Happy MLK Day Anyway!

It is a warm spring-like day, Martin Luther King Jr. day, the day before the inauguration of Barack Obama, the first black president of the United States of America, a cease-fire between Israel and Palestine has been called, and Israeli troops claim to be withdrawing. Today is a tentatively peaceful day, gentle, a day for cleaning-up bloodbaths in Palestine and for celebrating the end of the last 8 years of the United States Presidency.

It is also a day of occupations--hundreds of them. Police swarming neighborhoods, two-million people rotting in cages, Iraq and Afghanistan flooded with US troops, Palestine destroyed, environmental devastation on Native lands, fences in Israel and fences on the US-Mexico Border.

How do we reconcile ourselves with this consistent, enormous violence and these feelings of peace?

We live, we breath, we fight, we die. Sometimes we enjoy a pleasant day as a background for our tears and our struggle. Sometimes we laugh anyways.

Unhappy New Year

I have often used the tagline "pleasure, revolt, despair" to describe my personal-political disposition. Entering 2009, my heart is filled with the latter. The Israeli invasion of Gaza, the continued occupation of Iraq, the escalation of the war in Afghanistan, and the war against immigrants, people of color, women, and queers continues to cost thousands of lives. With all the celebration in the U.S. cities over the past year, we have heard so little frustration, strategy, revolt.

May this empire of greed and destruction collapse. May the oppressed be liberated. May 2009 bring down the violence of the United States of America.