying waste of the authority of the U.N., the Kyoto Protocols, the Geneva Conventions, the Army Manual, the Bible, the Qur'an, the United States Constitution, the basic human conscience, bit by bit by bit. No more checks. No more balances. No more rules but because we can.
It was a slow erosion, and every little bit counted, but no-one wanted to call those bits what they were--our high ground, our morality, our decency, our hope. Our ability to cooperate went first in a storm of arrogance and wrath, but then our ability to see what we were doing went, and our ability to discern lies from fictions, and then our ability to see each other as real humans and real families, and then all of our perspective on mercy and law.

The smoking gun was, indeed, a mushroom cloud. It's just that that cloud was half a century ago, and those who saw forward were called fools and maniacs.
We did not learn from the Philippine War, where butchers blamed their crimes on their victims and the newspapers ate it up, where allies who'd given their lives alongside our own soldiers were turned on and killed because they were too brown to run their own homeland.
We did not learn from the senseless waste of a generation's youth in World War One's trenches.
We did not learn from any of it. Vietnam, Iran-Contra, the rise of the fascists, the turning over and over of People's Revolutions that ended up starving their people and grinding them down, dictators beheading dictators, coups begetting coups, many on our dime. We did not learn because neither had our ancestors learned from the Sicilian Expedition, from Poike Ditch, from Qin Shih Huang Di. We refused to learn from torn-out Aztec hearts and the charred mouths of murdered Sufis, and we have been infected with this thing, this basic original sin of humankind:

Separation. Solipsism. The old lie that this is how it must be, that we are alone, that a balance tipped means everyone's death, and that even that doesn't matter, because first comes Me. The vile and noisome Father of Lies, that Us and Them is the way of things, and Them needs to be beaten to death and ground into the dust before Us can thrive.

Now is that great lie's ultimate moment: the moment when power, given every chance to know itself and its shortcomings, to rise to its better self, to atone, to evolve, to nurture the garden of human greatness, looks that hope in the eyes and says, smugly, no.

Weeping will not fix it.
Nor will screaming.
It is time, you who are wrapped in your mantle, to stand up and settle the responsibility of being a human being on your shoulders, because right now, nothing matters more than this: that those with the most power, with the power to draw scars across a world or to deliver into birth its decent future, with the power to declare you a person or not, have declared that you are not, and that nothing is more important than their power, not even their longevity, not even their profit, any more.
It has happened before, on smaller scales, with smaller but no less heartbreaking betrayals.

Stand with me and dedicate your beating heart, your shaking hands, your bones and tongue and pride and blood and moving feet, your very future, to oppose this--to call our brothers and sisters back to remembering themselves, remembering each other. Throw yourself with me against the wheel. The machines of hate and control and exploitation and, yes, fascism, will leave none of us un-ground, in a macrocosm of that basic street rule, that nobody who enters a knife-fight leaves uncut.
It is worth everything we have to keep this monster from growing any further, because, in the end, it will be worth everything everyone else has if we do not. If we do not stand together now, there will be nothing to stand on. No-one is safe, any more. No-one is safe and no-one is free until we topple this abomination and expose its innards to history, so that our children and our children's children may see it for what it was, and shudder, and set their hands to never allowing it again.

It is already grinding you. At least use its workings against it, until it is no more. We owe it to each other, and to the unborn.

This is a moment that echoes in history, that will be in whatever books there will be. How do you want to be remembered, in that story? Who will you tell your children you stood with, and what will you tell them you stood for?

flashback to other days like this

Let America Be America Again
4th July 2004

There are fireworks going on outside my window, but I am sitting inside nursing a broken heart.
Tonight, the Fourth of July, Independence Day, I did something I do every year: I reread the Declaration of Independence. Some of you may remember it from high school. I’m young; high school was only four years ago. I read it not so very carefully, then; I admit that, most years, I skip the first paragraph, read the bit about self-evident truths, and skim the rest.
This year it seemed new to me, fresh. I’ve always assumed that I got the gist of it, and that its time, while important, was done—but the offenses laid out by Thomas Jefferson have not gone away, nor is the battle fought by the founders of this nation over. Once upon a time, the idea that people ought to be allowed to have a say in their government mattered enough to die for, to risk livelihood and reputation for, to give up everything for.
Once upon a time, this document mattered more than anything to a small, determined group of people. It mattered that their ruler was removing the authority of judges to make legal decisions and silencing legislators who disagreed with him. It mattered that some citizens had more rights than others, that the most powerful people in government were ignoring the rule of law, that the poor were taxed to feed the rich. It mattered that the military and the enforcers of law were being used as tools against their own people, and were not prosecuted for crimes of violence they committed; it mattered that many of them were conscripted to bear arms against their will. It mattered that citizens were denied trial by jury and were incarcerated overseas on unproved grounds. And it mattered that in all their efforts to air these grievances, they were only laughed off and called agitators and traitors. It mattered enough to give everything for—and many among the coalition who signed the Declaration had everything to lose.
Tonight I went downtown, the Declaration of Independence in hand. I found an open spot in an amphitheater at the waterfront, where people were gathered in droves to watch the fireworks to be launched in an hour. “It’s Independence Day,” I said. “Do any of you folks mind if I read the Declaration of Independence?” Nobody paying attention seemed to object, and one man leaned forward to call out, “Today? Of course not.” So I cleared my throat and started reading.
That was when one woman in the front row shouted for me to go pray in my closet at home—she didn’t even recognize the words “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” and, like many others, assumed that I was a street-preacher. People in the crowd actually laughed as I called out that “all men are created equal,” groaning in disbelief that the outdated words should be uttered loud enough to hear while they were having a good time. Parents directed their children to set off fireworks at me, and as my voice became hoarse from the gunpowder smoke, they laughed. Folks with nothing better to do than stand in line for the Blues Festival mocked the Declaration of Independence, not one word more or less, and continued to shoot off firecrackers and smoke bombs at my feet.
I finished it, every word, and then said simply: “This is what today’s about. Please remember to vote in November.” With that, I left, shaking with shame.
When did the Fourth of July stop being Independence Day? When did this become a country where we count it a victory if more than half the populace votes? We have a president who proudly claims that he doesn’t read the news and an Attorney General who declares before the Senate that he feels his personal opinion supersedes the law of the land and the Constitution. When our own soldiers are caught torturing, raping, and killing other human beings in a prison where, according to the Red Cross, as many as 90% of the inmates were mistakenly arrested, some of us shake our heads and say it was no big thing—and besides, they must have deserved it. At the same time, the brave men and women dying on the frontline have their combat pay cut and their tours of duty extended without their consultation. International reporters are chastised for asking questions at press conferences that are not pre-approved; Americans who choose to disagree are shunted off to ‘free speech zones’ where the news and the President can’t see them. America is a free speech zone. We have a Bill of Rights for that.
This has happened to our country. Worse has happened in our country, and is happening as we speak. Ignoring the news and lending the government unquestioning support is called patriotism, while participation in our democracy by respectful disagreement or, God forbid, calling for change, is called treason. Sometime while we weren’t looking, the Land of the Free became a place where you can be locked up in Cuba without being charged, just for looking suspicious. The Home of the Brave has been cowering before Homeland Security.
The Fourth of July is about time together with your family and friends, good food and celebration—I look forward to it, every year—but it is far more than that. Independence Day rings hollow in a land where people seem not to care why we declared our independence in the first place. This country is not a simple place to be. It is, however, our country, and what it means is slipping out between our fingers as we fail to engage, passionately, with what it means to live in a nation whose government is supposed to be by, for, and of the people. You may be a Democrat or Republican, Independent or Green or Socialist or Libertarian; you may be conservative or liberal. You may love the current administration or hate it, be a soldier or a peacenik or both, rich or poor, young or old. These things only matter if you have a voice. They are nothing if we all are not allowed to speak and, ultimately, participate in democracy. Once upon a time, this mattered enough to live and die for.
Freedom is dangerous. Freedom is a revolutionary thing. Our founders knew that it is not comfortable or easy, and that it demands a commitment of responsibility from all who wish to participate in it. From the soldier who sacrifices his or her life on the battlefield to the schoolteacher who brings up our children, we are all required to pay the price of vigilance and dedication in order to keep the rights and freedoms guaranteed us by our Constitution and our consciences. This is a day for the pursuit of happiness, certainly, but it is, most importantly, a time to remember how revolutionary our freedom still is. I love this country. Tonight, at the waterfront, it let me down.
Fellow Americans, the Star-Spangled Banner means nothing if all we can remember of it is the rockets’ red glare.

hit the road, jack

Spokane

I have a strange relationship with the highway.
I ache for it, sometimes, need desperately to get out on it, but I shudder at going too fast, and my shoulders tense up into stabbing pain, and I’m troubled by what the highway means. Still, opening out on the blacktop, stopping in random places and breathing them in before continuing, it’s a peculiar love affair and has more than a little to do with running away.
It’s almost as conflicted a relationship as I have with my country, which I love, which I’ve been considering with increasing seriousness fleeing for shelter somewhere else, somewhere, ironically enough, less dangerous, less exhausting, less likely to cause me to lose perspective and give in to despair. So it’s funny that I found myself on Interstate 90 at midday on Independence Day, fighting it out with the early July sun and all alone in a metal cocoon ready to hash it all out.
We used to call my car the Mighty Chariot, for the drag races I’d won as a teenager and certainly not for anything I’d done with young women in the passenger seat during those same years. It’s a station wagon, and it’s got a big dent in the side that’s my fault, and I pat the dashboard when it performs especially well. We’ve been close since I was sixteen, and though I’m notoriously nervous about machines, I sometimes forget, on long trips, that we’re separate. I used to hate driving. Moving that fast with my feet off the ground terrified me, and so did relying on machinery I couldn’t watch work, but familiarity breeds many things besides contempt.
The highway’s a weird non-place, all about being on the way to somewhere, never about being anywhere, and you start to see cars as people, not as vehicles with people in them. That Chevy over there did a thing, not the Chevy’s driver. That pickup over there is being a jerk. And there’s tribes.
I cannot leave behind my fear of the squad cars, as they dart in and out of traffic as great fish, as wolves dividing a herd. It is unreasonable, it is paranoid, but I still get shaken every time I see a police vehicle, even one I know for certain is helping people, even one I know is helping me. Ever since one bad night, I just freeze up, even when I know rationally I’ve got nothing to hide or worry about.
The highway’s a strange place, but I’m on it, at the northeast extremity of Washington State, headed westbound for friends who wait where the sun sets. Out here, I’m reminded of eastern Oregon, which is much alike and hard to distinguish if you put photos side-by-side, and I think, I could do this. I could come out here and wear sturdy jeans and drive a beat-up pickup, I could bale hay and be tough as my old tomboy days and find myself a cowboy hat to fit my outsized head. This out here, though I fled it for the city, this is familiar, this is standard. I could come out here, I could come stay by these ragged fenceposts, I could belong to this land if it weren’t for the people in it, who I know are good folk but who don’t know I am.
Highways like this, I used to run alongside, for hours and miles at a time, and I knew all of the ranches by sight, back there. I used to drive out with my camera and find old trees that cast interesting shadows. I quit piano lessons to learn to care for livestock, once, and that might be part of why I never became the musician my brothers did, and might, really, be part of why I carry a first-aid kit today.
Maybe, I think to myself, still wanting to pull over and buy a hat somewhere for no good reason, maybe I’m just going through my horse phase.

Somewhere near Sprague

The sun is blazing directly overhead in a vast and gauzy sky, and it’s dry enough to crisp the Creature from the Black Lagoon. The flat horizons on all sides just disappear into vagueness instead of going up the way I expect them to, unlike anything except my memories of driving out West in our minivan when I was six and staring out the window at endless expanses of Kansas and Nebraska and Iowa. That way, I think, that just keeps going till Canada. That way is the Columbia and then it keeps going, all the way to Utah. That way’s the Rockies, and that way’s the Cascades, too far to see. There is no way to appreciate how many shades of brown and yellow and gold and tan and buff and taupe there are until you’ve been out to the high desert, this part sectioned off into huge rectangles and occasionally irrigated. I let it all blend together, only stopping once to pull over and ask a couple changing the tire on their camper if they need a hand. They tell me no, and I stroll back along the shoulder to my car, grasshoppers the color of everything else swirling around my feet. There is a clunky old cell phone lying in the gravel by the edge of the pavement, and I give it a glance before leaving it face-up for the crows to enjoy.
Traffic slows to a crawl for something that involves multiple squad cars and an ambulance, and a bearded biker in his goggles and leathers waves traffic around it. On the back of his black leather vest is a yellow cross and the legend, TRIBE OF JUDAH JESUS CHRIST IS LORD. As I pass, I see the paramedics and police bent over a man prone, in biker clothes himself, and then it’s all moving again.
The radio in Eastern Washingston is something else. If it’s not country music with bad reception, it’s about God, and only one version of one God in particular. I listen to a sermon about how the best part of being a Christian is the gifts you get at the end, that really, it’s all about knowing for certain that in exchange for your—it’s left indistinct, but participation, at least—God has promised some nice things for the end, which is around the corner, fine things. I find myself wondering if this preacher has ever loved his God for anything but the Cracker Jack prize at the bottom of Creation, and the country song that comes on about how God will turn His face from us and give up if we don’t leave Him in the Pledge of Allegiance sets me wondering. Can’t we do better than this, I argue aloud with the radio, thinking of Rabi’a’s torch and bucket. Surely we can do better than this.
I tune in to another long sermon, holding with it for a while, enjoying the reverend’s gravelly voice. He goes on about how yes, when God promised Abraham a blessing on his seed, that was fulfilled through Christ’s act of mercy, but that’s not all, that’s surely not all. In Abraham’s children, in this man’s scripture, God’s blessing was also expressed in, as he says it, the tribe of Abram’s “military intervention” into the affairs of Sodom and Gomorrah, the “liberation” of its people. So do we, as heirs of Abraham, he says, have a responsibility to do the same. “The English-speaking people of the world,” he says, are the true and only heirs of Abraham, and to them falls blessing and burden. Christ’s grace is well and good, but how can we, as “the only nation in the world powerful enough to project freedom wherever we choose,” not intervene militarily as Abraham did, given the opportunity? I wonder about his phrasing, his citation of our power as evidence of our being the true heirs of the Hebrew legacy, about his choosing to say that we go where we choose, not where God chooses. I seek along the tuner band until I find another country station. Let’s roll, America, sings a man who no doubt wears a big hat, ‘cause God is on our side. And I think not of Rabi’a, but of Lincoln, who could not dare to make such a claim, who prayed that we would find it in ourselves to be on His side instead. On another station, the only woman I’ve heard all day prays that women all over the country will learn to be more loving to their husbands, be more obedient to the Word as it applies to serving a man “no matter the cost,” and I have to swallow, hard.
It becomes apparent that many of these radio men talk more about America than about their God, and I’m not sure what that means—about this nation, not the Kingdom of God, about our promised glories but not about the poor, or the sick, or the naked. One of them calls Social Gospel a blasphemy, but explains himself in kind tones, and I find myself at a loss.
They are all of the radio stations, this deep into the steppes and scrublands, and I continue to listen.

George

I pull off of I-90 into George, Washington, remarkable only for its too-cute name and the nearby Gorge Amphitheater, home to concerts that seat thousands and near nothing else at all. In central Washington, the farmland competes only with tawny hills, and this close to the river, those hills crumple the landscape and cradle little pull-offs like George not lovingly, but without rancor. Stopping my car in the lot of the shiny new gas station, directly across from the beat-up one with the case of ice for sale, I drag my red bandanna off my head and around my neck like a kerchief, ready to make it a dust mask. The taqueria I was hoping to hit has closed for the holiday. I have been at this intersection twice before in my life: once, on my way east the day before, to gas up my car and lift the hood to make sure that my CHECK ENGINE light didn’t mean anything in particular, just another pretty Latina on the way to somewhere else, not yet in today’s disguise, the wind tugging at a suede A-line the color of the landscape. Once, more than three years ago, in the middle of the night, returning from a concert at the amphitheater, my friends asleep in the back and too high to care, my girlfriend crumpled over her seat and looking serene despite the fight we’d been in before she dropped off. I had waited a while before I realized that I needed to pump my own gas in this strange state, and when I got out to operate the nozzle, there were two girls from my hometown in the next car, sweaty, tired, amused. Both times I used the beat-up gas station, and deliberately.
Today, I take a deep breath of the dusty wind and find that I cannot shake my desire to find a cowboy hat. The general store down the way looks promising, and I pull into its parking lot, walk in looking absurd, don’t find what I’m looking for amidst the work gloves and dry goods and packaged snacks. I say howdy to the bespectacled blonde woman at the register and pay for a tamarind soda and a Pepsi that was on sale, trying to be polite. GOD BLESS AMERICA, says her t-shirt, and her husband, a vast and ruddy fellow with a white beard and leather pate, wears one to match. It appears to be his picture on the donation can by the till, which proclaims that someone’s house burned down, and I hope it’s not these sweet folks, but that’s the way of things now and then. I wish her a happy Independence Day and wander out, stopping by the van in the parking lot to read their menu, all in Spanish. They serve lengua and cabeza, so they check out, and I surprise myself by not attempting any Spanish when I order. Perhaps it’s out of embarrassment; all the men ahead of me are old migrant workers, stocky and windworn, like all of the Mexican families in the dusty lot a few yards away, looking at tractors all lined up like it’s market day. There is no sales tax on my tacos, and I eat them quietly, in the closest thing there is to shade. Every other business on the block—which is to say, every other business here, since everything else in sight seems to be gas stations, tractors, or housing—is out of business, their spaces for rent, some still with Hallowe’en decorations up. Nowhere to go but the fields, which stretch unavoidable in all directions, dry and brown. Popping the cap on my soda with a multitool from my emergency kit and slamming the hatchback shut, I put my car into gear, put my sunglasses back on, and get back on the highway, jockeying for position with boat trailers and pickups, leaving George behind.
I had told myself no more stops, but I’m in no special hurry. and I take an exit where the sign tells me there’s a viewpoint. It’s a shelf of basalt out over the gorge, and below me is the Columbia, much nearer her source than I’m used to, impossibly blue between brown-gold banks and steep cliffs the color of tobacco and sunsets. A sere wind takes all the moisture out of my mouth and nostrils and I ponder just following the river back to its mouth where I came from, but the highway map doesn’t agree with that notion. I pour out water from my canteen and bow, but when I take a drink, it’s hot and bitter from two days in the car.
It’s time to get back on the road, time to keep moving and know that I’ll see this river later, at a less young place, where it’s fed by another river I love.
I refuse to turn off again when I see a sign for the petrified ginkgo forest, but I do leave the window down all the way to Yakima.

Iron Horse to Snoqualmie Pass

As the land shrugs and folds and finds itself a coat of pine, I can see the jagged teeth of the Cascades coming up ahead, and here in the foothills with one foot in the desert and one in the Ponderosas and volcanoes I find myself thinking, home. I was born on the Chesapeake Bay, thousands of miles away, but I have only one blurred memory of that place; I insist on thinking of this as the land the birthed me, that shaped me. These mountains, this indifferent sagebrush, this is my homeland. For all my railing, this is my homeland, this is where I come from. This is a place I understand.
No matter where I go in the world, no matter how many places adopt or astound me, I cannot escape that.

Snoqualmie to Seattle

Higher up in the pass I pull over into a ferny trailhead and call a friend for directions to his place, and the police pull up in a white SUV meantime, waiting for me to produce a recreational pass, break into a parked hiker’s car, or be on my way. I choose that third option after relieving myself courtesy the Forest Service, but when the turnoff finally comes up, I’m blocked by a semi and miss the exit.
There is nowhere to turn around, so I just keep going past all these places named by people who aren’t here any more. Sammamish. Issaquah. I only stop for gas before blazing across the Mercer Island bridge, level with a glittering lake, and into Seattle proper with daylight to spare. I find myself performing too much at dinner, not appreciating my friend, who I’ve missed, nearly enough. I’m itching for the road again, telling myself it’s just because I’m tired and sore and want to get back to my own bed, or get back in time to meet friends on the rugby field, or have my own radio stations back when I press the preset buttons on my console. So I excuse myself, and hug goodbye for now, and promise to come back soon.

Seattle to the river

As I pull away from Jess and her work friends and the brightly-colored house she’s taking care of, I light up a cigarette, put on the radio, become briefly lost in the north of Seattle before I finally muddle my way to I-5 and begin to glide the overpasses of downtown. The sunset is winding down, and fireworks begin to launch over the bay, and I get a long glimpse of the Space Needle, lit up and somehow kind for all its World’s Fair alienness, somehow warm, a flag flying from its point, dominating the skyline out my right-side window. The interstate takes me past the stadiums, lit up red, white, and blue; across the Sound I begin to see the flashes of distant combustions, and I begin to rethink my troubles with the rockets’ red glare.
After last year, standing in choking gunpowder smoke, fireworks a weapon against me as I tried to read a Declaration of Independence nobody seemed to recognize, I turned my back on fireworks. Portland’s display began behind me as I left a perfect viewpoint, walked across the Hawthorne Bridge shaking and near tears, and drove home to write bitterly about my grief for the nation. The flashes of light I had seen before, and now the wonder of it, the thirty seconds of ooh and ahh before they became repetitive, that had been taken, too: the bombs bursting in air, for me, had become just another glory in our ability to blow up other folk, a lightshow to celebrate hubris and distract citizens from their history and rights.
I don’t sit still for them, this year. I hit the road, south on I-5, thinking I’ll ignore them and take advantage of everyone else’s foolishness to make good time on the highway. As darkness falls, I begin to see them, to the left and to the right, multiple displays simultaneous as I pass through them, like the storm-chasing I used to do in the desert back home, heat-lightning making white whole sections of the sky. From backyard and city center, over wood and water, blossoms of color, silent, exuberant, behind hills and tucked in bays, cascade on all sides and sometimes directly above. As I listen to a radio report on the latest Nobel Peace Prize and grassroots activism in Kenya, every township sends up fountains of shivering light. There is no time to stare at any, as I barrel through the night at a mile a minute. Just pockets and showers and moments, pink cauliflower and hissing undulation and the knowledge that a thousand thousand towns out there in the dark are doing the same, and I forget, for a while, about nation, about this pride in a country, just seeing human beings tossing aloft tiny starscapes and saying, here I am, here I am, here I am. Tacoma. Olympia. Sleater-Kinney, Pe Ell, Kalama, Vancouver. As the darkness grows and the lights begin to fade, getting toward midnight, NPR becomes staticky and indistinct, and I push a tape into the player, turn it up to compensate for the age of the cassette.
Hold me closer, tiny dancer, croons Elton John, count the headlights on the highway, as I count the endless litany of truck stops and Food Next Right and Portland, 64 Miles.
Here I am.
Here I am.
Here I am.


Happy Fourth of July.