Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, where have you been, my darling young one?
My body should ache right now.
I'm not yet thirty, but already I can feel my youth slipping away. I have muscle pains I never had before, and I can't have more than a couple drinks without my head and stomach making me pay hell for it the next day, and the last time I tried to sleep on a hardwood floor of a friend's apartment, I had a bruise on my hip that took a week to heal. So sleeping on a cold marble floor should be out of the question.
Yet on the night of Saturday, February 19th I slept on the floor of the Capital Building of the State of Wisconsin and suffered no ill effects. I didn't get much sleep, it's true, but later I felt no aches in my back or hips. No pinched neck or frozen shoulders. In fact, my body felt better than it had in months, maybe in years. I almost felt my age.
As anyone who reads my blogs knows, I have an extremely dark view of our contemporary society, which I have increasingly come to see as deranged and psychotic. And it was in fact the malignant manifestation of this psychopathy, that sickness in the Wisconsin state legislature that lead me to make my bed on the floor of the Capital Rotunda. But that is why I now feel better about my country, my world, and indeed my species than I have in years. Because sleeping along side me where over four hundred Americans representing almost every walk of life who are just as Fucking Pissed about the Current Order of Things as I am. And after day broke over the Capital dome on Sunday morning our numbers would grow, until at noon that four hundred would number nearly one hundred thousand.
I've always been at odds with the activist left. Even though my politics are best described as Libertarian-Socialist (an ideology who's most famous intellectual is Noam Chomsky) me and other lefties out in the same area of the political spectrum just don't quite see eye to eye. Too often I've felt their actions amount to some romanticized nostalgia trip; humping some glorious vision of the past with no regard for long term strategic political thinking, or the meat hook realities that await anyone able to supplant the Capitalist System. They put on Protest Theater instead of actual protest; all pre-scripted and predictable. If they hold non-violent protests than the Kingdom of Terror presents it as evidence that we are in fact not living in the criminal state we most clearly live in. If they resist with force then is merely further justify the existence of the Security State and it's elaborate pageants of Security Theater.
Well, not this time. This the protests were real, the solidarity was real, nothing was preordained and the possibilities are endless as long as we have the determination to see them through.
I saw people from all walks of life join together in the capital together to fight for each others Human rights and basic dignity; to stand up and resist the brutal class war (which more closely resembling economic genocide) of the American Middle Class. There was nothing corny or dowdy about referring to each other as Sister or Brother; everyone who had come out to demonstrate, many for days at a time, was my family. It feels very weird, savagely surreal, for me to even write a sentence like that. I'm a misanthrope with a weakness for assuming the worst about people, not because I'm vindictive or hateful, but because the sad reality of my life to date has more or less proved this to be the most grounded and realistic stance to take. But for the first time I can remember I honestly felt like there might be more people in the world who are genuinely good than those who are loathsomely self-interested or simply apathetic; that in fact there are thousands of decent human beings who are as feed up and angry as I've been at the deranged nature of our society.
I didn't think anything could wake Americans up to what's been going on in our country or force us to overcome our petty differences and unite for the Common Good. But I saw off-duty cops and prison guards stand shoulder to shoulder with anarchopunks and communists; I saw strangers treat each other with politeness and care, not out of any normative social expectation, but because it was what they genuinely felt for each other. And all I could think was: Hey, maybe Humans have a chance to survive after all. Maybe we even deserve to.
There's no telling exactly where this is all headed. Scott Walker is a loathsome crony capitalist who isn't qualified to manage a bodega let along a state. If this bill, a piece of pure legislative fascism in the most literal sense, passes it will cause the sort of social unrest this country has not seen since the end of the Vietnam War. And what started in Madison is already spreading to other states across the Rust Belt as newly elected Teabagger governments attempt to institute similarly regressive measures.
Will working people and the middle class finally set aside their internal differences and work together? Will the American Left be able to overcome it's tendency to factionalize and get bogged down in minutia? It's too soon to say. But the days of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to an end. The battle for democracy and the economic survival of the American People is finally joined. The fate of the country and indeed the World rests on its outcome.
Oh, what’ll you do now, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, what’ll you do now, my darling young one?
I’m a-goin’ back out ’fore the rain starts a-fallin’
I’ll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest
Where the people are many and their hands are all empty
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison
Where the executioner’s face is always well hidden
Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten
Where black is the color, where none is the number
And I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it
And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it
Then I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin’
But I’ll know my song well before I start singin’
And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard
It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall
Originally published at Let's give it back to the squares