From The Half-Red House

Seize the Day has come out with a new song that suggests that rank-and-file police hold the key to ending the mad militarism that has the planet in its grip. Simon, the writer of the song, says:

Having myself been beaten and persecuted by the police on several occasions as a young person, I developed a hard-to-break habit of seeing cops as the enemy of everything I stood for. Nevertheless, police men and women are human beings, and as such they are composed of pure love, stardust, and dreams just as much as I am. In fact, probably 99% of the police I’ve met have been sincere, decent and hardworking people.

I hadn’t thought about it in a long time, but when I was in my early thirties, I was troubled by a recurring lucid dream of being a British Bobby with a helmet and club, about to beat an anarchist’s head in. In real life, I considered myself an anarchist, an anti-authoritarian. A lucid dream is one in which my (waking?) consciousness, conscience or will intervenes and can change the course of the dream. Some of the time, I succeeded in getting my dream-self to walk away in bewilderment, and some of the time I failed. What strikes me now is the bewilderment of my dream-cop-self… imagine doing something so outside the pattern of my whole life history.

When a young woman, a  member of my union, had her leg broken by police at a picket in North Providence, Rhode Island last month, my first reaction was to get mad and say it’s just the nature of police to abuse power and hurt anyone who doesn’t look and think  like them. Later, I remembered  some of what Jesus and Gandhi taught about loving the enemy, and tried to put myself into their shoes. Maybe they were just doing their job, when a bunch of dangerous wierdos invaded this town where they lived and worked; for all they knew, the union members might threaten their kids if allowed to stay.

If the police could come to identify with (and trust) the people they are interacting with, both those they have been sent to restrain and those they have been sent to protect, rather than with the killer ideology that sent them there, just imagine the positive results! It seems the first step is establishing human-to-human relationships between protesters and rank-and-file police. This year-long blockade of Faslane weapons depot in Scotland seems to have done something  along those lines  in one small place.

Go listen to the song PC 365; the lyrics are right there, so you can follow along. And then pass the idea along to others, and start opening your eyes and ears for opportunities to make this dream real. Of course, Simon makes the really good concrete suggestion that a genuinely independent police union would make the process a lot easier.

Hot off the virtual press, here is CBA Members for Justice Flyer for the September 29 election:

I just wanted to point out a recent article by Aviva Chomsky of Salem State College that points out  how the latest Harry Potter book can be used to discuss what’s wrong with excluding and criminalizing a segment of the population based on such arbitrary things as birthplace. She points out that “…the desperate struggle of Muggle-borns and half-bloods to document their status, the punishments meted out by the Ministry of Magic to those who try to work or attend school without documents proving their lineage, and Voldemort’s obsession with determining just who has true wizard ancestry, and restricting and punishing those who don’t, have some pretty powerful resonances with the last massive legalized form of discrimination in our own society: discrimination against non-citizens.“

The ultimate success of Harry Potter against Voldemort is, as Chomsky points out, intimately bound to his defense of the excluded: house-elves (who are held in perpetiual slavery), muggle-borns, innocent muggles…Could it be that our domestic struggles for economic fairness and equality, marriage rights, sustainable agriculture, etc. must be tied to immigrants’ rights and dignity in the same way?

Actually, this should be a fun social get-together, but it’s being called a fundraiser, because the I.U. 460/640 workers really do need to raise money, but just show up if you’re interested or curious. You can park in the visitors’ lot across from the side entrance to the building (on Saturdays you have to enter via the side “security” entrance and follow a windig corridor around to the CFWC offices which are on the first floor just inside the main entrance.  One of our hopes is that we can start a Merrimack Valley Branch, so that the many members and friends of the IWW between Manchester NH and Newburyport MA can get together without trecking all the way to Boston.

Fundraiser for IWW Food and Allied Workers – Sep. 15

Wed, 2007-07-25 13:41

The Coalition for a Better Acre holds its annual elections on Saturday, September 29 (4:00 p.m.), and members will have a chance to cast a vote for a slate of candidates who are committed to reinstating the CBA’s primary mission of organizing the residents of Lowell’s inner-city ethnic neighborhoods to defend their rights to decent housing and stable neighborhoods.

The Coalition for a Better Acre (CBA) is a community organization, which is committed to ensuring that the voice of residents is organized, heard, respected and decisive in shaping the future of the Acre neighborhood and other areas of Lowell with similar needs. Here is the CBA Mission Statement:

Anyone who agrees with the Coalition Mission Statement can be a member, regardless of where he/she lives. Dues are as little as a dollar a year. You can join on the day of the election and vote in the election, but it will be important for all members to educate themselves about which candidates are supporting the position of the CBA  Members for Justice. I’ll try to list the  CBAMJ slate and platform in a later posting. Please send me a private message or comment if you think you can commit to joining and showing up for the election and I’ll get you a membership application and keep you informed about CBAMJ

CBAMJ came together when two key organizers, Lindolfo Carballo and Darcie Boyer were fired  earlier this year by the newly-hired director and it became clear to many of us that there was a movement afoot to undermine the CBA’s mission as an activist organization and put a top-down structure in place.

Here’s an interesting comment I found in a blog from last year, that describes the way Darcie and Lindolfo have been getting local people involved in activism over fair housing issues, etc: (From Dan McNeil at: http://lists.thecsl.org/pipermail/cadre-politics/2006-September/000533.html)