JAIL IN VEGAS LEADS TO FARMING IN SIERRA NEVADA

Tom S. joined the CW Marching Band at Creech AFB, home of the killer drones.
Photo courtesy of the Nuclear Resister via FB

"Who can say, who can know, where my dreams go?" is a line from the Miwok song, a regular part of our song-tradition back home at the Catholic Worker Farm. For a few days, our dreams became reality when Tom Spiritbringer and Pegasus left the Sierra Nevada mountains to see the Nevada Desert with other Catholic Workers from around the nation. Three of the 120 participants came from Australia, Germany and the Netherlands. Although the International gathering was a spiritual family reunion for some, I didn't get to say goodbye because I was in jail with 12 others for the evening. We 13 were captured via 26 police cars visiting Creech Air Force Base from further away in Las Vegas, NV. Those police knew that 120 Catholic Workers and friends were present, so the police tried to protect the ability of soldiers @ Creech to continue killing scores of innocent folks via drone warfare that afternoon/evening. The street party was at 3:30pm Pacific Time, yet the work of Creech drone crews later that night (around 9:00pm) was destined to be a nightmare for their targeted victims (in daylight elsewhere on this planet) and nightmarish for those of us who were arrested at Creech amidst gaiety (the marching band was lovely).

Pegasus rent his wings in protest of killer drones, inspired by Kelsey's use of bloody hands to decorate the driveway with a heart.
Las Vegas Metro Police gather with Air Force personnel to prevent further incursion in their sanitized territory of terror: drone warfare from abroad.
Photos courtesy of the Nuclear Resister
Grief came later as we (Alex, Kelsey, Kathy, Brian, Claire, Scott, Allison, Sam, Steve, Austin, John & Phil Runkel with me) heard and saw the brutality of the jail system first hand with fellow inmates, mostly swept into the system without warning. Some folks enter the jail through barbaric situations (whether perpetrating violence or victims of such) OUTSIDE jail, but all of us are tossed into the cauldron INSIDE for a host of horrors starting with some humans controlling others, continuing with things like... no treatment or kindness towards mentally disturbed folks, wheel-chair constraints for rambunctious folks, deprivation of sleep for all, not to mention the high-carb grey goo for breakfast. Twelve of us were able to leave before Monday Oct. 10th (a Monday holiday for some in the USA) and I was left inside for another 12 hours. It's nice to get out to the regular chaos of urbania, but hearts are still broken inside of the jails, and therefore outside as well. Upon release, my friends with NDE took me to supper at an Ethiopian restaurant for succor.

For Indigenous People's Day, Spiritbringer and I took the long journey back to Earth Abides CW Farm, with hopes that some of the people we encountered at the International CW gathering will join us for stints as volunteers this coming Winter and Spring. We are lucky that many folks in the CW movement are flexible enough to be available to put in some work at our Catholic Worker Farm in the Sierra Nevadas. As we awoke in the morning, ready to make the trip home, others on the northern border of the USA successfully conducted a beautiful direct action for justice and peace.

We all have much work to do for justice' sake. We probably need to make FM radio broadcasts to the commuting air force folks so they might get a better chance to hear our message in the comfort of their cars (since their traffic moves to the middle gate as soon as we step into the road at the eastern gate). We probably need to be at all three entrance gates simultaneously to have more conversations with Creech employees. Many lovely peaceful tactics can be deployed to ramp up our efforts for justice in these deserts and peace in the foreign lands as well as our local lands. The audio echo of radio broadcasting is similar to the "bloody-hand heart" we painted in the access road after we left--either one is less-direct than eye-contact during a vigil. At least for the International Catholic Worker gathering of October 2016, the security personnel left the road decorated as we left it on October 9th. It was still very visible on October 11th at 8:30 am.




UPDATE on Pine Bark Beetle Struggle

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Here's the 40-year old Farm House before and during the tree removal season. CLICK FOR PRIOR INFO

As you may have seen in our last entry, At the time of our first celebration of the 40th Anniversary for the Catholic Worker Farm, a dozen trees were dead near the original Farm House. That was April/May. Then the easily observable tree mortality was up to at least 46 trees by July on the border of our land trust and the neighbors' land. Then by September we counted 80 trees dead, including the area between Pace House and the K-Knoll. According to locals and CNN, the dying forests are changing our bioregion, but it's really a simple matter of temporary and long-term climate change, via extended drought, the pine bark beetle, new flora which follow wildfires. The death toll continues, and many humans in our region question: "Will we enjoy the new environment?"


We were thrilled on our way home across the California/Nevada border to discover that earlier that day folks on the northern US border had successfully turned off the flow of oil to our over-consumptive nation. I suppose Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin would be pleased over this positive step by ordinary civilians. And yet, the goodness of nonviolent risk-taking during the Days Prayer and Action is not complete...

If our friend Father Jerry Zawada, ofm and his team of pacifists had been thrust into the limelight, they'd be impeached upon dismantling the D.o.E., I.C.E, the Pentagon, and subverting institutional sexism and violence. Of course 'tis a sin for lovarchists, personalists or anarchists to vote for a human being to be saddled with the "authority" to kill. What would Saint Francis do? Diffuse and dismantle the violent systems and machines, of course. No need to forfeit the soul (like any typical President of the US Empire) when you've got Franciscan supa-power!

THE MIRACLE CARROT is LIKE A PROTEST

There's many reasons to protest Trumplimania while ONE special item grew at Earth Abides and ONE simple financial decision helps stop DAPL.
Now is the time for all good folks to revolt. Of course, it's always been the time, but NOW is a more popular time, due to negative weirdness in the air as millions of Americans were targeted by a particular TV star winning Electoral College power. On Saturday, thousands of people across the USA demonstrated their opposition to the Trumplican movment, symbolized and galvanized by the specter that a quintessential anti-public servant will be sworn in to being Commander-in-Chief. I'm reminded of the rise of a different movie star to supreme power in 1981. That fiasco of democracy (the presidential election of 1980) caused a revolt in '81 of 1,000,000 folks marching against nuclearism in New York City. More info on the November protests in Vegas is available elsewhere.

For our future, here's a good place to start: Live,Share,Grow. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was born on January 15th, like my sister Stephanie, but King's birth anniversary is celebrated in the USA on a Monday--JANUARY 16TH, 2017 will be the next one. And it's only a few days before the coronation of ego-maniacal violence, if we get that far. There's a million facets to the upcoming revolution, which is one largely driven by symbolism--speaking on the same turf as the Trumplicans, but using a different language--a different set of symbols.

Therefore I'm looking forward to the upcoming symbol-driven set of nonviolent revolutionary activities, all week long in January, 2017. Lakota Peace Stops Trumplican Violence:
From January 16th to 21st:
Boycotts in SF, NYC and North Dakota
National Protests: J16
HISTORY of 750,000 black women
FUTURE 750,000 women: J21