On, Revolutionary Time!

its kind of sad, most of our best poetry is reserved for The Internet.

I’ve never liked the sound of it - the ‘get out of the city’ suggestion (there’s only ever one - no matter where you end up, you’re out of THE CITY).  It seems almost defeatist, as if I was retreating from a place I want to know and live.  It’s not as if I’ve explored it through;  with so many paths untaken here, I don’t yet want to fully give up their potential for an open road.

I’m usually a skeptic of the curative powers of travel, but I think I need to take a moment to put myself outside myself.  Everything I’m not quite feeling here seems to be knotted together on top each other - every time I try to pull loose one problem, I end up finding myself drawn into others, and resolving any one only seems to exacerbate the others.  The confused distracted mess of it all ends up whipping me into some kind of existential fervor, the kind that leads me to feel pretty profound despair.   I might need to put myself on the road to somewhere else (even for a little while) to get the real chance to pull it all apart with more care.

I’ve been preaching myself patience as the strategy for resolving whatever it is I’m feeling now, and I think I’ve finally begun to take to it. I feel comfortable now entering social situations without the expectation of knowing someone there - even if it’s awkward for a while, I can calm down and wait until it works itself out.  I’ve tried to draw down the panic of loneliness by maintaining an active internal dialogue, finding ways to pursue ideas and experiences in ways that doesn’t lead me to rushing into lame bullshit.  Now, however, I think I need to come out of that dialogue, to make sense of where it’s going.

Part of the problem is that I wonder if I’ve pursued it with any real effectiveness - too often I look back on days (or weeks) as a tangled mush of dissastifaction.  I’ve started a few things,  followed through fully on even less, and it’s the follow-through that really turns feelings into form, creates something useful for thinking about my life.

Sometimes still I’m struck by the gasping enormity of living.  It’s a feeling of ubiquity; the sense that the sum of my experience and decisions compose all that is or ever will be myself, and that I’m daily able to create my world anew.  It makes me feel enormous, because the decisions I make and the way I feel about them are all that could possibly ever matter for myself - but also tiny, for the sheer number of potential paths that realization opens up.  There are moments in the day sometimes when I feel this way and have to stop whatever I’m doing to think about what it could all mean.

The real question is why I ever go back to what I was doing before after having thought it.  I need to develop the fortitude to take those big leaps, to jump - again and again and again - to creating something new.

building, building, building

“Okay. Everyone’s obsessing over these French books, The Call and The Coming Insurrection. It’s annoying, though, because it’s like they’ve forgotten all the feminism and anti-racism we’ve pounded into their heads over the past five or whatever years.”

-anonymous, thus far

So, yeah. The social clash. I never totally forgot about movement building, thats allways there. But, man… the social clash, the social war, broken windows, spies, too many arrests to count, a! anti! Titilation. Since I’ve moved back here, ive dreamed about too many broken windows to count, too many abandoned buildings, too many street parties, too much atmosphere. Too much pining for the atmospere of struggle,

But people ARE struggling, to eat, to take care of their kids, to maintain housing, work. And it is Autonomy not social war which will help them. The ungovernability of bodies may strike during The Riot and charge the atmosphere, but it is not all, we are not only ungovernable, we are to be autonomous. And I’m sorry but autonomy doesn’t mean I can’t tell you I think you’re dumb for throwing down that circle-a in spray paint. Too many double negations? Whatever.

Working with the childcare collective, I get the same feeling I got working with Gateways (popular education program, bringing together college kids, incarcerated folks, and formerly incarcerated folks, with some overlap. It is a sense of creation, and collaboration. Reclaiming the work I do in other spaces (college for gateways, childcare for childcare) helps me to re-enter those spaces having excericised creative control over my autonomy work, and reengage with some new confidence and new doubts.

Ive been thinking about creating autonomy, creating a new world. Finding ways to meet each others needs in the present and future, so that we can build more space for revolutionary social movements in the present and future. Not only in  an anti-oppression framework, not only as a way to withdraw, but as a way to more effectively engage, to build community instead of scenes.

A community takes care of one another, a scene is an assortment of individuals and circles of friends that end up in the same spaces often. The scene will not feed you, the scene will not give you childcare. The scene give a fuck about you as long as you make the scene more exciting. The community gives a fuck about you.

I feel very vulnerable right now.

This Mother’s Day, 7 mothers and 1 father in Minnesota working with the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign (PPEHRC) defied foreclosure orders issued by their banks and promised to remain in their homes indefinitely.  The struggle of these families on the brink of homelessness embodies the brutal human rights crisis fostered by the latest economic  downturn, but also provides us as Evergreen Students ways to work for real justice, even as we exercise forms of privilege and power we seek to ultimately destroy.

This announcement is the latest in a months long campaign. The campaign includes sit-ins and demonstrations at the Sheriff’s Sales where houses once belonging to families and individuals are sold to investors still looking to make a quick buck on the housing market, it includes the resistance of a local Minneapolis activist who after 20 years living in her house is fighting her imminent eviction, perhaps most dramatically it includes the coordinated takeover, unveiled this past Valentine’s Day, of 13 vacant houses to house 13 homeless families, some with disabilities, some with children. Some of these families were evicted from their new homes in the midst of a Minnesota winter, one family had their truck confiscated. This is a scene reoccurring all over the nation as groups associated with and independent from the Campaign stage similar actions as part of a political and social movement building process, as well as acts of survival.

These local and timely actions are part of a larger movement for Human Rights in the United States. Long portrayed as a stumbling block for developing countries or excuses for US military action, human rights are being denied to those in our own country. PPEHRC has created itself as a multiracial organization of poor folks from across the country, building what Martin Luther King called “a new and unsettling force” for economic human rights. These are the UN declared human rights to housing, food, education, social security and healthcare.

Students and former students are a crucial part of this campaign. PPEHRC recognizes the skills and resources of students and actively recruits them into the organization. Campaign organizations all over the country sponsor internships as alternative spring breaks, and as Summers of Social Action. These opportunities to get involved with grassroots organizations seeking fundamental change in the social and economic systems are too rare in a world of surface level and temporary fixes. After my internship this last summer, I returned to my hometown, looking for work that would pay me to help make the world a better place. My experiences with Minneapolis PPHERC had paved the way for a profound disappointment with the array of direct service jobs I found on my arrival. I decided to maintain my relationship with PPEHRC while doing the work of ferretting out the grassroots foundation shaking movements here in Austin, while going back to an underpaid and underappreciated job as a preschool teacher to pay bills.

As students with access to a large pot of institutional resources such as grants, computers, and the intellectual support of faculty and other students who study and participate in their own movements, we sit at a crucial nexus. This privilege shouldn’t exist but while it is there we should reap as much as we can to support the possibilities of change that will support everyone’s basic needs. Even after college we should use our skills and connections to aid in grassroots movements, even if it means we have to find someting else to keep us fed. Meanwhile, as you prepare to enter the job market or work at the ones you already have, just think… What would ‘work’ even mean if I and everyone has access to food, healthcare, housing and education?

Peter Cooper is enrolled in an Independent Learning Contract due at the end of Winter Quarter. You can reach him at peterppehrc@gmail.com. For more information on PPEHRC and Economic Human Rights see economichumanrights.org.

Agency as of late

Im where I want to be right now, really glad I moved to Austin.

Its going to take a second to feel comfortable in the spaces I would like to operate in, roots and thorns, roots and thorns.

I’m worried and not worried about taking care of insurance stuff.

Good people are coming to town.

I have had a very successful week, have started projects and finished them in a timely manner, have put in work over time to make them better. Have created some useful shit.

My relationships are interconnected, whats that word? Oh yeah, community.

Even the more dramatic parts of my relationships seem to be working themselves out, or at least I’m playing a part in working them out.

I enjoy the feeling of discomfort I get in at least one of these spaces, I think that means growth.