Over the last few months, I have been an active, critical, yet ultimately proud member of Occupy Oakland. Despite the sometimes-questionable tactics and lack of much diversity in this working-class, multi-racial city, I believed that Occupy Oakland was still a young movement and would mature into a more solid political force. Sadly, it seems, we still have a long way to go.

On January 28, Occupy Oakland’s attempt to take over an unused public building turned into yet another painful, predictable street battle with the Oakland Police Department (OPD), with over 400 people arrested by night’s end. The police’s actions were more brutal than ever, from the tear gas and sound grenades to the unlawful mass arrest that has left many of my comrades still in jail as I write this. I stand unequivocally against the severe repression and the increasing police state that we find ourselves in. To my fellow Occupiers, though, it is time that we critically examine our own tactics. If we don’t, Occupy Oakland is going to fizzle out quicker than Rick Perry’s presidential campaign.

The events in Oakland on January 28 indeed occupied national headlines and local jail cells, but they almost certainly lost more supporters to the movement than they gained. Needlessly picking fights with the cops, vandalizing City Hall, and putting our own people in harm’s way is not the path to social and economic justice. It is a losing, incoherent strategy, one that will continue to damage the public’s support for Occupy until our claim that “We are the 99%” becomes a bad joke. Forget whether folks can survive endless police confrontations and court dates. The question now is: Can Occupy Oakland survive itself?

Continue reading the full article at The Progressive

Sal Alper sat casually in front of the Wells Fargo headquarters in downtown San Francisco, as if chaining herself to the banking giant’s front doors was a normal thing to do on a Friday morning. As one of the many Occupy San Francisco protests on January 20, Sal had joined dozens of people in blockading since 6:00 a.m., so by the time I arrived on the scene at mid-morning, she was smiling and relaxed. When I asked her why she was protesting the banks, however, her smile quickly faded.

“My parents lost their home to a bank foreclosure two years ago,” Sal said. “They moved in with my uncle, but then he lost his home too. So they all moved over to my grandma’s — and now she is being threatened too! And it’s all because of these banks right here.”

Such stories of anger and resistance were everywhere in San Francisco, as thousands of protesters took over the streets of the city’s financial district in their ambitious attempt to “Occupy Wall Street West.” In a daylong series of building occupations, marches, and civil disobedience, Occupy San Francisco organizers mobilized the biggest direct action in the city since the start of the Iraq War in 2003. While unable to fully shut down the business district, activists mounted the largest Occupy action in the country of 2012 so far, as they begin the next phase of the rising movement for social and economic justice.

Continue reading the full piece at The Progressive.

As a member of the self-identified “slash profession” – writer/organizer/educator/whatever pays the rent that month – I have learned how to wear multiple hats. How to move between different worlds and code-switch my headgear to meet a particular place and community. Alright, I got this big event coming up tonight…should I wear the Kangol, the fitted, or the yarmulke? (Correct answer: all three.) Sometimes, though, it’s a struggle figuring out which slash to bring out in which situation. Take Occupy.

I got back in Oakland full-time last month, and immediately jumped into the beautiful chaos that is Occupy Oakland. I joined the big West Coast port shutdown on December 12, started attending the alternatively powerful and painful General Assemblies, and connected with the two committees I’ve begun organizing with, Occupy the Hood and Labor Solidarity. It’s been great, and I’ve gotten to stretch some of activist muscles that I hadn’t used in years. (Sometimes literally – holding one side of a 30″ banner with that wind whipping off the bay is harder than it looks.) But while I’ve been bringing my organizing and education experience to the table, sometimes I leave behind the thing I do that I’m doing right now on this laptop. Writing. Telling stories. Creating culture.

Last night, however, some of my cultural comrades and heroes reminded me what it means to be artist in the movement. Artists of the 99% organized a panel/workshop (oh artists, how we even have “slash events”) that dealt with strategies for artists participating in social justice movements. It was a power-packed room: Jeff Chang (Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop), Favianna Rodriguez (printmaker activist powerhouse), David Solnit (street theater artist/organizer), and Zeph Fishlyn (Beehive Design Collective). Plus 100 or so radical artists who love talking about radical art on a Saturday night. My kind of folks.

Jeff set it off with his thesis that “cultural change precedes political change.” Meaning, we need Jackie Robinson before we get Brown v. Board of Education, Ellen Degeneres before we get gay marriage (at least in seven states). I don’t fully agree with Jeff – I think culture and politics very much go both ways – but overall, yes: people connect deeper on a daily basis with beautiful flash mobs and Youtube videos than with congressional committees and talking points. The question is, how do we get that flash mob’s message to those congressional committees and make the changes we need? (And yes, I know the obvious answer is to do the flash mob IN the committee itself…but I just don’t think Bernie Sanders has the dance moves to pull it off.)

Or maybe the point of cultural organizing is direct our energies more towards the 99% itself, rather than our so-called representatives. That seemed to be Favianna‘s argument, as she explained her work with CultureStrike, a pro-migrant project in Arizona started last year in the racist aftermath of SB1070. CultureStrike organized a pop music boycott of Arizona that was inspired by similar actions targeting apartheid South Africa in the 1980s. At the same time, they actually brought grassroots writers and artists to Arizona — but rather than perform, their job was to see the border walls and mass deportations for themselves and then create and promote artistic work to challenge the anti-immigrant climate of fear spreading across the country.

Regarding the Occupy movement, Favianna asked,  “What are the strategic stories that we need to tell? Whose stories in the 99% are we lifting up?” The corporate media likes to focus on college students and angry anarchists for a reason. We need to highlight the stories of urban youth activists, immigrant day laborers, Black and brown homeowners — AND the college students, the (former) white-collar workers, and even the occasional anarchist. This is what artists do: shift the conversation, broaden the debate, literally paint the pictures that show both our unity and our diversity.

In that spirit, I was thinking about ways that “slash artists” can do more than just participate but take a real lead in progressive movements, from Occupy to environmental justice to international solidarity. I seem to be into lists these days, so I’m going to focus in on three concrete roles I see for me and my fellow artists:

1. Artists as Questioners

All great art, like all great political movements, starts with a question. I don’t mean marching around in a circle chanting, “What do we want? When do we want it?,” especially when we all know that the answers are deeper than “Justice” and “Now.” Artists have the power to question and critique the many injustices that often go unnoticed or unmentioned in present-day America. Just check the massive reaction, both positive and negative, to the recent “Shit White Girls Say…to Black Girls” videos. Culture, and especially humor, opens people up to ask the tough questions they would otherwise avoid.

Movement artists have a double role to play when it comes to asking questions, though — turning the lens not just on wider society, but on our own personal actions and organizations. When it comes to spoken word, I know the best political poem is when the poet isn’t preaching at me but struggling within themself. If only we saw more humility and self-reflection at Occupy Oakland.

On an organizing level, elements like street theater or marching bands do more than just liven up the crowd — they question the division of protesters and folks just passing by, of message and medium, of serious politics and God forbid, having a good time. To paraphrase Emma Goldman: if I can’t dance to some remixed, radicalized pop songs with you, I don’t want to be a part of your revolution.

2. Artists as Promoters

This is a practical one. If there’s one thing that all artists have in common, it’s the hustle. We’re constantly on the move, passing out flyers, sending out Facebook blasts, talking to people wherever and however we can to pack the next show. Outreach is always my number one focus for any event, because if you don’t have the folks ready to rock with you, what’s the point?

Too many political organizers, though, have an “If you build it, they will come” mentality when it comes to publicity. That might get you enough people to fill up a baseball park in Iowa, but if you want the tens of thousands of people needed to say, shut down the San Francisco district on January 20, the outreach motto needs to be more like, “If you build it, make it look and sound hella fly, build real community partners, and do a combined month-long social media/street team promo campaign…then they will come.” Assuming you don’t plan it the same day as the 49ers game, of course, which luckily is the next day.  

Musicians, poets, and visual artists can bring this all-out outreach mentality to the movement, not to mention our mailing lists. Some of us are even moderately famous. Boots Riley has been at the forefront of Occupy Oakland not just because he’s on point in what he says, but because every hip-hop head in the Bay and around the country already loves dude’s albums with The Coup. This is the true artist as promoter role. Don’t just shout out Mumia in your one “conscious rap” song. Shout out the movement that’s trying to free him and invite people to join in. People listen to what you say. That’s why they call it Call and Response. Give your fans a call to liberation and just see how they respond.

3. Artists as Strategic Organizers

Now this is the most interesting, the most challenging, and ultimately the most important role. Not just for artists, but for anyone in a grassroots movement. Strategic organizing involves thinking about what it would actually take to win our demands, and how the hell to go from here to there. Putting on a poetry slam against Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is organizing. Putting on a poetry slam of LGBT former soldiers and staging it outside an army base as part of a multi-tiered, national campaign…that’s strategic organizing.

To make any real change these days, we need to change the culture. Occupy Wall Street is never going to be able to physically occupy the stock market on Wall Street — the NYPD has too many guns, too many helicopters, and too many undercover infiltrators.  What we do have, or could have, is the will of the people. We need the 99% to become a massive wave of real democracy, rather than the isolated ripples of confusion and consumerism that we are now. Artists, especially the artists/teachers/biracial-bakers who have their finger on the pulse of so many different worlds, as much as anyone can help change the tide.

In the end, our job is to contribute our creativity to the greatest art project ever: saving humanity from ourselves. For me, that means getting down and dirty in the nitty-gritty work of planning, building, and executing specific campaigns for justice. But at its most basic level, it means just doing what a good artist does: responding to the reality of our times and imagining the possibilities that could be.

Part of being a political artist also means fighting the competitive, individualistic nature of American art. If we want to build a collective future, we’ve got start with a collective now. More and more folks are stepping up to the plate, from the local Occupy SF Arts & Culture committee to the national, newly launched Art is My Occupation project, which is offering mini-grants to artists on Occupy-related efforts. Resources for the creative revolution? Love that!

I don’t know if a full-on Occupy arts movement is going to emerge like the labor-left Cultural Front of the 1930s or the Black Arts movement of the 1960s, but there’s only one way to find out. See you on the streets, my friends…and don’t forget your dancing shoes.

In the meantime, here’s my vote for #AnthemForTheMovement…So Far.

Dead Poets Society

for Otto René Castillo (1936-1967), Roberto Obregon (1940-1970), Guadalupe Navas (1942-1980),  Luis de León (1939-1985), and all the poets and people of Guatemala who gave their lives for the people’s struggle

this is not a movie starring Robin Williams
this is not a white prep school teacher
secretly teaching dead white authors
to rich white schoolboys, God forbid

this is the highlands of Guatemala
the cloud forests of a genetically modified banana republic
indigenous colors masked by corporate logos
guarded by young soldiers carrying guns bigger then they are,
all clearly marked, Made in the USA

i am a poet
made in the u.s.a.
a land where the greatest risk
of my profession is answering
the Christmas party hosts’ ice-breaker,
“So what do you do for a living?”
and watching their mouths drop
in an eggnog mix of confusion and pity

but here in Guatemala
land of volcanoes and United Fruit plantations,
i have met peasants and ex-guerrillas
who during the war years
(when were they not war years?)
secretly passed poems amongst the hungry
like bread or rifles

every poet was a fighter
every fighter a poet
not everyone went up into the mountains
but they made their struggle on the pages
and streets of this beautiful, broken nation

Roberto Obregon
Guadalupe Navas
Luis de León
and of course
Otto René Castillo

you lived for your people
and were killed for your words
tortured for your stanzas
disappeared for your poems
but your poems did not disappear

Otto, the army took your ode of solidarity
and turned it into a torture manual

I will stay blind so that you can have eyes
I will stay without a voice so that you can sing
I have to die so that you don’t die

and so when those soldiers cut out your eyes,
removed your tongue, and carved out your heart
they thought they had finished their bloody job

but your voice still rings out
of the people’s lips
like the call of the quetzal
flying high above the mountains
never to be caged or buried

i don’t know if the pen
is mightier than the sword
but what is the meaning
of a poem in the first place?
to end its days, quiet and comfortable
in the pages of an anthology?
or to go out fighting, and perhaps survive
in the hearts of the people?

poetry gives life
poetry needs life
poetry is life!

¡Vámonos patria a caminar!

When this whole Occupy movement kicked off back in September, I wasn’t on the streets of Lower Manhattan. I wasn’t even on the streets of Oakland. I was walking along the quiet streets of Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, where my partner Esther and I had just started a three month journey through Central America. So when the Occupy stuff really got rolling in the weeks that followed, I got an email from my brother: “Well, Josh, it looks like we needed you to leave the country for us to start the revolution.” What a guy, my brother.

I don’t know if his statement was true or not (technically speaking, I left the country one day after the first protest on Wall Street), but it was weird to be out of the country, and especially Oakland, as shit was going down. When my brother asked me in that same email, “You sure you don’t want to come back?”, I was tempted but I also knew my answer. I was seeing and learning things in Guatemala that I would never do back in the States. The movement would still be there when I got back, but this was one of my few chances to experience life and politics outside the stars and stripes.

In that vain, we spent the fall in Central America: mainly in Guatemala, but with short stints in Honduras and Nicaragua as well. We spent the first six weeks in Quetzaltenango studying Spanish at an amazing, socialist language school called Proyecto Linguistico Quetzalteco (PLQ). The one-on-one classes are taught in a way that mixes grammatical practice with information about Guatemalan politics and culture, so I spent my days at PLQ conjugating verbs into the subjunctive tense, all while discussing the fallacies of neoliberal trade agreements. We also had the chance to meet different social activists, including ex-guerrilla fighters, indigenous leaders, union members, and much to Esther’s delight, traditional Mayan midwives. Needless to say, the school was awesome. Any gringos out there who want to improve your Spanish — I can’t recommend it highly enough.

After getting our español up to semi-quasi-conversational status, we started traveling around the country and then across two borders. We visited ancient Mayan ruins, historical colonial cities, and cooperative coffee farms, traveling by bus, boat, and at one point, a tiny plane that was more like a minivan with wings. Between the lush green rainforests, the mountain sunrises, and the joy of seeing two oceans in two days, we went through a million beautiful places. But I’ve always been a people person first and foremost, so to me the most interesting thing was always (surprise, surprise) the politics.

Although Central America has not been swept up in the people’s uprisings that took so much of the world by storm this year, each of the three countries we visited made an important socio-political case study due to their not-so-distant past: a successful revolution (Nicaragua), a failed revolution (Guatemala), and the only poor country in the region that never had a revolutionary movement (Honduras). And the common thread through all there: U.S. intervention. This, plus the fact that both Guatemala and Nicaragua had their presidential elections while we were there, made it quite the advanced sociological seminar.


Here are some of the things, big and small, that I learned from my time south of the border(s). Most of these are things I understand at an intellectual level before, but it’s one thing to read about the Sandinista revolution in a book, it’s something else to be standing inside a cell of the former Somoza dictatorship’s brutal political prison in Leon, which when the people liberated it in early 1979, was the sign for the Sandinista guerrillas to come down for from the mountains because the people were now ready for revolution. So yes, back to the bullet points:

• Armed Struggle is to be Honored — and also Mourned.
  Among the leftist circles I run in, armed revolutionaries like Che Guevara, the Zapatistas, and our own Black Panthers are often seen as romantic heroes. We idealize these rebel activists who fought and the many who gave their lives for the movement. When it comes to guerrilla warfare, however, the truth, as it always is, is a little more complicated. Take Central America, for instance.In 1960, Guatemalan opponents of the military dictatorship installed in a U.S.-led coup six years earlier began a guerrilla struggle that came to last until 1996. In retaliation, the military government committed massacres and many atrocities not just against the rebels, but against the whole civilian population, mainly poor Mayan villagers. Knowing that they would never win an armed struggle, and unable to bear seeing their community literally decimated, the guerrillas signed the peace treaty in 1996.Since then, however, the problems that started the conflict – the grinding poverty and exploitation of the Mayan majority by a tiny wealthy ruling class – have only continued and in some ways exacerbated. Of the Guatemalan activists I met and talked with, including former guerrilla fighters, there were evenly split opinions about whether starting the armed struggle had been a good decision. The same split emerged about ending the conflict. Violent struggle didn’t work in Guatemala, but nonviolent protest hasn’t had much success either.Meanwhile, in Nicaragua, you have the example of the last successful violent revolution in the world. (All revolutions since then, have actually been non-violent: think Poland, South Africa, Egypt, etc.) Against one of the most brutal (and again U.S.-sponsored) dictators in modern history, Anastasio Somoza, the Sandinista guerrillas waged a low-scale conflict for over two decades. When the Nicaraguan masses rose up in 1979, the Sandinistas were able to seize the moment and finally defeat Somoza. But the victory was not without its losses — every city I visited in the country had its Galería de los Heroes y Martires (Gallery of Heroes and Martyrs), with photos and stories of the town’s young men and women who had given their lives in the struggle. Armed revolution is a strategy, not an ideology. And it’s a strategy that would never work here in the United States. Outside our borders, I won’t make any blanket claims for or against violent struggle, but having visited former battlefields and current graveyards in Central America, I won’t respect it, not romanticize it.

• There is no “Perfect Movement”
  On a  related note, we often look to the past, or outside our borders, for social movements that were or are “truly revolutionary.” These go for non-violent movements too: we paint Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela as saints whose movements therefore must have been just as saintly. But they were people, not saints, and their movements, like ours today, had their own faults too. In Nicaragua, the Sandinistas did lead the revolution that overthrow a 50-year oppressive dictatorship. They soon embarked on an ambitious literacy campaign that brought the illiteracy rate down from over 75% to 15% in just a few years, and have made massive improvements in health care, land reform, and other key social issues.At the same time, they also quickly embraced the other side that all governments share: corruption. Transparent governance and promoting civil liberties is not the Sandinistas’ strong suit, let’s put it that way. In last month’s presidential election that the Sandinistas won handily, even their supporters acknowledged there was some level of fraud. At the same time, though, they were going to win anyway, and the reason wasn’t bribes. Their leadership in the struggle for self-determination, and their achievements since then, still make them the people’s party of choice. An important lesson for my friends here in the Occupy movement: we will never be perfect – we shouldn’t expect to be – but we can choose a more moral path than the powers-that-be.
  

• Mayan Wisdom, part 1: The World Will Not End in 2012
  After going all throughout Guatemala, with its 23 different Mayan groups, one message they all wanted me to take home to America was: “The world is NOT going to end next year! Stop being so crazy — or at least send us some of that Hollywood money from the next John Cusack disaster movie.” Ok, I might be paraphrasing a little bit, but the point was clear. The Mayan calendar is incredibly long (we’re in approximately year 5125 right now) and has cycles that last around a millennium. What is going to happen on December 21, 2012 is not going to be the cataclysmic destruction of the world — it’s going to be the start of a new cycle on the calendar. Just flipping the page to a new, thousand-year datebook.Oh, and that new datebook may possibly usher in a new change of global social consciousness. Which would be awesome, and given current events from Egpyt to Oakland, may already have started a year or two early. The main lesson, again, is: never trust John Cusack.
  

• Mayan Wisdom, part 2: All Empires Fall Eventually
  This one comes to you straight from the ancient ruins of Tikal, deep in the northern Guatemalan jungle. With its giant pyramids, economic power, and cultural symbols that serve as both inspiration and intimidation, “Tikal was the New York City of the Mayan empire,” our local tour guide told us. He then preceded to tell us how this once-great city, home to over 75,000 people in 700 CE, was later abandoned as the Mayan civilization mysteriously disintegrated. Whether it was due to overconsumption of resources, internal conflict, or natural disaster, no one really knows why the great Mayan city-states all fell so quickly. But as my tour guide pointed out, “They weren’t the first empire to fall, and they weren’t the last.” And then he gave me, the only American on the tour, a knowing wink.
  

• Bananas Don’t Run these Republics Anymore — But the U.S. Still Does
  Guatemala’s coup in 1954, which overthrew their only real democratic government of the 20th century, was done to protect U.S. corporate interests, especially those of United Fruit Company. At the time, United Fruit owned more land in Guatemala than all other Guatemalans put together, and throughout Central America it was known as “el pulpo” (“the octopus”) because it had its tangles in every country’s affairs. Since then, banana lost its place to coffee and other products as the king, and king-making, crop of the region. What hasn’t changed is the amount of unabashed, unmistakable power the U.S. has over “its backyard” known as Central America.Honduras, the one country without a revolution, had the region’s first coup in years in 2009, when U.S.-backed politicians ousted President Manuel Zelaya, a left-center leader who was daring to not follow Washington’s directives. Newspapers throughout Central America acknowledge that the most powerful person in their respective countries is not their elected (or unelected) president, but the U.S. Ambassador. Indeed, the most popular joke I heard over and over again was: “Why has the U.S. never had a coup in its own country?” The answer: “Because there’s no U.S. embassy there.”
  

• And yet…not Every Problem Originates from Washington
  Spend any amount of time in Central America, and it’s hard not to come out angry (or angrier) about past and present U.S. foreign policy. And yet, we do not have a monopoly on imperialism, racial oppression, or environmental destruction. The Spanish and, more than I understood before, the British were the region’s original colonizers, and set up the feudal oligarchical policies that continue to this day. The largest multinational corporation that is presently causing controversy in Guatemala with its mines that are destroying rural communities is Canadian. And the country’s own elites, all European descendants of those original conquistadors, are only too happy to exploit and exclude the indigenous and mestizo majority from any social and economic progress. None of this is good, of course. But as American activists protesting the wars, bank bailouts, prison expansions, and everything else done in our names with our tax dollars, it’s important to remember we’re not fighting America per se. We’re fighting capitalism, it all its oppressive forms, everywhere. We’re not the only ones with crazy people with guns in charge of the government, it’s just that our guys’ guns are bigger. (No offense, Canada). So it’s on us for our movement to be just as big. Time to hit the gym, Occupy.
  

• Immigration Ain’t Stopping Anytime Soon
  One thing about being from California and traveling through Central America is that everyone – and I mean everyone- asks if you know their cousin in Los Angeles. After explaining to them that the Bay and LA are six hours apart (something I also have to explain to all my East Coast fam who always ask me why I never go to the beach), we would then start talking about immigrant life in the States and life-without-your-migrant-father/brother/cousin in Central America. Everyone I talked to knew that undocumented life was no dream: they knew firsthand about how the economic recession, ICE raids, and anti-Latino racism have combined to devastate lives across borders. And yet, these very same people would then proceed to ask me, “So do you know any jobs I could get up there in California?”No matter how many walls we build in the desert, immigration isn’t going to stop anytime soon. That is fine by me – I proudly live in an immigrant neighborhood in an immigrant state – but is often devastating for the communities they leave behind. Remittances (money sent back from migrant relatives) may help people pay the bills, but no one can call it sustainable development. But people keep coming. How could they not, faced with such grinding poverty and economic displacement, exacerbated in recent years by further U.S. corporate penetration through the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). People are poor, and if they do have a few dollars, they eat at McDonalds and watch reruns of “Who Wants to be a Millionare?” The pull is too strong, despite the risks. Until the U.S. changes our foreign policy in the region to one of cooperation and, dare I say it, reparations, don’t expect any change in the flow of people coming north. But hey, that’s why I’m  about a North American Union.

• Neither are the Drugs.
  Guatemala is one of the most violent countries in the world, with a murder rate that makes many people wonder if the civil war ever really ended. Honduras is just as bad. Nicaragua, on the other hand, is relatively safe outside of Managua, despite the fact that it’s just as poor as its neighbors. What this means is that Nicaragua was the one country were people out and about at night, hanging out with their neighbors, and making their cities full of life. The reason for this discrepancy is clear, as Nicas were all too happy to tell me: despite their other drawbacks, the Sandinistas have kept out the drug gangs.If there is any U.S. policy that has done as much damage to Latin America as our immigration policy in recent years, it is the immoral, failed War on Drugs. The drug trade exists because there will always be high demand here in the U.S. (yes, I’m looking at you, coked-out hipsters), and the poorer countries to our south are only doing their job in the most lucrative international market they have access to. Unfortunately, the ultra-violent Mexican drug cartels have spread into Guatemala and Honduras, working with the homegrown criminals (including many former soldiers from the war days) and corrupt politicians and policemen to turn the tiny countries into “narco-fiefdoms.” When I was in Guatemala during their presidential election, everyone talked about their choice between “a murdering general and a crazy narco-governor.” The general won, mainly because he promised to come down hard on the drug gangs, but many people wondered if he was in bed with them too. As the saying goes, “Don’t steal. The government hates competition.” Such is the drug trade, from Guatemala City to Washington.

• Chicken Buses: Making this Interconnected World Go Around
  So…I just looked back on my list and realized that most my points are really depressing. Which isn’t too surprising: Central America is stunningly beautiful, rich in culture and tradition, but when it comes to politics, things aren’t so pretty these days. That said, I want to leave this ridiculously long post on a happy note, and on the same way I left every city in Central America: on a chicken bus.A chicken bus, for those that don’t know, is an old, yellow U.S. school bus that was decommisioned from use back in the States after however many miles, but has found a second life on the streets and highways throughout Central America. It’s not yellow anymore, though. No, these buses are beautifully re-painted with every color imaginable, and they take you to every corner of the country imaginable (including parts on tiny, windy roads that no bus-sized vehicle should probably ever go.) We traveled on these chicken buses, sometimes 100 people deep, with our backpacks alongside massive bushels of corn on the bus roof, through three countries. One of my favorite moments was driving through the small city of Coban in central Guatemala, our red-blue-and-orange bus so packed with campesinos that we had to stand on the three hour drive, the music blasting some terrible evangelical music in Spanish, and I look over and there on the inside of the bus was a bumpersticker that said, “Leave it to Beaver.”From mid-century suburban America to the highlands of Guatemala: that’s what the chicken bus is about. We are all connected in this crazy world, from immigration and drugs to tamales and t-shirts, and nothing represents that better to me than the reused, ridiculously awesome chicken buses of Central America.Rock on, chicken bus, rock on.
  

In all my years of marches and demonstrations, I had never been on a picket line at 3 a.m. Yet here I was on this oh-so-early Tuesday morning, out on a quiet street on Oakland’s waterfront alongside hundreds of my fellow Occupy activists. All of us were cold, tired — and cheering louder than ever. Why the noise? We had just received word that the port authority had cancelled yet another work shift, and the docks would be closed till morning.

“We did it!” a young woman behind me shouted.

And indeed we had — not just here in the Bay Area, but up and down the West Coast, the Occupy movement claimed victory in undoubtedly its boldest action so far.

From San Diego, CA, to Anchorage, AK, and over a dozen cities in between, the Occupy movement staged a coordinated day of action on Monday, December 12, aimed at disrupting the coast’s various ports, dubbed by activists “Wall Street on the Waterfront.” Occupy Oakland had already shut down the Port of Oakland once as part of its general strike of 40,000 people on November 2, and put out the call to action for this protest to our sister Occupy cities. We had done it before locally, but this time, with the national focus and possibility for heightened repression, the stakes were even higher.

Continue reading the full piece at The Progressive.

From the massive student strike at OccupyCal in Berkeley to the police crackdown of the OccupyWallStreet movement’s birthplace in New York City and dozens of actions and headlines in between — from coast to coast, last week was an important, up-and-down week for the growing Occupy movement. Where the movement heads in the weeks and months to come, however, will be even more critical to the fate of this people’s uprising — and possibly to the fate of equality in America. So the eternal question presents itself again: what is to be done?

Someone just sent me a higher-quality video of the piece, which includes some of the subtle (and not-so-subtle) punchlines that the other videos didn’t capture. The introduction is from the great Lynne Savio Hollander, widow of the Free Speech Movement hero whose legacy we were honoring, Mario Savio.

Despite the crackdown at Cal, Oakland, New York, and a dozen other cities this week, the Occupy movement is continuing to grow and build in new, innovative, sometimes complicated ways. We will see (and help determine) what happens, but what I do know is, there’s a new energy in the air and in the streets of America. It’s about time.

So once again, for everyone out there making their voices heard, with or without our Occupying tents, this is for you. When Hope Comes Back.

Last night, I was out on Sproul Plaza at UC-Berkeley, with over 10,000 people reclaiming the space for OccupyCal. I was there to receive the Mario Savio Young Activist Award, which had been scheduled for the same night across the plaza inside Pauley Ballroom. But with thousands of people outside demanding free speech and equal education on the very same steps that Mario Savio had once stood himself, the two events were beautifully combined, and I was able to give my poem outside with the people, right where it belonged.

Here’s some very rough video of the piece, along with the full text below. Long live Occupy!

When Hope Comes Back
(A Poem for the 99%)

when Hope comes back
he will be more than a campaign slogan
and a face on a poster faded red, white, and blue
he will not come from a presidential palace
bought and paid for like a Citibank stock option villa
he will put not forget to put on his walking shoes
and join the picket lines in New York
the bread lines in Baltimore
to shake the calloused hands
of everyone walking by

when Hope comes back
he might be named Barack
but he won’t be named Obama

when Hope comes back
he will be a Black Panther baby
who speaks Spanglish
and cooks Korean tacos
and does 180 sun salutations
to the soundtrack of Zion I
- yes, Hope is hella Bay

when Hope comes back
he will be a UFW farmworker
who loves his fields and his flag
more than he hates his foreman
he will be a runaway foster child
who forgives his parents
he will be an Iraq war veteran
who returns to protest in Oakland again
without tear gas canisters to his head

when Hope comes back
he will come back from the future
in a DeLorean like Michael J. Fox
and show us all the things we’d won
like people swimming across the Rio Grande
for fun rather than survival
and the only student debt being to our livers
rather than to our banks
and then Michael J would take us
for a ride back to the past
and show us this is not our first occupation
Flint, sit-down strikers in ’36
Alcatraz, American Indian Movement in ’69
Sproul Plaza, Free Speech Movement in ’64
and every semester since then that was worth a damn
and reminded Berkeley what it means
to be called Berkeley

when Hope comes back
he will be one of my students
East Asia meets East Oakland
brilliantly cross-continental
even though he hates the ocean
speaks with the wisdom of Buddha and Mac Dre
really, he is my teacher
and I think he knows it
and we’re both ok with that

when Hope comes back
he will actually be a she
because hey, that’s who actually gets shit done
she will be a librarian by day, a DJ by night,
an Occupy activist in between
she will be thick hair and thick hips
and if you try to touch either one
you’ll get a thick hand to the face
when Hope comes back
she’ll show us to burn down the banks in our
hearts and love without lust or profit or restraining orders

when Hope comes back
she will be an OPD cop,
then NYPD, then UCPD,
refusing to follow orders
putting down their riot gear
and picking up a picket sign
cuz when the cops join the 99% they actually belong to
that’s when the banks will have nowhere to hide

when Hope comes back
she will be a midwife
in tune with the moon and the womb
an ancient healer who knows every herb in the redwoods
ready to help us birth a new world
one without bombs or borders or Michelle Bachman
a planet of peoples free to honor the earth
and each other like the God
in whose image we’re still trying to evolve into

when Hope comes back
she will be here
right here, right now
on the streets and plazas and parks
of New York and DC
Milwaukee and Austin
Portland and Nashville
London and Manila and Cairo
San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley, CA
with the people and the hashtags
setting up her tent in the morning
paintings banners in the afternoon
attending ridicously long meetings in the evening
shutting down the port of Oakland
and reminding us all that yes,
Hope still lives here in America
she has always lived here with us

and now she is back before our eyes
marching head high, fist higher
and whispering to the millions amongst her,
“Thank you.
Thank you.
You’re bringing me back.
Take my hand,
feel my pulse joined with yours.
Trust my taste on your tongue,
my strength in your lungs,
and let’s see how far we can go
together.”

Three days before I left for Guatemala back in September, I got a phone call from Lynne Sabio. Lynne is the widow of Mario Sabio, the great activist and founder of the Free Speech Movement at UC-Berkeley in the 1960s that laid the foundation for the anti-war movemment, women’s movement, and many other progressive stuggles. Needless to say, Mario is a hero of mine and many student (and former student) activists. So it made me truly smile when Lynne told me that I, alongside my rock star Youth Speaks poet Christsna Sot and environmental justice activist Ellen Choy, had won this year’s Mario Savio Young Activist Award.
 
It was totally unexpected news, and truth be told, I’m not a big award person (other than the Grammy Awards…but I’m still waiting for my invitation for my hyphy remix of Fiddler on the Roof’s “If I Were a Rich Man”). But hey, if you’re gonna get an award, it might as well be for radical free speech and youth organizing. So next week I’m going to take two buses, a plane, and eventually a beloved BART train to come back to the Bay for a couple days and accept the award in person. I’m working on my song for my acceptance speech right now. Take that, Grammys.  

If you’re in the Bay and free next Tuesday, come up to Berkeley (details below). I’ll be the one wearing the purple bow tie, being 10 times taller than Robert Reich.

Other than that, I’m planning to spend as much time at OccupyOakland as I can. I gotta make up for lost time! I can’t believe folks had the first general strike in 65 years when I was gone…but damn, well freaking done, my friends.
 
Who knows? Maybe the award ceremony will turn into the next #Occupation. 

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Mario Savio Lecture & Young Activist Award Presentation
Tuesday, November 15, 2011 · 8:00 PM
Lecture by Robert Reich, “Class Warfare in America”
Awards presented to Josh Healey, Christsna Sot, and Ellen Choy
Pauley Ballroom, MLK Jr. Student Center, UC Berkeley
Free & open to the public. Doors open at 6:30 PM.
www.savio.org

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