I arrived in Phoenix very very early this morning to do another video screening this afternoon. Actually, I'm in Tempe, the college town on the east side of Phoenix. I woke at 3 am this morning in order to get a ride from Flagstaff to here, since Carly, my host in Flagstaff, was heading to Phoenix airport to get a plane to L.A. It's a beautiful day now that the sun is up and I am killing time, wandering around Tempe till the show, which is at Gentle Strength Coop at 3pm. All the people here in town who set up the show for me are not available.
Last night's screening in Flagstaff was really great, at least compared to the last 2 shows, and it raised as much cash as did the one in San Francisco. I'm really impressed with the strength of the activist community in Flagstaff, which is a pretty small town. I guess there are a lot of progressive students, and a lot of issues people are passionate about there: water issues, native american issues, the public land fee demo thing, which is or was also a big deal in the Northwest, nuclear stuff, and more.
I guess maybe the timing is right, too. It's been over a week since the election and people are perhaps starting to snap out of their shocked depression and starting to get active again, starting to stir out of the disillusioned lethargy which perhaps was the cause for low turnout at my shows in Santa Fe and Albuquerque. Some people in Flagstaff seemed excited, looking forward to people radicalizing even more in the wake of this latest fraud-ridden election fiasco. Learning about the resistance to opressions in Bolivia and elsewhere fits right into this mood, as people start to really consider that more drastic measures than get-out-the-vote campaigns are needed to save our country.
Many of the Flagstaff folks are in the grip of a horrible local situation that I think I should mention here. When Kerry came to Flagstaff in August, several of them showed up in wacky costumes, chanting and singing, to excercise their free speech rights and remind people that Kerry wasn't neccesarily the wonderous answer to all our problems that the DNC would have us believe. They ended up getting attacked by local police and 3 of them were actually arrested and charged with various ridiculous felonies like assaulting a police officer. One of them is still in jail because bail was set at $15,000 that he didn't have. This kind of repression at Kerry campaign events is not a surprise, and we saw similar things in Portland, but not, I think, to this degree. Rudy, one of the people who arranged for my screening in Flagstaff, was one of the others charged, and he has had to change his whole life in order to deal with his legal defense. He's gone from a very simple lifestyle, basically supporting himself through dumpster-diving, to doing 12-hour shifts waiting tables in order to pay for his lawyers, extra rent (his housemate is the guy still in jail), and other expenses incurred as fallout from the arrests. This kind of thing is just infuriating. I'm sure that eventually they will prevail, because the police don't have a leg to stand on, but it just sucks to have to deal with this kind of totally undeserved bullshit. I guess Flagstaff cops are as bad as Portland's.
Anyway, it's really exciting and great to be meeting all these great activists in the Southwest and learn what struggles they are involved in, and share with them what's happening where I live and what the common concerns are. I feel once again that I'm an agent of network-strengthing again, like I was in South America, a contributor to the complexity and emergent behavior of the global progressive movement.
Posted by steev at Noviembre 13, 2004 10:59 AM