IVAIVAW

I think the time has come for us, as activists, as people invested in the anti-war movement, to begin to wonder what has happened to our once great movement. I feel that we have come to engender and support inside of ourselves and our communities the kind of behavior that we presumably divorced the workaday modern world for portraying. Where we should be sewing hope we are reaping only frustration and sadness and this is not simply because the task we set out to do is hard. It is because we know that we are doing it the wrong way.

And where to start with the ways in which our way was wrong. Perhaps with the media and with what it did to us. As a short story the media did to us what it does best, what it’s industrialized function was made to do. Our message was decimated into a sound bite, fed in a palpable but unremarkable way to the population and promptly forgotten as so much noise and a bad digestion. That is what the media was made to do, but like fools we handed over our whole narrative to them on the naive gamble that they would spread our word. And they did. In so far as it made them money, and when it did not the word stopped spreading.

How entirely un-radical it is to deny your own right to your narrative. Did the movers and shakers of previous generations call ABC on the phone? Jack Kerouac? Ken Kesey? Did these people pathetically throw themselves at whatever corporate venture would tolerate them, boil the beauty out of their own stories just so it will be consumable to people who could never see the world the way that we do? Why not do as the people who actually moved generations did and take control of our voice?

What can one say of our generations other than that we have a dazzling amount of highly educated people underemployed in terrible service jobs, yet for all of these degrees floating aimlessly around there are so few people which have any tangible skills to offer, which is fine because now the only skill that is required is that one can tolerate at least three two hour conference calls a day.

This is the kind of work that arises when a payroll gets introduced into a group that was formerly all done for free. Mandatory labor. Compulsive Committed Behavior. An organization turns into an employer and begins to think like one, and in suit all of the little people who used to feel equal now feel like something less than an employee. A host of skill-less unpaid interns. All waiting for the command from… whom?

Ah, a white man. People snort and ramble out necessary guidelines and codes to show that they are in the know about gender, race and power, yet the very reality of the things we can ignore. Is this not like the culture that we are trying to provide an antithesis too? Shouldn’t we be that new thing that we want to see instead of just being what we were before we changed but SAYING that we are something new and that we are something to believe in.

I think there are so many burn outs because we all secretly know that we aren’t and we aren’t.

Unless we push ourselves independently to challenge these things and individually challenge the barriers between ourselves, but nobody really wants to do that work.

We all want our safe idea of what it should be to be protected. In short we are all full of bullshit. Fantasy. And we are determined to not fracture the calm of our fantasy “revolution” by using only safe words and tip toeing around each other politely. Because that is what they do in the regular world, right? What would most of us know about that place? We spent a long time in some pretty impolite places.

We have become so fragile that now when someone speaks out against the direction that our Organizations are taking they are quickly silenced with guilt and shame at having interrupted the working of this perfect replica of the system that we ought to deny. Too radical for even the radicals. Don’t you see how, even here in this activity that we do to make ourselves feel better, we find ways to enslave ourselves and to feel worst.

So why rant and rail against it? Why attack it? Why not leave people to their illusions?

Because we will never get anywhere is all. If we continue to delude ourselves into thinking that playing their game is going to win our battles then we are lost and everything we have ever worked for has only historical value, which is to say that it dies in vain.

I challenge you to be more critical about our precious radical organizations. I know that there are people out there who feel as if things are not going the way they should. We should step up and say these things. We should take responsibility for our feelings and hint to new ways and if we are scolded then we should say “fuck the lot of you, we’ll start over as something new.” I challenge you to speak out now, not against the military, but against that which is against the military.