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  • From: lakinroe@silcom.com
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [permaculture] Fwd: [starhawk] Blogging from the US Social Forum
  • Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2010 08:35:45 -0700 (PDT)


>From Starhawk:
I’m here at the US Social Forum—and I’ll do my best to blog every day or so—I
won’t send them all out to ever single one of these lists, but you can find
them—with pictures and comments, at www.starhawksblog.org .
Enjoy!

US. Social Forum—We’re Here!
I flew into Detroit last night with two wonderful women from the Hunters
Point Family agency that our Earth Activist Trainings partner with. Lena
Miller directs the agency and Jasmine Marshall runs the Peacekeeper program,
working as a case manager for many of the girls who work in the gardens where
I’ve volunteered.

We arrived—and attempted to reach our motel by the river—just at the moment
Detroit’s Riverfest culminates in a massive fireworks display. A million
people go down to the river to watch—which made reaching out motel a
challenge. We finally had to abandon our taxi and walk the last block, with
all our bags. But we got there to find the streets humming with people, a
party in progress in the parking lot, barbecues going on patches of grass by
the sidewalks, and the sky alight with the thunder and a rain of light and
color.

We got settled and headed out to find food. I have to say it was a different
experience for me, walking down the street in those crowds and crowds of
people, mostly young, mostly black, all of them dressed to look good. The
whole city was drenched in heat haze and pheromones, and I enjoyed seeing it
a bit through the eyes of much younger women who were looking pretty good
themselves—and definitely attracting far more male attention than I ever do
on my own these days. Jasmine, who is twenty-three, was so excited! “I can’t
believe it—all these black people out on the streets, just chillin’, having a
good time, and nobody shuttin’ it down! Why can’t we have that in the
Bayview?” And it’s true—with all the economic devastation of Detroit, there
are thousands of people out here enjoying themselves, wearing short shorts
and gold platform shoes. A trio of trumpeters in an empty lot blast out a
riff. A couple of trombone players across the street answer them—and they
play back and forth, a musical conversation in the street.

Why can’t we have it in the Bayview? There’s a long history, that goes back
to the bulldozing of San Francisco’s Fillmore District back in the 60’s for
redevelopment, destroying a thriving and lively Black community. To the
closing of the naval shipyard, once the big employer in the Bayview, and the
resulting unemployment and poverty and the residues of toxic wastes. And most
immediately, to the intertwined gang violence and police violence. More
people die violently, per capita, in the Bayview than in Iraq, or so I've
heard. The infant mortality rate in the Bayview is on a par with Haiti or
Bulgaria.

As I’m writing, Jasmine and Lena are gossiping and the conversation moves to
all the young men they know who are dead. Jasmine says, “My whole age group
is gone. All the boys I grew up with—they’re all gone.” Dead, or in prison.

We spend a lazy morning, sleeping in, and finally make our way down to Cobo
Hall, the big convention center that houses registration for the Forum. The
line to register stretches about a mile back. We take turns waiting. In line,
I meet a man named Leonardo, from LA. He turns out to know my buddy Lisa, who
is part of our training collective Alliance of Community Trainers. Lisa is
slight and blonde and always charged with energy—after ten minutes of
acquaintance, Lena calls her “A soldier of the movement.” She’s biked down
here and is holding a place for us.

Leonardo tells us how he’s organized his community in East L.A. They’ve
managed to get a whole progressive contingent elected in the neighboring town
of Mayview, and they threw the whole police department out. The cops were
corrupt and abusive, harassing the Latino community, setting up checkpoints
for cars and confiscating them from illegal immigrants. So, they simply fired
them all. Every one. Now they will create a police department—if only so the
city can get insurance—but it will be under the direction of a civilian
police commissioner, not a chief of police.

So, I’m already inspired by the time I get my registration armband. Then I
meet up with Bill Aal from Tools for Change—with whom I’ll be teaching the
Earth Activist Training in Bellingham with a focus on social permaculture,
and Carlos, from New York, who does popular education and is part of a men’s
healing group. We all go to lunch at the Avalon Bakery, a small bakery
started by two women, Anne and Jackie, to bring a thriving business alive in
one of the city’s dead zones. Now it’s the anchor of a street of cafes and
shops.

Then Bill, Carlos and I go on to the march, while Lena and Jasmine go back to
rest up. The march is quite wonderful—colorful, lively, not painfully loud,
but mostly what’s wonderful is the incredible diversity of people. The
organizers of this event have really done it—they’ve brought together a truly
diverse crowd. As Lena puts it—“It’s not only every type of person, but every
shade and variety of every type.” Black, white, Latino, Asian, Native
American, every race, age, style of dress and political persuasion seems
represented. There are environmentalists carrying sunflowers and a contingent
of domestic workers in magic T-shirts. There are a couple of anarchists with
black flags and Revolutionary workers selling newspapers and big puppets of
Martin Luther King with recordings of his speeches playing. A brass band
plays and four young people in pink T-shirts dance. Two clowns walk by on
stilts, and drummers play a samba beat.

The march is a beautiful vision of what a real social movement could be.
Ironically, we march through downtown Detroit, an area blasted and blighted
by the city’s economic losses. Vast areas are simply empty—full of weeds,
with here and there a burned-out carcass of a house. Beautiful stone
churches, relics of a time when there was money and jobs, loom over vacant
lots. The old Detroit Free Press building, a dignified stone castle, is now
boarded over with a sign offering free rents to any enterprise that would
venture to locate there. Faded signs grace the tattered marquis’ of boarded
over department stores. London had more signs of life after the blitz.
Indeed, it’s hard to imagine any enemy nation inflicting more damage on a
city than has been done here by capitalism at its most irresponsible and
brutal.

Through the devastation winds this lively and beautiful march, a sign of hope
and resilience. If there’s any hope for our poor country and our battered
world, any chance we can turn our direction around toward real justice and
balance, it lies in the people here, this beautiful coming together across
all the divides.

Now we’re resting. Maybe we’ll go out to a party tonight, maybe we won’t. But
I’m so glad to be here.


This post has been sent to you from Starhawk@lists.riseup.net . This is an
announce-only listserve that allows Starhawk to post her writings
occasionally to those who wish to receive them. To subscribe to this list,
send an email to Starhawk-subscribe@lists.riseup.net . To unsubscribe, send
an email to Starhawk-unsubscribe@lists.riseup.net . Starhawk is a lifelong
activist in peace and global justice movements, a leader in the feminist and
earth-based spirituality movements, author or coauthor of ten books,
including The Spiral Dance, The Fifth Sacred Thing, Webs of Power: Notes
from the Global Uprising, and her latest, The Earth Path. Starhawk's
website is www.starhawk.org , and more of her writings and information on
her schedule and activities can be found there.

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