Anniversaries

Today marks the forty-something wedding anniversary for me and Ms Ché, closer to fifty than forty these days. We're a bit vague on which anniversary year it is because we lived together for several years before we were officially wed, and  whether we count those years or not depends on mood as much as anything else. At any rate, we're getting closer and closer to fifty years together, and it feels fine.

Of course we've had quite a life together and many, many adventures over the decades. We've always lived relatively simply, never -- till rather late in our lives -- aspiring to what's taken as normal and expected by most folks. Even as we adopted some measures of a more or less typical middle class lifestyle -- what with government employment, a little house in a fancy neighborhood, two cars, cats and dogs in the yard, computers and devices and so forth (and we had enough disposable cash to buy another house in New Mexico where we now live in "active retirement") -- we were and to a large extent still are, rebel hearts.

We were hippies of a sort when we were young, but even hippie-dom had its own set of norms, some of which we simply couldn't accommodate. Use of substances was one of them. We just couldn't do it. Marijuana puts me right to sleep, and practically every other substance I tried made me squirrely as heck. No good. Ms Ché had no better experiences than I did, so... no drugs for us.
 
Later on in life I was around and often working with people were either in recovery from substance abuse or were badly fucked up by one substance or another -- meth being the worst I saw -- and I was glad we didn't fall into that realm.

I'm not anti-drug-use so much as I am for living "high" without them. "High on Life" is cliché, but there is an element of truth and possibility to it. On the other hand, not everyone can handle it!

The communitarianism of hippiedom was always in tension with liberationism, and after a while, the liberationists predominated in the public eye while the communitarians faded. Rather than face that quandary head on, we opted to go for a life in the Theatre, one that required extraordinary dedication and hard work, but which was -- for us -- both liberating and community-based.

Our lives in the theater are subjects for another post, though, so I won't go into detail now.

We moved to New Mexico and our present day "active retirement" a year ago, so we're celebrating that as well today. We had really amazing experiences in New Mexico for decades before we moved here, and since we've moved here, it's really been astonishing for both of us. We knew we would be entering a very special and unique world here -- we'd already encountered many aspects of it in our many past visits and vacations. But we really didn't understand how thoroughly it would penetrate our beings.

I feel like I'm far more a New Mexican than I ever was a Californian, but at the same time, I know that since I'm still a newcomer here (!), I'll never be taken as a native -- although I have been by all kinds of people already. Because of her Indian heritage, it's a little easier for Ms Ché to be taken for a native New Mexican -- except for the fact that her tribe (Cherokee) is not a local one. Oh well...;-)

As rebels, we feel like we fit right in!

Today we're off to Santa Fe for some adventures and maybe a quiet celebration dinner. We have much to celebrate, much to be grateful for, much to reminisce over...

What a long strange trip it's been...

More on S17 2nd Anniversary Events

Much more information has been coming into my email about 2nd Anniversary events in and around New York and Wall Street:

New York S17 Lit

S15 Teach-in Schedule

S17 Quarter Page Promo Flyer

S17 Rally Wholesheet Flyer

S17 Constitution Poster

TPP Actions on S17/ Teach-ins After S17

S17 Call to Action – US

For Those Who Thought Occupy Was Dead

Occupy Network

We're coming up on the second anniversary of Occupy Wall Street -- really? Only that long ago? Wow. -- and for some time now, I've been hearing the chatter that "Occupy is dead." or "it was a tragic failure" or what have you.

The fact is Occupy doesn't get a lot of mainstream media attention these days, and it doesn't get very much alternative media attention either. So it may seem to have disappeared, but that is hardly the case.

My email inbox now has many thousands of messages from and about various and ongoing Occupy endeavors all over the country. Recently, there was the Second Occupy National Gathering in Michigan. There is an almost unlimited number of Occupy related activities in dozens of cities nearly every day.

I'm amazed, really, that after the brutality of the Occupy suppression during the fall and winter of 2011-2012 and the absurd level of public animosity toward anarchists and the Black Bloc led by Chris Hedges following the J28 actions in Oakland, anything of the movement survived.

But it did.

On the Anniversary of Teh Revolution(!)

Haven't had time to get caught up with the News of the Day this morning; don't even have the radio on -- somewhat unusual for me.

I spent a few minutes watching Nate's streams from New York last night before going to sleep, and it was a fairly dismal recapitulation of NYPD's usual thuggishness toward OWS or anything that might resemble OWS or might be construed as OWSish or hint at support for OWS -- or, most horribly, show a pup tent. Nate was clearly distressed at what he was witnessing and documenting. The videos were titled "March against OWS" -- which I thought was odd, but after opening one of them the full title was revealed, "March Against OWS Suppression." Ah, of course. Naturally, suppression had to occur.

From what little I saw, the suppression consisted of the now time honored police tactic of "snatch-and-grab," literally pulling people out of the march at random and arresting them. NYPD did this hundreds if not thousands of times during the later stages of Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, and it was clear then, as it is now, that it is a terror tactic designed and intended to suppress protest and dissent. "Snatch-and-Grab," along with mass arrests, infiltration, non-stop surveillance, intense police violence and brutality, public torture, and other methods were used successfully to shut down the encampments and prevent the emergence of a unified and coordinated revolutionary force.

These efforts to shut down OWS in New York were mirrored by (sometimes led by) similar efforts on the part of police departments throughout the country. It's striking that there is still debate over whether the federal government coordinated the crackdown against Occupy. Of course they did. It was obvious. Tactics of suppression were tried out in various cities (including my own fair city); "what works" and "lessons learned" were shared widely -- and quite openly -- through federal channels, and the the information was archived and no doubt studied intensely -- by DHS and the many other agencies that support the National Security State.

We live in a Police State.

And yet it is still debated -- because it's not as "bad" as the rest of them.

Of course the whole "(non)violence" debate served the purposes of that State nicely. By essentially claiming that the presence of people wearing black or bandanas or shouting at the police (or on very rare occasions breaking windows or committing other acts of vandalism) was "justification" for the police crackdowns or at least lost the Movement the Moral High Ground, the self-proclaimed "nonviolence" advocates actively split the Movement everywhere they could and in as many ways as they could, performing their role to ensure that the Occupy Movement did not become an effective Revolutionary Movement.

Old-line Socialists and a very diverse community of anarchists collided from the very beginning of the OWS efforts in New York and many other places, with the Socialists insisting that the anarchists were "doing it wrong," and the anarchists insisting that if the Socialists were an effective revolutionary force, we wouldn't be in this mess now. Many mutual anathemas ensued.

And yet the Movement inspired a raft of experiments in Future Living, something that we haven't seen in this country for decades. The Future, after all, was cancelled by the Reaganites back in the day, and there have been few public efforts to revive the concept of a Future. Now that Occupy provided a framework for the coalescence of Futurist visions and efforts -- yes, even the Zeitgeist and Venus Project people -- the most valuable and ultimately useful outcome of the initial phase of the Movement-Becoming-Revolution is the idea that there can be a Future, and that it will be better than today -- if we want it.

Another World Is Possible.

People all over the world are making it happen.

There is a march going on in New York right now highlighting the environmental degradation caused by fracking and the many other resource extraction and transport activities, including pipelines (Spectra in New York). Environmental issues have been at the top of the list of Occupy interests, along with civil liberties, democracy, ending wars, preserving and enhancing communities, preventing the systemic abuse of everyone who isn't part of the "1%", and so on.

I encapsulated the values of Occupy -- some growing out of the values expressed during the Arab Spring uprisings -- as:

• Dignity


• Justice


• Community


• Peace

 Seems those are still the guiding values.

Still working on the implementation phase...

We are unstoppable, another world is possible.

[Back to the packing for the big move for me... my friend may have been right. This is harder than I thought and I can't do what I used to be able to... old age is a bother..]