Judith Butler describes a certain contemporary morality in this way. Each of us is only responsible for ourselves, and that responsibility starts with a responsibility to be economically self sufficient, even under conditions when self sufficiency is structurally undermined.
She suggests one way to view the protests we have seen in the streets of cities around the country as essentially bodies assembling, making themselves visible in order to say, “we are not disposable”, “we are still here”. In this public sphere they are making themselves and the demands for a livable life visible.
In the book, Conspiracy to Riot Lee Weiner writes about the long journey of making meaningful change. The year 1968 was devastating: Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, the Vietnam War was ongoing, and Mayor Daley in Chicago gave shoot to kill orders to the police before the start of the Democratic National Convention.
In March, 1969 Weiner was one among 8 men indicted together by the federal government for conspiracy to riot. Most of them barely knew each other, having only briefly come together to protest the 1968 Democratic National Convention and the war in Vietnam. The group included the more well known, Abbey Hoffman and Bobby Seale, but Weiner was a little known community activist and social worker.
In this famous trial called the Conspiracy 8 and later the Chicago 7, all were acquitted of the charges because speaking and association are protected by the First Amendment. But Nixon’s “law and order” theme received a great deal of press. The judge jailed all the defendants for Contempt of Court for 9 days before those charges were overturned. However, this was long enough for the Cook County Sheriff’s department to shave their heads and display piles of it at a Republican fundraising dinner that week.
In our modern world we live in a peculiar kind of time, committed to the future and sometimes only looking straight ahead. Stories of the future often separate us from the past and this collateral damage leaves us with ghosts.
The rhetoric now is about walls and trying to again “command away” trouble. But some trouble, not all, is inevitable. The longer the attempts to wall things off, things start leaking and finally there is quite a mess. So what is the best way to be in it? Asking if things hold or not?
Donna Haraway reminds us that, “Trouble is an interesting word. It derives from a thirteenth-century French verb meaning “to stir up,”. We–live in disturbing times, mixed up times, troubling and turbid times. The task is to become capable, with each other in all of our bumptious kinds, of response. Mixed up times are overflowing with both pain and joy–with vastly unjust patterns of pain and joy, with unnecessary killing of ongoingness but also with necessary resurgence…The task is to make kin in lines of inventive connection…Our task is to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places. ……learning to be truly present.” Staying with the Trouble.
SHORE AND GROUND
Keep walking, though there’s no place to get to,
Don’t try to see through the distances. That’s not
for human beings.
Move within, but don’t move the way fear makes
you move.
Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and
frightened.
Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical
instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the
ground.
—-Rumi
Be well,
Marlene
Photo by Rinzi Ruiz; @rinzizen
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