Now, during our catastrophically idiotic war in Vietnam, the music kept getting better and better and better. We lost that war, by the way. Order couldn’t be restored in Indochina until the people kicked us out. That war only made billionaires out of millionaires. Today’s war is making trillionaires out of billionaires. Now I call that progress.
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country
Rapacious. “They got theirs, so I better get mine. Yes, things change, and, sure this sleepy town is about to boom but that’s the way of the world…. Might as well be part of the winning team – that money making side of things. That’s all you can do.”
I just finished talking to white guy in his late forties, gassing up excavators and huge dump trucks. We’re near the Estacada High School, and he tells me the scrapping is to make room for more ball fields. The school already has fields and a football stadium. This is a town with 3,000.
Che! You are one of the greatest revolutionaries of the 20th Century. You inspired tens of millions of people throughout the world to fight for justice, for their freedom and civil rights. You have left a vision of hope, of never giving up – a legacy of solidarity and of Venceremos! – we shall overcome.
In exile at St. Helena, when asked about his dishonorable treatment of Toussaint, Napoleon merely remarked, “What could the death of one wretched Negro mean to me?”
Because the tribe is its members, the tribe is what its members want it to be—nothing more and nothing less.
― Daniel Quinn, Beyond Civilization: Humanity’s Next Great Adventure
Sixty days. A year. Five years. A week. A day. An hour. Right now.
That’s the curse of addiction, those needles, inhalants, the entire barbarity of cheap booze shilled by the chosen ones, the money changers, all amortized and bundled debts in trans-capital, sold next to the playground, the trees cut down for billboards pronouncing sexual prowess and football hero-dom with the flick of the Mike’s Hard Cider or a fucking Bud.
Refusal is the highest honor. “I prefer not to.” Any sort of Bartleby. These times call for Herman Melville, Twain, Memory of Fire, Emma Goldman, Malcolm X, Virginia Bolten, Mujeres Libres, Wilde, Shaw!
Were civilization itself to be estimated by some of its results, it would seem perhaps better for what we call the barbarous part of the world to remain unchanged.
― The Writings of Herman Melville, vol. 1, eds. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (1968)
I can’t believe it, but then I can believe it, or I must believe it. These are compliant times, where people in the US workforce are kowtowed and then for years these multiple generations in the workforce have thrown in the towel and been so bullied by the Politically Crap Corrective Collective Group-Think that they are not even human — they can’t even rage against the injustice befalling them. I have both taught and worked alongside people who just believe deep down there’s no sense in fighting the powers that be, and that’s it, too bad, sure, but what can we do about it?
Movement lawyer, organizer, advocate. That is how Ahmad Abuznaid describes himself. Whether he is helping organize a historic 31 day sit-in in the Governor of Florida’s Office, presenting before the United Nations Human Rights Committee in Geneva, working as Legal and Policy Director for Dream Defenders, or leading a delegation of Black Lives Matter activists to Palestine, Abuznaid, who has been a lawyer for five years, is all about justice.
Beginnings
