To the Comrades in the Bay after the Silence of the Shootings

To the comrades in the Bay

Given the police shootings of ten days ago and the lack of response from the Bay's famed anarchist scene, I wanna ask with utmost respect and sincerity: where the hell are y'all at?

In towns big and small we put ourselves on the line after the Mehserle verdict, even though we didn't have any crowds to give us cover, and we were ready to give y'all the support you needed, to help make this thing spread, but we've heard of only a lukewarm anarchist presence that retired early. Even now we're getting ready fundraisers for the Oakland 100 and the prisoners of the latest riot--solidarity for non-anarchists mind you-- but we're hearing that there at ground zero not many of you are doing the same.

And then, to find out that in the same month as the verdict, the cops kill another guy near the Fruitvale BART station, and no one, or almost no one, even gathers at the spot? If it's liberal to hold a candlelight vigil, what the fuck is it to stay at home and drink a beer?

You sit on a fault line of history, at the center of one of the most important moments in decades, when liberal identity politics, electoral politics, and the non-profit industrial complex have all proven their inadequacy and their inability to buy people's complacency-- a moment when only anarchist or other anti-authoritarian revolutionary politics can offer anything remotely resembling an adequate response to the insult and oppressiveness of this situation, and that moment will be lost if we carry on the way we have been. A black president, a major media campaign, and a close alliance of police and human rights groups cannot keep the people off the streets, or scare them away from popular violence. A year when the mass media has been acknowledging the existence of anarchists more than at any time since the 1920s, and our best response, when they say that the riots are being led by outside white anarchists, is to stay off the streets. This is pathetic.

There is no reason why there should not be tens of thousands of flyers and posters giving an anarchist critique of police and state violence distributed throughout all the streets of Oakland, fundraisers every week for those who were arrested in the riots, and continuing anarchist protests, attacks, and other forms of presence, no matter how small or peaceful, to keep this matter alive, fresh, remembered, talked about in the streets and the neighborhoods.

Normally I don't believe in making demands of distant comrades, in guilting people into action. But you owe the rest of us a debt, Bay Area. For years your reputation of coolness has stolen solid anarchists from each of our communities, who flee the sordid reality of struggle in the Rust Belt, the Bible Belt, the 'burbs, factory towns and farm towns. They're drawn to the promise of a scene so large it can seem like a movement.

But meanwhile in those places where the movement is pathetic (Pittsburgh, Portland, and Toronto come to mind) fucking-A have we kept it real in the last few months.

Bay Area: step up to the fucking line, earn that reputation, or send us all our people back.

with love and grumbling,
a for real comrade