Today is the 34th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade. In honor of the day there is a lot I want to say about abortion rights, and also an important announcement I want to make about a new project. But the dialectic and the announcement will both have to wait until the next couple days thanks to the demands of work; for now, I will mostly be repeating what I said last year.

There’s a lot not to like about the specifics of the reasoning in Roe, and it’s sometimes frustrating that Roe is the ruling that we’ve got to celebrate, or at least defend. But the decision did concretely take the boots of the male State from off the necks of millions of women across the United States. January 22 is a jubilee day, representing one of the chief victories of a remarkable, explosive struggle — which took place over the course of just under 4 years, from the decisive beginning of the feminist pro-choice movement in early 1969, to the decision in January 1973. (There was a small, barely effectual abortion law reform movement before 1969; but February and March 1969 marked the beginning of the abortion law repeal movement, and also the beginning of the pro-choice argument — that is, early 1969 is when the argument shifted from the old tack of getting people to feel sorry for the poor desperate girl, to the new demand by radicalized women for their right to the determine how their own bodies will or will not be used.)

Like most anniversaries, this one is partly about remembering and honoring. Today there are three things that I want you to remember, or to learn.

First, you should know all about two months that made all the difference. This is from Susan Brownmiller’s In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution:

February 1969 was an important month in the abortion struggle. Larry Lader, a biographer of Margaret Sanger, summoned a handful of professionals in law and medicine to the Drake Hotel in Chicago for the organizing conference of NARAL, the National Association for Repeal of Abortion Laws. (NARAL became the National Abortion Rights Action League in 1974.) The conferees targeted specific states where they believed the repressive codes could be knocked down. New York, with its liberal constituency, was a top priority. Bills ranging from modest reforms (in cases of rape and incest) to outright repeal of all criminal penalties were already in the legislative hopper.

Betty Friedan, one of the main speakers at the Chicago NARAL meeting, reflected the changing political climate. At NOW’s founding convention in 1966, she had bowed to a clique that insisted that abortion rights were too divisive, too sexual, and too controversial for the fledgling organization, but since then a groundswell of younger members had stiffened her spine. NOW was being inundated by kids, one member observed. The kids from New York, Michigan, Ohio, Texas, and elsewhere pushed through an abortion plank at NOW’s 1967 convention.

And the kids were forging ahead with their own tactics. On the same wintry day in mid-February when NARAL’s founders were traveling to Chicago for their first conference six state legislators held a public hearing in Manhattan on some proposed liberalizing amendments to the New York law. Typical of the times, the six legislators were men, and the spekaers invited to present expert testimony were fourteen men and a Catholic nun.

On the morning of the February 13 hearing, a dozen infiltrators camouflaged in dresses and stockings entered the hearing room and spaced themselves around the chamber. Some called themselves Redstockings, and some, like Joyce Ravitz, wre free-floating radicals who were practiced hands at political disruptions. Ravitz, in fact, had been on her way to another demonstration when she’d run into the Redstockings women, who convinced her to join them.

As a retired judge opined that abortion might be countenanced as a remedy after a woman had fulfilled her biological service to the community by bearing four children, Kathie Amatniek leaped to her feet and shouted, Let’s hear from the real experts–women! Taking her cue, Joyce Ravitz began to declaim an impassioned oration. Ellen Willis jumped in. More women rose to their feet.

Men don’t get pregnant, men don’t bear children. Men just make laws, a demonstrator bellowed.

Why are you refusing to admit we exist? cried another.

Girls, girls, you’ve made your point. Sit down. I’m on your side, a legislator urged, raising the temperature a notch higher.

Don’t call us girls, came the unified response. We are women!

The hearing dissolved in confusion. When the chairman attempted to reconvene it behind closed doors, the women sat down in the corridor, refusing to budge.

Stories appeared the next day in the Times (Women Break Up Abortion Hearing), the New York Post (Abortion Law Protesters Disrupt Panel), and the Daily News. Ellen Willis slipped out of her activist guise to do a report for Talk of the Town in The New Yorker. Nanette Rainone filed for WBAI radio and the Pacfica network. Barely a month old, Redstockings, with an assist from the radical floaters, had successfully dramatized the need for woman as expert in the abortion debate.

Five weeks later, on March 21, 1969, Redstockings staged a public speak-out, Abortion: Tell It Like It Is, at the Washington Square Methodist Church, a hub of antiwar activism in Greenwich Village. For some Women’s Liberation founders, the speak-out was the movement’s finest hour. Astounding, is the way Irene Peslikis puts it. It showed the power of consciousness-raising, how theory comes from deep inside a person’s life, and how it leads directly to action.

Peslikis had organized the panel and coached the women who were willing to speak. The idea, she says, was to get examples of different kinds of experiences–women who’d had the babies that were taken away, women who went to the hospital for a therapeutic abortion, women who’d gone the illegal route, the different kinds of illegal routes.

Three hundred women and a few men filled the church that evening as Helen Kritzler, Barbara Kaminsky, Rosalyn Baxandall, Anne Forer, and a few other brave souls passed a small microphone back and forth. Baxandall broke the ice with a touch of humor. I thought I was sophisticated, she joked into the mike. My boyfriend told me if he came a second time, the sperm would wash away, and I believed him.

Another woman recounted, So there I was in West New York, New Jersey, and the doctor had these crucifixes and holy pictures on the wall, and all he wanted was nine hundred dollars. I took out a vacation loan and I’m still paying it off.

Judy Gabree hurtled forward. I went to eleven hospitals searching for a therapeutic abortion. At the tenth, they offered me a deal. They’d do it if I agreed to get sterilized. I was twenty years old. I had to pretend I was crazy and suicidal, but having the abortion was the sanest thing I’d done.

More women added their personal testimony. I was one of those who kept quiet. Irene Peslikis had asked me to be one of the speakers, but I chose an easier path and played Village Voice reporter. My front-page story, Everywoman’s Abortions: The Oppressor Is Man, was the only substantive coverage the landmark speak-out received. Some retyped it in Chicago for the Voice of the Women’s Liberation Movement newsletter, which carried the news to activists around the country.

Another journalist, in aviator glasses and a miniskirt, was taking notes in the church that evening. She hovered near Jane Everhart, a NOW member, and whispered What’s going on?

Everhart whispered back, Sit down and listen!

Gloria Steinem was a friend of Women’s Liberation in 1969, but she had not yet thrown in her lot with the movement. Her plate was already overflowing with causes. Gloria spoke out against the war in Vietnam on late-night talk shows, raised money for liberal Democrats and Cesar Chavez’s farmworkers, and wrote earnest pieces on all of her issues for the popular magazines. Genetically endowed with the rangy limbs and sculpted features of a fashion model, Steinem glided through the rarefied world of radical chic expertly building her political connections. Beneath the exterior of the celebrity journalist was a woman who yearned to save the world.

Steinem received a shock of recognition when a Redstocking quipped, I bet every woman here has had an abortion. Hers had been done by a Harley Street practitioner in London during the late fifties after she’d graduated from Smith. Later she would say that the speak-out was her feminist revelation, the moment that redirected her public path. That night, however, she was working on a tight deadline. She threw together a hasty paragraph for the political diary she wrote for New York magazine. Nobody wants to reform the abortion laws, she explained in print. They want to repeal them. Completely.

The Redstockings abortion speak-out was an emblematic event for Women’s Liberation. Speak-outs based on the New York women’s model were organized in other cities within the year, and subsequent campaigns to change public opinion in the following decade would utilize first-person testimony in a full range of issues from rape and battery to child abuse and sexual harassment. The importance of personal testimony in a public setting, which overthrew the received wisdom of the experts, cannot be overestimated. It was an original technique and a powerful ideological tool. Ultimately, of course, first-person discourse on a dizzying variety of intimate subjects would become a gimmicky staple of the afternoon television talk shows, where the confessional style was utilized for its voyeuristic shock value. Back then, personal testimony was a political act of great courage.

–Susan Brownmiller, In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution, pp. 106–109

Second, you should know why they were out there, putting themselves on the line for this, and why doing that had such a remarkable impact in so short of a time. I think we can find some of the reasons in Lucinda Cisler’s wonderful, hauntingly prescient Abortion law repeal (sort of): a warning to women (1969).

… The most important thing feminists have done and have to keep doing is to insist that the basic reason for repealing the laws and making abortions available is justice: women’s right to abortion.

… Until just a couple of years ago the abortion movement was a tiny handful of good people who were still having to concentrate just on getting the taboo lifted from public discussions of the topic. They dared not even think about any proposals for legal change beyond reform (in which abortion is grudgingly parceled out by hospital committee fiat to the few women who can prove they’ve been raped, or who are crazy, or are in danger of bearing a defective baby). They spent a lot of time debating with priests about When Life Begins, and Which Abortions Are Justified. They were mostly doctors, lawyers, social workers, clergymen, professors, writers, and a few were just plain women—usually not particularly feminist.

Part of the reason the reform movement was very small was that it appealed mostly to altruism and very little to people’s self-interest: the circumstances covered by reform are tragic but they affect very few women’s lives, whereas repeal is compelling because most women know the fear of unwanted pregnancy and in fact get abortions for that reason.

… These people do deserve a lot of credit for their lonely and dogged insistence on raising the issue when everybody else wanted to pretend it didn’t exist. But because they invested so much energy earlier in working for reform (and got it in ten states), they have an important stake in believing that their position is the realistic one—that one must accept the small, so-called steps in the right direction that can be wrested from reluctant politicians, that it isn’t quite dignified to demonstrate or shout what you want, that raising the women’s rights issue will alienate politicians, and so on.

Because of course, it is the women’s movement whose demand for repeal—rather than reform—of the abortion laws has spurred the general acceleration in the abortion movement and its influence. Unfortunately, and ironically, the very rapidity of the change for which we are responsible is threatening to bring us to the point where we are offered something so close to what we want that our demands for radical change may never be achieved.

–Lucinda Cisler, Abortion law repeal (sort of): a warning to women, ¶Â¶ 2–10

Cisler goes on to review four different restrictions or limitations on abortion-law repeal that she thinks could make for just this sort of roadblock. One of the best sections in the essay is her discussion a restriction with which we are all too familiar in the post-Roe world:

3: Abortions may not be performed beyond a certain time in pregnancy, unless the woman’s life is at stake. Significantly enough, the magic time limit varies from bill to bill, from court decision to court decision, but this kind of restriction essentially says two things to women: (a) at a certain stage, your body suddenly belongs to the state and it can force you to have a child, whatever your own reasons for wanting an abortion late in pregnancy; (b) because late abortion entails more risk to you than early abortion, the state must protect you even if your considered decision is that you want to run that risk and your doctor is willing to help you. This restriction insults women in the same way the present preservation-of-life laws do: it assumes that we must be in a state of tutelage and cannot assume responsibility for our own acts. Even many women’s liberation writers are guilty of repeating the paternalistic explanation given to excuse the original passage of U.S. laws against abortion: in the nineteenth century abortion was more dangerous than childbirth, and women had to be protected against it. Was it somehow less dangerous in the eighteenth century? Were other kinds of surgery safe then? And, most important, weren’t women wanting and getting abortions, even though they knew how much they were risking? Protection has often turned out to be but another means of control over the protected; labor law offers many examples. When childbirth becomes as safe as it should be, perhaps it will be safer than abortion: will we put back our abortion laws, to protect women?

… There are many reasons why a woman might seek a late abortion, and she should be able to find one legally if she wants it. She may suddenly discover that she had German measles in early pregnancy and that her fetus is deformed; she may have had a sudden mental breakdown; or some calamity may have changed the circumstances of her life: whatever her reasons, she belongs to herself and not to the state.

–Lucinda Cisler, Abortion law repeal (sort of): a warning to women, ¶Â¶ 19, 21

Third, you should know what the women of Jane did in Chicago to help make their sisters’ ownership of their own bodies a reality, without the blessing of the male experts and in defiance of the male State. Here’s Brownmiller, again:

Radical women in Chicago poured their energy into Jane, an abortion referral service initiated by Heather Booth, who had been a one-woman grapevine for her college classmates. In 1971, after Booth’s departure, some of the women took matters into their own hands and secretly began to perform the abortions themselves. Safe, compassionate terminations for a modest fee became their high calling–a model, as they saw it, for women’s empowerment after the revolution.

Leaflets appeared in the Hyde Park neighborhood of the University of Chicago bearing a simple message: Pregnant? Don’t want to be? Call Jane at 643-3844. The number rang at the home of one of the activists who volunteered to be Jane. As word spread and the volume of calls increased, the service acquired its own phone line and an answering machine, a cumbersome reel-to-reel device that was one of the first on the market. Volunteers, known inside the service as call-back Janes, visited the abortion seekers to elicit crucial medical details (most important was lmp, the number of weeks since the last menstrual period), then another level of volunteers scheduled an appointment with one of the abortionists on the group’s list.

At first the service relied on Mike in Cicero, who was fast, efficient, and willing to lower his price to five hundred dollars as the volume increased. Mike gradually let down his guard with Jody Parsons, his principal Jane contact, an artisan who sold her beaded jewelry and ceramics at street fairs and was a survivor of Hodgkin’s disease. The clandestine abortionist and the hippy artisan struck up a bond. When Mike confessed that he was not in fact a real doctor but merely a trained technician, she cajoled him into teaching her his skills. Jody’s rapid success in learning to maneuver the dilating clamps, curettes, and forceps demystified the forbidden procedures for another half dozen women in Jane. If he can do it, then we can do it became their motto.

Madeline Schwenk, a banker’s daughter who had married at twenty, six months pregnant with no clue whatsoever about how to get an abortion, moved from counseling to vacuum aspiration after Harvey Karman, the controversial director of a California clinic, came to Chicago to demonstrate his technique. Madeline was one of the few women in Jane who was active in NOW, and who stayed affiliated with the Chicago chapter during the year she wielded her cannula and curette for the service. I’d get up in the morning, make breakfast for my three kids, go off to do the abortions, then go home to make dinner, she reminisces. Pretty ourageous behavior when you think about it. But exciting.

Jane’s abortion practitioners and their assistants were able to handle a total of thirty cases a day at affordable fees–under one hundred dollars. A doctor and a pharmacist among the women’s contacts kept them supplied with antibiotics.

Fear of police surveillance in radical circles had its match among clandestine abortionists who relied on a complicated rigamarole of blindfolds and middlemen. Jane straddled both worlds. Abortion seekers gathered every Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday at a front apartment, usually the home of a Jane member or friend, and were escorted by Jane drivers to the Place, a rented apartment where the abortions were performed. The fronts and the Place changed on a regular basis. New volunteers, brought into the group by counselors and drivers, went through a probation period before they were told that women in Jane were doing the abortions. The news did not sit well with everyone. Turnover was high, from fear and from burnout, although the service usually maintained its regular complement of thirty members.

Jane lost most of its middle-class clientele after the New York law [repealing the state’s abortion ban] went into effect. Increasingly it began to service South Side women, poor and black, who did not have the money to travel out of state, and whose health problems, from high blood pressure to obesity, were daunting. Pressure on the providers intensified. Audaciously they added second-trimester abortionsby induced miscarriage to their skills.

On May 3, 1972, near the conclusion of a busy work day in an eleventh-floor apartment on South Shore Drive overlooking Lake Michigan, Jane got busted. Seven women, including Madeline Schwenk, were arrested and bailed out the following day. The Chicago Daily News blared Women Seized in Cut-Rate Clinic in a front-page banner. The Tribune buried Lib Groups Linked to Abortions on an inside page. Six weeks later the service was back in buinsess. Wisely, the women facing criminal charges selected a defense attorney who was clued in to and optimistic about the national picture. She advised them to hang tight–some interesting developments were taking place in Washington that could help their case. (After the January 1973 Roe decision, all outstanding charges against the seven were dropped.)

The activists of Jane believe they performed more than ten thousand abortions. It’s a ballpark figure based on the number of procedures they remember doing in a given week. For security reasons they did not keep records.

–Susan Brownmiller, In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution, pp. 123–125

It’s important to remember that, although the occasion for celebrating January 22 is a Supreme Court decision, the repeal of abortion laws wasn’t a gift handed down out of benevolence by a gang of old men in robes. It was struggled for, and won, by women in our own times. Women who stood up for themselves, who challenged the authority of self-appointed male experts and law-makers, who spoke truth to power. Radical women who took things into their own hands and helped their sisters, in defiance of the law, because they knew that they had a right to do it. Radical feminists who built a movement for their own freedom over a matter of months and decisively changed the world in less than five years. It’s not just that we owe Kathie Sarachild, Joyce Ravitz, Ellen Willis, Cindy Cisler, Heather Booth, Jody Parsons, Madeline Schwenk, and so many others our praise. They do deserve our cheers, but they also deserve our study and our emulation. They did amazing things, and we — feminists, leftists, anti-statists — owe it not only to them, but to ourselves, to honor them by trying to learn from their example.

Further reading:

• GT 2004-01-22: Happy birthday to Roe!
• GT 2004-03-08: April March
• GT 2004-06-24: Pro-choice on Everything, Part I
• GT 2004-11-18: Culture of Life
• GT 2005-01-22: Roe v. Wade Day #32
• GT 2005-01-26: Let the hand-wringing begin
• GT 2005-03-10: Don’t they know abortion is illegal in this country?
• GT 2005-11-03: Goodbye to All That. Again.
• GT 2006-01-22: Roe v. Wade Day #33
• GT 2006-02-16: Other people’s wombs
• GT 2006-03-08: Abortion on demand and without apology (Dakota Remix)
• GT 2006-04-30: Over My Shoulder #21: Kathie Sarachild, The Power of History, in Feminist Revolution (1975)

Officer Michael McHale (2006-11-30), on reactions to the 50-shot police murder of Sean Bell:

I love all you monday morning quarterbacks. You really don't have a clue. I sometimes wonder why law enforcement officers offer there lives for the likes of you, your not worth it. … But, hey, as you go through everyday lives don't worry we will continue to DIE to protect you so you can make more money and get more things. Because it is our mission to Serve and Protect, even you.

I never asked you to.

Further reading:

• GT 2006-05-11: Quidditative essence

Here is the latest communiqué from United for Peace and Justice. This will be interesting ….

From: UFPJ Action Alerts
To: Charles Johnson
Date: September 14, 2006 5:39 PM

Please forward as widely as possible!

On Tuesday, Sept. 19, President Bush will be speaking at the United Nations as part of an election-year public-relations push on his disastrous Iraq War.

The New York City Police Department has refused to grant a permit to United for Peace and Justice to march anywhere near the United Nations. ]Based on feedback from our member groups and supporters][1], we have come to a decision: We are marching anyway. Permit or no permit, we will stand up against this immoral war and for our right to dissent.

While the Bush Administration has pursued its belligerent policy of preemptive war abroad, attacking a country that posed no danger to us, our Constitutional rights have been steadily eroded here at home, with peaceful protesters treated as security threats. In New York City, the NYPD and other agencies have systematically declared one location after another off-limits to protest — no rallies in most of Central Park, no marches on Fifth Avenue, no pickets in Times Square, and so on endlessly.

We know there are serious security issues to consider when the president and other heads of state are in town. But those needs must be balanced against protecting the right to assemble, the right to protest, and the right to dissent. The NYPD said no to every alternative we put on the table and simply refused to give us a permit for a reasonable location for our march next Tuesday.

Enough is enough. We are marching — marching to demand that the troops come home now, and to assert our right to peaceful protest. Marching without a permit amounts to nonviolent civil disobedience, and those of us who participate in the march on Tuesday will place ourselves at risk of arrest.

We also know and respect the fact that many people cannot participate in an activity that does not have a permit. And so we are seeking a permit for a rally starting at 8:30 a.m. in Herald Square, one of the busiest locations in Manhattan. This will enable anyone who wishes to protest the war and the restriction of our civil liberties to join us without risking arrest.

There are important details to work out, but this we know for certain: we will not be silenced, we will call for an immediate end to the war in Iraq, and we will be on the streets of New York City on Tuesday, September 19th!

WE NEED YOUR HELP:

1. Please share this email message as widely as possible. Help make sure that everyone knows about the rally and march on Sept. 19th and the denial of our request for a march permit.

2. Especially if you are in the NYC area, make plans now to join us next Tuesday morning. If you would like to participate in the march, please take a moment to call our office at 212-868-5545 so we can give you information about nonviolence trainings. We would rather take this risk than allow our rights to be undermined.

3. Check the UFPJ website for updates on the details for Sept. 19th, including the exact time and location of the rally and the plans for the march. If you are looking for or would like to offer a ride to NYC, please visit our ride board.

4. And, of course, all of this work takes money. Whether or not you are able to participate in person on Tuesday, you can show your support by making a financial donation today! Make an online contribution, call our office at 212-868-5545 to make a credit card donation over the phone, or send a check or money order to UFPJ, P.O. Box 607, Times Square Station, NY NY 10108.

Posting has been light lately thanks to a combination of moving to a new apartment, catching up on backlogged academic writing, and having to wait until September for my Internet access to be set up at home. I have been coping by catching some Internet time through the local library’s WiFi and by playing a lot of Tetris. While I’ve been away, though, our august State has certainly been busy Securing the Homeland. Consider, for example, the case of Iraqi-American architect Raed Jarrar:

The next day, I went to JFK in the morning to catch my Jet Blue plane to California. I reached Terminal 6 at around 7:15 am, issued a boarding pass, and checked all my bags in, and then walked to the security checkpoint. For the first time in my life, I was taken to a secondary search . My shoes were searched, and I was asked for my boarding pass and ID. After passing the security, I walked to check where gate 16 was, then I went to get something to eat. I got some cheese and grapes with some orange juice and I went back to Gate 16 and sat down in the boarding area enjoying my breakfast and some sunshine.

At around 8:30, two men approached me while I was checking my phone. One of them asked me if I had a minute and he showed me his badge, I said: sure. We walked some few steps and stood in front of the boarding counter where I found out that they were accompanied by another person, a woman from Jet Blue.

One of the two men who approached me first, Inspector Harris, asked for my id card and boarding pass. I gave him my boarding pass and driver’s license. He said people are feeling offended because of your t-shirt. I looked at my t-shirt: I was wearing my shirt which states in both Arabic and English we will not be silent. You can take a look at it in this picture taken during our Jordan meetings with Iraqi MPs. I said I am very sorry if I offended anyone, I didnt know that this t-shirt will be offensive. He asked me if I had any other T-shirts to put on, and I told him that I had checked in all of my bags and I asked him why do you want me to take off my t-shirt? Isn’t it my constitutional right to express myself in this way? The second man in a greenish suit interfered and said people here in the US don’t understand these things about constitutional rights. So I answered him I live in the US, and I understand it is my right to wear this t-shirt.

Then I once again asked the three of them : How come you are asking me to change my t-shirt? Isn’t this my constitutional right to wear it? I am ready to change it if you tell me why I should. Do you have an order against Arabic t-shirts? Is there such a law against Arabic script? so inspector Harris answered you can’t wear a t-shirt with Arabic script and come to an airport. It is like wearing a t-shirt that reads I am a robber and going to a bank. I said but the message on my t-shirt is not offensive, it just says we will not be silent. I got this t-shirt from Washington DC. There are more than a 1000 t-shirts printed with the same slogan, you can google them or email them at wewillnotbesilent@gmail.com . It is printed in many other languages: Arabic, Farsi, Spanish, English, etc. Inspector Harris said: We cant make sure that your t-shirt means we will not be silent, we don’t have a translator. Maybe it means something else. I said: But as you can see, the statement is in both Arabic and English. He said maybe it is not the same message. So based on the fact that Jet Blue doesn’t have a translator, anything in Arabic is suspicious because maybe it’ll mean something bad!

Meanwhile, a third man walked in our direction. He stood with us without introducing himself, and he looked at inspector Harris’s notes and asks him: is that his information?, inspector Harris answered yes. The third man, Mr. Harmon, asks inspector Harris : can I copy this information?, and inspector Harris says yes, sure.

inspector Harris said: You don’t have to take of your t-shirt, just put it on inside-out. I refused to put on my shirt inside-out. So the woman interfered and said let’s reach a compromise. I will buy you a new t-shirt and you can put it on on top of this one. I said I want to keep this t-shirt on. Both inspector Harris and Mr. Harmon said No, we can’t let you get on that airplane with your t-shirt. I said I am ready to put on another t-shirt if you tell me what is the law that requires such a thing. I want to talk to your supervisor. Inspector Harris said You don’t have to talk to anyone. Many people called and complained about your t-shirt. Jetblue customers were calling before you reached the checkpoint, and costumers called when you were waiting here in the boarding area.

it was then that I realized that my t-shirt was the reason why I had been taken to the secondary checking.

I asked the four people again to let me talk to any supervisor, and they refused.

The Jet Blue woman was asking me again to end this problem by just putting on a new t-shirt, and I felt threatened by Mr. Harmon’s remarks as in Let’s end this the nice way. Taking in consideration what happens to other Arabs and Muslims in US airports, and realizing that I will miss my flight unless I covered the Arabic script on my t-shirt as I was told by the four agents, I asked the Jet Blue woman to buy me a t-shirt and I said I don’t want to miss my flight.

… The woman went away for 3 minutes, and she came back with a gray t-shirt reading new york. I put the t-shirt on and removed the price tag. I told the four people who were involved in the conversation: I feel very sad that my personal freedom was taken away like this. I grew up under authoritarian governments in the Middle East, and one of the reasons I chose to move to the US was that I don’t want an officer to make me change my t-shirt. I will pursue this incident today through a Constitutional rights organization, and I am sure we will meet soon. Everyone said okay and left, and I went back to my seat.

— Raed in the Middle (2006-08-10): back from the mideast

Well, thank God, says I. If government spooks didn’t partner with corporate pencil-pushers then who would protect white American airline customers from men wearing t-shirts with offensive scripts that they can’t read in languages they don’t understand? What Raed didn’t realize is that Homeland Security had to be on the look-out for Arab-American men wearing a shirt saying We Will Not Be Silent, because it has a compelling State interest in providing the tax-paying public with an ostensive definition of irony.

Incidentally, I am now taking bets on how quickly all those Red Staters and professional blowhards who spent the past couple decades railing against restrictions on offensive speech and against the culture of enforced sensitivity will be rushing to Raed Jarrar’s defense.

Good night, and good luck.

Further reading:

• GT 2004-09-21: News from the Front

Let us sink such differences as nationality, religion, politics, and set our eyes eternally and forever toward the rising star of the industrial republic of labor; remembering that we have left the old behind and have set our faces toward the future. There is no power on earth that can stop men and women who are determined to be free at all hazards. There is no power on earth so great as the power of intellect. It moves the world and it moves the earth.

— Lucy Parsons (1905): Speech to the Industrial Workers of the World

From last year’s commemorative post:

Today is May Day, or International Worker’s Day: a day to celebrate the long, hard struggle of workers for freedom, self-determination, and a better life. The day originated during the heady days of the Eight Hour Day campaign in the late 19th century, a campaign led not by bureaucratic union bosses, much less by Marxist thugs, but by ordinary workers agitating and organizing amongst themselves. Most of them were anarchists, and their struggle was as much against State power as it was against the bosses (part of the reason for May Day commemorations, mind you, is to remember the Haymarket martyrs, anarchists murdered by the state of Illinois).

— GT 2005-05-01: May Day, May Day

From Kevin Carson’s commemorative post from last year:

May Day, the international holiday of the socialist and workers’ movements, is popularly viewed in the U.S. as that commie holiday. It’s commonly associated with big parades and displays of military hardware on Red Square, and exchanges of fraternal greetings between leaders of the USSR and its satellites.

In fact, though, it’s a holiday that started in the U.S., and is as American as apple pie. In 1884, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, predecessor of the AFL, called for a nationwide general strike in favor of the eight-hour day. It was to be introduced on May 1, 1886. The political strife resulting directly from that movement included the Haymarket bomb and the subsequent police and judicial riot. The celebration of May Day as a worker’s holiday dates back to that movement.

The foreign and communist associations of May Day, in the popular mind, are in large part the outcome of an elite propaganda campaign in the U.S. U.S. ruling circles attempted to identify the assorted workers’ and populist movements, in popular consciousness, with foreign radicalism, “unAmericanism,” and “Red Ruin.” This campaign finally paid off in the War Hysteria and subsequent Red Scare of the Wilson administration, which was used as an opportunity to suppress (via mass arrests, criminal syndicalism laws, etc.) organizations as diverse as the I.W.W., the Non-Partisan League, and the Farmer-Labor Party. Thanks to the war propaganda, the Palmer Raids and the quasi-private vigilantism of groups like the American Legion, socialism largely ceased to exist as a mass-based movement in the U.S. Around the same time, Congress designated May 1 as Loyalty Day.

— Kevin Carson, Mutualist Blog (2005-04-29): May Day Thoughts: Individualist Anarchism and the Labor Movement

Which is not to say that the Bolsheviks and the business unionists weren’t more than happy to play along, and lay claim to this day (and labor radicalism as a whole) as if it were their idea, or their rightful heritage. Hell, the pro-government trade union bosses and the nostalgic apparatchiks are still using it to mill about in public, longing for the good old days of tanks and commissars and ballistic missiles hauled down the street:

MOSCOW (AFP) — Tens of thousands of people marched through central Moscow on Monday to celebrate May Day in peaceful demonstrations organized by pro-government trade unions and Communists nostalgic for Soviet times.

About 25,000 trade union members called for a social state, holding balloons and flowers, according to police spokesman, Viktor Biryukov, quoted by ITAR-TASS news agency.

Several thousand Communist Party supporters also marched from the Lenin monument on October Square to a bust of Karl Marx near Red Square, carrying red flags and portraits of Stalin, an AFP reporter at the march said.

— USA Today (2006-05-01): Trade unions, Communists march through Moscow on May Day

We know, or if we don’t know we damned well should by now, what the Bolshevik cannibal-empire really meant for trade unions and for ordinary workers. To hell with that, and to hell with any holiday that celebrates it. But we also know, or if we damned well should by now, that this holiday isn’t theirs to ruin. As I said last year:

One of the (many) crimes of the state socialists in the 20th century was their wholesale theft of May Day; what had been and properly remains a day for celebrating the free actions of ordinary workers became, in the bloody talons of the so-called workers’ states, a day for celebrating socialist God-Kings and hideous parades of military power. The folks over at Catallarchy have gone so far as to name May Day a Day of Remembrance for the victims of state Communism. What they are doing is important. The Moloch of Marxist-Leninism consumed more victims than any other power that the world has known in history–through mass executions, through unbelievable mass starvation, through pestilence, through death camps, through war. History is important and memory is political; the stories are harrowing but they need to be told. But I do not think that May Day is the day for the solemn observations. I think that this gives the butchers too much credit. Marxist-Leninism stole May Day from anarchists, from workers, like it stole everything else it ever gained in the 20th century. It did its best to silence its victims, like it did to silence all its other victims, with a bullet to the head and piles of pirated loot to parties and unions that would toe the Bolshevik line. I will not give up May Day to them any more than I will give Juneteenth up to William Tecumseh Sherman or give Easter up to the Holy Inquisition. (If you’re looking for a day of remembrance, I’d suggest the 6th of March, the day that the Kronstadt massacre began.) But today is the International Workers’ Day, not the State’s day–meaning neither the bureaucratic-managerial state so beloved of the conservative AFL-line unions, nor the blood-soaked workers’ states (a contradiction in terms).

— GT 2005-05-01: May Day, May Day

May Day is and ought to be a Day of Resistance, of defiance against the arrogance and exploitation of the bosses — whether corporate or political. A day to celebrate workers’ struggles for dignity, and for freedom, through organizing in their own self-interest, through agitating and exhorting for solidarity, and through free acts of worker-led direct action to achieve their goals. So what a real joy it is to see May Day 2006 honored through general strikes across the country, demanding freedom and respect for immigrant workers:

It is being billed as The Great American Boycott 2006. Tomorrow, international labour day in the US, thousands or perhaps millions of people are expected to join in a nationwide boycott to protest against proposals that would toughen existing immigration laws.

Under the slogan No work, no school, no sales, no buying, the boycott will be accompanied by marches and protests across the country. Organisers hope that it will build on the unexpected scale of the anti-immigration reform protest held at the end of March, which saw around half a million people take to the streets of Los Angeles and helped push the immigration debate to the top of the political agenda.

Protesters have been galvanised by the passage of a bill in the House of Representatives in December that focused on tougher restrictions on illegal immigrants without offering any route to legality.

Today’s protests will include events in 72 American cities, 25 of them in California, as well as Mexico, where a boycott of US goods and services is planned. Subcomandante Marcos and his Zapatista rebel movement have promised to hold a rally outside the US embassy in Mexico City.

The biggest US demonstrations are expected to take place in New York, Chicago — where estimates suggest that around 300,000 people will turn out — and Los Angeles, where two demonstrations are planned, each of which could attract 500,000 people, according to police estimates.

— The Guardian (2006-05-01): US protesters stage one-day boycott over immigrant bill

From FOX40 KTXL in Sacramento:

We’re here to make a statement, said Catalina Hernandez, an environmental specialist who brought her niece and nephew to one of the Los Angeles marches. All these people didn’t just appear here overnight. We’ve been here all this time.

Many of the demonstrators were like Juana Teresa Kouyoumdjian, 35, who by 5 p.m. had spent eight hours marching through Los Angeles with her brother, Enrique Orellana, 36, and still faced a long trek back downtown to their car.

Quitting wasn’t an option because I want to fight to the very end, said Kouyoumdjian, who is now legal after illegally coming to the United States from El Salvador 16 years ago.

The boycott’s economic power was evident at the Los Angeles and Long Beach harbors, where despite being the nation’s largest port complex few trucks were rolling. In all, traffic was off 90 percent, said Theresa Adams Lopez, spokeswoman for the Port of Los Angeles.

… In California’s agricultural heartland, immigrant farmworkers took the day off to march and rally in towns throughout the San Joaquin Valley.

Several hundred farmworkers marched in downtown Porterville, 70 miles southeast of Fresno, waving American flags. Outside town, groves still holding some of the winter’s orange crop were empty of workers.

We’ve got to help all the people living here without papers, said Samuel Jimenez, 54, a Mexican farmworker who lives Porterville.

— FOX 40 KTXL-TV Sacramento (2006-05-01): Immigration Rallies Draw Thousands

From the Associated Press, via Forbes online:

More than 1 million mostly Hispanic immigrants and their supporters skipped work and took to the streets Monday, flexing their economic muscle in a nationwide boycott that succeeded in slowing or shutting many farms, factories, markets and restaurants.

From Los Angeles to Chicago, Houston to Miami, the Day Without Immigrants attracted widespread participation despite divisions among activists over whether a boycott would send the right message to Washington lawmakers considering sweeping immigration reform.

We are the backbone of what America is, legal or illegal, it doesn’t matter, said Melanie Lugo, who with her husband and their third-grade daughter joined a rally of some 75,000 in Denver. We butter each other’s bread. They need us as much as we need them.

Two major rallies in Los Angeles attracted an estimated 400,000, according to the mayor’s office. Police in Chicago estimated 400,000 people marched through the downtown business district.

Tens of thousands more marched in New York, along with about 15,000 in Houston, 50,000 in San Jose and 30,000 more across Florida. Smaller rallies in cities from Pennsylvania and Connecticut to Arizona and South Dakota attracted hundreds not thousands.

In all, police departments in more than two dozen U.S. cities contacted by The Associated Press gave crowd estimates that totaled about 1.1 million marchers.

The mood was jubilant. Marchers standing shoulder-to-shoulder filmed themselves on home video and families sang and chanted and danced in the streets wearing American flags as capes and bandanas. In most cities, those who rallied wore white to signify peace and solidarity.

In Los Angeles, the city streets were a carpet of undulating white that stretched for several miles, with palm trees and grass-covered medians poking through a sea of humanity. Marchers holding U.S. flags aloft sang the national anthem in English as traditional Mexican dancers wove through the crowd.

In Chicago, illegal immigrants from Ireland and Poland marched alongside Hispanics as office workers on lunch breaks clapped. In Phoenix, protesters formed a human chain in front of Wal-Mart and Home Depot stores. Protesters in Tijuana, Mexico, blocked vehicle traffic heading to San Diego at the world’s busiest border crossing.

Many carried signs in Spanish that translated to We are America and Today we march, tomorrow we vote. Others waved Mexican flags or wore hats and scarves from their native countries. Some chanted USA while others shouted slogans, such as Si se puede! Spanish for Yes, it can be done! Others were more irreverent, wearing T-shirts that read I’m illegal. So what?

— Gillian Flaccus, Forbes.com (2006-05-01): Update 26: 1M Immigrants Skip Work for Demonstration

Immigration creeps have mostly been muted today, but this is driving them up the wall, because they knowexactly what it means:

Make no mistake. This day is about confrontation, intimidation, and extortion. No American, no person who hopes to be an American, should embrace an action that has criminals demanding that their law breaking be overlooked and even celebrated.

–Kleinheider, Volunteer Voter weblog, quoted by david, the view from below (2006-05-01): Immigrant Action Reaction

Of course, there’s no actual extortion involved in refusing to work for a day; workers are not your servants, not even immigrant workers, and declining to freely give their work for a day is not forcing you to give up anything that was yours to begin with. But you’re damned right that this is about confrontation, and you’re damned right that it’s about defying the law.

You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. … One may well ask: How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others? The answer is found in the fact that there are two types of laws: There are just and there are unjust laws. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with Saint Augustine that An unjust law is no law at all.

— Martin Luther King Jr. (1963-04-16): Letter from Birmingham Jail

And it is an unjust law: neither you nor the government has any right to commandeer the lives and livelihoods of innocent workers to satisfy your Law-and-Order hang-ups, or your theo-national power trip.

But this is ultimately beside the point anyway. Even if failing to learn English was a dreadful threat to the prospects of liberty; even if not celebrating Veterans’ Day or Flag Day or Arbor Day were an ominous step towards totalitarianism, it would provide absolutely no justification whatever for using force to stop people from traveling to property where they are welcomed by the owner (either out of hospitality, or because they pay rent, or because they are prepared to buy it for themselves). Certain kinds of bad thoughts may very well be corrosive to liberty, but there’s no libertarian justification in restraining, beating, shooting, detaining, jailing, or exiling somebody just for having bad thoughts. Neither you nor the government has any right to force people off of property onto which they have been invited, even if you think that their presence is a looming danger to the future of liberty in America, unless they have actually done or threatened real violence to somebody else. Vices are not crimes, and only crimes can justly be resisted by force.

— GT 2006-03-31: Libertarians Against Property Rights: You Will Be Assimilated Edition

What we are witnessing today, and have been witnessing for the past few weeks, is nothing less than an explosively growing freedom movement. A freedom movement bringing millions into the streets, bringing together labor militancy and internationalism. And it is being done in defiance of the violence of La Migra, the bullying bigotry of the nativist creeps, and the condescending hand-wringing of the sympathetic politicos. It is exactly what May Day was made for. And exactly what the kind of creeps behind the Loyalty Days of the world — whether state-communist or state-capitalist — fear the most: ordinary people standing together, celebrating together, free, happy, irreverant, and unafraid.

There will be a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today!

–Last words of August Spies (1887-11-11), immigrant, anarchist, and Haymarket martyr

Happy May Day.

Past commemorations

• GT 2005-05-01: May Day, May Day
• GT 2004-05-01: Free the Unions (and all political prisoners)

Further reading: immigration and events today

• deleteTheBorder.org (2006-05-01): MayDay General Strike / Walkout Action Roundup
• InfoShop OpenWiki: Accounts from May Day 2006
• InfoShop.org (2006-05-01): May Day 2006 Around the World
• david, the view from below (2006-05-01): Immigration Action Reaction
• Heart, Women’s Space/The Margins (2006-04-30): May Day 2006
• Samhita, feministing (2006-05-01): Don’t forget!
• media girl (2006-05-01): Un Dia Sin Inmigrantes — A Day Without Immigrants
• egalia, Tennessee Guerrilla Women (2006-05-01): A Day Without Immigrants
• egalia, Tennessee Guerrilla Women (2006-05-01): Immigrants Boycott & Turn Off Lights in Tennessee
• The Dees Diversion (2006-05-01): Today is Loyalty Day
• The Dees Diversion (2006-05-01): Lamar Alexander is an idiot
• Echidne of the Snakes (2006-05-01): The Smell of Fear
• Eugene Plawiuk, Le Revue Gauche (2006-05-01): May Day Headlines
• danah boyd, apophenia (2006-03-28): MySpace, HR 4437 and youth activism

Further reading: the meaning of May Day

• Heart, Women’s Space/The Margins (2006-05-01): A Tribute to Lucy Parsons
• freeman, libertarian critter (2006-05-01): may day post
• david, the view from below (2006-05-01): May Day
• Eugene Plawiuk, Le Revue Gauche (2006-05-01): The Capitalist System
• Eugene Plawiuk, Le Revue Gauche (2006-05-01): Workers Control
• Lady Aster (2006-05-01): May Day blessings!
• Kevin Carson, Mutualist Blog (2005-04-29): May Day Thoughts: Individualist Anarchism and the Labor Movement

Further reading: from Geekery Today

• GT 2006-04-09: Freedom Movement Celebrity Deathmatch
• GT 2006-03-31: Libertarians Against Property Rights: You Will Be Assimilated Edition
• GT 2005-12-31: Proceedings
• GT 2005-12-20: Lazy linking on Leftist labor libertarianism
• GT 2005-12-30: Over My Shoulder #4: Paul Buhle’s Taking Care of Business: Samuel Gompers, George Meany, Lane Kirkland, and the Tragedy of American Labor
• GT 2005-12-16: Over My Shoulder #2: from Adam B. Ulam’s Stalin: The Man and His Era
• GT 2005-12-09: Over My Shoulder (or: Friday Book-Bragging)
• GT 2005-03-23: El pueblo unido jamás será vencido!