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Onward,
Alexander, Jeffrey, Becky and Deva
November
2, 2006
Building an International Movement for
Civil Rights and Economic Equality
Honoring
Bradley Will
By STEPHAN SAID
Of the many people whose lives Brad
Will's intersected, several of us have written about our memories
of him, about his commitments and interests, and our shared involvement
in trajectories of global justice activism from temporary autonomous
zones, earth first, to housing and squatters' rights, gardens,
critical mass, independent media, reclaim the streets, direct
action network, protests against international monetary organizations,
for landless workers, to most recently the teacher led civil
rights movement in Oaxaca. Some of us who knew him, whether for
a short or long time, are, only in his death confronted by the
fact that it was his stumbling "grand fool" of the
court-like character, that calm but giggling simplicity, that
enabled him so often to rush in where angels feared to tread,
for better, and sometimes for worse. That is not what I am writing
about.
In the 15 or so years of knowing
Bradley since our first meeting at the Naropa Institute in 1993
(we both landed in NYC's lower east side squatters' community
the next year), to organizing, getting arrested, singing, and
dancing with him, we and most of our wide, inter-nected web of
friends have often said that what we needed and most hoped for
was the birth of some kind of international movement for equality
and peace, that great big movement to unite us all that humankind's
talked about since the beginning of time but never achieved.
Our desire and need to build such a movement rises not so much
from some moral and ethical conviction or good will. It rises
from our understanding that only an egalitarian social contract
among humankind can foster the level of mutual trust and responsibility,
economic development, and environmental sustainability, necessary
to prevent the already mounting violence, poverty, disease, and
environmental degradation encircling our world. If there is one
defining sentiment of our generation of activists, it is the
perception that the need to live by the prophetic notion of 'oneness'
and 'doing unto others,' is no longer simply a matter of moral
or spiritual choice, but now a matter of life and death, survival
of the planet or imminent, irreversible destruction.
But while the global justice
and peace networks, digital technology, independent media, and
worldwide sentiment evidenced in Oaxaca, Chiapas, Porto Alegre,
and the World Social Forum, have all greatly increased the potential
to realize such a global imagination, we in the U.S. are no closer
now than we were 15 years ago at incorporating our myriad sub-protests
for housing, farmers, landless indigenous populations, and against
the WTO, the Iraq War, or arctic drilling, within a clarion movement
for global economic equality or civil rights. Almost unbelievably,
despite the fact that republican voting farmers in the United
States have been losing their farms at the hands of the same
system that subjugates middle eastern families to the global
oil market, and leaves Oaxacan people dead in the streets for
demanding livable wages and sanitation, the progressive community
in America has been less successful at expressing the clear link
between exorbitant wealth and poverty, than the Bush administration
has been at convincing the majority that Iraq had weapons of
mass destruction or that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were
bed-buddies.
In part, our movement has remained
scattered because it is so diverse, widespread, and resultantly
disjunct: many of us have been so busy trying to correct the
myriad wrongs around us that we've all headed off, some to the
barricades of Oaxaca, some into organizing, some to the redwoods,
some into protest music, some to Porto Alegre, some to Palestine,
many of us, frenetically, to all of the above. On the other hand,
either because of lack of leadership or for political/funding
reasons influencing editorial, and lingering McCarthy-era self
censorship, our larger progressive networks have shied away from
the message of global economic equality which should be the basis
of our domestic and foreign policy position against war, poverty,
disease, debt, and for fair trade, indigenous rights, etc. The
problem is, no movement for civil rights in history ever succeeded
by being anything but just that. The Indian Independence movement
and the Civil Rights movement were not movements against salt
taxes or to get to ride on Montgomery buses. The latter were
sub-campaigns within the framework of a larger, positive demand
for basic rights that were irrefutable. The demand for these
rights identified the respective movements and provided the basis
for the positive imaging, more universal accessibility, and ultimate
undeniability of those movements. The no-compromise stances empowered
effective non-violent strategy.
We are kidding ourselves if
we think we can address the root causes of the Iraq war by ousting
the Bush administration, that we can affect the sources of Mexican
inequality, unless we primarily address the system of global
economic hegemony that is proving itself both humanly and ecologically
unsustainable. We are squandering the opportunity of the immigration
struggle if we continue to allow the importation of Mexican products
at prices that enforce wages there below those of our own country's
minimum. The same goes for our efforts to put an end to sweatshop
labor in free trade zones, to protect the arctic from further
oil drilling, or genuinely address the debt of developing nations.
We have learned nothing from the history of social movements
if we think we can create an international movement for civil
rights and global economic equality without stating that as our
purpose.
If we want to honor Brad, the
people of Oaxaca, the citizens of chaos-ridden Iraq, the old
growth trees and oil rich arctic wildernesses, it is time we
stepped back and looked at where we've come. It means assessing
the tools at our disposal to create a movement for a different
global economy. If another world is possible, it will be because
a movement erupted demanding it. Like Brad's body, that movement
has to come home. In our mourning for yet another colleague among
thousands needlessly killed, let us focus our energies at last
on building that movement, no holds barred, and let's go where
angels fear to tread.
Stephan Said, aka Stephan Smith is an activist,
recording artist and journalist living in New York City. His
works appear on Rounder Records, Artemis Records, Universal
Hobo Records, and in The Progressive Magazine, San Francisco
Chronicle, Sing Out!, and other publications. He is Iraqi-American.
He can be reached at: management@stephansmith.com
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