Many people speak of the struggle, but I think many do not appreciate or truly understand what it is about. Some struggle in their own specific cause and yet do not fully appreciate what their own struggle is about, let alone how it relates to the struggle that does I feel relates to us all. One of the few I have found who both understand and can express it well is Russell Means, who I sometimes fear is this continents last remaining revolutionary.
I have found that I have many interesting and surprisingly profound discussions with Russell, and often it is in the shortest things that he says which require the greatest thought and consideration. Hence, it was his choice of describing the Lakotah struggle as that of recognition as human beings that made me think more deeply on how all our struggles do relate. My response to him was a rather honest one, in that how can they recognize the Lakotah as human beings when the invasive species does not even recognize or treat each other as such. But I think most people know or can determine why Russell Means understands such things while I think few even here really know or understand why I would choose to be so involved in the struggle. So I thought it was a time to finally say something about what it has meant for me personally.
As only a very few here I think already know, in the early 80’s I came to live on the streets of Chicago, and in fact places like Robert Tailor Homes and Cabrini Green are familiar to me, if only because they were too expensive for people in our community to live in. With no jobs, no families, we mostly survived in the then abandoned buildings around printer row and similar places along the fringe of the financial district. While partially blind, I could still see the hard looks people gave us when we moved from place to place, while at the same time concerned that should we somehow get ahead, that it would somehow mean they are less advantaged. That is the lesson, as I believe I have said here before, that I learned about people on those steets, but there was one other lesson I learned while living on those streets which I have never discussed before.
The other lesson I learned was love, and my first true lover. Not the girl you grope and screw in high school, but the one you may wish to spend your life with. And with all the deprivations, with that, I found it worth surviving on those streets. However, when I had found a chance to escape that life, she had refused to come with. She did not wish to leave the life, the place, the people, that she was familiar with. And so, I made that choice alone, and when I left those streets, that door and that entire life closed with my departure. With no phone or fixed address, there was of course no way to find or keep in contact with her, especially being far away. However, there were a few people I still knew who lived in the area who did have the means to reach me even if rather late.
It was, rather ironically as it turns out, while I myself was in the hospital recovering from pneumonia in 2004, that I had learned of her passing several days earlier. She had went to the hospital with a 105 fever, and, as it seems common for how people with no medical insurance or means to pay are treated in our “for profit” medical system and hospitals where the Hippocratic oath has become the hypocrites oath, was sent immediately back out onto the streets with a prescription she had no means to fill to avoid unnecessary costs to the hospital. She had died that very night. As did my interest in being in any way part of this “thing”, this abomination called America.
I know many people now are speaking about how a manufactured crisis is being used to loot the American public. But that people relate this way to each other in America does not surprise me. That people see others misfortunes as their own opportunity has become irrelevant, just as who is the next president, has no meaning at all. Just as I closed the door on the streets so long ago, that night I closed the door on America. My chosen way is that of freedom, not occupation by and slavery to the meme of Rome reborn from a colonization of the western mind and re-made whole in the invasion and colonization of this once free continent.
Freedom, a chance to live as free human beings, means that this “thing” called America, as presently formulated, must clearly be abolished. In it’s place I dream of something new, of a continent, filled with free people living in free and friendly nations, of people living not at the expense of others, where the needs of the many are sacrificed for the greed of a few and people are allowed to openly die on the streets because they are not “important”, because most lives are not as relevant as the few, but respecting and treating each other, everyone, as human beings with worth and value not measured in class and currency. Or, as my friend the Italian physicist Stefano Barale would say, “where every human being is important, where every human life matters, not just some.” This once existed on our Turtle Island, and I wish to see it restored for those who will live in this place after us. Beneath the banner of no nation, but only that of a vision for a once-again free Turtle Island, is what I do choose to struggle for.
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