THE NEXT 30 DAYS

So all of us who live in America know what we’ve got to do in the next 30 days, right?

A) Vote. Get everyone else to vote. Vote for everyone in America whose vote has been taken away from them. Vote for everyone on the planet who lives at the mercy of the American Empire.
B) Get Bush out. Get progressive candidates and progressive legislation in. Local elections are just as important as national ones – the measures and propositions on our ballots will directly affect our daily lives and our communities in the next 4 years.
C) Commit ourselves to keep working on issues. The day after Kerry wins, we need to get back to building an effective progressive movement: a movement for peace, social and economic justice, environmental sanity and the dismantling of the military-industrial complex across the globe.
D) Recharge our souls with art that makes us laugh and think and shout and cry and dance – and then get back to A), B) and C). Check out my performances this month, and Aya de Leon’s amazing new show!

Stay hopeful, people. We CAN take our world, and our lives, back from the psychopaths – corporate and human.

In community,
Shailja

WAKE-UP CALLS

New York blew me away. Each day was bigger, richer and more amazing than the one before – I felt like a constantly expanding balloon. Thank you to everyone who made La Casita unforgettable – organizers, artists, and most of all, audiences, at the Lincoln Center, Langston Hughes Library (Queens), The Point (Bronx), and La Plaza Cultural (East Village). Thank you to everyone on this list who sent me encouragement, celebration and support. Thank you to all the brave, beautiful people filling the streets of NY in the anti-RNC protests, putting their bodies on the line for peace and justice. And thank you to Max Café, at West 123rd St and Amsterdam, for a panna cotta that I still dream about.

I was lucky enough not to be arrested in NY. Thousands of other peaceful people, exercising what they believed to be their democratic rights, did not have the same good fortune. At the end of this mailing is an article, “Little Guantanamo” by the mother of one young woman arrested - she wasn’t even at a protest! Read it if you still cherish any illusions that Americans enjoy the right to due process. The writer holds political views far to the right of mine – she proudly displays American flags at her front gate and on her car window, and accepts without question that the real Guantanamo houses “Al Qaeda terrorist political prisoners”. Yet, her daughter’s experiences seem to have been a shocking wake-up call for her; and her article is a wake-up call for us all.

In community,

Shailja