|
|
|
Aug 23, 2021 Door hanger update; help wanted; protest and press conference at Q Station in Nob Hill 9/1/21 Permalink for this letter. Please forward as desired. Prior letters to this New-Mexico-oriented list. Dear friends -- Good morning everybody. Door hangers: update As some of you have told us, few people know what is going on with the evolving crisis of constructing industrial plutonium warhead ("pit") facilities at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), still in its early stages with many difficult milestones (read: opportunities) ahead. Fewer still understand what that full expansion would mean, in the context of other developments for this state and its people. How about "Government in Our Pocket" for the combined nuclear weapons industry, space war industry, global surveillance industry, megacorporate wind and solar extraction industry (to support brown growth in other states), and all the special corporate "friends" working on absolutely stupid, unworkable schemes like "blue hydrogen," "carbon capture," and "hydrogen fuel cell cars"? Under the combined weight of these corrupt, mostly senseless schemes there will be no need or role for most of the people now living in the state, or their children. They and their gardens and crops are just "useless drinkers" to the new carpetbaggers of "innovation." Of course a certain amount of "charm" is needed for the purpose of luring and keeping the hapless new technocratic minions, so we need lots of brewpubs and suitable entertainment venues (e.g. Meow Wolf: "Psychedelic Nihilism R Us!"). Hurry and squeeze into the plutonium "jobs pipeline" while you can! You too can stop worrying and learn to love The Bomb! Back to door hangers. The fragmentation of information sources in our society leads to us reach out in various new ways. The door hangers complement billboards and other outreach methods, as well as your own personalized outreach (which is likely to be an order of magnitude more effective than any more impersonal method). So -- a huge thank you to everybody who has helped so far with the campaign. Thanks to some of you we've distributed about 2,000 door hangers so far. Delivery by hand is however complicated to administer, and our overall delivery rate is much slower than we'd like. While our conviviality and popular participation goals are being partially achieved, this is true only for those few who volunteered. Also many people with health issues can't participate. Undeterred, we will now speed up delivery by saturating USPS carrier routes. Meanwhile those of you who wish to distribute door hangers as flyers in your church or other group (which would be lovely) please write Trish and we will supply you! Please get ready to help with in-person, mass actions -- one of which will be on Sept. 1 The door hanger asks these questions:
"On-line events," which are to say trainings and meetings, are really only preliminary to "in-person events," which are where the political rubber meets the road. To make these in-person events large enough to matter we need help in the ways indicated (and more). There hasn't been any significant political opposition to nuclear weapons, or war, in New Mexico for a long time.There are occasionally forgettable (and quickly forgotten) feel-good gestures, like standing on a street corner holding signs aimed at passersby, or a handful of people gathering at the State Capitol. The same situation generally holds true with some exceptions for climate issues, energy issues, education issues, health care system issues, poverty issues, and many others. The bottom line is that people want major change without major action. Frederick Douglass famously said: If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. Typically, we are so inured to empty political gestures from activists on the one hand, and utter hypocrisy and lies from politicians on the other hand, that most people can hardly remember -- or perhaps never knew -- what actual political traction looks like and requires. "We thus drift," as Einstein said in 1946, "toward unparalleled catastrophe." Seventy-five years later, "drift" is too slow and far too mild a word for what is happening, although "unparalleled catastrophe" remains up-to-date. We drifted alright. Now a tsunami of consequences is coming ashore and we are in it, whether we know it or not. It's a horrible situation. What can we do? There is only one grown-up answer, though it has a thousand faces. "Save as many as you can." We need to question the "feel-good" actions we typically see. We should not feel good about things which have no effect. They infantalize us and help create an overall atmosphere of unreality. I'd like to quote from a recent essay by Patrick Mazza: First, we cannot trust the people who run this world. They rose to their high positions in institutions buying into the power and profit assumptions which drive those institutions. If they are not sociopaths going in, the institutions make them into sociopaths in order to rise in the ranks. Some of them may even say the right words to soothe us. Sociopaths are good at that. As always, look at what they do, not what they say. What does this mean, in practical terms -- to not "trust" our political authorities? It means to stop writing letters to the President, or our senators, pretending to ourselves and others that they will actually pay attention. It means to stop doing a whole host of silly things and take up the burden of understanding and doing things that will actually be powerful. For crying out loud stop begging from sociopathic politicians. Second, it’s up to us as ordinary people to take it into our hands. Rise in mass action, in ways that stop business as usual, throw sand in the gears of everyday operations. Until we do, our own personal realities will be as schizoid as the world we live in. Mazza is absolutely right. It is the same point Chris Hedges emphasizes over and over, and he too is right. We need mass action to have any possibility for our children, and countless beautiful species, to survive. The flyering and advertising we are doing is for the purpose of broadening the base for those actions. In all such actions, in whatever form they take, we must be totally nonviolent, to persons and to property. Nonviolence is really holding firm in truth (satyagraha) even as we seek to know it, to stand in it. We do need that for our own integrity, as Mazza concludes, but in the final analysis it's not about "us" at all. Protest and press conference at "Q Station" in Nob Hill, Wednesday September 1, 11:00 am There is going to be a third action at the "Q Station," 3225 Central Ave NE, Albuquerque, on Wednesday, Sept. 1, at 11:00 am. (For partial background please see this earlier letter). The "Q Station" is meant to suck young people into America's war machine -- it is, quite literally, a storefront for what Martin Luther King called a "demonic, destructive suction tube:" It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube. So, I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such. We would like as many people as can come to show up at the Q Station at 11:00 am, joining with the ANSWER Coalition, Stop the War Machine, Veterans for Peace, and other allied groups. Bring signs and friends. You know the issues. Greg, Trish, and the rest of the Study Group gang |
|||
|
|
|||
|