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9 Responses to “Speak Your Peace and See Chicago 10 Today!”

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1. How long will Americans insist on stay unconscious to what matters?
   How long will Americans ignore the truth for convenience?
   How long will Americans bow to the programmed fear of those who want to control?
   How long will Americans accept lies as acceptable in politics?
   How long will Americans turn away when elections are manipulated?
   How long will Americans let corporations run their lives?
   How long will Americans let money be the major influence in our government?
   How long will Americans contain the power fo the people for the illusion of safety?
   How long will Americans put up with Congress not holding this administration accountable for all it has done that is unacceptable?
   How long will Americans allow our government to spy on us, hold people illegally, conduct torture, kill people for whatever reason they make up and so many other unacceptable policies?

   We are the creators of America. If we blame and complain and don’t take responsibility, we are just empty words. There are way too many empty words out there. Where has the heart gone? Fear only controls those who have lost contact with their hearts.

   Just watching the preview got my juices flowing.

   Joseph
   http://www.ExploreLifeBlog.com and http://www.Peace-Together.com

   Joseph Bernard February 29, 2008 | 2:57 pm EST

2. It can’t be much longer, for the sake of our future. The rest of the world is dying from us and now our children are at risk.
   They are living in a new world where they get diseases in needles and live with plastics, pesticides, and other pollutants.
   Young lawyer students should figure out a way to challenge big corporations in the sue you arena.

   Issues to look at: vaccines vs auto immune diseases, plastic bottles vs corrosive beverages, pesticides vs nervous system disorders (ie als), and lead vs learning disabilites.

   My father, who died of lung cancer, always snickered when he heard the ‘rumours’ that smoking caused cancer. He claimed it had not been proven. When it was finally confirmed, he quite cold turkey, but too late.
   We cannot let companies insist we prove their product kills. From now on, they must prove it is safe for children!!!!
   And they can’t use our children for test subjects. At least not mine!

   How long will we let our governments trick us into thinking our enemy lives in a foreign land when it lives here.

   lora bruncke March 1, 2008 | 12:07 am EST

3. I can’t resist posting my latest political poem, in which I speak my peace.

   LINK
   For our youth

   Zelda is waiting for her hero LINK. Not anyone who I’d consider a *zink.
   Like those who sell our kids drugs to drink; taking my daughter to an overdose brink.
   Energy punch sounds good to our teens, who probably have heavy metal in spleens.
   Parents try hard to make them eat greens. Big businesses spoil them by any means.
   LINK is a pointer. Follow the direction. Do polio vaccines LINK to aids by reflection.
   Viagra and cialis LINK to small man’s ejection. Does autism LINK to vaccines injection?
   Some say we must prove what hurts our kids. Women have tried to pry open eyelids.
   Men like a fight, after placing their bids. How many babies have now died of SIDS?
   Does diabetes LINK to pesticide sprays? Toys LINK to lead as a child plays.
   Cancers LINK to our hot sunny rays. Lets all follow LINK till the end of our days.
   LINK points a direction we have to pursue. We must learn what is false and what could be true?
   To save a future for my children and you, study the LINK. Lets think them all through.
   Love Lora Bruncke

   *zink - word changed to protect the innocent

   lora bruncke March 2, 2008 | 4:06 am EST

4. Last Tuesday I went to the screening of the “Chicago 10,” came home crying, and decided to write about it. Having moved to Chicago months ago, I am constantly looking for ways to access Chicago histories of resistance. So the idea of a movie on the Chicago Conspiracy Trial purporting to “present . . .contemporary history with a forced perspective” was right up my ally.

   I walk in the door to a crowd I know well: Mostly white. Mostly old. Mostly liberal. Although disappointed so many voices are missing, I take my seat in anticipation (I will someday be old, white, and “liberal” after all).

   When the movie starts, I am immediately uncomfortable. The film is mostly animated - cutting between pranks at the trial, hippies dancing on Lincoln Park grass, clever moments of confrontation, Abbie Hoffman performing stand-up, and real images of police violence. Everything is loud, flashy, and cinematic. And the audience seems to laugh the whole way through.

   Abbie Hoffman calls a female police officer who is testifying against him a “dyke.” The audience laughs.

   A black woman (the only person of color in the film who speaks other than Bobby Seale) is asked if she feels bad for the white DNC rioters and says “no.” No follow up context is provided for her comment. The audience laughs. Race is left screaming in a room that seems not to hear.

   Kids are shown playing a new game called “police brutality.” One kid testifies: “sometimes its not fun being the protester because sometimes it hurts.” The audience laughs. I am shocked.

   The movie climaxes in Bobbie Seale being gagged and chained for speaking back to the judge.

   And Abbie Hoffman sums it all up as “total theater.”

   But this is not theater. This is racism at its most vibrant and privileged activism at its most uncritical. This is a movie about a trial that put a black man in chains. In a time that saw Fred Hampton brutally murdered by Chicago police and 43 shot dead in the Attica Prison rebellion, the movie positions resistance as humor, fun, and hippie pranks. Something people just “forgot to care about.”

   In the panel discussion afterwards, all three panelists are white men. None of them consider themselves to be current activists in Chicago. Tom Hayden begins by saying “it’s hard to contextualize this stuff,” which I appreciate, but no time is allotted for him to explain. None of the alliance work or related struggles that carved out space for the protest are mentioned. When my housemate brings up race, Hayden points to the movie poster’s gagging of Abbie Hoffman: “the trial was about the gagging of a black man. The poster is about the gagging of a white man.” Again, no time is given for response. Conversation turns to the war in Iraq, the genocide in Sudan, whether our votes still count. . .

   Until we recognize the violence of the past, how can we begin to understand the violence of the present? Until we look at our own home, with a prison system that incarcerates 1 in 100 adults, immigration laws that violate basic human rights, a school system founded on structural inequality, and urban development that is displacing thousands, how can we begin to speak out on the war abroad? And until we acknowledge our different positions of privilege in political struggle, how can we begin to attempt truly collaborative work?

   I want to believe in intergenerational dialogue, I want to believe in coalition-building, and I want to believe in crowds like the one that came to the Chicago 10. But I did not find the Chicago 10 funny, I do not think activism just “goes away,” and I do not think today is any less urgent than the past. It’s time we find better ways of engaging with discomfort and privilege than trying to laugh it away.

   Hannah March 5, 2008 | 1:32 pm EST

5. While no sane person doubts Iraq is a disaster, that Bush, to put it mildly, is a divisive figure like LBJ, and that the race for the Democratic nomination in 2008 is “hotly contested,” there is a world of difference between 1968 and 2008. Anyone who is actually old enough to remember 1968 (unlike the director of this film, who probably wasn’t even born then) knows that. It is historically disingenuous to compare the two. There is no massive social, cultural and political upheaval today that compares to anything that happened in 1968, and the years preceding 1968. There were two assassinations of major figures in the few months preceding the 1968 Democratic National Convention. A president had been assassinated a mere 5 years before. MLK’s assassination sparked race riots. The country was still roiling from the impact of the civil rights movement. There was a huge and not infrequently violent anti-war movement, something that certainly does not parallel the “laid back” anti-war efforts of today. And the scale of our involvement in Vietnam and our involvement in Iraq today do not compare. We had far, far more troops committed in Vietnam at the height of Johnson’s escalation, and far higher casualty rates, than in Iraq. Most importantly, of course, there was a draft then. The comparisons between 1968 and today simply won’t hold up. It’s all wishful thinking and historical ignorance by wannabe radicals who couldn’t have carried Bernardine Dohrn’s bra or Abbie Hoffman’s jockstrap. The director of this film needs to go back to playing with his X-Box and I-Phone. The fact that a good portion of the “documentary” is apparently animated is a definite “no go,” despite the interesting subject matter.

   david autry March 23, 2008 | 11:22 am EST

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