R: and ArtVanGoGo brought brushes and paints and some music and the mothers, these women, and most of them are mothers, they started working, some of them with their kids, painting flower pots.
H2: mm
R: And it - it was amazing--first, these are street tough kids. They lived under bridges and one of them, the story goes, when she was given her apartment, said "can I close my eyes when I sleep now?" Oh, why wouldn't you close your eyes? "Because when I'm sleeping under a bridge and I close my eyes I get raped." These are tough kids and they have hard exteriors, but once they started working with the art, it started freeing up a different part of them and they were smiling and, it was just wonderful to see that and the creativity they brought to it was amazing. One of the woman got on her phone and accessed a page of Chinese characters and painted the Chinese characters for love and passion..
H2: awww
R: on her pot. And then another one asks, "what do I do with this plant?" Because they got flowers too, and they didn't know how to take care of a plant. They'd never had a plant, they never had a home to live in. That's the story. That's a story that really moved me. Just seeing -
H2: Yeah!
R: how - realizing how something, seeing such a little thing meant so much to these women.
H1: mmm
H2: Exactly. Yes.
R: Now of course you know there's Occupy and the Arab Spring. I spent a lot of time at five different Occupy locations particularly New York, Zuccotti Park, and in Philadelphia, but also in Washington and Trenton and in Rhode Island. Yeah for me those were very exciting times and Occupy is still very exciting for me and I believe that it's in-germination. It's not done.
H2: [ss] Yeah
R: There's a lot more to come of it and people are getting really pissed and there's more of this gonna happen. This is not over yet.
H2: Well I believe, I believe it. I think the major media have tried to make it look like it's dead and buried but you know, that the underlying passion and need and rebellion against the top down authority that we've been held under for so long is, it's got to still be brewing. It's got to be, I like your word germinating, because, you know, it's going to pop through the soil again and it's one of those things that it's gonna pop through in so many-different places and in so many different forms that the powers that be aren't going to be able to stomp it out everywhere.
R: You know Woody Guthrie, Woody Guthrie and Howard Zinn have both said that it's gonna take millions of little efforts and actions and changes that are gonna make the big changes happen. And we never know which one it's going to be. I started a - called smallacts.org, small a c t s .org because I really believe that it's very often, and I just had somebody write an article about it the other day about avalanches, I think you commented on that article too, Burl, that, sometimes an avalanche takes, the sound of the snap of a twig to move hundreds of thousands or millions of tons of snow and ice.
H2: mmm
R: And I think that could be the case and it probably will be the case when it comes to the changes that are going to happen here in the United States. It was very exciting for me to learn about Horizontalism. The HorizontalidadMovement of Argentina that Marina Sitrin has written about. In Argentina, the people took down the government then they did it again and again.
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