Preliminary Notes from No Man's Land: An Excerpt from Red State Rebels

Voting on Election Day, seen as one of the only ways to democratically vent our collective disgust, doesn’t always do much good. In fact most of the dissidents in Red America don’t vote at all. And for good reason. They know the system is rigged. Besides, they don’t trust the government or its policies anyway. They see what it has done for their families and loved ones, and that’s not much. They recognize they didn’t enjoy the benefits of those federal tax cuts. They know their hardware shop went under because Wal-Mart moved to town. They see that their Grandpa lost the family homestead because industrialized farms began receiving huge subsidies from Washington. And they sure as hell don’t trust the so-called liberal establishment. Why should they? Life under Hillary’s husband wasn’t any better than it has been under Bush.

The resistance isn’t always about revolution; it’s about maintaining a semblance of dignity in a world where such a thing is in short supply.

That’s why there has been a resurgence of organic farming in the Red River Valley of North Dakota where farmers like Todd Leake are fighting Monsanto and supporting their families through farmer’s markets and community supported agriculture. If you want to learn about the negative effects of genetically modified crops, you don’t need to consult a study by a scientist from Berkeley, just talk to the Nelson family of Amenia, North Dakota who stood up to Monsanto after the company sued them for patent infringement.

Or take a trip down to Colorado where feisty environmentalists are fighting the moneyed interests of billionaire Red McCombs who is trying to build yet another sprawling ski resort in the heart of the Rockies. These radical greens are fighting McCombs in the courts and may soon plant their bodies on Forest Service roads to block his bulldozers. Since we’re here, may as well take a trip due west to the outback of Escalante, Utah, where Tori Woodard and Patrick Diehl routinely receive death threats for their environmental activism. A few years back, a band of local yahoos vandalized their home, threw bottles of beer through their front windows, kicked in the front door, trashed the garden, and cut the phone line to their house. It takes real guts to stand up in the distant belly of the beast, where defending the Earth usually results in a face-to-face confrontation with a bulldozer, a taser or a shotgun.

Down in Texas, not far from where the government torched the Branch Davidians alive, anti-death penalty advocates spared the life of Kenneth Foster, who was to be put to death for a murder he didn’t commit. Or traverse Interstate 10 to New Orleans where passionate groups of local citizens, without much help from the Federal government are slowly rebuilding their forgotten neighborhoods. Many lost everything in the devastating, preventable Katrina floods of 2005. But they refuse to give up. Since we are in Louisiana, why not roll on over to the tiny town of Jena where protests rage on over the racist incarceration of six black youths who were unfairly imprisoned for beating a white kid.

This book offers a just a few snapshots of the grassroots resistance taking place in the forgotten heartland of America. These are tales of rebellion and courage. Out here activism isn’t for the faint of heart. Be thankful someone is willing to do the dirty work.

Nope, we’re not supposed to exist. But here we are, in the flesh, with mud on our boots and green fire in our souls—living examples of what Greil Marcus calls the Invisible Republic. Deal with it.

Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: The Politics of Nature and co-edits CounterPunch.org. Joshua Frank is the co-editor of Dissident Voice and the author of Left Out! How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush. Together they are the editors of the brand new book Red State Rebels: Tales of Grassroots Resistance in the Heartland, published by AK Press.

 1  |  2