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| Summer reading in P Town |
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| Street Graffiti by Caroline Shepard |
I used to hate summer
reading assignments. Most kids do. But when books of our own choosing fly in the
door, into the mind, of ideas, opening up memories, hopes, tragedies, and the
like, then summer reading becomes a lovely and gripping experience. In between trips to the beach, hanging out,
cyclones games, gossiping about the Weiner and sexting, banjo playing,
blogging, finishing edits for a book, and bbqing, swimming in Cape Cod watering
holes, and hanging out, I managed to peruse some of the social movement
literature which has come out over the last or two. A few
of these texts include:
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| Cycling and gardening books and images, history and activism. Scenes from Newtopia and Transportation Alternatives. |
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| Summer activism. This author to left, Garden activist with cucumber to the right. Photo by Diane Greene Lent |
Crow, Scott. 2011 Black Flags and Windmills: Hope, Anarchy and the Common Ground
Collective. Oakland, CA: PM Press.
Haugerud,
Angelique. 2013. No Billionaire Left Behind: Satirical Activism in America. Stanford University Press.
Scholl,
Christian. 2012. Two
Sides of a Barricade: (Dis)order and summit protest in Europe. State University Press of New York.
McKay,
George. 2011. Radical Gardening:
Politics, Idealism, & Rebellion in the Garden. Frances Lincoln Publishers London
Furness,
Zack. 2010. One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of Automobility. Temple University Press.
Each
of the books tells a different kind of a story, using multiple methods for
answering questions, pointing to a different direction for where social
movements are taking us. McKay and
Furness point to gardening and cycling as a
ways of creating new models of sustainable urbanism. McKay fashions gardening as a form of
resistance culture, tracing an alternative history of the practice, while Furness
suggests cycling offers a new kind of right to the city, tracing cycling
activism from the women’s movement through European socialism, Situationism and
anarchism. He quotes Susan B. Anthony and her 1896 homage to
cycling: "I think it has done more to emancipate women than any one thing
in the world. I rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel. It gives
her a feeling of self reliance and independence the moment she takes her seat;
and away she goes, the picture of untrammelled womanhood." Bikes really are freedom machines. Part of what is important about these studies and stories
is the way they point to forms of activism which impact everyday life. One need not purchase a train or airplane
ticket or use sick days at work to participate in these forms of activism, which
are redefining and transforming cities the world over. Instead we can all fight for our right to the city.
The same sentiment can generally not be said of summit protests,
the subject of Christian Scholl’s work Two
Sides of a Barricade. A scholarly
work, the author acknowledges that the authorities have largely neutralized the
tactic. The text largely echos the work
of Louis Fernandez,
Amory Starr, and other street ethnography
of the era, without engaging the overarching question: does summit hopping impact
everyday living? My sense is that
security shows up; people scream; some get arrested. And everyday life remains the same. At least this is my impression after taking part in a few US convergence actions. The question remains: are there better tactics approaches to living and social struggle? Not that some of the summit actions were not
amazing – but as the era of summit hopping continued after Seattle, mechanisms of power seemed
to remain unchanged. In the peak of the
Occupation Movement, labor historian Staughton Lynd aptly
noted:
In the period between Seattle in 1999 and
September 11, 2001, many activists were into a pattern of behavior that might
unkindly be described as summit-hopping. Two young men from Chicago who had
been in Seattle stayed in our basement for a night on their way to the next
encounter with globalization in Quebec. I was struck by the fact that, as they
explained themselves, when they came back to Chicago from Seattle they had been
somewhat at a loss about what to do next. As each successive summit (Quebec,
Genoa, Cancun) presented itself, they expected to be off to confront the Powers
That Be in a new location, leaving in suspended state whatever beginnings they
were nurturing in their local communities. So far as an outsider like myself
could discern, there did not seem to be a long-term strategy directed toward
creating an “otro mundo,” a qualitatively
new society.
Go local Lynd advises, pointing to creating
counter institutions, worker centers, and communities of resistance, care and
solidarity. And most certainly, the transnational networks helped build support for other ways of living, being,
and challenging systems of oppression.
But, many workers hoped for more sustained resistance in their own homes
and communities. Scholl’s work is a telling archive of a period in time, in activism. Yet, we never want to fetishize one tactic over others. Summit-hopping is but one of many, many tactics. Still, Scholl's use
of militant ethnography is an important methodological choice, one which I hope
more researchers choose to engage.
Perhaps
the most effective recent example of this methodology which I have seen is by
anthropologist Louis Fernandez. In his
essay, “On Being There: Thoughts on Anarchism and
Participatory Observation” from Contemporary
Anarchist Studies: An Introductory Anthology of Anarchy in the Academy, Fernandez
suggests militant ethnography
is all about being there making sense experience of his experience. He describes trying to conduct interviews
during a WTO meeting in Cancun, Mexico in 2003.
“We kept interviewing people, but kept a close eye on what felt like a
tense situation,” he writes, in a major underestimation (Fernandez, 2009, p.
93). “Soon a small group of young
activists began throwing rocks over the fence, which landed on the helmeted
police. We continued with our
interviews, feeling a bit nervous and sensing a clear shift in the mood of
demonstration,” (p.93). The police have started throwing the stones back. “[W]e could see medical crews disappearing
into the thick crowd only to reappear moments later escorting individuals
covered with blood seeping from head wounds,” (p. 93). As medics move back and forth, he talked with
one man about his struggle to hold on in the midst of economic tumult. Breaking from the interview, the man
commented on the circumstances of the protest.
“’Somebody is going to die today.
And its going to be a good horrible death.' The truth of the statement almost knocked me
over. He was right,” Fernandez
ruminated, observing himself in the his interview (p. 94). And it could have been him. For Fernandez, “these experiences only come
from being there, by placing ourselves within and among the lives of those who
suffer, by running risks and by placing ourselves among those who suffer,” (p.
94). Fernandez’ writing in his book Policing Dissent serves as a case study in movement
participant observation. “Early on, I
adopted a combination of approaches: one methodological, the other ethical,”
(p. 39). Herein, the researcher
approaches his research subject with “deep connection with those one studies”
“empathy, compassion, and understanding,” (p. 173, 40). The method builds on notions of
reflexivity. His thoughts about
knowledge and participation help propel the ethnographic narrative away from
notions of objectivity or scientific method toward the observation of self and
other. “Instead of adopting a stance of objectivity, then, my methods
deliberately blur the distinction between protester and researcher,” he writes
(p. 41). “I deliberately blurred the
boundary between observer and observed, hoping to induce in myself the fears
and stresses that the police inflict on protesters as they employ the
mechanisms of control. This approach
worked well, producing intense emotions,” (p. 41). These feelings “fueled my analysis”
(p.41).
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| The Billionaires inaction Images by Fred Askew |
Anthropologist
Angelique Haugerud borrows utilizes a similar methodology for her ethnography of
the work of a seminal movement group rather an event or history. The title of the work implies a broad based
study of the ludic tactic of satire.
Yet, her study of the satirical group the Billionaires is much for
focused. It masterfully considers the interweaving
topics of disparities in wealth, big money in electoral politics, and the
history of this group. This is a thick
and telling ethnography study of irony, activism, economics and culture. And like the best of ethnographies, it is
also a terrific read, with interviews and observations that kept me coming back
day after day. Haugerud’s ethnography begins
with the 2004 period when the Billionaires took center stage in the street
activism anticipating the Republican National Convention in New York. With clashes between egos, undercover cops and direct
action groups, reporters, critical masses and riot cops, and anti –
Bush activists, I recall this as a murky
often uncertain period of activism. Full
disclosure, I was part of the Reclaim the Streets and Lower East Side
Collective working groups of the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, attended the
first Billionaire meetings, even a few of their actions with my friends, including
getting arrested in top hot, and spent years observing the group and their interactions
with the larger movement of movements. When I first saw the book, I was
apprehensive. Were we ready to reconsider
the billionaires? They just left. After witnessing the Billionaires, then the
Billionaires for Bush (or Gore) in the previous election cycle, the joke of the
Billionaires felt less fresh as some of the interviewees concede in my
ethnography of this period of activism
Play, Creativity and Social Movements: If I Can’t Dance Its Not My Revolution. By 2004, the group which satirized the
richest people and the corrosive
influence of wealth on our politics, had also come to emulate some of the
snootiness they sought to critique. The
billionaires were the rock stars of the ironic activist set and they knew it. Sometimes smug and pleased with themselves and
their sartorial approach, the group seemed to leave questions about poverty,
reproductive autonomy, and public policy to others, even while ridiculing those
with an interest in social welfare policies who differed with their analysis. Throughout the first presidential cycle for
the group, the Billionaires choose to minimize the differences between Bush and
Gore. Certainly the Clinton era had its
flaws and Gore was a terrible candidate.
No dought both candidates worked for the United States of Corporate
America, as all politicians do. But the
policy differences, some large and small, between the two were real. One acknowledged the reality of climate
change, while the other had ties to the oil industry; one acknowledged a women’s
right to reproductive autonomy, while the other supported a platform to do away
from the policy; one supported energy alternatives while the other supported eroding
environmental regulations; one supported expanding the Earned Income Tax
credit; the other had never heard of it, etc. To paint these differences with a
broad brush instead of a fine pen was a significant error for a group which
prided itself on getting the facts right. Gore lost the election in 2000 in a razor
tight election, a razor tight election. Haugerud is right to point out that
many grew frustrated with the group’s 2000 election cycle contention that there
were minimal differences between the two.
Some went as far as to blame the election debacle of 2000 on the group. Haugerud’s coverage of these debates is
important. It brings up an important
point about what happens when “jocular exuberance” (p.137) becomes a substitute
for a space where there is space for open debate, respect for differences, or
room for ideas outside of group ideology or groupthink. Sadly, Gore’s failures and the inability of
the left to see any of his strengths opened the doo
for Bush and war.
for Bush and war.
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| The author as Billionaire, in the middle, during 2002 World Economic Forum Actions in NYC. |
Still, in a world with the Patriot Act
corralling dissent, the Billionaire message that we all work for the
billionaires resonated. After Bush was
appointed by the Supreme Court, the whole thing felt like a big, ridiculous
joke. But it was better to laugh than cry, many
contend although many did cry with the re emergence of the Christian Right on
the national stage. The first time the
Reagan Bush crowd was around horrible things happens to Unions, people with AIDS,
and family policies. Marx’
adage - the first time these sort of
things happen, it feels like tragedy, the second time its farce – became the
slogan of the day. “For the Billionaires” writes Haugerud, “the
consequence of ironic humor, is not meant to be simply more humor. Political satire does not merely mirror societal
incongruities or imbalances, it also helps us to define what is thinkable,”
(p.52-3).
In a 2005 interview, Zizek specifically argued
there is a rationale for such thinking.
“The only way to signal you are serious, at the level of form, is to
make fun of yourself,” he explained.
“This pseudo-Heideggerian jargon, we live in fateful times, the destiny
of humanity is threatened blah, blah, blah – I think you cannot talk like
that,” Zizek elaborated (Clover, 2005).
So one has to find different ways to engage the serious. This, of course, was the point of the Billionaires
and Haugerud’s study of the group. Her
captures an elegiac quality of the Bush years and the loss many of us felt, as
the sartorial splender of the era gave way to bombs and blitzkrieg, shock and
awe. In the end, it was hard to look
back at the difficult era in which the Billionaires made their way through
three election cycles. The issue of efficacy is hard to measure and this is the
core question facing the Billionaires, like all movement groups. Suggesting the group helped support a culture
of resistance, Haugerud’s ethnography
does this period justice.
A mug shot of my
friend Andrew Boyd, a founder of the group, is featured on the cover of
Haugerud’s telling and important book. Boyd sat for an interview for my book,
excerpted below. He began his interview
with a discussion of his work with a college group called the Nuclear Saints
and the United for a Fair Economy, a Boston based group organized around issues
of economic justice. Yet, unlike similar
groups, they had Andrew Boyd who spearheaded a series of smart pranks designed
to highlight the issue of economic fairness.
This history is the roots of the Billionaires. So were Boyd’s exploits in satirical activism
at University of Michigan. The following
excerpt from Play
Creativity and Social Movements considers this ludic terrain:
From his work with United
for a Fair Economy to the Billionaires for Bush, Boyd has made a career of
borrowing from popular educational and theatrical forms (see Boyd and Duncombe,
2004) to highlight the issue of income inequality and the corrupting influence
of money to electoral campaigns (Boyd, 1999, 2000, 2002). He has also made use of irony. When he was in college at University of
Michigan, Boyd found out the school was conducting military research on
campus. So, instead of staging protest
as others had, Boyd and company formed a group called the Nuclear Saints, who
called for more military research, not less (Barto, 1983). A press release from the 14th of
November, 1983 established the rationale for the action.
At pm on Monday, November 14th,
12 members of the student organization, the Nuclear Saints of America, entered
the laboratory of Professor Thomas B.A. Senior, demanding an increase in
military research on campus. Professor
Senior’s lab was chosen as the sight of the action because of NSA’s fervent
support for the Professor’s work on electromagnetic pulse shielding.
The action is intended to
demonstrate the organization’s commitment to national defense. By volunteering to aid Senior, the NSA are
working to ensure the reliable functioning of America’s first strike
capability. The NSA have come to do
military research, and they will not leave until they get some done.
It included a rib at
conventional campus activists.
The NSA have also realized the
necessity of purifying the laboratory after its defilement last week at the
hands of a band of brutal leftist thugs.
At 3:00 pm, the NSA will commence a religious ceremony to cleanse the
lab of the evil spirit left by the agents of darkness.
Boyd would recall the
ironic Nuclear Saints stunt as a key moment in the mythology of the
Billionaires for Bush. It was also a useful example of the efficacy of play
based organizing. “When you’ve got a
super serious target, it’s one way to take away the aura of authority,”
explained Boyd some two decades later. “Like what we did with this guy in the
military research lab.” Clever, silly
and non-too earnest, many of the gestures, include the mockery of the earnest
left, the world would see with the Billionaires
could be witnessed in the Nuclear Saints prank.
One of
Boyd’s favorite pranks with United for a Fair Economy (UFE) was a mid-1990’s
Boston Tea Party Action. The goals for
the action were twofold: 1) to counter Republican claims that the Flat Tax is good
for working families and 2) to reach the
broad public with this message. He
recalled the prank:
So this Tea Party thing was doubly interesting because they were
staging an event and we restaged it by intervening. These were two guys, two
Republican congressman who I think are still congressmen, Dick Armey and Nick
Townsend. One’s from Texas and one’s from Louisiana. They’d been campaigning
for what they call a “tax reform,” which was a flat tax or a national sales
tax. They were pushing to get rid of the entire tax code and institute this
very regressive tax system. It seems fair because it was simple and was
treating everyone the same way regardless of whether they had eighty billion
dollars or negative assets and seven kids. So it was a flax tax vs. a sales
tax. So they were promoting that and they came to Boston and threw a cask of
tea overboard the Boston Tea Party ship, the historic one where it all happened
back in 1773 or whenever it was, symbolizing their liberation from the IRS tax
code. So we called up pretending to be Young Republicans and found out what
their basic plan was. We read the stuff they were talking about doing in the Wall
Street Journal. And so we kind of thought how to restage this in a way that
sort of brought out the truth of what they were actually advocating. You know,
you can give a press conference afterward and say how they were wrong, or you
can get in there and mix it up. So we got in there and mixed it up. We got
there before they did, set up our people in a way that they wouldn’t notice
them. And then [the Republicans] were about to throw their tea overboard and at
just the right moment, we had this little dinghy which had been hiding in the
Boston Harbor on the other side of the [tea party] boat, sort of padding
furiously underneath where they were about to throw [the tea]. And the dinghy
boat had two people on it. One had a construction hat and the other woman had a
kerchief and they help up a sign that said ‘Working families life raft.’ And
they started saying, ‘Don’t sink us with your flat tax. Don’t flatten us with
your flat tax.’ ‘We’re the working family life raft this tax will be terrible
for middle class tax payers.’ And then [the Republicans] were sort of caught
dead in their tracks ‘cause the photograph caught these guys [in the boat].
They are about to throw this thing overboard, but then not doing it, because
our storyline was that would be a bad thing. And then we had all these sort of
rich people on a boat. They started saying, ‘We’re the Rich People’s Liberation
Front. We want this tax plan. We want this tax plan.’ [Illustration – insert
andew boyd tax party photos]
Boyd’s boat tipped over at the exact
same time that Dick Armey’s group dropped their cask of tea overboard. “They threw it overboard and we capsized at
just that moment,” Boyd explained:
People ended up in the water. This is the Boston
Harbor, mind you, so it’s not cleaned up like the Hudson. So it was a huge
thing. The photos were in the Boston Globe and it was looped on CNN. It
was Tax Day.
But if you see the picture, you’ll see basically how
we restaged it. That’s the point. We’re staging something and we understood how
they were staging and what the various things meant that they were trying to
invest with meaning. And we invested them with different meanings, sort of
creating a stage around their stage. Not disrupting them and not stopping them,
but restaging them.
Through the action, Boyd and company offered
a compelling counter narrative to the schrill politics of Republican tax
cuts. “[A]ll politics happens in a very
mediated way, its all about spectacle,” explained Boyd. “It’s all about
symbolic communication with an audience. It’s all about storytelling and
mythology and using and repurposing symbols and stuff like that they were
doing. But we did it the same way.” Yea
instead screaming about what was wrong, their performance changed the
storyline. “It may be play,” Boyd mused.
Here, part of the play of social movements is changing the rules of the
game and altering the playing field. For
Boyd and company, their disruptive performance also served as a more inclusive
production in democratic world-making. Boyd noted:
We’re not storming the boat. We’re telling them to do their thing. And
here’s what it means for all of us. Again, you’re respecting the symbol system
that they’ve set up. But you are re interpreting it. You’re restaging it. And
in a sense you are hijacking their power, their prestige, their star status
that turned out all the media. If we were going to stage something on our own,
who would come? But no, we hijacked all the media and the spotlight. They
already had a stage. And they had a stage because they were powerful.
The prank, gained media coverage on CNN and around the world (Ellis,
1998). A good student of organizing,
Boyd felt the action incorporated: “good research, symbolic engagement,
surprise & stealth, timing & discipline, upstaging, straight/satirical
combination, appropriate tech, ‘media wrenching,’ media spinning, and control
of the confrontation.” In terms of
things which did not work so well, the activistsm “didn’t hold the field,
didn’t stay in character, and didn’t document ourselves.” The prank sent Boyd on a trajectory from
Boston’s United for a Fair Economy, where he articulated his ideas about artful
activism, to RTS New York, where he conceptualized the movement as an ‘Extreme
Costume Ball’, to the satirical Billionaires for Bush (or Gore) where over the
next decade (Boyd, 1999, 2000, 2002).
Part of
Boyd’s work was articulating a set of ideas about activism as a meme for others
to emulate. Good artists borrow; great
artists steal. William Etundi described this viral dimension of the politics of
play:
I think the biggest assets to the politics of play are, to borrow some
words from marketing, the viral aspects of public display. Like we create an
interesting action, it’s five people. And fifty people see it. Of those fifty,
ten people are into it. And those ten people go out and create an interesting
action that a hundred people see. And of those hundred, twenty people go out
and they are inspired and they do something exciting. And you start getting
this exponentially increasing thing. And I think that’s the biggest strength of
the politics of play.
New York activist Kate
Crane concurred, mindful of how many people got involved with activism through
their experiences with the Billionaires:
They were able to plug so many people in who otherwise would not have
gotten involved. Like the main PR person for the Billionaires, she’s an ad
executive who has no activism experience. She just knocked herself in full
force and ran with it. There was a lot of it that people could plug into; they
could feel it, they could identify. Here in New York because New Yorkers are
sarcastic, elsewhere because it was fun. And also they were able to take their
template and replicate it over and over again.
Throughout the decade, a movement of ludic groups seduced countless
new bodies into political engagement and participation. Yet the process of
getting people out was far from simple. New York party-promoter Abby Ehmann
organized parties and used those ties to rally protesters against New York’s
Giuliani Era XXX zoning law, adds: “I have to say, it has become more easy,
because more people are pissed off. And also, a lot of the protesting has
become more fun.” Through groups such as the Billionaires, Ehmann suggested the
new activism, “saw that the way to get people out was to do it via nightlife.
Like the Billionaires for Bush and the people who are making politics more
palatable.” Citing examples such as
Critical Mass, she suggested it is a way of expanding a political arena. And
from there, people got involved in many different kinds of campaigns. Etundi
explained:
You
see that in More Gardens and Critical Mass and especially in RTS. If you look
at those early RTS meetings, that was my first experience with political
organizing. You know, Mark Read, Beka, Andrew Boyd, so many people gelled there
and went on to do just faaabulous things. And it really spawned a whole lot of
stuff. The Billionaires were inspired by that. Complacent came directly out of
RTS. A lot of other projects have. And then these separate projects have
spawned people to doing separate projects.
One of the largest
criticisms of the politics of play is it lacks gravitas. To counter this charge, many have used
research to substantiate group claims.
Some have done it to better effect than others. For much of the 2000 election cycle, the
Billionaires for Bush (or Gore) argued that there was no difference between
candidates George Bush or Al Gore.
Corporations had bought both of them.
They argued the economic policies of Clinton/ Gore were be no different
than what Bush’s would be. To support
their claim, the Billionaires noted inequality had grown substantially under
Clinton/Gore, as a product of a neoliberal economic program which dominated
both conservative and liberal governments around the world (see Harvey,
2005). This was a fair and accurate
claim. Yet, the group failed to account for the findings that poverty went down
among almost every group of US citizens from 1993-2000, a claim that did not
happened with Reagan or Bush. Under
Clinton / Gore poverty in the US
actually declined in ways not seen since the Great Society years of the 1960’s
or afterward (Blank, 2000). When I
brought up this point during the first Billionaires for Bush (or Gore) meeting
held at Judson Church in New York City in the summer of 2000, I was shouted
down. The utility of play loses its
vitality in a movement campaign when provocation and defiant sarcasm becomes an
abiding practice, a substitute for ideas connected with coherent claims or
substantiated with comprehensive research.
Part of how ACT UP or Science for the People supported their causes,
however unpopular, was to highlight the ways research was on their side (see
Epstein, 1998; Moore, 2008). It is
vitally important for activist groups to back up their arguments with coherent
research. Otherwise, ludic protest
becomes bluster, rather than a compliment to a well coordinated campaign. Yet, as the years progressed, the group
seemed to be right that billionaires were running things.
From
Katrina to Sandy, Common Ground to Occupy
In
the years after the Republican National Convention of 2004, I gradually moved
further and further into the world of cycling activism, which Furness describes
(2010). Bicycles were a core part of a
Critical Mass changing New York City over the next decade. In 2004, police attempted to shut down the
movement of cyclists on the streets of the city. A decade later, the city was embracing them
as part of the solution to climate change and congestion.
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| "Wall Street brings the heat, we take the streets!" Polar Bears looking for ice storm Wall Street on the one year anniversary of Occupy. Photo by Brennan Cavanaugh |
On the
one year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, a group of activists on bikes dressed
as polar bears looking for ice in the financial district of Manhattan. “Wall Street brings the heat! We take the
streets!” the polar bears, including this author, chanted. The protest pointed to the politics of
climate change and the ways the billionaires of Wall Street, pushing for
financial and environmental deregulation, have only accelerated the process,
instead of embracing safeguards to protect the environment. A few weeks later, New York would see the
effects of these policies up front, as it was flooded by Super Storm
Sandy. Relief efforts after the storm
were developed out of a model born after Hurricane Katrina, which flooded the
Gulf Coast in 2005. With government inaction
after the storm exposing race and class based politics of exclusion and
disaster capitalism, a group of activists stepped into the void to take matters
into their own hands. Doing so, they
formed the Common Ground Collective, whose model of disaster relief would serve
as a best practice exemplar after Super Storm Sandy, when the tri state area
faced similar devastation. The story of
the Common Ground Collective is the subject of Scott Crow’s masterful memoir of
the period. I love this book. It
kept me warm on a freezing night of travel, stuck in a train station in Germany. And it points to a different kind of
organizing, based on care and affect, gestures of direct action and support. A compelling narrative, written by a master
storyteller, it is absolutely the best
book I have read since this year.
More
than anything, fellow Texan Crow weaves a great tale. Such stories help give us meaning, helping us cope, and provide direction
for the future. This was certainly the
case for the Common Ground Collective, an anarchist inspired relief
organization formed shortly after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast in
2005. “On September 5, 2005, a day of
trails by fire against hope, Malik, Shanon and I cofounded the Common Ground
Collective,” explained Common Ground co-founder Scort Crow (2011, 62). Crowe
and company were aware that those in the Gulf who had not only suffered the
storm but watched aspects of their culture attacked, ridiculed, and
displaced. Crowe and company understood
they had the right to control their own histories. “We would help communities to tell their
stories and we would tell ours, so as to move people to action,” noted Crowe
(p.62). Common Ground Collective was a
place where people could narrate their own stories instead of having someone
else write them out of history. This
would inform the collective and their efforts at disaster relief. “Part of shifting culture is changing the stories we tell others and ourselves,”
wrote Crowe (p.130). “[W]e must develop
our own narratives about our actions and what we imagine about the future,” he
argued, nothing: “Communities and
movements gain power in telling their own stories. If we tell our own stories we rebel against
being defined by those who don’t know us., such as the government, corporate
media, or others with ideological axes to grind…” In sum, “By consciously, telling our stories
we are about to reconnect with people in the real world, because it is in
language they can see themselves within” (p.130). Through Common Ground, a new
model of care informed narratives of disaster, anarchism, and radical public health, took shape informing
relief efforts for the decade to come. Those
of us involved in Occupy Sandy benefited from this model. And certainly, those in the Gulf found some
footing, relief, life and direction out of their connection with this story.
So, it feels like this essay about summer reading should end. There are so many others I could talk and
write about – the
novels Huck Finn by Mark Twain and Love and Garbage by Ivan Klima, William
Styron’s memoir of madness, or Harvey’s Rebel
Cities calling for us to take the revolution to the city streets. Some
of my favorites writing on social movements has been narrative based, Stacy
Lanyon’s oral histories, Scot Crow’s memoir, and the countless amazing
press releases from Queer Nation, ACT UP and Trans Alternatives. I have
loved many stories this summer, suffered others. We live in the stories of our times. Sometimes
we are captured by them. Most of the
time, this is a good thing. In other
times, we are immobilized by doubts or fears or conflicts in these stories
which lead us into dead ends. Through
the stories highlighted here, hopefully we can pave a path toward solidarity and
care and joy, even in the midst of the rubble of this world.
Post script
Its all about adapting to a changing world. Next week, join us as ride through the streets thinking about these questions. Join Wendy and I for our Adopting to Change Ride this Tuesday at 6:30.
Tompkins Sq Park’s Gaia Tree
Sandy’s storm waters surged into Manhattan, heralding a new 21st century reality. Bike with us to explore both the aftermath and solutions generated in the LES, East Village and East River Park that respond to the realities of climate change.
Join Ben Shepard of Play and Ideas and Wendy Brawer of Green Map System, and guest speakers including Jeff Wright, Claire Costello and Bethany Bingham of Partnerships for Parks.
Postponed if raining - find out more at http://facebook.com/
Join Ben Shepard of Play and Ideas and Wendy Brawer of Green Map System, and guest speakers including Jeff Wright, Claire Costello and Bethany Bingham of Partnerships for Parks.
Postponed if raining - find out more at http://facebook.com/
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