Read my latest flash, Venison, at 52|250.

On Easter Sunday, a group of protesters were arrested for shouting their opposition to the war in Iraq and spattering themselves and bystanders with blood during mass in Chicago’s Holy Name parish. At first I thought that they could have chosen a better target– say, a large evangelical congregation of the Republican persuasion, as those tend to be much more behind the war than the Catholic Church is (for all of its flaws)– but it turns out that the reason they chose this particular parish was buried deep in the article:

The protest erupted as the cardinal began his Easter homily, a sermon that celebrates the Christian belief that Jesus rose from the dead three days after his crucifixion. Dressed in their Sunday best—shirts and ties on the men, and the women in skirts—the six demonstrators moved into the auditorium aisles from their center-row seats and shouted their opposition to the war.

They decried the deaths of 4,000 U.S. soldiers and [hundreds of] thousands of Iraqi citizens, drawing angry heckles and shouts of “Sit down!” from churchgoers. As ushers and security guards rushed down the aisle, the group denounced the cardinal for having lunch with President Bush and Mayor Richard Daley in January.

The group also noted  a wish to reach prominent Catholic citizens in Chicago and further afield.

Despite the charges this group faces, its members did not act violently. Rather, they created an even that stood for violence, that signified the violence faced by Iraq. It was a slap in the face, an effort to wake people up to see that as they celebrated, others were dying. As they found their joyous day marred by sticky fake blood, others found themselves covered in real blood.

Inevitably, some of the parishioners’ anger was directed at the protesters, the self-directed vehicles of this message. The real outrage, however, should be for what the fake blood stood for: the real violence half a world away. The violence each and every person in that church helped pay for. The violence that smug statements about how we should all work for peace do nothing to amend.

Flowers

Peonies for your rebellion– you would not
Open no matter the power, no matter
Who ordered you;
Eglantine for your small size–
Rose of the bush,unloved by

Commerce and always in bloom;
Red poppies to help you sleep
And remind you to eat;
Zinnias in white for your goodness and
Yellow so you’ll think of me every day apart;

Spider flowers for their petals like legs,
Each ready to run you to me;
Nasturtiums for the victories for you
I see in their yellow petal standards;
Oleander for their overuse
Requires a place in every bouquet written;

Gladioli for the strength that
Earned them their human name and is
Not absent from your mind;
Echinacea for its healing– and spine
Really needed for the healing that you bring;
Acacia for its dense blooms concealing
Love and pollen

These blooms will I
Hand to you
All wrapped in saffron ribbon and
Netting without color

Shape or
Hopelessness.
We will dance together
Each time we win or live

Myanmar poet, Saw Wai, was arrested for writing an acrostic Valentine’s Day poem with an embedded criticism of the military junta: the first word of each line spells out the phrase “Power crazy Senior General Than Shwe”. (To adapt the form to English, I’ve used the first letter of each line in accordance with the idea of Emily Lloyd.)

A group of high school students in Berwyn, Illinois is facing expulsion for staging a non-violent sit-in against the war.  While it’s understandable that the students would face some penalty for not attending classes, expulsion is clearly excessively punitive and represents an effort to stain these students’ records and make it more difficult for them to earn a scholarship or even admission to a university.  (Though I would hope that an applicant explaining that they were expelled for protesting an illegal, immoral war would push them to the front of the line, suggesting as it does a willingness to think critically and then act upon those thoughts, there would seem to be a reason that I’m not in a position to make those decisions.)  This also provides more evidence that, at least at administrative levels, the goal of public education in the US is moving more and more towards the creation of conformists with enough technical skills to meet the demands of industry and further and further away from developing creative, thinking citizens.

The Indymedia article includes contact information for the superintendent, principal, and board of education, so you can let them know exactly what you think about this discipline.  There’s also an online petition in support of the students.

I’ve known too many people (though even one is too many) who can see the flaws of the status quo but refuse to do anything, because they say it’s hopeless or else not bad enough to be worth the energy. And then that refusal to act or struggle creates a horizon for their thought: they come to believe, consciously or not, that there’s no purpose for thinking beyond the limits imposed by present-day society, the laws, and those in power. You can’t change any of that, so any line of thought that doesn’t fall within those bounds is impractical, mental masturbation at best.

Then they wonder why they’re so depressed or why they find themselves mired in inertia.

The sort of thought to which they limit themselves means that when things are wrong or troubling, they can blame no one but themselves and those closest to them. Internalized anger manifests as depression. People with whom they are intimate get pushed away (blamed) or clung to in an unhealthy way, since only the closeness of a “good” individual can relieve pain and prevent it in the future. My own inability to see the social forces in play behind certain things that have happened to me has, on occasion, led me into similar affects and behavior. (Note that understanding the social causes does not mean absolving individuals of responsibility. I know that social and structural misogyny breeds men who rape women. I also know that Jon made a choice. I can’t change that he made that choice; I can work to change the conditions that encouraged him to do so.)

What’s more, people who limit themselves this way miss out on a certain joy. Struggling to change unjust aspects of society is not a grim and joyless task. It may not always be easy, but difficulties create a greater sense of achievement. There’s also a powerful sense camaraderie among those who work together for change. The person I love and I are at our strongest and most loving when we struggle together. Struggle doesn’t even have to be explicitly political; I believe in cultural change. I believe in the power of truly experimental art to change the way people view the world.

Now, I’m not very good at phrasing things in a diplomatic manner. When I try to explain my ideas on this subject, people tend to take offense. I’m often accused of thinking I’m better than they are. I don’t. I do, however, remember accusing the person who taught me all this of the exact same thing, so perhaps it’s not my fault. More likely, though, he and I just share some of the same flaws.