Dear fellow activist facebook friends:

We are in an unprecedented moment of energy and possibility.  In all my years of activism, I’ve never seen a time in this country where there were marches – big marches -- every night for weeks.  It’s inspiring and heartening and also a little scary and intimidating.  The scary and intimidating part for those of us who are not Black, and even more for those of us who are white, is the ever-present danger that we will overstep or misstep, miss our cue, give support where we shouldn’t or say something meant to be supportive that comes off as condescending, arrogant, appropriative, dismissive, dogmatic, ignorant, racist, idiotic, …  If you’re like me, you’re feeling this may be the moment you’ve been waiting for, and that you might end up being told you don’t have a place in it.

Doubtless we will be told that.  But here’s the thing – other people will tell us the opposite.  And that’s okay.  At times like this, a lot of things get said.  And a lot of them are true, and a lot of the things that are true are also contradictory, because there are many many truths.  I’ve read articles by Black people telling white people the only sign we should carry is #BlackLivesMatter.  And I’ve read things by Black people who don’t like #BlackLivesMatter.  I’ve read eloquent defenses of property damage and harsh condemnations saying it’s all white anarchists doing it and putting Black people at risk.  I’ve been at actions where organizers nearly came to blows over whether to have a die-in; some people felt it was too passive, and others that it powerfully symbolizes the incessant killing.

It’s tempting to just sit back, take it all in and not say anything.  That’s mostly what I’ve been doing, and it’s a comfortable position – hey, I’m just here to support and listen, it’s not my place to say anything.  But there’s a fine line between being respectful and dodging responsibility.

I appreciate so much the photos and news reports and links to great analysis my extremely attentive and prolific friends have been posting in the last few weeks.  I would be so much less informed without you.  I’ve also seen a few things in the last week that made me uncomfortable.  I’m not posting any links ’cause this is not about calling people out.  It goes without saying, you don’t have to listen to me.  If it resonates, great.  If it doesn’t, keep doing what you’re doing.  Don’t unfriend me and I won’t unfriend you.

Here are a few things I wish my facebook friends would not do:

• Compare one group’s action to another’s, saying, “This is more moving than this.”  It’s not a competition.
• Put down activists who choose nonviolence.
• Put down activists who damage property, as long as they don’t jeopardize others.
• Assert that those doing things you don't like at protests are cops, unless you know it, like in last night’s gun-toting CHP incident.
• Call a white person being choked by cops an example of white privilege just because he didn’t die.  No one should be choked.
• Suggest that college students who get raped get too much attention, because non-college students are slightly more likely to be raped.
• Pit victims of US drones against victims of ISIS beheading.  They’re both war crimes.
• Trash Malala Yousafzai as a Western puppet and then fawn all over her when you find out she’s a socialist.
• Call spending two hours in handcuffs and not being allowed to go to the bathroom “torture.”
• Post those privacy notices that don’t do anything.

I could go on but that’s enough.  Keep those links coming!  And see you in the streets (as soon as it stops storming).

Always,

Kate

An Unlikely Defense of Anonymous

Many years ago, I was picketing Jessica McClintock’s boutique on Union Square in San Francisco with about 25 other people.  McClintock makes these prom/bridesmaid dresses that look like they belong in Gone With the Wind, and she had contracted with a local sweatshop to manufacture them.  The contractor had gone out of business and disappeared without paying the workers, who were all Asian immigrant women.  A group called Asian Immigrant Women’s Advocates, AIWA, helped the workers organize to convince McClintock to pay the back wages and accept responsibility for the conditions of the women sewing her clothes.  Several years after this particular picket, the workers finally won their demands.

AIWA had a lot of funny chants for these actions.  In addition to the old standby, “Jessie, Jessie, you’re no good, pay your workers like you should,” my personal favorite was “Greedy, tacky and unfair, I wouldn’t buy her underwear.”  Another one, adapted from what I believe was a then-popular football cheer, went “U-G-L-Y Jesse has no alibi, she’s ugly! She’s ugly!”  (According to Yahoo Answers, the cheer originated with a movie called “Wildcats” in which Goldie Hawn plays a football coach.  Never heard of it but think I’ll rent it soon.)  Now I was never a big fan of that one but in the mouths of Asian women workers, it was pretty clear that UGLY referred to not paying your workers, and maybe a little dig at the clothes, which are unquestionably hideous (see photographic evidence above).  But some men on the picket line decided to amplify the message, yelling, “Yeah, she’s downright homely.  I wouldn’t touch her with a ten-foot pole.”  These men, I might mention, would not have been mistaken for Robert Redford on the street.

My friend and I told them to stop, that the chant was not an excuse for misogyny.  I don’t remember if they did or didn’t.

I do remember what happened when we tried to talk to some straight men at an antiwar march in 1991.  This was during the first US invasion of Iraq and they were carrying a big cartoon cutout depicting George HW Bush f**king Saddam Hussein in the ass (raping? sodomizing? hard to know what to call it, but we did not want to look at it).  We told them it was homophobic and offensive.  They’re response was something very pithy like, “Get lost, bitches.”

My friends and I used to get in knock-down-drag-out fights with members of the so-called “Revolutionary Communist Party” back in the eighties and nineties when their official position was that gay people were a product of bourgeois decadence and would go to reeducation camps after the revolution.  During one of those arguments, the poor guy who had made the mistake of trying to sell us his newspaper told my friend Daniel to “stop thinking with his genitals.”

I could go on and on but you get the point.  I’ve never been part of, nor heard of, a social movement that didn’t have to struggle with misogyny, homophobia, ableism (oh, sorry, we can’t hold our meetings in an accessible space), racism, classism, fat oppression.  There are two simple reasons for that: the movements take place in our society, which is rife with all those ways of hurting one another; and they are made up of human beings, who are (mis)educated and affected by our society.

These moments reeled through my head as I read the hit piece on Anonymous in the current issue of The Nation, which was one of the more widely shared links in my activist circles at the end of last week.  Like many of my friends, I was initially gratified to read all the dirt Adrian Chen dishes about the hacker group.  I’ve never loved technofixes for social problems.  I’ve written before about the problems I have with hacking as a major form of activism:  it’s solitary, covert and expert-driven.  The very Anonymous nature of Anonymous and its ilk make it virtually impossible for them to spark a movement, because where would you find them? For those of us who are not supergeeks, there’s no way to join.  And yes, the people who are supergeeks are most likely to be young, white men who play the kinds of video games that produced GamerGate.

I don’t like Guy Fawkes masks; I think they’re creepy and I don’t want to be in street actions with people who don’t trust me enough to let me see their faces.  I also don’t like people who claim to “be” the movement or its leaders, as I have heard Anonymous people do – or more accurately, people who claim to be Anonymous, because of course we cannot know who really is Anonymous.

So it was very tempting to join the chorus of, “Look, see, they really are Nazis and misogynist trolls,” let’s disavow them.

And yet, in a cooler moment, I feel Chen goes too far.  His piece is called, “The truth about Anonymous’s Activism,” but it should be called “Some (more) truths about Anonymous’s activism.”  It’s interesting and important to know that one of the first Anonymous groups “invaded the online teens’ game Habbo Hotel and formed their matching avatars into a giant swastika while spewing racial epithets.”

Anonymous, by its name and its principles, is a loose network with no gatekeepers and no accountability.  That’s a good enough reason for me not to work with them, and to discourage anyone who listens to me from doing it.  But as the examples I started this piece with attest, Anonymous doesn’t have a monopoly on people sincere activists shouldn’t be associated with.  People were raped at Occupy camps.  One of the founders of Common Ground became (or turned out to be) a government agent.  Moreover, many respected activists have dubious pasts.  Dan Ellsberg worked at the Pentagon.  Ed Snowden donated to Ron Paul’s campaign.  Diane Ravitch promoted charter schools.  The question can’t be who they were, it’s got to be who they are now.

Hacking is well-known as a male-dominated and white-dominated culture and much of Anonymous seems to fit right in.  But hackers are also doing some of the most innovative and accessible community-building projects around, in the form of “hackerspaces” where they share skills, equipment and space, often free or very cheap.  Noisebridge in San Francisco has an anti-harassment policy on the website for its 5200-square foot space which “contains an electronics lab, machine shop, sewing/crafting supplies, two classrooms, conference area, library, darkroom, and kitchen.”  Oakland’s “inclusive hacker space”, SudoRoom, is part of a new “collective of collectives” that just got a glowingwriteup in the East Bay Express.  I’m eager to check it out although the one time I was there for a meeting, when I think they’d just moved in, I found it about the moldiest place I’ve ever been. 

Anonymous has done some messed up things and they’ve done some very good things (like exposing evidence of the Steubenville rape and taking down the sites of credit card companies that refused to process donations to Wikileaks).  I think denouncing Anonymous at a time when the FBI is using it to stir up fear and justify bringing more “intelligence specialists” to Ferguson is a mistake. Call them out on their shit, yes, but don’t hit them when they’re down.  But we outside agitators need to stick together.

Toxic Twitter Feminism and the Long View of History

A bit over 20 years ago, I attended a conference at San Francisco’s Mission High School called Dynamics of Color.  Organized by a multiracial planning group over many months, it was a two-day extravaganza for lesbians to grapple with the myriad ways that racism divides us and gets in the way of our organizing for liberation.

I was there with half a dozen other members of LAGAI, which then stood for Lesbians And Gays Against Intervention – we’ve since gone through a few reworkings of the full name, which is now LAGAI – Queer Insurrection.  Since our mission statement, since the group’s founding in 1983, included, “To confront and challenge racism within the lesbian/gay community,” we were all looking forward to this conference as something historic and important.

As part of the introductions, we were given guidelines for calling out and responding to racial/racist dynamics that arose during the conference.  To concretize the discussion, the organizers put on a role-play that they said was based on something that actually happened during the conference organizing.  The role-play was a meeting.  A white woman announced that the outreach group had finished a huge mailing the night before, sending announcements (snail mail, that’s how we did it in those days, folding and stamping hundreds of letters and separating them by zip code and sending them off to physical mail boxes) to hundreds of organizations.  A mixed-race woman asked if a certain organization was on the list.  The white woman stammered.  She couldn’t remember, and she didn’t have the list with her.  She’d left it in the car, which was parked blocks away and she didn’t want to go get it.  The interchange culminated with the white woman crying and the women of color explaining, one by one, why that was an inappropriate and manipulative response.  Eventually she stumbled over an insincere apology, and that was the end of the role-play.

I felt a gnawing in the pit of my stomach.  Not because I had done something like that.  Not because I could identify with the white woman screwing up, crying in a meeting and being bawled out for it, although I could.  I didn’t believe the scenario, and I felt that it augured badly for the conference.  I discussed it later with my closest friend, who had the same reaction – that role-play seemed like a straw dog.  My friend said, “Every white woman I know would have brought the list.”

“Yes, I said.  She would say, ‘Oh, you want to see the list?  Here it is.  Please, feel free to add to it,’ and she would produce a list of ten single-spaced pages containing every group you ever heard of and lots that you never did, overwhelming you with her competence, and your insignificance.

Finally the agonizing preliminaries were done and BarbaraSmith, founder of Kitchen Table Press was introduced as the keynote speaker.

“Sometimes,” she began (I’m paraphrasing, of course, this is all at a remove of two decades) “I regret the day we ever decided to do anti-racism work in the lesbian community.”

I sensed a collective gasp.  She couldn’t be saying, “You brought me all this way to tell you you’re wasting your time.”  She wasn’t, exactly, but she was cautioning us against spending all our time focusing on the small harms we do to each other and losing sight of the bigger harms caused by the military-prison-industrial-educational complex.

“When I look around,” she said, “the people running the schools, the jails, the FBI, the Pentagon, they’re mostly not lesbians.”

That was truer then than maybe it is now, but the principle remains worth holding onto, as discussions of toxic twitter feminism begin to devour all the air in our intellectual atmosphere.  The opportunism of mainstream white feminists is a problem.  It certainly bears some of the blame for our failure to build a revolutionary, broad-based women’s movement confronting inequality, colonialism and imperialism.  But the lion’s share of responsibility for that failure doesn’t lie with feminism.  Feminism is not responsible for the backlash against it from Reagan and Schlafly and Cruz and Huckabee and and and and.  It’s not responsible for the rightward tornado that has swept the country and the world since circa 1973.  Mainstream feminism has not been as progressive as it should and could have been, but it has been consistently more progressive than the rest of the country.  Ultimately, the radical movements that should have been pushing on the mainstream of feminism and everything else did not fail to mobilize mass support because of feminism.  We failed all on our own, with lots of help from various forms or counterintelligence but also helped by our own unforgiving cultures.

In the early nineties, after volunteering with San FranciscoWomen Against Rape for eight years, I was tired of constantly hearing about what a problem white women were in the organization.  I felt stuck, like people expected me to do something I didn’t know how to do, to be something I wasn’t, and if I asked what it was, I was shirking responsibility for confronting my own racism.  I decided the best thing I could do was remove my toxic presence from the organization.

I wasn’t trying to be petulant.  I really thought I was doing the right thing.  If I couldn’t be part of the solution, at least I could stop being part of the problem.  I put more of my energy into ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) and LGBT antiwar organizing.  When ACT UP San Francisco imploded, due to the unwillingness of some of the middle- and upper-middle-class white gay men to consider racism, sexism and classism for even one precious minute, I went back to SFWAR with a new appreciation for an environment where at least, our divisions were seen as something to be confronted.  I learned that I could survive criticism and even grow from it.  I learned not to take every criticism of white feminist culture personally.  Most of all, I learned that the culture of an organization really can change, if there’s enough unity and commitment from the people in it.

I also made friends, both white women and women of color, who helped me to take those steps, and feel supported in my learning process.  That’s a piece that can easily be lost in movements where ideological purity is highly valued.  Of the people I’ve known who used to be political and no longer are, nearly every one has said the reason they stopped was because they felt unvalued and unsupported by their fellow activists.

When I hear about Susan B. Anthony’s racism, or Betty Friedan’s classism and anti-lesbianism, Gloria Steinem’s Zionism and Islamophobia, Margaret Sanger’s pro-eugenics beliefs, I’m mortified.  I don’t want to be tainted by those positions and it’s tempting to follow the trend of defining them only by their failures.  Yet I don’t define Malcolm X or Huey P. Newton by their sexism, or MLK by his caving into homophobia and red-baiting.

Recently, I heard an incredible radio documentary by Fran Luck, a producer on Joy of Resistance at WBAI New York.  It traces the founding of the National Organization for Women to the exclusion of women from the podium at the 1963 March on Washington.  In the aftermath, African American women leaders organized, a woman named Pauli Murray wrote an op-ed which Betty Friedan read and reached out and suggested that they have a meeting in Washington, D.C. to form a national organization for women’s equality.  This history doesn’t wipe out the ways in which Friedan later narrowed the scope of women’s issues to those that most affected white middle-class women.  But it’s interesting to me that we all know the later history, and almost no one knows the founding story.

My friend Carwil Bjork-James writes helpfully:

Anger can motivate awesome work and can motivate toxic and destructive work. It can be clarifying and illuminating, or convince us that our closest friends are just out to get us. But in expressing our anger about pop culture (that is, about people who made art that reinforces our (or others’) oppression, rather than directly oppressing us), I would suggest these propositions:

--Strategically deployed anger ultimately seeks to enlarge the community seeking social transformation, not to split it. 

--Publicly expressed anger depends on establishing that it is justified to make it strategic.

--Even justified anger needs calm, patient work of educating current and potential allies.

I’ve been one of the people who liberally dispensed anger when people didn’t live up to my highest standards of anti-oppression politics, who tolerated no middle ground the cutting edge issues of any given day.  At the time, I believed that was necessary and important for pushing movements forward, and I’m not going to say that it wasn’t.  It’s only in hindsight that I think, maybe I helped drive people away from the movement.  Maybe they were people who didn’t belong there.  But maybe some of them were people who could have been helped to see how their behavior, or their use of privilege or their short-sighted vision was detrimental to our mutual goals.  My own politics have certainly evolved over the years, yet at times I casually judged some people as not worth educating.

I will never regret trying to make the movements I worked in as radical, as inclusive, as responsive to real people’s needs as they could be.  But I do regret some of the strategies I’ve used.  As I get older, I realize I want my contribution to be the people I brought into activism, not the people I turned away or turned off.

Hard as it is for women in their twenties and thirties to believe, multicultural feminism is still in its infancy.  Less time has passed since the founding of Ms. Magazine (42 years) than it took the first wave of US feminists to win the right to vote (71 years).  But as I follow the angst of online feminists trying to walk that line between grinding each other down and letting each other off the hook, I remember Barbara Smith's words all those years ago and I can't help thinking, "We haven't come very far."

The Only Thing We Have to Fear

Remember when we had nothing to fear but “fear itself”?

Okay, that was an effort to stop a run on banks, maybe not intended to express a broad social outlook.  Nonetheless, it conveys an important proposition:  the role of government is to calm the public, convince us that everything is under control.  It suggests something I learned in civics class long ago – that a democratic government derives power from trust rather than fear.

We live in a very different time.  The role of government, for quite some time, has been to create a climate of fear.  Rather than keeping people calm, our government exists to fan the flames of fear – fear of the threat from Outside, fear of one another, and fear of government reprisal if we step out of line.  In fact, it doesn’t much matter which we are more afraid of – Them or The Others, as long as we are sufficiently afraid.

The fact that we are a fear-based society creates a paradox for those who are trying to alert us to the menace of government overreach:  their revelations may end up helping the institutions they are trying to bring down.

Laura Poitras, Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald and Julian Assange are willing to spend their lives in exile, burying every keystroke on their computers in layers of encryption.  Laura Poitras, in an extraordinary interview with Peter Maass, says she avoids using a cell phone and spends a day cleaning or securing her electronics before she travels.  For the work she does, that makes sense.  For many of us, it doesn’t.

I predict that the revelations will lead to a heightened security culture in movements, and in my opinion, that’s part of what the government wants.  Some activists, especially young ones, in my experience, like the idea of being involved in something dangerous.  It makes activist drudge work feel exciting and important, and knowing the security culture – whether it’s PGP (Pretty Good Privacy, a no-doubt-passé encryption software) or Guy Fawkes masks – is like a secret handshake.

But for those of us who are stopping by meetings or actions between our paid job and our volunteer job, our first paid job and our second, or our paid job and putting the kids to bed, it adds a level of complication we don’t have time for.  I barely – as lots of you know – get around to answering emails from friends and family.  I certainly don’t have hours every day to spend downloading, updating and learning to use encryption software.  I don’t want to dismantle my cell phone at a meeting to plan a public demonstration or a banner drop.  I think masks at demonstrations make us look shady and scary.  And the Guy Fawkes thing is just creepy.

For my coworker, who tends to be paranoid anyway, the exposure of the NSA’s spying program convinced him that if he signs an online petition he’ll go to prison.  He’s an extreme case, but it’s not hard to convince ordinary Americans that the cost of political activism is too high.

The NSA and their ilk don’t care if I don’t join a demonstration because I don’t want to encrypt my computer, you don’t join because you don’t like the people telling you to encrypt your computer, Debbie doesn’t join because the people encrypting their computers suspect her of being a government agent, and Tom doesn’t join because he’s afraid the government will put him in prison.  As long as we all stay home, they’re happy.  If enough of us don’t, that’s when they get busy using their security culture to turn our security culture against us.  I’m not going to go into how that happens – I’ve written about it plenty and so have many others.  It happened with Occupy.  It happened with the“Anti-Globalization” movement of the early 2000s.  It happened with ELF and ALF and you can bet it’s happening somewhere now.

I’m not saying whistleblowers shouldn’t keep blowing the whistle.  I’m not saying we shouldn’t keep listening to what they have to say.  I’m just saying we have to figure out how to absorb it and keep moving forward.  The fact is that all the prodigious spying that Homeland Security AND the Wall Street banks engaged in didn’t prevent Occupy Wall Street from pulling off huge disruptive actions.  All across the country, people planned actions, including major port shutdowns, in General Assemblies in public parks, and no one was sent to Guantanamo.  (In one infamous infiltration case, police involvement led to the charges being dismissed against Texas activists.)  For all their sophisticated spying equipment, the government was no match for the people, and it never is when we believe in ourselves.

What it was able to do, as so often in the past, was use fear of counterintelligence to drive wedges between activists.  In Oakland, core organizers assaulted each other in public, and a media collective branded a Palestinian activist a terrorist.  COINTELPRO?  We’ll never know, but if so, security culture didn’t help us – and Occupy Oakland was a hotbed of security culture.

For activists, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

Strong to the Finnish - Commies and Finns and Jews, O My!

A couple months ago I heard a guy named Michael Kazin interviewed on the radio.  He’d written a book about how left-wing movements in the United States, despite appearances of having failed dismally at most of what they tried to accomplish, actually significantly influenced the politics and culture of the nation.  I was skeptical – don’t we have the most entrenched plutocracy in history, with skyrocketing inequality, deep-seated racism and widespread misery mitigated only by our position as a global empire with unprecedented firepower and technology?  Nonetheless, I thought the book would cheer me up and I had an Amazon gift card to use so I bought it.

American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation was interesting but of course practically every chapter ended with “They failed to realize their goals but did have a social impact,” which for me blunted the feel-good experience I was hoping to have.  The main lesson I drew from it was that nearly all mass left-wing movements in this country have sprung from immigrant or African American communities.  That in turn made me reflect on how effectively the U.S. elite was from the beginning and remains to this day able to substitute white racial solidarity for class solidarity across racial lines.  (That has made me watch with new enthusiasm the increasing militancy and effective action of the Dreamers and other immigrant organizers.)

But leaving aside that sweeping generalization, by far the most interesting piece of information in the book was this:  In 1923, 40% of the membership of the Communist Party of the United States were Finnish – the largest ethnic component with about 7000 members.

Huh?  What about the received wisdom that the core of the Party were Jews?

Well, timing is everything, for one.  In the late twenties, about half the Party membership was Jewish, a fact apparently lamented by the leadership, which felt that would keep it from developing an “American” identity.  To counter that problem, says Kazin, no Jew was ever elected to lead the national party in its heyday.  There was a Finnish general secretary – Gus Hall (born Arvo Gustav Halberg).  (As it happens, just before reading the Kazin book I read the autobiography of Peggy Dennis (born Regina Karasick), who told the story of how Hall finagled to assume the leadership over the dying body of her husband, Eugene Dennis (she was Jewish, he wasn’t).)  There was, apparently, in the twenties, something of a battle between Jews and Finns for the soul (or for control) of the Party.

That aside, I didn’t even know there were 7000 Finns in the U.S. in 1923.  In fact, I never thought about there being a Finnish community at all, though why would there not be?  I started reading up on them.  In the process I found out most of what I thought I knew about Finland and its neighbors was false.

Before I started, what I knew about Finland was:

They have the “best school system” (whatever that means) in the world.  They provide free meals at school and kids don’t learn to read until they’re seven.  About two-thirds of kids go to college and only the top 10% of college students get to become teachers.  (That stuff is true, as far as I know.)

They speak an idiosyncratic language unrelated to any other European language (false: it’s related to Estonian, Hungarian and some other Baltic languages like Livonian, Votic, Karelian, Veps, and Ingrian).

The scene in the movie “Reds” where Diane Keaton scales snow-covered cliffs to crawl over the Finnish border into the Soviet Union was historically inaccurate.

Here’s what I learned from my research:

Sweden – known for its excellent health care and social welfare programs, home of the Right Livelihood Award and Ingmar Berman, was a major and pretty vicious imperial power from the thirteenth through the eighteenth centuries.  Swedish crusaders invaded Finland on their way to Russia, and for four centuries frequently battled Russia, and sometimes Poland and Denmark as well, for control over Finland and other parts of the Baltic.  Sweden moved settlers into southern and western Finland, and the kings gave land grants to their allies in Finland’s coastal areas, thus creating a Swedish-speaking Finnish elite.

The Swedish empire lost big during the Napoleonic wars, and Sweden ceded Finland to Russia, which controlled it until Lenin recognized Finland’s independence in December 1917.  The Russian general strike and attempted socialist revolution of 1905 had a counterpart in Finland.  Some Finnish socialists made their way to the U.S. in the aftermath of that revolution, as did some Russian Jewish socialists.  Others fled to escape increasing conscription into the Tsar’s army – the same threat which brought my grandfather to this country.

In 1906, the Tsar implemented some reforms in efforts to forestall future uprisings.  One of those established the Finnish national Parliament and the Finns insisted that it be elected through universal suffrage, making it the second country (after New Zealand) to give women the right to vote.

The period between 1870 and 1930 is known as the “Great Migration” of Finns to North America.  They concentrated in the upper Midwest, especially Michigan, where they currently constitute 16% of the population of the Upper Peninsula.  There’s a television show broadcast there called “Finland Calling.”

Many became mineworkers and steelworkers, and they were heavily organized by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).  When 160 IWW activists, including Wobbly leader Big Bill Haywood were arrested and charged with treason during World War I, five of the defendants were Finns.

The Finnish Socialist Federation (FSF) affiliated with the Socialist Party in 1908, at which time they made up 12% of the Party’s members nationwide.  In 1922, the FSF (later the Finnish Workers Federation) changed its allegiance to the Communist Party, which was then called the Workers’ Party.

The U.S. government, at the deportation trial of labor organizer John Swan, introduced the argument that Finns were actually related to Mongolians, therefore were subject to the Asian Exclusion Act.

After the Russian Revolution, about 10,000 “Red Finns” left the United States and Canada to settle in Finnish areas of the Soviet Union.

Not actually Berkeley - it's Butte, Montana
courtesy drbutoni

In the first half of the twentieth century, the West Berkeley area around University and San Pablo was known as Finntown. There never were really that many Finns there – only about 650 at its peak, but they built institutions including the Finnish Hall at Tenth and Addison, where we used to hold various radical meetings in the 1980s.  Finns also started the Berkeley Consumers’ Cooperative Stores, which when I moved to Berkeley in 1980 had four massive stores (down from a high of twelve) – groceries at Shattuck and Cedar (now Andronico’s), Ashby and Telegraph (now Whole Foods), University and California (now vacant, after sojourns as Living Foods and I can't remember what other chain) and a hardware store on University.

Famous Finnish Americans include actors Matt Damon and Christine Lahti (whose grandmother, Augusta Lahti, was an early American feminist), Clan of the Cave Bear author Jean Auel, and Dr. Amy Kaukonen, who in 1921 became the first woman elected mayor of an Ohio town (Fairport).

Newtown, Occupy and The Book of Mormon

1.  When I first heard about the school shootings in Newtown, I didn’t have a particularly strong reaction.  I saw the headlines, I saw the number 20, then it became 26, but I didn’t read the details.  When a friend said on the phone, “That’s so sad,” I agreed without really thinking about it.

Friday evening I went to a meeting at a café.  The Palestinian owner served my wine.  I noticed he looked upset.

“How are you?” I asked and he said, “Not very good.”

I asked why and he pointed to the television.  Military guys were moving around ambulances and at first I thought something must have happened in Palestine.  But the words on the screen said it was Connecticut.

He has an 18-year-old daughter.

It was only then that I stopped to feel the news.

 

Omar al Masharawi, killed by Israeli shelling
in Gaza, November 14

2.  The mainstream media is nonstop funerals, speculation about the shooter, debates on gun violence, tedious interviews with the same law enforcement people and politicians.  The progressive media has moved on to speculations about how different the discourse would be if the victims or the perpetrator had been people of color, at home or abroad.  They remind us of all the deaths we’re not grieving, from kids killed by gun violence in Chicago (117) to kids killed by drones in Pakistan (168) to kids killed in last month’s Israeli bombing of Gaza (30) (read their names).

These are totally valid things to remind us of, fair and even necessary questions to raise.  Usually I’d be right there with them.  But the efforts at parallelism are making me uncomfortable.

I think that’s because it emphasizes the profound alienation we leftists feel from the rest of our society.  It feels like we want to wallow in our alienation and fling it in people’s faces.

And I can’t help feeling that wallowing in alienation is what brought Adam Lanza to the point where he could think it was right to kill 20 children and 6 women.

Aren’t drones the ultimate expression of the alienation our society promotes?  It’s a form of warfare that alienates the actor from their actions, the shooter from the target, the person from their compassion. I don’t want to encourage any more alienation, by seeming to criticize people for their emotional response to the suffering of other parents.

I know that’s not what my friends and fellow leftists are aiming for.  They want people to feel the same compassion for the parents in Gaza and Pakistan and Oakland that they feel for the parents of Newtown.  But I can’t help feeling that heaping negative information onto people’s consciousness will only encourage them to distance more, to dull their awareness of other people.

For years, I believed that if only people knew what was happening, knew the cost of our policies, they would care, and they would do something.  But the evidence is that it doesn’t work that way.  What it usually takes for people to change their positions or their actions is deep personal contact with someone who is hurting.

Would white Americans feel the pain of Palestinian parents if they could see a Palestinian father grieving for the families in Newtown?

 

3.  In my writing class on Saturday, we discussed the first few chapters of my novel, Murder Under the Bridge.  Most people found the American peace activist highly annoying.  (Everything I do to try to make her more sympathetic seems to have the opposite effect.)

A young woman said, “I knew a lot of people like her in college.  They all went into the Peace Corps.”

“Yes,” said the teacher, “people who go into the Peace Corps are usually annoying.”

“They’re idealists,” someone else said.  “And idealists are annoying.”

That’s true, I realized.  In our culture, idealists are considered very annoying.  Why?  Because their refusal to be suitably alienated makes us question our own alienation?

 

4.  A friend and I saw The Book of Mormon on Thursday night.  (Please do not ask how much we paid!)  It’s hilarious.  It’s also deeply offensive on so many levels: casually racist, sexist, making jokes about things that aren’t funny like AIDS and rape.  A lot of its comedy is mean-spirited, but it’s sharp and the music and dancing is incredible. I couldn’t decide which I was more ashamed of: enjoying it or criticizing its political incorrectness. I’m pretty sure the fact that it’s such a huge hit says something about how we can do such terrible things to each other, not to mention those we consider Other.  Cynicism has become our religion.  Idealists are annoying.  Alienation is our god.

 

5.  Karl Marx predicted that under capitalism, workers would “inevitably lose control of their lives by losing control over their work.”  But Marx did not see capitalism continuing for this long.  He foresaw that the working class would rise up and reassert control over their lives through socialism.  Aren’t these mass shootings, at their most basic level, a response to the prolonged alienation of people from our labor, our environment and each other?

But a transition to socialism, whether by revolution or some more gradual means, can only take place if the alienation that separates us from each other is somehow lessened or challenged.

Occupy was the answer.  People were coming together, relating without the mediation of wages and commodities, representation and hierarchy.  That’s why it had to be so swiftly and thoroughly repressed.  It might also be why the crime rate in Oakland declined during the encampment at Oscar Grant Plaza.  But the repression succeeded.  The new manifestations of Occupy, smaller, targeted campaigns for foreclosure defense, debt relief, labor support, are great but they do not offer that broad, easy access to an alternative vision of what our society can be.

What the brief flame that was Occupy/Liberate/Decolonize did was cut through the cynicism that says that idealism is just annoying.  It made a space for ideals and the people who hold to them to be loved and cherished.

 

6.  Today is the Solstice, the End of the Mayan Calendar, The Great Turning.  Let it be a turning toward a world in which idealism is cherished, not annoying.