An Open Letter to the Protesters, Rioters, and Otherwise Impassioned Resistors of 2020

Notes on Creativity, Self-care and Being Fucked Up in the Head

First, I have a confession to make: I haven’t been at the protests. I’ve been watching, proud and impressed, as you all have really put yourselves on the line over your beliefs —ultimately simple humanitarian truths, that we all have the right to peace and security in this country. We should all believe in this, who profess to love this country and its people. And, while the incidental damage to individuals’ property (where it occurred), is something only an idiot would endorse, I know that it’s predominately daytripping thugs and provocateur infiltrators perpetrating in that way.

The federal building, of course, is a perfect physical proxy for the State. A logical target of your ire, at a series of governments who’ve pretended far too long there’s something about police murdering unarmed citizens that is simply to be expected. Also legitimate are the police buildings, Municipal buildings, statues of slavers, etc. —this is your public, too, after all. I keep bringing it up in conversations online, “Remember the Rodney King beating”? In 1991, the man was savagely beaten by police after a car chase, and it was caught on video, and shared with the world. The whole nation stopped, and voiced its outrage at the wanton violence these police indulged in. It was obvious to all who witnessed it —those cops were getting something more out of it, than justice.

But Rodney King didn’t die. And now they’re killing men, women and children with impunity. All the Americans who object to these protests are simply leaning into their privilege; narcissistically deriding these dramatic gestures of emotional unrest by the protesters, because it interrupts their ability to look completely the other way, and pretend their nation isn’t a cold-blooded killer.

There was a kid at Evergreen, when I went there, who’d went nuts and posted a manifesto, then went and shot a random cop dead at a gas station in Red Bluff, CA. Andy was his name. He was the neighbor of some guys I’d played music with, when they lived in the F Stack Dorms, back in 2002. He’d decided the police state needed to end, back then; he’d decided he was ready to get some blood on his hands, too.

People that complain about the destruction of federal property need to consider the alternative targets that angry citizens, in their upset and moral alienation, could have chosen instead —to disastrous consequence.

I moved out of the Seattle house where I’d been renting a room, in the first week of May. I’d been making so much on extended unemployment, I decided the only thing to do was to sock it all away. It’s been a goal of mine for years, now, to move to Los Angeles, so I’ve built a nest egg out of the money I’ve saved. I’ve been staying rent-free in a guest house, on my parents’ property in Eastern Washington, ever since. The protesting started up a week or two after I came out here. And I haven’t been able to reconcile the risk I’d have brought on my parents, of bringing the virus back with me if I’d jaunted over for the day to take part.

So I’ve missed all the protests, so far, and honestly I’ve been sort of glad to have had an excuse. I am a total fucking shit magnet, when I’m on the scene. I cut a very attractive target, to authority. I donated a few hundred to Captain Portland’s Gofundme for medical supplies, though, and I’ve been watching the footage and participating in some proactive debate about it on Twitter. But I’m also pretty sure I haven’t missed out completely. My sense is that these protests —and the civil outrage that is fueling them— are, of course, far from over.

I felt like I should touch in about a couple things, though. Some of you are probably new to this stuff, prior to May. Others have maybe only held signs and marched, in the past. Honestly, I’ve seen some shit in my day, but I’ve never been in a situation like the protesters in Portland have dealt with. I have had 50 caliber rounds fired as warning shots over my head, though. There isn’t much a human can do, to resist that kind of violent force. I have looked down the barrel of a Tank cannon, as it leveled itself threateningly at me. I once got shot in the leg by a less lethal round. It did enough damage that I couldn’t walk for a week, without crutches.

So far it’s been pretty ugly, the State’s response to the Black Lives Matter protests. But if the wanton, enthusiastic orgy of police violence that has surrounded these protests is any indicator, there’s a strong likelihood that things will get worse before they get better, for Americans seeking to demonstrate their upset with our government.

There are basically two things I wanted to talk about here. One is tactics, and the other is self-care.

My first direct action was a bit of a doozy. In 2003, me and another guy blocked traffic on the Fourth Ave Bridge in Olympia, WA, and we set about demolishing our own cars with sledge hammers and and awls, in protest of the Iraq War —at the time, the invasion was just over two weeks from beginning. Honestly, our action didn’t get the attention it deserved. We’d posted a manifesto online, and sent out press releases to local news outlets, the night before, but there was barely any coverage in the news following our action that day. My sister said she’d seen footage on a news station, but I never did. Our camera guy forgot to press record, so the only real witnesses other than the cops who eventually showed up and arrested us were the cars that snuck through the small gap we’d left between ours. I think one city bus came through, too.

There was a poetry to this action —we were disarming ourselves, in the war for oil. You think people are afraid of radicalism and property damage now? Back then, everything was being run by white-haired naysayers, who stole the mics from the youth at almost every chance. Every time somebody wanted to seriously fuck something up, a host of more experienced elders would swoop in and either talk the person down, or convince their peers they were dangerous.

But we’d found a way around that, by damaging our own property!

There was a creative quality to the action, which led the minds of those considering it down a path of anticipated logical thought —about why we’d done this; about what we’d meant to say, in doing it. Creativity is so fucking powerful, guys. It needs to be a part of what’s happening. I don’t know how one should protest cops gunning down unarmed citizens in a ‘Creative’ way. And I’m not criticizing what’s been going on, in the least. But for things to keep going —without incurring greater personal harm from Police and Federales, and thus alienating the people watching from home— I believe Creativity is going to be a necessarily central component.

The Yes Men were masters of using Creativity in their actions. If you are not familiar with the Yes Men’s work, it’s really inspiring stuff. They used the internet, and many officials’ effective idiocy with it, to constantly subvert imperialism and colonialism where they saw it. They had a website that looked exactly like George Bush’s website, and people would mistakenly reach out to them, when they meant to talk to George. They were able to infiltrate, in this spirit of subversion, all sorts of closed-door events, and turn the camera on these evil actors within the global culture of politics and economics, while they made them look like fucking assholes —if not absolute monsters. They released a film, the Yes Men, in 2004. It’s fun to watch, and inspiring.

Again, I don’t know what shape this should take, in the present set of circumstances, but Creative strategies —looking at the act of protest as spectacle; performance art— this is going to captivate the hearts and minds of people sitting home and watching. There is an unavoidable component of branding to any popular resistance, and many of these people watching are on the fence, moreso than they realize. That image from the Vietnam war, of a hippie girl placing a flower in the barrel of a soldier’s rifle, or the recent photo of the naked yogi, sitting on the street and opening her legs at the police —these were Creative acts, that subverted the narrative in play. And they stuck, in the imaginations of those watching from home.

Three days before the US invasion of Iraq, in 2003, Rachel Corrie was killed in Gaza. We were classmates, at Evergreen. I’d been acquainted with her since the year prior, mostly only talked to her at a couple of protests. But I was swept away on the wave of grief and outrage that spilled out of that moment, in Olympia and around the world. I went to the West Bank as an activist with ISM, myself, in July of that year. I stayed for two months and a little change. Honestly I’d have stayed as long as possible, if I hadn’t run out of shekels. I had to get back to the US and finish college, too, but the feeling I had when I was there made it seem like I’d never truly been alive, before. I didn’t want to let go of that.

I got shot in the leg, in the first action we did. High Velocity, close proximity, direct instead of richocheted; from a less-lethal round. We’d come as internationals to march in front and help the Palestinians to break through a gate in the Apartheid Wall, which had cut off the local farmers of Berqin from access to their crops. This was, of course, a general feature of the Wall, as it was constructed intentionally to violate the demarcations of the Green Line. It’s one of Israel’s favorite things to do to Palestinians, to take their land. It almost seems like it amuses them, when you talk about it with a Zionist; like they’re proud of how well they control the game.

As soon as I’d made it out of the hospital in the northern West Bank town of Jenin (where they’d treated me for free, as they treat all victims of the Israeli Occupation Forces), I called my girlfriend. She was in Montreal, at the oldest Ashram in the Western Hemisphere, learning to be a yoga teacher. She told me she wanted me to come home. I’d thought that was extremely unsupportive of her, and that I’d come to spend two months. I wasn’t about to run home with my tail between my legs, like a fucking coward. She’d said something about me being in ‘the bad reality’, which felt so fucking cheap and entitled to hear from her. Then I wrote a poem by the same name and shared it with my email list. It wasn’t very generous towards her, in its content.

We ended up breaking up, over that poem. I remember the night, well. it was the last light of day, and there was an Israeli incursion happening in Jenin. The ISM activists tended to stay with Palestinian host families, as a means of interacting more directly with their culture and lifestyle, but Jenin had just been ravaged the year prior, in Operation: Defensive Shield (look it up), to the extent that no outsiders were trusted well enough to be granted that sort of relationship. So we’d all stayed together in a rented flat, in an apartment building.

I was on the roof of our building, watching Tanks and APCs roll through the streets below us. Machine guns were exchanging fire in different clashes, throughout the town. And I was on the phone with the girl I’d thought I was finally going to make a real commitment with, listening to her break up with me. It was the only thing I could feel, in that moment, the severing in my heart, as I reckoned with the fact that the person who’d been filling me up with support and love just retracted it. Like that.

I’ve never felt so small, as I did in that moment. Standing on a rooftop, in a literal war zone, searing with the emotion of my loss —that my girlfriend had broken up with me.

It was something I couldn’t respond to any other way, even though I knew in the moment how frivolous my pain was, in contrast to the pain going on around me, on all sides. I remember later that night was the first time I’d heard a tank fire its cannon. It was the loudest fucking thing I’d ever heard. It broke the night in two —just a shot from up on a hill, aimed a couple hundred feet over the city. No real target. Just a further gesture to intimidate and harass the occupants of this broken city —strong and proud, though its people yet remained. I went to sleep that night, shedding tears for her.

The rest of that summer I just started trying to fuck every woman I met. I got laid a lot, but I got really toxic eventually. We weren’t even supposed to have sex with each other, as activists with ISM. It was considered a potential hazard to the group’s cohesion, if we did. I started smoking a lot of weed there, too. Another thing we weren’t supposed to do, and which we’d agreed in coming that we wouldn’t. I’d been trying to cope with my broken heart, which was only exacerbated by the breakup. I was already heartbroken, about the world in general.

I didn’t see it until years later —I’m really only unpacking a lot of it now, honestly— but I started spiraling down into some intense narcissistic behavior, which affected the relationships I made with other activists during my time there, and ended up becoming a problem for my community in Olympia, too, once I’d returned. It was like I’d distilled my person into these raw elements; refined and purified my soul. That’s how I felt inside, anyway. Outside, to others, it was like these bare wires, arcing and popping electric when they touched one another. I was a fucking mess.

Things just started stacking. I kept fucking up, with women. I kept feeling further and further disconnected from my community. Part of the problem was I just kept reaching out to the wrong people, for love. Well, actually it was sex I was reaching for; every time I encountered somebody, back then, who demonstrated a potential for emotional connection, I fucking bolted. I basically broke down, over the next year or so, and my community turned their backs on me.

In some ways, I feel the experience was necessary for me, to sort out some of these untouched problem areas in my psychological makeup. But in other ways, I realize that the love and connection I’d felt in the activist community was somewhat conditional. Nobody would talk to me, about what they were seeing. They were just sick of me and wanted me to go away. These people, who had practically egged me on into this volatile self-endangering lifestyle, they didn’t want anything to do with helping me figure out what was going wrong. The best I got was ‘go see a therapist’. Being broke, and unable to trust anybody, it was sort of a bullshit piece of advice. Many of the people I was inspired by —in going over to the west bank, or in demolishing my car— had been professors, at my college. And when shit got ugly, the best I got was a ‘buh-bye’.

I think I was suffering from PTSD, to some extent, but I think I also had a sort of latent or muted narcissism that had become inflated by the things I experienced, by the feelings I’d cultivated in my heart. I hadn’t anticipated the psychological burden I’d invited into myself, in my engagement with the world as a direct activist. Even though I remember, at least once, telling God when I was on Acid, that I invited the pain of the world inside of me. Like a ritual of cosmic self-sacrifice.

In retrospect, yeah —I’m pretty sure the dude heard me, and took me up on my offer.

I have a propensity for self-aggrandizement, and I’ve been learning lately that my parents both demonstrated patterns of emotional narcissism in the way they treated me as a kid. I don’t think it was ever going to go any different for me, but I have a hard time believing that it was just my specific makeup that created the problems inside me. I’m pretty certain this kind of internal downward-spiraling can happen to anybody.

So I wanted to make sure you all had this in your heads, as the feds retreat from the cities, and the protests recede. And it’s okay, if they recede. You guys have done a LOT, this summer. Don’t stop working for justice. Don’t stop fighting the power. But be really fucking mindful of your selves. Be careful, with each other. And keep an eye on the trail you leave behind you. It’s the areas in life we don’t watch closely, where we project our shadow most. It can do a lot of damage, to a person’s life and their community.

Don’t hold it in, and don’t try to fix it yourself, if you’re having problems with people after all this shit has gone down. Find some people you can talk to. Talk about what you’re feeling, about what’s going on inside you. And listen to people, if they tell you that you’re being fucked up. They’re probably right, at least on some level. And it’s okay, if you’re fucked up. There’s been a government-sponsored force, seeing that it happens; working to fuck you up for months now.

I hope to see you all out there, at some point. I’m doing what I can, in the meantime, to be effective in writing about it all. I don’t know where any of this is heading, but it’s really good to know there’s such a huge mass of conscientious humans out there, objecting to the barbarism our country has gravitated towards, since 9-11; that it’s now turning, on its own people.

Please lean into creative strategies as a way of subverting the attempts of authority to reframe the movement to your countrymen, as something dangerous. And please take care of your selves, and your hearts.

And try to be there for each other, if you can. Everybody’s going to be a little broken, after this shit.