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To Fly Or To Smite: A Story From Olympia There cometh a rich man from the West who shall pour his gold upon thee. From gold forge steel! Be ready to fly or to smite! -Dead Bald Man  http://www.mediafire.com/imgbnc.php/d5350add9f6a45acbfbf2efe15acdbfd4g.jpg
I: All milieus are counter-revolutionary, because their only business is the preservation of their own paltry comfort. -The Coming Insurrection I have grown used to disappointment. It is all I have felt in the United States, with rare exceptions. I try to expect nothing. Sometimes I cannot help myself. I expect the ground to crack open, I expect people to snap, I expect the veils of illusion to burn away. But that never happens. Does it? I am younger than some. I see the ones who are older and when I hear their stories I grow afraid. Perhaps it all is a downward spiral, and I will sink into the same irrelevance I once loathed in them. For they have grown used to disappointment just as I have. They wanted nothing more to do with the fight and chose to find what gave them satisfaction and comfort. Having a goat and some chickens and a family and a house and some land and a farm. When I was younger I cursed them. Now I respect them. But I am still in the same predicament. I do not want to sink into irrelevance. I do not want to live in perpetual disappointment. I cannot be happy with what the older ones have. Disappointment is all there is right now. But it is compounded when we all blame each other for our disappointment. We watch kids put themselves on the butcher block, watch them put themselves at risk, watch them throw themselves into a fire, and we do not help them. Why? Because if we were to help them, if we were to step out onto the street and out of our comfort, we would find only one thing: disappointment. It is a sure thing. We will feel it. So instead we wait and watch and tend to our goats. Sometimes we even call the young ones foolish and disown them. We watch them fail the same way we failed. http://www.mediafire.com/imgbnc.php/0cca9ea8cb5d7c2cd8c422858b9b9d424g.jpg
II: We have come up with a neutral idea of friendship, as pure affection without consequence. But all affinities are affinities within a common truth. All encounters are encounters within a common affirmation, even one of destruction. -The Coming Insurrection We are physical bodies. When we group together, in physical reality, we are powerful. But only if we have some unity of purpose. Most of the times this is not the case. There is no unity. The militant ones who 'get it' keep their secrets to themselves, hiding their inability to talk with others behind 'security culture'. The activists are shunned because they are stupid. The unaffiliated are treated as kids who accidentally sit down at the wrong lunch table. And together they all stumble into the night, in their respective circles, their mini-milieus, armed only with their divisions with each other, not with their affinities. Stumbling around in this way, physical bodies are neutralized. Power is lost. And when we happen to get coaxed or guilt tripped or convinced to attend one of these actions, we experience dread and, of course, disappointment. We want everyone to be together, to have the same analysis, the same blueprint. But they do not. And then we do not go to the next action. We tell everyone else that it was stupid, that it was a waste of time, that the street holds nothing but disappointment. And we are right to say such things. But we are wrong in one thing: It is our fault that the street is plagued with failure. We criticize from a distance and never offer an alternative. During the rare instances when some spectator has a good idea, they spectator never puts forth the effort to share it with others, to make it a reality. They have better things to do. Nothing changes because no one changes anything. When we find something that works we desperately hold onto it because at least this thing, this one repetitive thing, allows some of us to feel that we are not powerless. But that thing soon becomes boring to everyone. And then it is time to move on. We remain disjointed milieus, endlessly hoping to stumble upon 'the insurrection'. We wait for it to fall in our laps just as we wait for the show to come on after the commercials. All of the ingredients are here. We have each other, we have our friends and the friends of friends. But we are usually consumed with our lives and the things which fulfill us. We know that insurrection would fulfill us, but that, of course, is something which will never happen here. Mobilizing those around us for a common purpose seems to be impossible. And when we actually get 25 or 39 or 76 people on the street, we are flooded with a cacophony of criticism for everything we should have done and did not do. Sometimes this criticism comes from friends. And when we ask why they were not there, they reply, "I did not want to be disappointed." With these friends, we continue to go to parties and shows. Our lives and friendships continue to be built around pleasure and comfort and talk, talk, talk. We never learn how to act together because we never act together. We only consume together, survive together, find comfort together. When something does make us venture out onto the street, it is usual because the event sounds 'cool'. Someone being murdered is not enough to move us. But a catchy flier and a lot of hype seem to do the trick. We are lost. The only people to blame for our disappointments are ourselves. http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3390/3205188397_f786d7e15d.jpg?v=0
III: Sociability is now made up of a thousand little niches, a thousand little refuges where you can come in to keep warm. And it's always better there than in the bitter cold outside. Where everything is false, since it's all just a pretext for getting heated up. Where nothing can happen since we're all too busy deafly shivering together. This society will soon only be held together by the mere tension of all the social atoms straining towards an illusory healing. It's a power station that drives its turbines on a gigantic reservoir of dammed up tears that is always about to spill over. -The Coming Insurrection Jose Ramirez-Jimenez was executed in front of his girlfriend in Lacey, Washington. Kimya Dawson played a show for the reopening of the Timberland Library in downtown Olympia. Many members of the community were there with each other and their children. People were able to see each other, talk to each other, know that they were together in the same physical location. After Dawson played, she was joined by a choir of Olympia residents. Together, they all sang. When it was over everyone left the library. In the parking lot, some people from the community grouped together in a circle. There, they decided together to walk up to the West Olympia police station. Some people lit torches and road flares. There was no chanting. While moving past the bars, a person with a guitar and person with a banjo joined the march. They began to sing 'fuck the police from Olympia to Greece'. No one knew them. Everyone who saw the march thanked them the way some people are told to thank war heroes. Countless people yelled negative things about the police and told the crowd to flip another cop car. These people were told to join the crowd if they wanted to flip a cop car. Some of them did. 50 people walked up the hill to West Olympia. Five flames burned as they made their ascent. No one knew what was going to happen when they reached the police station. Some people gloomily walked on the sidewalk, others walked on the street towards uncertainty. Upon arriving one block away from the police station, a dumpster was overturned, blocking the one road to the police station. People were implored to get ready. And then everyone ran at the police station. In the distance, at least 10 cruisers appeared out nowhere, seeming to have been waiting for the arrival of the 50 people. Rocks were thrown at the reinforced windows which did not break. Someone lit a garbage can on fire. Apparently, according to the mainstream media, people threw torches at the building. Once everyone had run past the police station, the police began to hunt. 20 people were detained. Shotguns were pointed at their backs, pistols at their heads. Three people were arrested for misdemeanors and were released that same night. 50 people, at most, participated in the event. It was over by midnight. The bars downtown closed at 2 am, discharging their loyal crowds. http://www.mediafire.com/imgbnc.php/edbc2b9ad698e836567d206a0e233ac04g.jpg
IV: The coming revolt is the revolt of the lost children. -How Is It To Be Done? It is all futile. The Olympians did not get rid of the OPD. The same psychotic, ex-military killers are still on their streets. It is all futile if ones expectations are far too high. And there is no point in having high expectations, especially when we cannot hold ourselves to our own. The fire-bringers who marched up the hill did not think they would get rid of the killers. All that anyone carried up that hill was anger. People at the library concert saw that a portion of their community felt angry enough to march on the police station with torches. People who read The Olympian newspaper know some people were angry enough to do that. As was evident from the reaction downtown, there are a lot of angry people who were not on the street. How does one catalog the effect of an action like this? Is there even a point? Everything is cumulative, and one expression of anger fuels the next one. The problem is continuing to manifest such anger. This is especially difficult when such a manifestation is seen by many to be a protest, a dance party, or just another show to drop in and out of. Our rage is not dignified in people's eyes. Our rage is seen as a social event, designed to alleviate our holy boredom. Our rage becomes a commodity the second we market it, sell it, convince people to come to our 'thing'. We do not need to spread awareness about issues. We need to spread awareness of ourselves. First we need to convince ourselves that we are bodies, physical bodies filled with power. Then we need to convince our friends that we are real and that our desires and rage our real. And then comes the challenge of convincing others, the ones outside our circles, that we exist. We are invisible to them. But our invisibility, so far, has made us irrelevant. In the United States, our invisibility is no different than other invisibilities: invisible murders, invisible poverty, invisible misery. We do not grow stronger with our invisibility. We rot with it. And no one outside our circles knows that we exist. Five torches ascending a hill leaves an imprint in people's minds. It is our responsibility to tell others they can carry a torch as well. Our affinity is not ideological. Our affinity is based on what we share with the most people. In Olympia as well as elsewhere, that uniting factor is rage. http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3391/3196533666_44595e8082.jpg?v=0 V: Standing up again. Lifting the head up. By choice or by necessity. Whatever, really, now. Looking at each other in the eyes and saying "let's start again". Let everybody know it, as soon as possible. We are starting again. -How Is It To Be Done? We cannot be alone any longer. Our subculture has kept us isolated for years. Our giant milieu has landed itself in nearly total irrelevance. What we share we share only with our circle. We stick with the same safe things, patiently waiting for what we will never bring. Our desires are strangled by each other before they have a chance to be strangled by the police. We do not know how to do the simplest things. Those who try and learn, for themselves, how to do these simple things are treated as fools. No one is encouraged, no one is applauded. Everything is in the past. The time is not right. You are wasting your time. You will only be disappointed. Our lives are filled with disappointment. Every day. So why not throw ourselves into a rebellious disappointment? Expect nothing but the knowledge that you, and you alone, were not watching television. Make your highest ambition to be an extravagant failure. What does success matter in this world? Will our success be any different then the failure we have known for decades? There are millions of reasons not to act. There is absolutely no reason to act. A reason is not necessary at this point. Reasons quickly become protest signs and chants. Murder is not reason enough to act. What will be? Nothing. There is no group to join. There are only your friends and the ones you love. There are the people you meet along the way, in a cafe or on the street, fighting the police. There are the conversations you have, conversations which most of the time are centered around the scene. Begin talking to everyone about what you are feeling and how it is making you insane. You will find that everyone is going insane. Those conversations will soon blossom into relationships built around an effort to destroy what is making the world schizophrenic. We have two affinities with everyone worth more than the rest: We are all alive. We are all powerful. That is enough to begin. Your Humble Servant, Annie Nimmety Footnote: The above quotations are taken from texts well worth reading. http://tarnac9.wordpress.com/texts/the-coming-insurrection/ http://tarnac9.wordpress.com/texts/how-is-it-to-be-done/
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