I was born a protester " My mother had to go to the school a lot and talk to the principal.
- Dorli Rainey (In conversation with author Paul Haeder)
I am being jailed because I have advocated change for equality, justice, and peace. " I stand where thousands of abolitionists, escaped slaves, workers and political activists have stood for demanding justice, for refusing to either quietly bear the biting lash of domination or to stand by silently as others bear the same lash.
- Marilyn Buck, at her 1990 sentencing (epigram in Linda Ford's book, Women Politicals in America)
Personal Truth
Personal experience is like the yeast in good sour dough bread - lifts truth to the heavens. It wasn't just a shame to see Dorli Rainey, 80-year-old activist, sprayed with corrosive eye-nose-lung chemicals by the bicycling Seattle Police Department during a peaceful Occupy Seattle rally. That was November 16, 2011. We were all kettled in and sprayed by the fascist police force, all warm and fuzzy looking in their spandex bike shorts and on black Trek mountain bikes.
Seattle is a libertarian town, a city of racist and Nazi-loving cops and officers that kill Blacks, Latino/a citizens and Native Americans. The images of Dorli with milk splashed on her face being helped out of the crowd that hit the Associated Press headlines didn't change the patriarchal and thuggish leaders of the Emerald City.
The legacy of Rachel Carson and her work on environmental fascism by the purveyors of the chemical industrial war complex also was deep in my soul after I read SilentSpring at the impressionable age of 15.
Luckily, when I was a first-year high school student, one of my English teachers turned me onto the National Farm Workers Association and Dolores Huerta's role in leading with Cesar Chavez grape and lettuce boycotts. Ms Courtney was instrumental in inculcating my interest in women heroes in history, highlighting the work of both Mother Jones and Angela Davis.
A legacy of women activists in the streets and my own participation with their causes goes back when I was in my third year of high school, protesting the invaders trying to block people from receiving services from Planned Parenthood in Tucson. I was alongside women who demanded their right to reproductive medicine facing down angry men and women protected by a phalanx of Tucson Police Department goons.
A year later I was covering the police beat for the Arizona Daily Wildcat, a reporting job that put me face to face with the rape culture - most of the stories I covered involved the sexual assaults on and around campus and then throughout the metropolitan area. Four to eighty (4-2-80) was the figure I had emblazoned in my mind - a four year old girl raped by three men in a drug house and an eighty-year-old artist using a walker raped by what the fascist cops dubbed the "Apologetic Rapist." All ages, all walks of life, all races, that's what I had come to know as the rape culture engulfing me.
I wrote about judges who sided with the alleged rapists, double raping the sexually assaulted by admonishing her for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, for wearing provocative clothes, for playing drinking games with young healthy men - "what did you expect would happen?" I learned early on that my words as a journalist were nothing compared to a baseball to the heads of the perpetrators, both the violent sexual assaulters and the DA's, and judges, coaches, cops and colonized public.
I was told flat out that I was no longer a protected member of my own gender when I was accused of "siding with the radical fems castrating men" as I covered stories on Take Back the Night and protests against my campus sweeping under the rug (university politics then and now) of star athletes (male) leveled with rape charges that "mysteriously disappeared."
I fought tooth and nail around the various newsrooms I worked in, since I was both a hard left socialist and communist in name. I blasted the American Police state (with the full support and logistics of the city government) when they spearheaded and carried out an illegal and unconstitutional military assault against African Americans, while my news reporter brothers and sisters defended the cops and the bureaucrats. I called some of the defendants "the brave women in Philadelphia who had the guts to defend home and family and who witnessed their loved ones firebomb murdered." I was lambasted by both male and female editors while Debbie Sims and Janine and Janet Africa of the MOVE 9 ended up with 100-year sentences with no chance of parole because a cop was killed by friendly fire. They were political prisoners of a vicious killing machine, propped up by a schizophrenic rule of law pistol in one hand and a machine gun of empty constitutional rights in another hand. The three were locked up in a state correctional (sic) institution starting in 1978, although Debbie was released in June 2018.
Add to the many heroes of the women political prison class others less militant, like Lois Gibbs and other "housewives and mothers" fighting the patriarchal death goo of Love Canal's Hooker Chemical Co that dumped 21,800 tons of industrial hazardous waste from 1942 to 1953 that ended up being under a Niagara Falls middle class housing development of death. Birth defects, developmental disabilities, and tortuous death.
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