ReWyldStL

Prologue:

Wednesday morning. i get up early with my kiddo every morning. We’re both early risers. This morning i decide to take us both for a walk around the neighborhood so my partner can sleep in for a bit. We walk down to the nearest park and stop for coffee at the place on the corner. There’s a poster hanging in the window next to the Black Lives Matter sign that says “Stop profiling Muslims, now!” and another that reads “We welcome refugees”. i note this in a little corner of my mind you could call “signs of the times” and after a bit more walking head home.

We pass the neighborhood mosque on the way home. Some kids in the parking lot by the mosque are trying to get a game of pick-up soccer going. One of the Somali guys i know approaches me, we exchange greetings: him, with an emphatic “Salaam”, my still not entirely wakeful response “how you doing, neighbor?” His expression and demeanor changes, and he cautiously hands me a little folded piece of paper with bits of messy scotch tape folded over on the edges, the paper had clearly been crumbled at some point. He tells me “we found this at the crosswalk in my neighborhood”. i unfold a flier for the Ku Klux Klan. i’ve seen this same flier several times taped up the the bus shelter just a few blocks from where i live, ripping it down each time i’ve found it. “Thank you for showing me this. This is so fucked up. i don’t know what else to say but i’m sorry”. He dribbles the soccer ball a bit before replying, “I just thought you and your family oughta know about this. This is dangerous for us all. Wa-Alaikum-as-Salaam, friend.” i answer in kind, and finish my walk around the remaining couple blocks home.

The kiddo and i get inside & unwind, and find my partner sitting at the table we pulled from the alley a week prior. She closes our laptop, scoops up our kiddo up off the floor, and asks me “Do you wanna go to this anti-Trump rally downtown on Friday?” Somehow, it didn’t register with me at first that she meant downtown StL. It just seemed so counter-intuitive to me, for some reason, that Trump would come to St. Louis.

Since surviving a nasty car accident a few months ago, to be honest, while i’ve been focusing on my physical and emotional recovery from a very scary collision i’d been trying my best to avoid knowing too much about all the political party electioneering and the political theatre around the Trump campaign. But the past two or three weeks in particular the billionaire fascist had become impossible to completely ignore, even in my day-to-day relations with the people closest to me who understand and respect my decision to not focus on this too much while i’m recovering. Trump had given me a great reason to steer clear of social media for months, but it’s been getting to the point that i hear so much each time i take the bus to work, and what i’ve been hearing has been so disturbing, i resolved recently to try to catch up on current events in American politics.

Having just the prior evening seen footage for the first time of the ritualized oath of allegiance to Trump that Trump’s supporter swear en masse at his rallies, his repeated encouragement of his followers’ “roughing up” Black Lives Matter protesters and promises to defend his supporters in court when they get violent, and his thinly veiled threats to deport, force registration, and block immigration of families like mine to the United States, i had resolved to get involved; somehow.

We agreed we should go, but for the next 48hours debated whether or not to take our kid. Just one week before and a few blocks away, during a bullshit traffic stop of a black family headed to church, StL police held a loaded gun to the family’s terrified 2year old, telling him to “shut up & sit down!” After an evening protest outside police headquarters, the police department released an edited dashcam tape that doesn’t show what the cop on the passenger side of the family’s car was doing, and accused the family of lying about the incident & claimed the edited and incomplete footage “proves” the police’ narrative. Another day, another familiar story.

The evening before the Trump rally in StL i made the mistake of looking at social media, and saw on the event page urging folks to show up to protest & disrupt the rally, as well as on several friends & acquaintances’ pages, people were arguing over whether or not it is “safe” to show up and protest, at all. A lot of people referenced recent acts of ultra-rightwing vigilante violence against minorities, and the KKK’ stabbing of anti-fascist protesters at a Ku Klux Klan rally in Anaheim as reason enough to stay “safe” at home and, as one comment on a friend’s plea for a forceful AntiFa turnout put it: “we should stay safe now so we’re all alive and healthy to take down Trump at the polls”. A few liberals even pulled some scaremongering BS, alluding to the supposed threat of “outside agitators” (local anarchists) instigating violence with the Trump supporters, thus “justifying” police repression of “peaceful protesters”. Don’t even get me started on what an oxymoron “peaceful protest” is to me, each and every time i hear it described that way.

The fear-mongering pissed both of us off. A lot. So we decided to take the kiddo with us, and since low-key has never been our thing, we resolved to keep a cautious distance from any physical altercations. We packed a couple spare diapers, some sunscreen for the kid, a black flag on an old wooden mop handle, pepper spray, a bottle of Maalox, some vinegar, and a couple keffiyeh, just in case shit went down. We talked out a few rough contingency plans – we’ve been in these situations enough times before to know it’s foolish to make one plan and stick to that no matter what – made sure the right people knew we were going and what we were doing, and turned in a bit early the night before, so we’d be plenty rested for the crazy day ahead.

Friday, March 11

i’ve always been an early riser, but what is it about going to be early the night before that triggers an un-restful sleep coma? We got a late start, made our coffee extra strong and had a big breakfast. We learned a long time ago to eat a good meal before going into a situation which might result in one of us or our friends getting captured by the police and locked up.

In St. Louis, getting arrested on a Friday often means that – best case scenario – you’re staying in custody until at least Monday afternoon, and it seems like these sort of things disproportionately happen in StL on Fridays. Sometimes when the weekend falls across a big drinking holiday the pigs just issue folks captured from protests or direct actions a court date and fast track us back out onto the streets to keep cells open to fill with drunken festivalgoers, the white middle class “revelers” who these days are somehow totally “different” from rioters, basically because their disorderly behavior helps support the local economy of beer brewing and the enablement of alcoholism. Either way, StL survives on the tax revenues of big drunken corporate sponsored festivals, and on systemic kidnapping & extortion by police. With Saint Patrick’s Day antics all weekend to-come, i was hoping no one arrested would be locked up all weekend, but i wasn’t gonna bet on that.

We parked north of downtown and steered clear of police, barricades, and anything that looked like it might be a checkpoint. Already Trump supporters flooded downtown, and police were over-extended in their effort to manage the line to get into the venue, which stretched all the way round the block, while simultaneously corralling protesters and occasionally arresting protesters & getting involved on Trump supporters’ behalf when scuffles broke out. St. Louis police were also profiling and removing people from line who they thought “looked like trouble”. On any given day i never can quite tell what the fuck the police’ job actually entails and encompasses. i’m pretty convinced at this point that they all just make it up as they go along. Across the street from the venue, the Peabody Opera House, vendors were setting up for Saint Patrick’s Day festivities, and police were also attempting, and failing, to keep Trump’s followers and the protesters out of pop-up tents and barricades.

One of the first things that struck me was how homogenous in appearance were the people in line to see Trump. A LOT of blond hair, blue eyes, skin four or five shades lighter than my own, Dockers and khakis (their Sunday best) or jeans from Walmart & sneakers. There were a lot of folks wearing local sports team paraphernalia, camo pattern clothing, “Don’t Tread On Me” and American flag themed t-shirts, hats & pins, and US military veterans sporting patched jackets and occasionally medals.

It took us awhile to locate and reach our friends. Police had set up a barricade splitting the protest in two, and were forcing folks to walk around the block through thousands of Trump supporters to reach the other side of the barricade. There was oddly no police presence around the block, and several friends and acquaintances told us they’d been confronted by Trump followers and at least one friend had rocks thrown and misogynist & racist slurs hurled at her on the walk around the block. We also saw Trump supporters engage in body-shaming and the sort of low-brow bullying common on elementary school playgrounds at recess time. We saw Trump supporters telling elderly Black women to “go back wherever it is you come from”, calling redheaded protesters “Carrot Top” and protesters with curly hair “Sideshow Bob”, and especially antagonizing a small group of Muslim Persian & Arab women holding signs which read “Muslims are your friends” and “Islamophobia = Hate, Islam does NOT = Hate”.

A friend struck up a conversation with the Muslim women, and a few of us decided to march with them. My partner got into a verbal altercation with a Trump fan who was body-shaming several protesters and ranting about far-rightwing conspiracy theories steeped in anti-Semitism. Around that time the police announced they were closing the doors to the venue and not seating anymore people. There were still a few thousand Trump supporters in line, and there was a moment when the tension significantly escalated.

A few people from the line wearing military jackets and medals, POW/MIA patches, and Tea Party t-shirts started shouting something at me about ISIS, having spotted a vaguely “middle eastern-looking” person standing with the Muslim women’s group, holding a solid-black flag while wearing a keffiyeh. Somehow that combination of actions and perceived character traits = i’m part of ISIS. One man yelled at us that my flag kills Christians in Iraq. One of the Muslim women yelled back that Trump supporters don’t know their political geography if they think my flag was an ISIS flag. Undaunted by facts, another person from the line shouted that my flag “kills Jews in Syria”, to which another Muslim woman shouted back, “and we Muslims mourn and pray for them all, just as we pray for the countless Christians and fellow Muslims murdered by ISIS. People like you and your imperialist wars make ISIS possible!”

Somehow my friends got their hands on some homemade pennants that read “Make America Gay Again!” Several times confused Trump supporters approached us and asked what that meant. We heard more than a few disgusted bigots murmur amongst themselves “it’s the gay agenda!” Then word got out that the Peabody Opera House was going to blast audio from the rally inside through loudspeakers for everyone who couldn’t get inside. A huge number of people, cops, Trump supporters, and protesters all flooded into Market Street, in front of the opera house. All of a sudden we found ourselves shoulder to shoulder with the Trump people. None of us could remember a time in StL that the cops shut down a major street downtown so that a political candidate who reserved an indoor venue could broadcast his speech to thousands of his supporters standing in the streets outside. i felt that same sick feeling i had when i was a kid the first time i saw pictures of the mass rallies the Nazis held almost a century ago.

Before Trump’s speech even began, protesters who had reserved tickets and made it past security’s profiling to be seated inside started disrupting the rally and getting thrown out, some of them were arrested. This went on for between ten to fifteen minutes at a time. Trump literally spent most of his time on stage screaming “Get them out!” to security, rambling about building a wall, scapegoating China for America’s economic woes, demonizing Muslims, refugees and migrant workers, and talking about how, in his view, “the problem” with protesters is, apparently, that they get “out of line” because police are – again, supposedly – “afraid” to “rough them up a bit” and there’s “no consequences” for “them” protesting, anymore.

In response to this some of my friends started angrily talking about all the people locally who were seriously injured by police at Black Lives Matter protests, the past year and a half, like the pregnant woman who lost an eye to a police “less lethal” round at protests the night of the grand jury decision to let ex Ferguson pig Darren Wilson off the hook for the cold blooded murder of Mike Brown. But all i could think was “this is all redneck theatre, like a WWF wrestling event”. Trump’s “Get ‘em outa here!” catch phrase, the more and more i heard it, began to strike me as a symbol for his supporters’ desire to purge America of anyone who doesn’t look like them, live like them, love like them, or worship the same hateful green paper god they do.

As the first major fights broke out, the ones i witnessed resulting from white men putting their hands on people of colour who weren’t having that, who were then tackled and arrested by phalanxes of police, who surrounded and protected the Trump supporters who had started the physical altercations – at least once i saw police giving a Trump supporter who started a fight an “atta’boy!” pat on the back – it dawned on me that Trump isn’t really the real threat; his supporters are. Donald Trump, just a few short months ago the joke candidate only taken seriously by far-rightwing conspiracy nuts, has become a lightningrod for the already festering ultra-rightwing in America, drawing together hypernationalist racists, xenophobic “nativists”, elements of the Tea Party and Patriots movements, AM talk radio creeps, gun & conspiracy nuts, Oathkeeper & Minutemen militias, the neo-Nazis and the KKK – the Ku Klux Klan’s former “grand dragon” David Duke having recently endorsed Trump for US President, of whom Trump recently said:

“I have to look at the group. I mean, I don’t know what group you’re talking about… You wouldn’t want me to condemn a group that I know nothing about. I’d have to look. If you would send me a list of the groups, I will do research on them and certainly I would disavow if I thought there was something wrong. You may have groups in there that are totally fine — it would be very unfair. So give me a list of the groups and I’ll let you know.”

While standing in the streets thinking about Trump’s refusal to disavow the KKK without “looking into them”, another interaction my partner and a friend had with a Trump supporter during his speech left me speechless. A young white woman selling Trump merchandise approached my partner and a friend of ours. Amongst the Trump regalia was a large selection of buttons featuring right-wing slogans. Seeing our kid strapped to my partner, the Trump supporter told us “Your child is so beautiful! My baby is due in a few weeks…” Just as i was hearing this, i noticed one of the buttons she was selling read “Just nuke ‘em”, paraphrasing ultra-rightwing ideologue Ann Coulter, with a crude map of N. Africa and the Middle East beneath the slogan. Suddenly, i realized this person standing next to us, acting so friendly toward us and trying to strike up conversation about kids could be anyone, the person sitting next to you on the bus, standing next to you on the train; that she was moving seamlessly between chatting us up and praising our kiddo, while directing her customers to purchase the “Just nuke ‘em” button.

A nightmare scenario unfolded, something like a movie montage in my mind: Trump says he’ll bar Muslims from the US; his favorite slogan lately has been “Get ‘em outa here!”; he says he’ll “round up” and mass-deport refugees, migrants, and Muslim immigrants; he promises to bomb “ISIS” to smithereens; his supporters love all of this, and are linking his campaign, at least in this one instance, to genocide-mongering Ann Coulter’s fantasies of nuclear holocaust in the Middle East. My kid is part Iranian. i am part Iranian. My family is part Iranian. Though none of my family are Muslims, many, MANY of our friends and the people we know and are close with are Muslims. This person adoring our kid wants to nuke the place my family came from. And before today i wouldn’t have known her from anyone else standing in line to order during lunch break at my crappy job.

Several fights between Trump supporters and protesters later, and about five minutes before Trumps speech was scheduled to end and his fired-up supporters inside were to come out into the streets, my partner and i decided to get our kid out of there, as a lot of other protesters we know with kids, handicaps, or serious health conditions chose to do, too. Most of our friends stayed behind to confront those inside the opera house when the rally was over. My partner and i and a couple friends talked about our conflicted feelings about leaving early on the long walk to where we had parked, north of downtown, and later well into the night with friends we invited over to try to process together all we’d seen and experienced and felt today.

Personally, i had meant to be more confrontational with Trump’s supports, but instead found myself horrified and left speechless not so much by his words or his fans repetition of them – that is not to downplay how disturbing is Trump’s rhetoric and the mainstreaming of that rhetoric, rather, i was most horrified of how casually his supporters switched from polite small-talk and “pardon me”s to advocating genocide and encouraging their kids to pick fights with racialized persons protesting Trump, people of colour who are subject to substantially greater violence at the hands of the police than the white suburban teens who, having just shoved someone with darker skin, group-chant “Thank You Police” as the pigs slammed Black St. Louisans face-first down into the pavement of Market Street. The relationship between the ultra-right aspiring to state power, and the enforcers of the day-to-day order of state power, the police, is drawn out for all to see in graphic detail.

i’m still processing what i saw, what i experienced, and how it make me feel. For the first time in a minute, i feel like there are a great many people who hate me, hate my family, and want to do harm to us and people we care about who are marginalized and Other-ed in different ways from us. What i realized is how easily even a dirt poor Iranian-American single parent barely getting by on foodstamps, an anti-authoritarian with no illusions in representative democracy, capitalism, normativity, or the status quo of “struggle”-for-reform via identity & ally politics, can be lulled into a false sense of security. i live in a majority 1st generation immigrant neighborhood, surrounded by people Other-ed for similar reasons in similar ways as my family and i. But even in this environment, coming from this background, believing and living as i do, i realized that i too can focus on the wrong enemy.

Donald Trump and what he represents, the mainstreaming of ultra-rightwing politics, absolutely is a problem. However, i would argue that the greater problem is the great many and growing mass of people who have hitched their hopes for a whiter America on Trump, people already brimming with bigoted hatred frustration for their perceived lack of validation of their genocidal fantasies, and craving the actualization of same LONG before Donald Trump transformed from birther peanut gallery hack to possible frontrunner for a major mainstream political party nomination as candidate for the executive of global capitalist empire. These people, for whom legitimacy and state-power matters so much, have received validation for what they already believed. It does not follow that an electoral defeat for Trump would seriously impede the growth of this burgeoning reactionary movement that built up its base primarily outside of electoral politics.

i suppose the question i’m posing is, do we recognize the threat in front of us as an ultra-rightwing movement that will remain a threat long after Donald Trump, and, are we prepared to take the fight to them, not so much in social media, message boards and comment sections, not in polling places, but in the streets, and in the relationships and micro-interactions which comprise everyday life? Do those of us concerned with the threat posed to ourselves and to each other by the escalation the ultra-right reactosphere’s quest for state power get stuck staring into the blinding highbeams barreling down the road toward us, or can we recognize how much we have to do, and urgently set about building the relationships and material force adequate to confronting the many forms immiseration takes in all our lives?

i prefer to live in a world where we are capable of breaking the storm of hatred and reaction that is building, a world where we can imagine other worlds, better worlds, and we can realize those worlds in our own lives, ourselves, together; a world where we can choose something other than a life on our knees in a world of ruins, we can fight, really fight, and we CAN win. Because if we want more than mere survival, but to actually live in these better worlds, we must find one another and together learn to learn to do by doing. Now.

This Friday, March 11th 2016 at 12noon fascist presidential candidate Donald Trump will be holding a rally for his StL-area supporters in downtown Saint Louis at the Peabody Opera House. This is a call-to-action for anti-fascists and anti-authoritarians to converge and meet-up with an anti-Trump/anti-racist protest at the Peabody Opera House, 1400 Market Street, St. Louis, MO 63103 at noon to help deliver a great big “Fuck You!” to Trump’s fascist supporters.

The ultra-rightwing’s recent boost in confidence and their escalation of violent attacks on people of color, Muslims, people of Middle Eastern descent, immigrants and refugees cannot be ignored. Instead of hiding behind our keyboards and glowing screens making fun of Trump and his supporters, it’s time to meet them in the street and make very clear that their fascist-asses are not welcome here, and will no longer be ignored and allowed to organize and operate openly in and around Saint Louis.

To learn more, visit this facebook event page set up by a local student group, or just get some friends, family, co-workers, neighbors, etc together and show up to help us shut Trump’s shit down!

Solidarity Means Attack!

All day, evening and late into the night of December 22nd, a few longtime friends/accomplices in Saint Louis, MO tagged militant anti-police & anti-prison slogans, defaced multiple billboards, and stencilled black roses all over the metro area. This was done in solidarity with Greek comrades‘ call for an international Black December.

The black rose is an old and storied symbol, one used sporadically by anti-authoritarians around the world and throughout history. Our black roses have been left at sites of state violence, to memorialize every daily harassment & indignity, every drop of blood spilled & every bone broken; every life ruined, locked up, and enslaved, and every brilliant star snuffed out the state and its agents. Our roses serve as a reminder of the countless atrocities committed by the agents of oppression & exploitation and as a threat to the police, with their badges & their guns; to the cowardly snitches who fear connecting with other human beings so much that they gleefully collaborate in state violence against their own neighbors; and to the kkkop in your own head, who we all must struggle with on a daily basis.

There are now over 240 black roses scattered across every neighborhood in Saint Louis, and more to come. We prefer to write on the walls of our city, rather than quibble in digital spaces, out of recognition of the profound danger of retreating into the aether of the internet. We prefer to direct our energy towards attack in full view of the public, calling out the enemies of freedom by name, to dispel the myth of their invincibility and show that even a small posse of friends and trusted comrades can shatter the banality of domestication. We do not seek to convert others to our cause, but rather, to throw up a signal to all those inclined to care, who would resist, who would wage war on misery, to signify that we are not alone and to remind one another that we can choose to take action in our own lives and, together, strike out against the spectacle, the police, their prisons, and all the forces of immiseration.

Kick-in the fences, burn the barricades, get free and bask in the warmth of the fires of resistance to come. Let us spread like the wildfires that once not so long ago and one day again and soon will rejuvenate the prairies and the forests and the land. Never forget, remembering means fighting.

For the wyld!

Your friend & accomplice, the wyldfire

We want to relive the days when “death shall have no dominion, and dead men naked they shall be one with the man in the wind and the west moon, and they shall break in the sun till the sun breaks down”
(paraphrased verses from a poem by Dylan Thomas).

Last month Greek anarchists called for an international month of autonomous, insurgent, and militant direct action in remembrance of our dead and imprisoned comrades, naming this call-to-action Black December. In the memory of all we lost which spurred the furious streetfighting of the past year, and in celebration of all we’ve each found with one another in these shared moments of insurrection, so beautiful and terrible all at once, we mean that this call-to-action not go un-answered in the greater StL-area.

Let’s shatter the banality of life in the river city, where we watch – as though we were helpless – as politicians and the gentrifying purveyors of progress, servants one and all to capital, build redundant sports arenas or an expensive aquarium to imprison animals for human amusement, rather than safe places for everyone in the city to sleep at night; a city that quietly bulldozes tent cities and casually plants anti-homeless spikes under overpasses, whose politicians pat themselves on the shoulder while professional activists line up to stroke the egos of city managers who claim to be “solving” the city’s homeless “problem”; where the biggest news of the year isn’t all the tears and hugs shared, the friendships & affinities forged and mental bondage broken by the explosion sparked by police’ coldblooded murder of Black youth, but rather, the fanfare surrounding the opening of a local Ikea.

There is no right or wrong way to do #BlackDecember, no instruction manual or actvist-y formula. We trust that the indominatable hearts of those inclined to act on this will guide them in the manner best suited to each individual. If you’re looking for inspiration, there’s plenty of recent, local examples of creative solutions to the immiseration of daily life in StL. Just think about it…

In a long-overdue development, ReWyld StL is opening up to contributions.

From the greater-StL area & got something to say?
Not from StL but got something to share?
Just wanna hate on us?

Shoot us an email at: rewyldstl@riseup.net

Maybe we’ll feature your content. Maybe not. Who the hell knows?

Make sure if you want your stuff posted though that you let us know any special considerations, like if you need content linked, or whatever.

From the Convict Lease to the Prison Plantation: Race, Gender, and Revolt Against the Carceral State

This past year we have witnessed an explosion of activity in response to the ceaseless violence against Black and Brown people by the hands of the police, white vigilantes, and the prison system. We are living the legacy of hundreds of years of colonialism and slavery, but also are part of an inspiring counter-history of revolt against these forces. This will be a provocative presentation and discussion on several histories of rebellion against prison and forced labor, and how those histories connect with our own period of anti-police riots and prison struggle.

Authors Neal Shirley and Saralee Stafford will be reading from their new book *Dixie Be Damned: 300 Years of Insurrection in the American South*, focusing on a cross-racial miners’ and prisoners’ rebellion against Tennessee’s early convict lease system, and a 1975 revolt at a women’s prison in Raleigh, North Carolina.

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Neal Shirley grew up in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and now lives in Durham, NC, where he is involved in several anti-prison initiatives and runs a small publishing project called the North Carolina Piece Corps.

Saralee Stafford was born in the Piedmont of North Carolina. Her recent political work has focused on connecting the struggles of street organizations with those of anarchists in the area. She teaches gender-related health in Durham, North Carolina.

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RSVP & more information available here: https://www.facebook.com/events/518117595004851/

You can purchase the book, Dixie Be Damned: 300 Years of Insurrection in the American South, here at AK Press: http://www.akpress.org/dixie-be-damned.html

To Change Everything: Struggle and Solidarity

If you are Roma in the Balkans, bars will refuse you service. You will give birth in a special room for Roma women. Medical personnel will disinfect the waiting room after you have been there. Your children will be forcefully showered at school, or sent to schools for children with special needs because they can’t read in the majority language. If you have a heart attack, the ambulance may refuse to drive into your settlement.

In the summer of 2015, mass protests took place every two days in the Czech Republic, against migrants from Africa and the Middle East who had almost died crossing the Mediterranean and were to be resettled in Europe. Protesters said that their culture was under attack.

From January to March, 2015, police killed 185 people in Sao Paulo, Brazil—most of them young black men.

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Everywhere in the world, we are witnessing the most repressed and marginalized populations rising against the conditions of their oppression. What can we learn from these struggles? What does it mean to act in solidarity with them? Does solidarity mean setting aside our own interests, or understanding them differently?

Join us for a lively discussion on race, gender, identity, and legitimacy with participants in grassroots movements from Latin America, North America, Eastern Europe, and the Balkans, as they share their experience of struggles in their contexts. All of the presenters are contributors to a recent dialogue project, To Change Everything, which appeared earlier this year in over twenty languages: tochangeeverything.com

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More information available at: https://www.facebook.com/events/1465254723781096/

A list of additional tour dates & stops available here: http://www.crimethinc.com/blog/2015/09/08/to-change-everything-us-tour-dates/

On Sunday, August 9th 2015 a small band of tight friends and down-as-fuck accomplices from all around the greater-Saint Louis area spent the day in Ferguson, MO on the one year anniversary of the murder of Michael Brown by now-former Ferguson Pig Darren Wilson. We sat down to discuss the events of August 9th &10th, 2015, twenty-four hours after a Police “state of emergency” was declared in the Saint Louis County municipality.

Names and sensitive information have been altered for the safety of our accomplices. What follows is not their story, but an account of the day’s events as experienced by several close friends and communicated by those they interacted with.

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Leone: So, where should we start?

Joan: Maybe with the Mike Brown 1 year memorial silent march in Canfield, Sunday morning August 9th.

Leone: Right, the march from Canfield Green to Saint Marks Church.

Joan: For background, Canfield is the neighborhood where Mike Brown was murdered by ex-Ferguson pig Darren Wilson a year ago.

Leone: It was hot. Very hot.

Joan: The weather was hot, but the temperature of the crowd was super-cool. Like, this time last year the pigs had barricaded both ends of Canfield so you couldn’t get in or out at all except on foot.

Leone: It was almost tame that morning. Very “organized” and heavily peace-policed by clergy and NGO professional activist peace police. This year the cops had the back end of Canfield blocked off so you could get in but you could only get in and out one way.

Joan: It also seemed like there were a lot more locals there and not nearly as many out-of-towners as this time last year. The energy was very different. It was pretty somber, but not really in a “sad” way. Just serious, almost like at a wake.

Leone: It felt to me sort of like the group luncheons or dinners some folks have right after a funeral. Not super-sad, but yeah, somber; that word feels right.

Moment of Silence. #MikeBrown https://t.co/8sMckZl5MQ

— deray mckesson (@deray) August 9, 2015

Joan: There were a few hundred people there. I remember seeing a lot of white men wearing “I Am Mike Brown” and “I Am Kajieme Powell” t-shirts. I felt like that was very inappropriate.

Leone: It was like that in at the rally turned-protest turned-mini riot in StL after the Zimmerman verdict came down “not guilty” back in 2013. A whole buncha white people wore “I Am Trayvon” shirts, or held signs that said that. It just seemed like they sort of missed the point about racism and police, legal and vigilante violence.

Joan: Well I liked what Mike Brown Sr. said, something like “People ask me about my son, and they ask me how I feel. That’s a stupid question. Ask me how my day is going, today”

Leone: That was powerful.

It seemed really strange to me that the Nation of Islam guy who got to speak kept saying over and over how “this movement is not an anti-police movement”. That got really mixed reactions from the crowd – no outbursts, but you could still tell a lotta people had mixed feelings about what he said, and others had very strong feelings one way or the other…

Joan: I think people were just trying to be respectful to Mike Brown’s family, but yeah you could feel it in the crowd.

Rest In Power, Michael Brown, Jr.

Leone: Like when that guy said all that pro-cop stuff, waves of intense emotion washed over the crowd; you could feel lit. Like when it rains over a puddle and all the little ripples overlap and affect each other and little patterns form. It was kinda like that.

Joan: There were a lot of clergy there, too.

Leone: Wasn’t the Billy Graham church there?

Joan: Yes, they had a camper and were handing out pamphlets and water as the silent march passed Canfield onto West Florrisant. It’s like they had this chokepoint set up for marketing their religion.

Leone: That thing was amazing, some straight-“robots in disguise” Transformers shit! It was like an RV that converts into a great big stage. Must cost hella money…

Nancie: We saw that stuff later on that night, too. There was an evangelical group there doing like a tent revival thing at the intersection.

Leone: The Billy Graham decepticon thing was gone, but in its place they had set up a series of pop-up canopies and had some people in there dancing, laying hands and praising the lord & stuff.

Nancie: Some older folks, mostly older Black men and a whole bunch of white people, were really getting into it.

Leone: It seemed though like it was entirely run by white people. But a lot of peoples on the street weren’t happy with it, at all.

Nancie: Right, I heard a lot of people from the neighborhood saying “Billy Graham’ racist” and “We don’t need a thing from them”, “We don’t want no papers or their racist water, either”.

Leone: I heard a few peoples suggest going over and “slappin’ a whiteboy” at the revival.

Nancie: I didn’t feel comfortable with some of that.

Leone: I noticed some of the white folk around us wasn’t comfortable with some of that, either. Some of them moved on down the sidewalk.

Nancie: But there were also Black men and women arguing with the people saying that stuff, saying “that’s no good, that’s not cool”

Leone: Tensions were high out there that afternoon.

Nancie: Well, that evening it was SO humid, like more than the weather; the air was thick with tension and pent up frustration & rage. First we went to Saint Marks Church, where Dr. Cornell West was going to speak later that evening. We never quite made it to see Cornell West, though.

Leone: Yeah, I mean you can see him on youtube…

Nancie: We saw him downtown last fall, anyway. It felt like a lot of theater, honestly; like a ritualized “passing of the torch” of civil rights leadership sorta thing.

Leone: It was pageantry. I wasn’t sure how to feel about the whole thing for a few days after, last fall.

Joan: “Leadership”

Leone: Right.

Nancie: There was a nice bbq going at Saint Marks though, and the JuiceMaster/Mike Brown Dollars thing…

Ex-Ferguson PD Officer Darren Wilson

Leone: It was like a community bbq thing, I think. That’s so weird how they got those Mike Brown Dollars circulating to get people into patronizing local small businesses. Some of those small local businesses are capitalizing the shit outa what’s happening in Ferguson.

Nancie: Yeah, anyway it was all clergy and not-for-profit types at Saint Marks…

Leone: I think they were doing a nonviolent civil disobedience training or something…?

Nancie: Right. So we refilled our water and checked out the Ferguson Police station, which had been the focal point of the past few months’ protests. It was totally dead there, I think there was a drumline crew or something like that there resting under a tent, so we trekked over to Canfield and West Florissant Ave., the neighborhood where Mike Brown got gunned down last year.

Leone: We figured if there was going to be any action on the streets, it’d be near where the QuickTrip gas station got sacked last Oct.

Nancie: Wow. It’s like, one year to the day since that happened, right!

Joan: Remember last year when some friends of ours did that thing under the burnt out QuickTrip overhang about a week after Mike B. was killed? They were serving tons and TONS of food and water to thousands of people for free all night, and they had like a little zine table set up. By the end of the night I don’t think it was even the same people running those tables, so many volunteers just jumped in when needed so other volunteers could go hit the streets, enjoy the protest and the endless parade of solidarity, or go fight the cops up by the National Guard staging area. It was very fluid and open, that night.

Leone: That was dope!

Nancie: I miss that party atmosphere from those late nights last year sharing food and water bottles with all the folks we didn’t know. Sometimes it felt like it’d never end.

Joan: All the conversations with strangers, and finding out things I thought not that many people felt like, all these other people I was meeting for the first time felt similarly. That was really deep. I miss that so much.

Nancie: That’s what we came out to do, though.

Leone: Just be there, present, in the moment; sharing space with other peoples in the struggle.

Joan: That felt so good, so right. It was like, this outrage – I hate when it’s called a “tragedy”, like it was an “incident” or could have been avoided with some sensitivity training or something. It was an outrage, but it brought so many people together. I dunno.

Leone: We never really got to Canfield though.

Nancie: Yeah, we got to the site of the old burnt out QuickTrip and it was so surreal. The QT has since been bulldozed and the lot is surrounded by a tall chainlink fence.

Site of the infamous West Florissant QuickTrip, now demolished, leveled and fenced off.

Leone: That fence looked like it’s almost been ripped down a few times in a couple spots…

Nancie: But it was like being hit by a brick wall, seeing that spot all leveled. There was even grass coming up through the concrete, gravel and debris. It was hardly recognizable. The only way I knew where we were at was the Canfield sign.

What really struck me was that the old concrete block barriers that used to line the QT lot were all gone. We used to sit on those blocks to rest and stand on them to get a better view, or we’d hide behind them when Ferguson PD fired rubber bullets and threw flashbangs at us during the HUGE nighttime street parties and battles with the police last fall on West Florissant.

Leone: I noticed a lotta the tags and murals that were up the last time I was in Ferguson were power-washed away, especially around the foot bridge on W. Florissant crossing the creek.

Nancie: Yeah, but there was A LOT of new graffiti up in the neighborhood, too, like those posters with the Bakunin quote on them, and the black rose memorials…

Leone: I saw that poster and got a picture of it. The Bakunin quote read “The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too” and then at the bottom it said “…Toward another year of creativity. Ferguson, Missouri, August 10, 2014”.

Nancie: There was also lots of FTP and Fuck12 tags up on the walls and utility boxes and shit around the neighborhood.

Leone: It’s really amazing how the neighborhood has changed. Something I noticed was the young people don’t wait anymore for any organized rally or call-to-action to mobilize themselves or take autonomous action.

When we arrived yesterday evening there were maybe 500 people total spread out on both sides of the street for about three blocks of W. Florissant. Most people were on the sidewalk or the parking lots of the businesses on the strip, but in the median there were already about two dozen young black men and women, a drum kit, and two cars. They were waving a red, black & green flag, dancing to Lil’ Boosie’s & chanting “fuck 12” and firing up the people on each side of the street to join them. Every few minutes another person or two ran into the median to join us.

Nancie: They were playing Lil Boosie on continuous loop and shouting “Fuck The Police” evening. When they started getting frustrated so few people were getting in the streets with them we decided to join them out in the median and were greeted with TONS of hugs and “thank you for being here”s.

Leone: Then we loaded the drum kit up in the back of a truck and started marching out of the median and into the streets. As I remember it, for a long time it was just a couple dozen of us together. Some folks on bikes blocked the traffic when the protest cars needed to change lanes or we had to go around a riot police line. We had a couple small standoffs with the cops, who threatened us with some ordinance violation, but each time we just got back out in the streets a block or so further down.

Nancie: And there was that fucking drone!

Leone: Ugh! The drone…

Joan: There was a drone at the Mike Brown memorial in Canfield earlier that morning, too. I think there was some uncertainty whether or not it was a police or mainstream media drone.

Leone: A few people said that there was a County cop who walked up behind the stage Mike Brown Sr. and the clergy were sitting on and threw that drone up in the air.

Nancie: Do you throw drones in the air?

Joan: Who knows. I feel like it was super disrespectful though that anyone flew that drone at the morning memorial. I remember first seeing it during the 4 ½ moments of silence for Mike Brown, and I think they might have launched it then.

Leone: I think you’re right. I remember seeing it rise above the stage during the moment of silence. I don’t know if that’s when the police launched it, but that makes sense.

Joan: There were so many people in that morning crowd, and everyone was amazingly respectful of the full 4 ½ moments of silence, except whoever launched that drone. It flew really low over the crowd and all you could hear was its motors whirring.

Leone: It was like that later in the evening on Aug 9th, too. The drone was flying so low you could easily have knocked it out the sky with a rock. Some folks were joking about doing it.

Joan: Were they “joking” for sure?

Leone: Ha!

Nancie: Well that evening, August 9th I remember the sky was sooooooooo beautiful right before it started storming! It was like the sky was letting us know it was gonna storm, but there was a beautiful opening on the horizon, like the storm was inviting us to be strong.

I don’t remember exactly why, but a HUGE number of people who had been onlookers from the sidewalk suddenly flooded into the streets right after the police rolled out from the most recent confrontation they had with us. It went from a couple dozen of us to maybe a hundred, or more. It was almost like last year when hundreds or thousands of us at a time controlled the streets and the police couldn’t shut us down.

Joan: The view of the sky is so beautiful from West Florissant. The street’s really wide there and the low buildings and treelines act to really open up the sky and make it look so BIG!

Nancie: Yeah, some guy with a bullhorn pointed out how beautiful the sky was and directed the crowd to all look at it. I think Leone tried to get a picture with his phone, but it’s like the sky just opened up suddenly and started POURING rain.

Leone: What was cool was the drone was flying right above us while we were in the streets and got caught in the storm with us. It was having A LOT of trouble staying in the air. At one point I heard it and looked up and it was tottering by the overhang we’d taken shelter under, and barely avoided crashing into a pole in the strip mall parking lot.

Joan: That’s hilarious. Fuckin’ drone.

Nancie: We were under there for a while, and watched most of the cops get in their cars and SUVs to take shelter from the storm.

More protesters on W Florrisant stepping out in the rain for #MikeBrown. #WorldWatchesFerguson pic.twitter.com/g8J28f2QsT

— Rebelutionary Z (@Rebelutionary_Z) August 10, 2015

Leone: There was actually still a lot of folks in the middle of W. Florissant holding the streets, when suddenly some folks taking shelter around us got really excited because a buncha people ran up on the strip mall across the street, took advantage of the storm and sudden demobilization of the police, and started looting.

Nancie: That was cool!

Leone: I know, right! I totally didn’t see that coming.

Nancie: Good street tactics.

Leone: The reactions of the people around us were pretty mixed. A couple peoples asked to borrow my phone to call a ride outa there, and some were criticizing the police for “allowing” that to happen. But some of the folks around us were cheering for the folks across the street.

One guy I’d had a really good conversation with earlier in the streets, call him “Germaine”, got into it with an older woman who was shouting some respectability politic bs about the looting, I think she was trying to shame the folks looting. He defended what has happening across the street, saying something like “You know the police and this racist system value stuff, their property, more than our lives, like we’re disposable. If our lives are so disposable, we oughta gladly dispose of their stuff.”

“…If our lives are so disposable, we oughta gladly dispose of their stuff.”
~Germaine, 08-09-2015 on West Florissant Ave.

Nancie: It was raining SO hard. Some folks were talking about conspiracies and weather control technology. One guy even speculated “they” might make a tornado go down West Florissant.

Leone: Yeah, and then I think the police started getting out of their cars and fucking with people. They pulled a few cars up at the strip mall and issues a dispersal order. Some people started shouting about the cops pepperspraying someone across the street. A lot of people started leaving and I think we left around that time.

Nancie: Yeah, we had a long way to go in that storm, and we both got SOAKED.

Leone: I had to dry out my cellphone and I think I had about a gallon of water in my clothes.

What I noticed on the way home was even before the rain stopped there were A LOT of people out in the streets, walking on the sidewalks chanting “Fuck 12! Fuck 12!” or blasting one version or another of “Fuck The Police” in their cars; that’s become so normalized, now. Then when I got home the first thing I saw online was that the police shot another young Black man in Ferguson.

I stayed up all night trying to find out details. Some people said he was killed, or that there were two people shot. I fell asleep sometime before sunrise and woke up to learn his name had been announced. His name is Tyrone Harris, Jr.

Nancie: They shot him that night. It was still the one year anniversary, and they shot another Black man on the anniversary of murdering Mike Brown.

Joan: The details were really hard to get straight. I was following on social media.

Leone: Yeah, there were all these nonviolent civil disobedience things the next day

Nancie: On August 10th. Getting arrested on purpose type stuff.

Leone: Right, and social media and text alert stuff was pretty crammed up with a lot of reports about those actions.

Pari: A lot of our friends got arrested at some of those actions; some got hurt.

Joan: It was frustrating how hard it was to find out details about Tyrone.

Leone: I felt like the only thing to do was to go back to West Florissant again on the 10th. Things were SO different there.

Nancie: There were less protesters, more clergy and legal observers, fewer onlookers and partiers. But even though there were fewer people overall, of the people out there on the streets on the 10th A LOT more of them were being openly militant. More of people were masked up, wearing fatigues or carrying red, black and green flags.

Leone: There was even a guy carrying a big black flag. Some peoples got up on the roof of a boarded up building and were waving it, mocking the police who were wobbling by in their heavy pads and riot gear.

There were also a bunch of Nation of Islam guys standing around together in suits, telling folks to “calm down”. I think they might have been guarding the businesses in the strip mall.

Pari: I feel like the cops maybe had some sort of orders not to let things get “out of control” or past a certain level.

Leone: Well, maybe until after the sun was down. Things changed as it got darker.

Pari: Right. I just felt angry and like a lot of people wanted to take it further. I wanted to take it further, too.

Leone: There were a few times when we were in the streets confronting the riot police, pressed right up against them, that a lot of pissed of peoples could have easily attacked the police cars and SUVs and probably got away with it.

Joan: Some of that may have happened, actually.

Leone: Really? I didn’t see or hear any of that…

Joan: Tires.

Leone: Right.

Pari: There was this guy standing in front of me on the line when the riot pigs pushed us up out of the street and onto the curb, and then some “officer friendly” types relieved the riot pigs and were palling around with the clergy; this guy was right in officer “friendly”’s face screaming “Fuck 12” and “FTP: Kill a pig!” and he was doing this literally about two inches from the pig’s face, I think he even spit in the pig’s face. The pigs didn’t lift a finger to any of that. I liked that guy!

Leone: Yeah, the police just stood there and took that, right! But the moment someone crossed the white line between the curb and the street the riot cops were on them. On Them.

Amarion Allen, 11-years-old, stands in front of a police line shortly before shots were fired in a police-officer involved shooting in Ferguson, Missouri August 9, 2015. Two people were shot in the midst of a late-night confrontation between riot police and protesters, after a day of peaceful events commemorating the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by a white officer one year ago. REUTERS/Rick Wilking TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY – RTX1NPTC

Nancie: I thought it was funny, somehow a bullhorn got passed around the crowd, and someone got on and started saying “why we got these white lines on the streets? We need some BLACK lines! Some red, black and green lines!” and a woman in the crowd shouted back “they put those white lines there to control us, like the white supremacy.”

Leone: Yeah I really liked that, too.

I noticed the Nation of Islam, clergy, and officer friendly types were all kinda working together to keep us on the curb or the sidewalk, but then there were more militant peoples out there who was trying to strategize playing cat’n’mouse games w/the police while we waited for more people to arrive. Eventually their strategy actually won out and got us back into the streets. We started marching en masse along the curb, crossing at crosswalks, and leading the riot cops around in circles, exhausting them under all that heavy gear. They were so sweaty and smelled so damn bad when you got close to their line of shields. Idiots.

Nancie: That’s funny. I didn’t notice that.

Leone: That time we marched straight through the street, blocked traffic and went right into the police staging area and disrupted whatever they were doing, I got really close to their lines a few times. A lot of people did. They had sweat all over their face shields and stank, bad

Pari: kinda like pigs…

Joan: Gross!

Pari: I left shortly after that confrontation. It was fun, though!

Leone: Oh yeah, you missed the old white supremacist dudes with machine guns: the Oath Keepers. They showed up later. They were walking around taking close-up pictures of people with high-quality cameras. Before we saw the guns and fatigues you coulda thought they were media or something. They acted like media.

Nancie: Yeah, later we found out there were there to protect the InfoWars people.

Leone: Uhg… Alex Jones conspiracy nuts. They’re racist as hell! Maybe those were the guys with cameras? InfoWars?

Sometimes people try to show me conspiracy stuff from that website. I can’t even look at it. They’re hella racist, anti-gay and anti-immigrant, and misogynist. Disgusting.

Joan: What about that 12y/o girl who got arrested?

Pari: I’m not sure what happened to her. That’s horrible…

Nancie: At least no one got shot that night, like the night before.

Leone: Right, but they mass arrested a bunch of people

Joan: Later we learned that Belmar, the police chief in the county, permitted the Oath Keepers to patrol W. Florissant.

Nancie: It got heated. The police started pushing and shoving, tried to snatch & grab some people and attempted a mass arrest, and then they threw some kind of grenades at protesters and fired rubber bullets. The cops chased people all the way to Canfield and fired off chemical weapons in the neighborhood.

Leone: It’s almost as if one year later, after they killed MikeMike, the police haven’t learned a damn thing in Ferguson. Isn’t the definition of insanity doing the same over and over but expecting different consequences?

Nancie: Yep.

Leone: The worst thing about that is the realization that even if things die down again, if the clergy and white “ally” types and Black liberals and NGO professional activist-y types wear us down again, the police are going to kill again, and again, and again; and they’ll keep on keepin’ on killing us and we’re gonna be right back in those streets, tearin’ it up with the police… pigs.

Pari: It was scary when I was going home, there were some white guys in a car that shouted out the window “hey, go home; you’re white!” and I’m not actually “white”, I’m indigenous – and they are colonizers – so I shouted back at them “No, you go home, my people were here first!”

Joan: They’re trying to escalate: the Oath Keepers, the cops, random racists in a bar in Ferguson or in the break room at your work or shouting at you walking home from their cars. They work like this: passive aggressive escalation, so they can always deny it, gaslight you and make like it’s your fault.

Leone: I didn’t know that happened. That’s crazy!

Nancie: That’s cute. Colonizers.

Pari: Hey, guys?

Nancie: Yeah?

Pari: Fuck The Police!

All : Fuck The Police.

Back in August 2014, outside the burnt-out husk of the QT on W. Florissant Ave. in Ferguson, MO we ran into some white people and old folks pissed off over having witnessed younger people tagging anti-Police messages on the concrete barriers facing W. Florrisant Ave. These oldheads’ respectability politics rhetoric made us wonder if someone who pissed them off so much might have something in common with us, so we made a pilgrimage to the now-fenced in QT to check out “the writing on the wall” and asked around.

We talked about Ferguson, Mike Brown, the Police and the uprisings in the streets in the StL-area and now popping off all around the US, and much, much more! Some names and locations have been changed to protect friends & accomplices.

Since everything went down in Ferguson, it really is amazing how often you meet someone like-minded & it turns out you have A LOT of mutual friends. Small world, huh?

Small town. Saint Louis is a small town that likes to imagine it’s a big city. Chicago is a big city. LA, NYC, those are BIG cities. Relatively, Saint Louis is a small town and I think it really does have a sort of rustbelt small town feel. Everyone seems to know everyone here, or know “someone who knows someone”, y’know? Think about one of the most common icebreaker questions folks ask in Saint Louis: “Where did you go to highschool?” I feel like most people in Saint Louis, and in small towns, generally, have a lot of like-minded mutual friends. It’s a little easier for people to find each other that way, right.

You’re from StL?

I’m from all-over, but somehow I keep landing back here. I moved back and forth a lot, between my father’s family in Chicago and my mom here in Saint Louis. Mostly mom and I lived around the Baden neighborhood on the North Side of Saint Louis. I spent a lot of time dropping out and re-registering at different schools in college, moving from state to state with friends, couch-surfing, seeing a whole lot of North America on the cheap.

That’s the best way to see anywhere, really.

It’s the only way to really experience it, or any place. I don’t think you can really get a feel for a place, for the people there, unless you’re living it on the cheap, at street-level, in the dives, laundramats and alleyways.

You’re partial to alleyways?

Very. Tourists and gentrifiers, academics and preachers, politicians and law enforcement talk about the “seedy underbelly” of society, but that’s just a way of shit-talking the crumbling infrastructure that holds their whitewashed “squeaky-clean” theme park world of suburbs and trendy redevelopment neighborhoods together. The rest of us, most of us, live on the cheap, in the alleys and dives and hole-in-the-wall bars where life is desperately, precariously, and passionately lived; really lived.

That word you just used? “Precariously”? Tell us about that.

You sure about that? Whenever I get into these sort of discussions, especially interview type things, I tend to get super-nervous and talk too much. Not that I’ve ever really done a lotta interviews, you understand?

No, it’s fine. Interviews intimidate me, too. So, about that word…

Well, it’s the way the world today is forcing more and more of us to live. Intellectuals talk about it like it’s something new, but I feel like that’s disingenuous. The very poor and marginalized, the oppressed and other-ed and the most exploited in many past societies lived lives on the edge. It’s about desperation, and we can talk all day about personal responsibility, but personal responsibility is really only really relevant insomuch as we have control over our own lives. Precarity is about the theft of control & choices over our own lives, theft from those below by those above. Precarity is the real-life everyday lived-experience of generation fucked. Maybe social safety nets or unions used to ensure that only the most-marginalized really experienced precarity in the West, but I feel like we can look at the world today and see precarity is being extended to more and more of society, even in the so-called “first world” countries.

Thank you for explaining that. We’re finding that idea of “precarity” is becoming a buzzword among liberals and activists.

Of course, you gotta include academics and “socially conscious” self-styled intellectuals in that, as well. Precarity is a very trendy buzzword in their sorta circles. I can’t tell you how many professors in college who thought they were so “radical” tried to “subversively” teach us that our generation is living something “new” called “precarity” and how significant that is. As though women’s lives, Black lives, LGBTQ lives, immigrant lives, poor lives or the lives of anyone deemed Other in these fucked up systems we’re under have ever been anything other than precarious! It’s real sad, really.

Which “systems are you referring to?

The systems which rob us of the choices over how to live our own lives. Authority. Hierarchy. What we hear about more often in terms of patriarchy, white supremacy/racism, homophobia or hetero/cis-normativity/supremacy, capitalism, the state. All the ways those in authority, those who’ve taken power over our lives, keep themselves on top and keep the rest of us desperate. And it’s all inter-connected. I feel like we really can’t talk about any of this without talking about all of it, if we want to be serious.

It’s what we’re seeing in Ferguson right now, those systems inflict so much trauma and suffering on so many people, and every now and then some of us who’ve known suffering and trauma do something desperate; because we don’t see things changing for the better otherwise. The oppressive systems put this desperation on us, and we strike back and those in authority seem shocked by that, that we’d do something desperate, but desperation is all some of us have ever known.

So that’s what brought you out to Ferguson?

No, the police murder of an 18 year old young Black man named Michael Brown is what brought me out to Ferguson. The murder of a young person who had just graduated highschool and was looking forward to college just a couple miles from where I grew up at hit me like a god-smack, and I don’t mean the crappy band, either. I felt so… I don’t know. Everything. Angry, sad, outraged, depressed, scared, everything except surprised; and I think that’s what emboldened me, and a lot of other people. Was anyone really surprised by what the police did in Canfield, that day? Was anyone really surprised by the officials’ response?

Going back to what you said before about desperation, it’s ironic how REALLY surprised the Pigs & politicians seemed by people’s response in the streets.

Right! They murdered a young man who was walking with a friend to go see family. He was killed for being Black while doing something as common as walking to go visit family, and this happens all the time. In the past we did the petitioning and the voter registration and the ballot initiative stuff and the marching politely with signs and a permit, I mean, I did all that; plenty of my friends and family and a lot of people I’ve known have passed through that at some point. Some are still stuck on it, like a needle stuck in a groove. I think a lotta folks have moved past that, now. You see enough out here in these streets, and you start to realize none of that shit works.

Think about it. How many times a year do you hear about police shooting someone, whether or not they were armed or doing anything “wrong”? How many times a year do you hear about the police beating someone up? How many of those videos of police beating up activists & protesters who are shouting “nonviolence” and “peaceful” back at the police while they’re getting brutalized by the cops? How many ballot initiatives and petitions are we asked to sign each year? How many times are we going to vote for the black or the democrat or the liberal candidate because some activist says they’ll totally be different this time than the last guy was?

We’ve seen it all before. None of it works. And the system keeps turning up the heat on our communities. When they push us so close to the edge, they shouldn’t be surprised what’s happens when we strike back.

Do you mean what happened to the QT on W. Florrisant Ave.?

And the rest of that shit, yeah. The evening Michael Brown was gunned down, the police came into Canfield with shotguns and machine gun-looking things and snarling dogs and teargas. They brought clubs and armor to a candlelight vigil. They had riot-shields and armor the next morning at the police station. They brought out an armored truck and more military equipment the night that gas station got burned down. I’m not certain what else they were expecting.

What about people who say we’re just hurting ourselves, hurting our own communities?

Fuck that. Fuck that! How was that outpost of the Quick Trip corporation ever a part of “our community”? How are any of those places, corporate or privately owned, that sell our people poisons, keep us sick and weak and intoxicated, broke and distracted, part of “our community”? That shit was as much a valid target as the cop who chose to point his gun and pull the trigger, over and over again. That shit is as much a valid target as the institutions and the individuals who’ve got us all like this, that are benefitting from our suffering.

It appalls me how certain people refuse to recognize the context and inter-connected histories of oppression, of exploitation, and genocide. It’s been built into the system from day-one. It’s not “broken” at all, and that’s what I feel like we’re seeing more and more people understanding and feeling. The system is not broken, it’s working exactly how it was always meant to work.

In that context, what happened on West Florissant was what the military calls “blowback”. It was a moment of rage in which people who have been pushed closer and closer to the edge all our lives finally struck back and exercised our own power. That being said, fuck the naysayers who criticize us for burning down “our own communities”. I wonder what “community” they’re talking about. I wonder if those naysayers have to deal with racial profiling, stop and frisk, weekend checkpoints, constant surveillance and summary executions carried out by police on their streets; because that’s what we have been dealing with for a very long time.

But what they’re worried about is some broken windows, some paint on the walls, and a burned down gas station; not an ongoing genocide.

It really is every day.

It is, yes. Now we’ve got these “allies” out here, so “outraged” that history appears to be “repeating itself”. But it never stopped. It never got better. It never went away. It’s still here. It’s gotten worse.

But a burned down gas station, looted merchandise, smashed windows, that’s what the news and the politicians and the pundits want to focus on.

Do you think the media would have given this the coverage it has if it weren’t for the violence?

Let’s be clear on one thing first, I’m not going to talk about “violence” on the part of protesters, because the way I see it that’s self-defense. When you live under siege like we do, when you and your parents and great-great grandparents were all born under siege, what isn’t self-defense? It’s all self-defense. All of it. We need to remember that.

There’s a slogan I saw spray painted up on the walls walking around Ferguson the day after QT burned down. It said “remembering means fighting back!”, and gotta say that I feel that, hard. The fight needs to be taken beyond the streets and to our oppressor’s own doorsteps. All this whooping and wailing and cryin’ doesn’t mean shit if we don’t act on our rage, hook-up and crook-up, and take the fight to our enemies. All of them.

When we first got in touch, it was because we’d seen these little black roses tagged all around the burnt-out QT with some pretty militant call-to-action slogans attached to them, and we heard from a mutual friend that those roses were meant as memorials. Can you tell us about that?

You wanna talk about those roses? Well I won’t say much about this, because it’s kinda personal, y’know? But yeah, they’re partially memorials. I borrowed the black rose tag from a much older friend in Mexico City who taught me all about the history of anarchist symbolism. When I moved to Chicago I started throwing them up in spots where police brutalized or killed someone. Out in LA I started stenciling the rose at my haunts around town, just places that had some meaning to me.

I got involved in this relationship with one of those mutual friends of ours that you mentioned earlier, a few years ago when they moved out to LA for a while to get away from StL, and when I later returned to Saint Louis a year or so after they had, I found that they’d borrowed my tag and slapped it up in significant spots all over the city. There’s still a few faded black roses scattered all over StL, actually, if you know where to look. But when Ferguson PD murdered Mike Brown and shit went down, and I saw that slogan up on the wall it inspired me to revive the black rose tag in the spirit that I first used it; as a memorial and as a call to action.

So there’s multiple meanings to the rose tag, depending on who’s using it?

Yeah, just like anything else anyone ever writes, right? Or, the difference between whatever meaning someone intends when they write, and the meaning understood by the reader. Or even the difference between how the writer relates to their own writing the next day, a week later, a year or a decade-on.

The roses started out for me as little memorials to the outrages and tragedies we endure every day. Later on, in another setting they became like memorials to beautiful moments I experienced in certain spaces, and nowadays they’re like these memorials to outrages or tragedies, but also they’re like a call-to-action and a message to our oppressors that we’re not takin’ shit no more.

Didn’t the mafia use gifts of black roses as a sort of threat?

I think that might be apocryphal, y’know? Like something out from The Godfather flics. But honestly I really don’t know anything about all that, or the history of the mafia or the other symbolic uses of black roses. I do like that, though, the idea of using the rose as a threat. That’s cute! Actually, I really feel that.

Sorry, not to get you off-subject…

No, that’s cool actually. Yeah, I mean I gotta get to work soon, anyway. But that’s what I suppose I’d like to end with, is this notion of not takin’ shit anymore, y’know what I mean? Taking the fight to the man, to the source, not just to the individuals but to the institutions and all the norms and conventions and ideas they uphold. There was another slogan up on the walls the morning after QT burned, another slogan that got my attention. It said “Solidarity means attack!”, and that’s where I think I’m at personally, at the moment. So if someone sees some wall art that resonates with their experience in their day-to-day life, and it inspires them to action, that’s the best I could hope for.

Talk is good, and necessary, and has its place in time, but we got to learn to take action. We gotta learn how to fight back and go on the offensive and fuckin’ win, because this shit’s got to go. We’re not going to get there following the leader down the same old deadend paths, and we’re not gonna get there praying or marching on the sidewalks or sitting on our hands drugged-up, disillusioned and bitter.

So yeah, to me solidarity totally does mean attack, and remembering really does mean fighting back. And the people I’m interested in meeting and getting with are the folks who feel similarly, whether they’ve come to that place just recently or suspected & felt this way for a long time, already. That’s pretty much what it’s all about!

Thank you so very much, A’isha, for your time and for what you’re doing. Be safe out there!

No, you gotta say “Stay dangerous, out there!” We gotta learn to get dangerous and stay dangerous together.

Stay dangerous out there.

You too!

First things first, let’s get this on the table:

Yes, absolutely when we say queer we very-much DO mean the obliteration of your “straight” cis-topia of normativity, identity, gender and the politics by which you capture, categorize, catalogue, sanitize, sterilize, hierarchize & domesticate the great throbbing, swarming multitude of anarchic wyld life you oh-so passive aggressively call “humanity”; as though the very mobilization of this morally loaded designation obligates all the rest of us to civil social behavior in blind acquiescence to the eco-cidal prison you call civilization.

How did we come to this point, you ask? Perhaps it is the feeling of being cornered into constantly explaining to your conservatives how the struggles of people not currently granted the same pitiful socio-legal, cultural and economic rights & benefits as you is NOT equivalent to the legalization of horse-fucking, or marriage between queers and cacti, for example. Maybe we’re sick and fucking tired of the mutherfuckin’ horseshit games you expect us to submit to playing, or being played by, which privilege you at the expense of Other-ed persons; not to mention that these biopolitical games are the very same which imprison us all by virtue of our very participation in them, out of some misguided hope for “equal rights” – as though gaining said rights would make us anything other than what you are, a beneficiary of the privilege extracted from the exclusion of those onto whom the Other category must necessarily be applied so that your disgusting, gluttonous lifestyle can go on commodifying and consuming us all.

Alternately, perhaps it is the tendency of your liberals to co-opt, redirect and rehabilitate our resistance into a pissant movement for “inclusion” into your sick system of privilege, of hierarchy, of extractive industry and of subduing, subverting and replacing the hot & heavy, chaotic maelstrom of messy, wet & wyld actually-living life into reified mapable & marketable discreet categories of “things” called identities, which we are then and only then granted the “right” to “choose” between and which thus having been chosen-from-at-gunpoint must be performed, adhered-to, tried on and switched-out like so many plastic garments mass-produced in third world slave conditions, pushed like so much heroin into our veins & our brains via sterile strip mall displays, clever product placement in this summer’s next record-breaking blockbuster, and popup adds determined by focus groups to be the ideal inroad to efficiently exploit “the queer market”.

Does any of this sound surprising to you? Shocking, perhaps? Appalling? Anti-social, narcissistic, and/or borderline sociopathic? Feel like we’re blowing this all out of proportion?

Well guess what… too fuckin’ bad. And fuck you. No, it’s not “too late” for dialogue, either, because discourse with authority and the status quo has never been our goal. However, the utter ruination of authority, of the status quo, the perversion of everyday life has ever been our delight, our raison d’être. We mean to lose ourselves in loosing the wyldness of undomesticated life upon civilized humanity, and in so doing find one another.

If any of this resonates with you, you must know by now that you are not alone. Not by far. We’ll find one another, and together we’ll smash all their toys and burn this shit to the ground.

For The Wyld!