Place Matters
Revolution needs its plaza, places for songs and shouts. Public space is more and more controlled by the wealthy. Our parks are now “Conservancies” and “Authorities” with their own police forces. As the wealthy take over, our 1st Amendment rights keep shrinking. In Union Square in NYC, a birthplace of labor in the United States, you can’t sing a song anymore. You can play a Woody Guthrie song on your computer that has a line in it about “singing on a grassy spot in Union Square,” but you can’t go do it yourself.
In this Trump time, it is so important that Standing Rock and Black Lives Matter, the Women’s Marches and the Let-Them-In rallies at airports took place. They give us some breathing space, by which I mean shouting and singing space. Every revolt has its iconic gathering places, its pressure points. The Civil Rights Movement had its Pettis Bridge, the highway to Selma, the Lincoln Memorial and the bus-stops of Birmingham. You can think of these places as stages. ACT UP had its Stonewall and Castro. ACT UP had unexpected stages in the offices of bureaucratic buildings, plays in theaters and cabarets, in the White House itself and on the congressional lawn with the AIDS Quilt, a portable space that took control with a quiet shouting imagery and its scale.
In the Church of Stop Shopping we are specializing in banks that finance the Dakota Access pipeline. In New York that means Citi, TD and Wells Fargo. These three killers have thousands of bank branches in the tri-state area and are just begging for our spiritual trespassing.
We will all have to discover our gathering places. Our cities and towns are riddled with “dead space,” – spots where we can gather and talk in that embodied way, with the passion that is beyond computers. We need to be ready to re-emerge and surround the hater. This is his Custer’s Last Stand.
I Love My Country
Why? Because we're wide open. At the airports at the borders anyone can come in and go out. The United States invented this. Long ago we discovered that there is safety for us in offering safety to others. I love my country. Why? The 1st Nations and the Africans rose up and created the Land of the Free. I love my country. The Women fly up through the glass ceilings. Women have the power! The Other is our President. The Earth is our Mother. I love my country! I love my country! I love my country!
Matt Hopard
MATT HOPARD IS STOP MOTION SOLO AND HE IS AN IMPORTANT JOURNALIST ARRESTED. Our friend Matt Hopard AKA Stop Motion Solo, our favorite streamer, has been charged with felony riot while covering the black bloc protests of J20. He is an accredited journalist who’s work has appeared in major international news outlets like Democracy Now! and The Guardian. Wasn't Matt also in the NYTimes? He was part of the reason many of us started streaming with Occupy. Matt where are you now? Please Matt's friends chime in here with next steps.
stopmotionsolo.tv Tardigrade CERN (@StopMotionsolo)
Prayer for Pussy America
Life spirit we felt your presence in our surge of bodies this weekend. We ask for your guidance. We are poised to leap into a new chapter of history. We've had big marches in the past that came to nothing real. We ask that the reality of our love-fest become real action in the coming days. Earthalujah! The patriarchy doesn't believe that our nonviolent pussy coup will take power. The patriarchy congeals and hardens into lonely stone monuments of greatness with their money, gas and guns. Be with us Earth-life! We peacefully refuse to respond to their threats. They will pump out their advertising that they are God and Country. But women lead the way. Joyful life-a-lujah leads the way. The indigenous women from the earth cultures lead with their wisdom. Fear doesn't govern anymore. A previously inconceivable Pussy America brings the soft revolution. Help us to remember that government is a series of choices, agreements, human contracts. The monuments of the great man can be left there. The President can continue spitting insults at his teleprompter, while love’s good governance grows and grows like a wild forest of Pussylujah! Earthalujah!
Big Bank Robbers
Sunday evening at our rehearsal we talked instead of singing this week. We sang so much at the Women's March and wanted to talk. Our talk soared and looked down at the years of activitism. We asked the question, "What would we like to do now? Choosing from our history..." We discovered that we missed performing in that most formidable place: banks. Robbing the bank of itsholy vibe, while informing customers and tellers and ourselves, that Chase Bank, or Citi, or HSBC, or UBS or whichever bank we're offering our radical songs that this bank finances mountaintop removal coal mining or industrial agriculture projects or pipelines... And so we decided to start right away, and we will return to Times Square on Wed and I will sidewalk preach again there with the choir visiting and supporting Nehemiah (on the keyboards and singing) and myself... Back to sidewalk preaching. Back to banking. Earthalujah!
Women's March Lesson One
Fast food kills the undergrowth. The choir is on the edge of DC, drove late last night from NYC piled into Motel 6 rooms. I got up at dawn to police the environment here, taking pictures back at Trump Inc from the POV of Eartth. When I grow up I want to be a cop for the Earth. I submit the evidence of the crime. The enemy of complexity, of difference, of possible rebellion - McDonalds scorches the Earth with god knows what chemicals. The shrubs remain as ornaments. Any possible life, and life that doesn't apparently increase profits, the official national fixation with Trump. Kill the undergrowth. The rooty small things, the snails, bacteria, fungi and the 10,000 living things in a cubic millmeter of forest floor. Oh, put up a wall to keep all the life that isn't gun-toting white males iwth bellies full of Big Macs... Oh, as our banners say, NOW IS THE HOUR FOR PUSSY POWER. Earthalujah!
We have got this gratitude!
With Lena and Savi addressing thankyou postcards to the 300 folks who helped out in this holiday askathon... Its a good idea to do this personally and feel the multitude in this community. Feel the names and feel the addresses, so many fantastical originals in the stop shopping faithful. We have waves of "Oh what did we do to deserve these gifts?" and then we look at our life of singing and preaching until we come to a rest in the forced meditation of jail... Your generosity gives a moment of distance on what we do all year and it's been many years now and we don't know what else we can or want to do but this. The important thing is to hit it hard every time, let it evolve into new actions, let ourselves be surprised by how the activism and the stage dramas can change. Well, much thanks, much thanks. ---Rev, Savi, Lena and Stop Shopping Choir too.
When Trump Ends
When Trump's power ends, the Earth won't. When Trump is over, the black mothers will still disarm us. When Trump dies from the cancer he gives everyone else, the wetlands will renew the sky with amazing birds...When Trump ends, the Earth will be alive on her own terms. She will let families cross borders with only love as an ID. When Trump opens his eyes he will see that his only opponent is the Earth, her storms and droughts, her wildfires and tornados...
When Trump's power turns to dust, he will blend into forest floors, unknown aquifers, bacteria fields in the magnetic ice...When Trump goes, the Earth won't have to forgive him. When we go, the Earth will lift our death bed to the stars. She will effortlessly take us back.
We are all threatened animals now
Not to be discouraging. We have to evolve in the next minutes and years, that's all. Grow new wings from our shoulders, claws for fingers... Most of all we need new dreams.
As a species, we've lost our way. We suffer extreme memory loss, which we were told was good for the economy. We don't know how loving we've been. We can't remember Peace. We think that justice is a new app.
We are entertained so much, how do we sort out when the toxins, and bullets, and advertising that celebrities fling against any passing Other - how do we know when our shopping for famous people is like a secret holocaust? We look up and notice drowning children and wonder if it had anything to do with us. We go for a hike and face a mountain that is completely silent, covered with death. Did I do that? Our solution to send in the drones. When the last mountain lion dies make sure it goes viral.
Life is re-organizing and the question is - will we evolve, too? That would be a gift, a real gift, to remain alive, considering what we've done. We sense that the Earth is making its move. The final songbirds take their position on the wind. They have a message to deliver, an instruction, a code. The Great Dying is here. The eco-systems know what to do.
The Earth asks its predator species to stand in one place and sing, as the regeneration begins.