like a hungry runaway*

This morning my partner sent me down the street to pick up some things for breakfast, because neither of us was thinking about what would happen on the way.

I rounded the corner past the church, its bells pealing for Mass, kids running about, and promptly stumbled into a gauntlet of a solid dozen cafes and restaurants and lunch carts all packed kitchen to door, all their signs cheerfully chalked to announce their specials for Mothers' Day Brunch. It seemed like every storefront had something to say on the matter, or was closed so they could be home to say something else more personal.

I've been trying to avoid noticing today, to skip past all the greeting cards and helpful internet reminders and e-mail from Planned Parenthood telling me via cute video about how much I should appreciate my mother, the best in the world. Last night's crying jag made it clear that this was not a workable strategy. This is not a fun day for me. This is not about picturesque brunch.

When you're barren and motherless, Mothers' Day is a calendar mark to dread.

I will never carry a baby under my heart and above my hips. And the person who carried me, we don't talk any more. There's too much hurt. There's too much poison. Here we are at the day where I'm supposed to idealize that, where I used to call every year and pretend things were other than what they were. This time, it's different. This time I'm not pretending. The rest of my family probably had a lovely spread on the table this morning, but I wasn't there. I may never be again.

I've been trying to hide from this day as best I could, but, as when I was a child, there's nowhere to hide, is there? There's nowhere I can go that the people who made me aren't with me, in the end, nowhere that who they are and what they did isn't encoded in my bones and carved into my corneas. I already knew when I was little that even hidden in a closet or up a tree, nowhere was safe for long, if nothing else because I was there, and I brought it all with me. When it's in you, when it is you, when it's where you come from, you bring it everywhere, stinking in your hair like rancid cigarette smoke, like a red-eyed thing hanging behind your neck and reading everything over your shoulder. I don't know who I am without it. There has never been a version of me without it.

Last year in March I climbed a mountain alone, and sat at the peak trying to put away the whole human world for a while so I could see further, but I brought it with me. My veins and shoes and food wrappers and eardrums were all human, and all came into that place. When I tried to strip away everything and get to the bottom of myself, near the bottom was a terrible, paralyzing fear, infecting all my decisions. That fear spoke in a voice I recognized all too well. Sometimes it wore a face that I recognized, too. Always there. I couldn't get away from where I came from. I brought it with me.

You can't run from where you start. You can't hide from it. You can stop picking up the phone, change your address, change your name, but you'll find it chalked onto the sandwich boards of every cafe in your neighborhood, find it in your inbox as a reward for your volunteer service, and you will find yourself looking over your shoulder every minute, afraid to see in person the people who are always there anyway, but no longer made of smoke and mirrors and hurt but flesh and blood and audible voice, ready to dismantle every shrine you've built in yourself.

I am trying to come to terms with this day. Trying to find a way to make it positive for myself instead of a stab-wound. I think, well, I will never carry a child inside, but I may be a mother someday. I think, well, what about metaphors, about cultivation and vegetable gardens and art, about making new things and nurturing them? I think about the wonderful mothers in my life, who aren't my mothers but who surely count. I think about all the people who helped mother me even if we never shared blood, all the people who gave me somewhere to run to, who showed me a different way to be. I think about elders in my community worth honoring. I think about spiritual mothers, universal mothers even, trying to reach further out into something sacred and more wholesome.
I think of someone dear to me who reminded me that, as Audre Lorde said, we have to learn to mother ourselves. But it's hard to know the best way to mother yourself when your only model is so full of hurt, and is so full of hurt because her only model in turn hurt her. Learning to mother yourself in a new way, when you don't know what the safe and healthy way to do it even looks like, is a tall order.

Mothers' Day is no picnic when you're barren and you're motherless. But I'm not really either of these things. I am fertile, though I cannot give birth, as soil in which to grow things. And I have a mother. If I didn't, this would be a very different kind of hurt, but I do have a mother, one who shaped me, one who is integral to who I am and have become, who is never not looking over my shoulder whether I like it or not. The key is not in the fiction of being motherless. It's in learning to deal with the mother I have, or had, and what she is, now, in me. It's in healing the mother in me so I can mother myself, and so someday when there are children in my care I can do right by them. I don't know how to do these things, but maybe Mothers' Day is a good place to start. My Independence Day, or Dependence Day, or something, something about saying right here and now that even when you ran away, even when you changed your name and address and phone number, you cannot hide from what is written in your ribcage and seeping to fill your muddy footprints, sketched on your palms and wrapped around your throat. If you cannot hide, you have to figure out something better to do.

For all of us learning to mother ourselves, if not a happy Mothers' Day, a hopeful one, one where we give ourselves more chances. A day to remember the good days, the moments of respite. A day to learn to grow something new in ourselves, and start to be brave enough to loose its seeds on the wind. A day to support the mothers around us who are, as our own did, doing the best they can. A day to believe that they, and we, can do it differently.

Where we come from is always in us, and we take it everywhere. Maybe we can learn something from it better than what it wanted to teach us. Maybe someday we can go home.


*props to my friends Coyote Joe and Miss Grace, who you should know better

no regrets no looking back and no goodbyes

I get so homesick.

I'm a country girl. We know this. And I ache sometimes for the hot breeze and tobacco-colored rimrock cliffs, sitting on my dusty car's hood looking up at a sky bigger than anything, somewhere on a potholed back road out at the edge of the big pines. For soaking in the river and baking on a boulder till dry, scrambling over the jumbled basalt with skinned elbows and a big pocketknife in sturdy jeans. For walking up logging roads and past split-rail ranch fences, sometimes with an eye to where I might park with a girl once the moon came up. I knew every flower by name, could tell you which bird just by its silhouette.

Back home, past the rusted-out stacks of the empty mill, you can see the Milky Way oozing glitter across the arch of everything. The train tracks go forever and so does the horizon, except where stretching calderas come up, a great cradling hand, to hold the boundaries of the knowable.

There's a soda fountain that makes its own chocolates and milkshakes, down there, and you can smell their caramel corn all the way down the street at the little restaurant we all went with our prom dates. Both of the old florists continued to not hire me every summer.

I don't get to go back. Maybe ever. I'm gone from there. I kicked the dust from my boots, packed everything in a station wagon, and ran. As far as most anyone knows, I might be dead.
And I might be, if I did go back. You never know. I did famously at cutting and running, and sometimes that cuts back.

The river cuts through everything there, and everything leads down to it. You just look for the green. We used to jump off a bridge in the summer , where two X's had been scratched into the rail to tell you where was deep enough, and crawl back up through the rocks and shady wild mint patches for another go. You just shucked your shoes and jeans and went, though I was always a big chicken about it.

Quaking aspen and knobby juniper tell you where you are, out there. We don't get those where I live now.

I say awful things about my hometown, bitter, narrow-eyed. Fair enough. It hurt me, bad. But some days, it's just to get away from loving it, from feeling rootless with my feet on all this cement, grasping at bluegrass music and "ain't" and typing inside to stay out of the weather.

I used to dangle my feet over a clifftop, rolled-up jacket for a pillow, and make sketches of every growing thing. I knew what time of year the dragonflies would have their highspeed aerial junctioned relations. Sitting up on my parents' roof in the snow, I'd watch the first melt sigh and plop off the branches. I'd shoo the deer from the summer garden, see if the coyote'd come by, and head down the road to town, singing.

They hurt me, and I ran, and I can never go back. But I can't honestly say there's nothing for me there.

I live in a city with art museums and film festivals and statuary. There's a queer community, and your choice of Thai restaurants, and roses everywhere. There are actual other Filipinas. There's opera. There's my little creaking house with its overstuffed bookshelves and ancient stove. There's the woman I'm marrying.

But I've never yet seen an osprey stoop for a steelhead trout here. It's been years since I've pulled off the road, sat up on the hood of my truck, and named constellations like old friends.

Maybe I'm just not a teenager any more, and don't notice these things. Maybe, in a world that seems a little grimmer and more complicated, I've just let my sense of wonder slip, let the sky get a little less big. But maybe I'm just homesick for a home that didn't want me, an old lover that'll never take me back.

Nostalgia is foolish and dangerous. I've made a new home and a new life, with plenty of joy in it. The riotous wealth of subcultures and body-mods, the sidewalks that don't roll up at seven, the new places to go that don't run out, the people, all matter. I get giddy at the press and smells and close-in messy human wonderfulness at Pike Place Market, grin affectionately at the ornate Victorian houses Southeast Portland has long since rented out for duplexes to college kids and station-wagon dykes raising kids. I can rent Bollywood movies, for Gods' sakes. There's colors here I never knew existed, before. Besides, nobody pretends that my hometown is still what it used to be, anyway.

Nostalgia is foolish and dangerous, and I have the scars to prove it. Life goes on, often into something richer, fuller, more honest, more whole. But a leopard can't change her spots sometimes, and for everything that's changed, some things never do, and I can't shake the feeling, some days, that I'm in exile.



(This post had a soundtrack, on the train when I wrote it. It's Kim Richey's "A Place Called Home," for the record.)

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.

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

over the rainbow

How do you navigate the politics of heartbreak?
Really.
No, really.

Because I see so many of us burn out. Slow down. Drop out. Get tired, exhausted, worn down. Nothing gets to an activist like despair, and there is no despair like that inspired by just looking at things the way they are.
All of our work, all of our exhaustion and blood, will not make our own situations very different, really, for the most part. The change we want--the deep-seated social shifts that will make the world a more decent place for more people--that will echo, and grow, and move planets for our children's children's children, and maybe they will thank us. But we will not taste it. We will not cross the Jordan. And what is it we're changing?
Well. Put simply? This world is a heartbreaker. This world is a heartbreaker and love--the only thing that makes activism, or life, worth anything--the only thing that can make all this effort, and all this breathing, all these heartbeats, matter or even work--love is a breaker of things. Sometimes they're things that needed breaking. Sometimes they're things you wanted very much to keep.
And it doesn't care. The soil, the sky, and the social structure could give a good goddamn, really; as it turns out, a life of virtue, or even a simple devotion to looking after the people you love...well, that and a buck fifty might get you a soda at the corner store.

You know, though? This is the wrong tack to take, in this windstorm. It's not this big stuff that matters. It's not the overwhelming nature of the world's sorrow, it's not the impossibility of processing all of the hurt in this world in this moment.
It's us. It's our lives. It's our jobs and our loved ones and our burnt dinner. It's the fact that, with our hands braced against that big world out there, our backs are braced against--well--the clock-on-and-off. The family you got or made. The ache in your joints. The lovers, coming in and out of the pattern like so much gold embroidery. It's the fact that I'm not writing this out of a grand apprehension of some philosophical principle or as an outgrowth of a theory of the universe I hold dear.
It's that tonight at work, I had to call in a break so I could find an unused room and break down, for a half-hour, into uncontrollable, ragged, desperate sobbing. And I only got it together, really, honestly, because there was work to do, and it wasn't going to stop needing doing, just because I wasn't going to do it.
It has to do with the fact that when you grow up, your responsibilities never go away. Ever. You can just choose whether or not to be responsible about them. And they usually won't wait.

So how do you deal? How do you deal with looking at your job day in and day out when the state of things outside, in the world, is tearing at your insides? How do you set your shoulder against social injustice or poverty or oppression when your guts are tied up in knots over what you'll have to face when you go home? Where do you draw your lines? Where do you find the strength? How do you manage to be a person, and a servant of a cause, and a participant in humanity, and survive? And the answer is I don't know. Winston Churchill said that sometimes it's not enough to do your best; sometimes you must do what is required. Fine words. And everyone, looking hard at this mess from the beginning of all of us, has tried to come up with some way to reconcile it:

The world hurts. It hurts bad. It takes us apart and grinds us down and shatters what we thought we could lean on. So how do we get back up? How do we brush off the dust and the scabs, crack our knuckles, and keep going?
Well, there's always "because we have to." It's a good one. Hope isn't optional, in this world. It's a survival skill. It's a will to continue. And there is too much need not to get up if you still can and get back to it. Your goodness will not protect you and your loved ones, but what you build might.
There's "it's a crooked game, but it's the only game in town." That's something. Life isn't fair, but the alternatives are pretty permanent. The dead have plenty to do that we don't, whatever it is they do, but there's plenty of time to be dead. One way or another, you'll be doing a lot more of it than being alive, so you may as well do the things you can do in life that you can't do when you're not living. Act like the living while you're alive. Play the hand you've got. Plenty of time to get to the rest of it later.
There's "we just don't understand the big picture from here." Nice. Quite possibly true. And, to a tiny little person, pretty useless, because even if it tells you someone's in charge, it means they might not notice you at all anyhow.
Okay, sure. But that doesn't make it okay. That's not a comfort.
Neither, honestly, is the thought of the benefits of future generations. Does it give me a warm feeling? Sure. Is it the goal? Sure. But I won't know any of those people. I won't see them benefit or even smile. I won't see them benefit and I won't see my neighbor right now benefit, either, and that? That burns. It rankles.

So what are the politics of heartbreak? How do we go on, in this? How do all of us--even those of us who mostly do well, because we all have these times--how do we deal with living in a world that does such damage to us? How do we scrub away at the tears and keep on going, even while the hammer falls on our hearts, over and over and over? Make important decisions, or any decisions at all? Because, by and large, somehow, we do. Somehow we're still here, and still fighting, even if it's just fighting to tread water.
There were those alongside us who didn't make it. I know. But somehow, those of us left have found a way to make it work, and sometimes, improbably, impossibly, to look to those who couldn't, and try to do something. We have taken that great wrecker, love, and made it the warmth of our hearths. We have reached across chasms of understanding to join hands. We have, against every set of long odds there ever was, kept getting up after beating after beating.

I don't know how we do it. I don't. And in a moment like this, of weakness, of broken-ness, of vulnerability, I don't understand at all. But we do, somehow. We hold tight to that heartbreak and we keep on going--even if we have to step back from this or that in order to hold our ragged little ships together.

That's as close to a miracle as I'm willing to see right now. I hope it's enough.

de profundis

Four years ago, the political got very personal.

I was a good little radical then; that night, if anything, is what galvanized me. I had wandered down into the streets ready to spend a few hours protesting the oncoming war and then go home and on a date and to my homework. I can't really claim much in the way of nobility: I cared, I cared until my little heart was worn out, but I wasn't a grownup about these things, not yet. I still wanted Bad Guys to line up against. I still wanted to Win and Go Home, because I still thought there was a chance things worked that way.

So I wandered into the eye of the storm, and into a protest that shut down Portland highway by highway and bridge by bridge. The notion was to get everyone to stop and think: this is an inconvenience, but bombs are about to start dropping, tonight, on a nation of real people. Stop. Stop and look around. Feel this moment. Know that it matters. We knew everything would change, we knew it would be a disaster, no matter how much we could never have predicted about the four years to come.

I have written about this before: the peaceful protest I sat in, the places elsewhere in town where it got ugly, where demonstrators fought with riot police, where a police chief shipped in from LAPD and a mayor who wanted to make political examples got brutal and militaristic, where anarchists and would-be revolutionaries got stupid, or naive, or nasty. The squad car driven at me and my friends, engine gunning. The flashbang grenades thrown in our faces. The scared preteen who wanted to make a stand, choking on vinegar-soaked cloth in case of tear gas, that I helped smuggle out of the worst of it. The firehose, the rain, the choppers, the friends with black bruises a foot square that lasted weeks, the people dragged off of sidewalks and then arrested for jaywalking, the children called terrorists. The cops who told me, as they cuffed and searched me, that they'd like to torture me for opposing this President, that they wished they could treat me as Saddam would. The bones that stayed intact because of news cameras. The sadistic prison guards who forced me to watch footage, over and over again, of the first bombs dropping, complete with mocking commentary on how I hadn't been able to stop the deaths of my "little I-racky friends." I've written about the violences that gave me shaking, terrified flashbacks for months after, and I've exorcised those, mostly. I've told the funny bits, gestures wide, trying to make light of a night that changed who I was and my trust in the world forever, trying to make a good story out of the scared kid I was. I've tried the heroic angle, the confessional angle, the big-picture, the find-the-themes tale. I keep wanting this to be the opener for a piece about my discovery of street medicine and a new politics of triage, or part of a larger account of demonstrations, or about the conversation I had shortly afterward with a South African dissident that midwifed my perspective on matters of justice.

This should not be those, because I haven't exorcised the most selfish part of how I changed that night. Many, many people died that night, four years ago, far away from where I was. Many have, as a consequence, died since. Perspective tells me these things are the most important, that these things are, if I am decent and an activist and true to my faith, what I ought to write about, on this brutal, tragic anniversary of a war that never should have been.
My politics are concerned with those and daily, but four years ago, the political got personal. That's what I need to exorcise.

Feel this moment. Stop and look around. Somewhere, there's a bridge blockaded in my head. Somewhere, I'm still cuffed and working on an escape plan, but the daily routine gets hit, diverted, stymied, bottlenecked. Feel this moment.
I keep wanting to put it in continuity, in context, because that's what I do: stories. I keep wanting to move on down the road.
Feel this moment. Stop.

Okay:
I didn't go to jail that night at the protests for the war. Was I on the street to protest this invasion? Yes. Did I stay there because I felt that the law of morality and humanity came first, before my concern for the convenience of my neighbors, that this was a great enough wound in the world's order to merit disruption and risk-taking? Yes, of course, yes. Was I motivated by a dead grandfather whose world was turned upside-down by a US occupation that pulled out and left his homeland free of their prior oppressors, but still full of bloody, awful chaos, who I wanted to honor by trying to prevent any other children like him being forced into guerrilla war? Yes, yes, yes, peace be upon him. That was why I sat in the street. That was why I linked arms. But it was the arm-linking that made me stare down shotguns and sing at truncheons. It was the people I was with in the streets that night that made me bold enough to resist for more than eight straight hours in the cold rain, and it was eventually those same people who made me turn into another sort of activist entirely, the kind with a medical kit.
But it wasn't why I went to jail that night. I could have run away, even at the end, when we were surrounded by armored police and vehicles in phalanges two and three ranks deep. I like to think that I went behind bars for the cause, like Bonhoeffer and Berrigan and Esack and Tutu. Part of me did.

Let's get personal: I went to jail that night for a girl. Not one I particularly liked, while we're in the confessional.
One of the people at the core of the protest with me that night was a transgendered girl, a transient who was staying with some of my friends. She was deeply unbalanced, not a particularly healthy person to be around, but well-meaning. She had a lot of wild stories about a past escaping a cruel family, falling in with a cult, breaking free, moving on, finding herself on the streets, leaving behind a name she never told us. That night, over her more practical gear, under her satchel, she wore a tutu. She never did have much sense.
Let's confess: I was only a few steps out of the closet then, with anyone other than family and close friends. I had shoulder-length hair and looked fairly androgynous and didn't pass so very well even when I tried. That night, raw and haggard in a turtleneck and jeans, I looked male, and I had allowed that on purpose for protection, for privilege, to cover my ass. I still have survivor's guilt over it--but I'm getting ahead too far.

We were surrounded, two and three ranks deep, by masked men with covered names in black armor, with shotguns, with hands on canisters of pepper spray, with armored cars. I cannot tell you, if you have never looked on all borders of a space the size of a street intersection and seen this all around you, what it feels like. If you have not been there, I cannot really get across the feeling of looking at people next to you and trying to predict who will get hit first, who you might have to take a truncheon for, a bullet for, not knowing the intentions or the limits of whatever faces are behind all of that implacable, reflective plastic. I shed a lot of skin that night.

They announced, over a loudspeaker, the order to disperse. None of our guards moved; a small gap had been left on the southeast end of the box, as an escape route. The girl in the tutu got up, moved toward it, shrugged at the rest of us; it wasn't worth it to go behind bars, for her, I think. I was ready to get up and follow. She approached an officer, to ask him if that southeast gap was the way to exit, and could she disperse, as asked--I was near enough to overhear. He began to point, nod, confirm, when two more armored officers came up behind her, threw her to the ground, cut her satchel-strap and cuffed her. She was ground into the pavement as they hogtied her and carried her into a van belly-down.

I could not let her be the only one in there. Do you understand? We were the only two out trans women there, that night, in that place. She was not my friend, really, but I could not let her be the only one in there, alone. I linked arms and went nowhere; when they came for me, I stood up, I was polite, I announced the contents of my pockets and went civilly--but I went.
They split us up, as it turned out. I missed some parts that were related to me later. They put her in a cage--a cage!--first, apart from other people, poked at her, mocked her while she was under restraint. She was held out in the rain under a bridge, as I was, but for longer, and under a different bridge. Eventually, later that night, we were brought to the same precinct, where it got worse for both of us.

I keep wanting to move past the nausea and tell the bit about getting the other prisoners to sing "I Feel Pretty," the moment of queer solidarity I had in the holding cells, the way I small-town-charmed the detective who first processed me, before I was relocated. I want to tell the good bits. I want to keep my city lit up and lively.
Stop. Feel this moment.

She and I were processed one after the other. They read me as male; they read me as queer.
The sherriffs didn't stop at taking my shoelaces and my name. They cuffed me, surrounded me, and told me they would strip me down and lock me up with a rapist they had just arrested, who they described in graphic detail. They told me I would have no contact with a lawyer or the outside for at least three days, and that they could arrange this in the processing, that I would be alone in an isolated cell and they would ignore any cries for help. They told me in no uncertain terms that they would have me raped, even while I was cooperating, and they laughed. There were a lot of them, and I was alone, and they laughed. I was cold, and damp, and naive. I was very young. They did it because they could.

She was brought in after me, stripped down to her long underwear, and as they were throwing her to the ground and removing her piercings, she tried to bring up the local statutes preventing discrimination against the transgendered, the right to self-identification, hell, the right to remain silent. As they had told me, they told her these were "TV rights," and they knelt on her back and grabbed at her crotch and triumphantly announced that she was a he, and that he was a freak.

What did I think I was going to do, when I let myself be arrested? Did I think that I would be able to protect her? That my bearing witness would matter? There was that sharp, sick moment, where I tried to move, to intervene, to stop what was happening, as they dragged her in front of a medical examiner, harassed her, mocked her, shoved her around. There was that moment before I realized I was under lock and key, and being shouted at by armed people, and could do nothing to stop it. There was that moment where I contemplated the cowardice of not being beaten senseless and chose it.

There is a dull horror in watching and being able to do nothing. Maybe there's something I could have done, and I didn't. I don't know. I didn't. I froze and I choked on that feeling and did nothing. And I let it get selfish, because--
because--
It could have been me. Any other night, if I had worn a different shirt, if I had been further along, if I had--it could have been me, there. They threatened me; they carried out many of those threats on her, and I watched. I watched knowing that it very well could have been me, that for the rest of my life it could be, with no more option to hide things, soon enough. (I hear someone in my head, going, but there are laws. That kind of discrimination is illegal. Didn't you tell them?) I don't know what I thought I would accomplish, watching what they did to her, feeling it creep into me.

They locked her in a solitary cell and covered the window to isolate her completely. I was made to watch the foreign deaths that began that night on television, on repeat. Eight hours later, they let me out. Ten after that, they let her out.

There was supposed to be a suit against the bureau. She skipped town, moved on, scared, before her chance to testify. Records were, shockingly, lost, of who was on duty that night, of who was involved. The city moved on. The traffic was unblocked. Larger stories unfolded and the flurry of outrage was forgotten for a homeless, unbalanced young transsexual done wrong by people in uniform.

We never heard from her again. But let's be honest: this is a selfish exorcism. I don't know how she is, if she's even alive, but I know I'm stained, and that that night just won't wash out. No matter what stories, what themes, what global events were more important, no matter how many times I tell myself the context, no matter how many times I try to process it and get the traffic moving and get over the bridge we blocked together.

Stop.

It is spring, and the cherry blossoms are appearing, tree by tree.

Feel this moment.

on life shearing a little too close to the hadith

So last Saturday on patrol, we're posted up on a streetcorner because someone was throwing bottles at people, around one in the morning. I'm standing just outside a little alcove in the brick building my back is to, where two homeless people are wrapped in blankets trying to get to sleep. One of them pushes the blanket down, revealing that she is a tiny, wizened old woman, missing some teeth. Barely audible, she asks the guy across from me if she can have a smoke. He's not a smoker, and he looks at me; she turns and querulously asks me if I can give her a smoke, so I bend down, pull my pack of Parliaments from one of my pouches, open it, and hand her a couple of cigarettes. As she's asking if I could give her a light, my lighter drops from the cigarette pack, so I just pick it up and hand it to her. "Actually, just keep the lighter," I say; it seems absurd not to, and I'm more likely to be able to get another one than she is. She says thank you, for our being out here and looking out for her. I shake her hand, and then she looks at me in particular, and thanks me again. "Of course, ma'am," I say, "Any time." It was an odd thing to say: Any time you're going to sleep on the street and need a cigarette, I'll be there? But it popped out, and there it was.

She looks up at me, directly into my eyes, her own huge under wrinkled eyelids. Almost too quietly to hear, she says, "Any time you need my help, too."
All I could say, with a sort of thrum in my breast, was "Thank you." And then we had to move on.
When I came by there a little less than an hour later, my shift over, she and all her things were gone without a trace. The other guy sleeping there hadn't moved.
What I said out loud to my comrades walking with me was, "I hope she's okay."
In my head, I was thinking many other things.