minnesota was a police state!

here

that’s Alexis Baden-Mayer of the Organic Consumers’ Grassroots Netroots Alliance taking photos while the police scream at her that they’ll shoot!

from August 30th, after we got pulled over at gun point

 

MINNESOTA IS A POLICE STATE

today, some friends and i were at my parents, when suburbans started circling the area. then we heard and saw at least 2 helicopters circling the area.

we left and were followed by a black suburban on and off 94 and into minneapolis where we were finally pulled over by 3 cop cars on Lake and 13th.

when we stopped the police got out of theirs and pointed at least six guns at the van we were in (2 were shot guns), they ordered us to get out with our hands up one by one. we got out, walked backwards and were each handcuffed and searched (without consent), with guns on us the whole time. they then took our ids and ran them, asked us where we were staying and if we were doing anything illegal.

i asked one of the undercover people from the black suburban if we were being detained and she said “no”, i asked if we were being arrested and she said “no”, i asked if they had a warrant and she said “no”. someone else asked why we were in handcuffs if we weren’t being detained or arrested and she didn’t say anything.
then i told her i had to pee and were we going to be let go and she said it’ll just be a few minutes”

in my mind, this proves this was an intimidation tactic being used by ramsey county sherif’s department. the police officers involved were polite, even joking around with us a little, and clearly had been called in by the undercovers in the black suburban. who were these undercovers? reports are coming in that they are not FBI or homeland security, but working for the ramsey county sheriff’s department…

we were held for 20 minutes, handcuffed the whole time. this is being detained, yet we were told we weren’t being detained. they had no legal reason to follow us, no legal reason to pull us over and no reason whatsoever to pull guns on us.

this is a police state. they are doing illegal things such as raiding people’s houses, confiscating cameras and stopping people on the streets. why? an assumption that we’re a threat to the republican delegates, an assumption that everyone with a camera, everyone not in a business suit is here only to threaten these people coming to take over this town.

who’s next?

http://twincities.indymedia.org/2008/aug/welcome-minnesota-out-town-activists-pulled-over-police-gunpoint

 

so, this doesn’t go too into detail about what happened, but we were followed for over 30 minutes. on and off the highway, around the mississippi river, through a McDonalds drive thru and finally to that intersection where we were pulled over. at that point it was just a relief, until we saw the guns.

when we got pulled over there were a lot of people already on the street. it was a busy intersection, and immediately a woman started taking pictures, until they screamed at her to “get out of the line of fire or we’ll shot! stop taking pictures or we’ll shoot”.  the whole thing was hilarious and terrorifying at the same time. more and more people started gathering around us and legal observers (organized by Coldsnap legal collective) appeared. we were on the sidewalk in handcuffs, but not being questioned when 2 women came up to us and asked us for our names, writing down everything that happened and then calling a friend of ours who had stayed at my parent’s house to tell him what was going on. we saw several friends, a woman biked to her house and brought us back water, other people started asking the police what was going on and taking pictures. all in all it was pretty amazing.

the last few months

i didn’t forget about this blog, or the idea of sharing experiences of radical women! but, there are times when you have to get off the internet and onto the streets. or just lay outside in the sun.

unfortunately neither of those is an option right now as i’m at work in a windowless building at a desk. who would have guessed? oh, capitolism…

in septmember i, and others from around the country, went to the rebuplican national convention. i’m going to attempt to give you a recap through some other shit i posted through out time… stay turned, bitches!!!

First Nation’s Women Still Preyed on

I recently read a letter someone wrote about how native women on reservations who are raped by non-natives have no legal recourse. Even though I spent a year and a half researching just how much First Nations in America have been forced to suffer, I wondered how frequently non-natives would really go to reservations and prey on women. Then I read this, actually in The New York Times, and remembered how easy it is to forget the plight of the oppressed when you are categorically an oppresser (even if it isn’t voluntary).  Since the government almost completely refuses to honor treaties, respect sovereign nations, AND refuses to allow Nations to protect themselves against outsiders…maybe we need to form an anti-rape militia.  That’s right Homeland Security, I said militia.  It was their “homeland” first.

just do it

so, i haaven’t updated in a long, but there’s a lot to come to get caught up and shit i’ve been writing but haven’t put up. a few ladies recently said they wanted to write something but didn’t feel like they had polished their blub/article/whatever enough to put it up. my response: read everything else! nothing is polished, words are spelled wrong, grammer is misused (but you know it likes it), there’s a bit of cursing and rambling. the point isn’t to make some clear arguement or an article that would appear in a newspaper, but to faucilitate discussion, provoke thought and work on our issues together. if can confront pop culture. government, social constructs, our own internalized isms, look at cute animals AND share wicked recipes we are already particapating in a revolution. not a Ron Paul revolution, but a much better, more fun revolution which goes on inside of us. and we have to educate and liberate ourselves first in order to have the slightest hope of a truely free society. this does not require you to think of the perfect wording, spell check, make an arguement, whatever. it requires honesty.

so, if you want to say something, talk about a news articles, review a zine, or whateva don’t be scared! just do it!

the creepy purity movement

Seriously.  When science shows that a certain strategy isn’t working, fundamentalist Christians flock to that strategy with blind fervor.  In this case, the strategy is the abstinence/purity movement.  I’ve listened to various reports about this movement through Christian radio stations and it fucking creeps me out.  I think it is *so* important that parents talk to kids about sex but the way the purity movement discusses this idea of “purity” sounds like a not-so-repressed fetish with virginity.  I don’t think it’s healthy for parents to be obsessed with a child’s virginity.   Here’s the NYT article: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/19/us/19purity.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1211203267-81AcCQpe7lGMl3FVovzw7w

What I love is this one line of truth, “But studies have also shown that most teenagers who say they will remain abstinent, like those at the ball, end up having sex before marriage, and they are far less likely to use condoms than their peers,”  juxtaposed against an entire article of descriptives about girls in evening gowns, ceremoniously placing white roses beneath a cross and dancing with their fathers. Ick.

not really about mother’s

It’s all over the sensationalist news right now that this woman is getting charged with murder because she yelled rape when her husband caught her with her lover.  The husband shot and killed the lover. WOW. This is fucked for so many reasons, on so many levels. What the woman did was really, really wrong. But she told a lie.  Her lie was much smaller than the type top politicians tellevery day (ie–trillions of US dollars should go towards this war because we found evidence of weapons of mass destruction…). What her husband did was MURDER SOMEONE. He killed another human being and his rash, violent act is being pinned on her because she lied. Why is it that women are charged so harshly when they lie and kill (women get an average of 6 times the sentence men get for murder, that’s 12 years versus 2)  but there’s this societal concept that men “can’t help themselves?” When men commit acts of violence, it’s so much easier for the media to accept.  A tragedy took place, a human life was taken but it was not the wife that pulled the trigger.  I want these reporters to stop for one moment and notice–this is news because false rape claims are RARE.  They happen in 2% of cases which is the same percentage of false claims of theft.  I wish as women we could ban all women from making this false claim that’s so commonly called upon in rape trials.  But I wish even more that the much higher percentage of women who never report, would come forward.  But frankly, I understand why they don’t.

Here’s more of the tragic details: http://victimsover18.blogspot.com/2008/05/woman-whose-false-claims-of-rape-led.html

May, bitch.

Sunday May 11th is Mother’s day! according to my Slingshot Mother’s Day was declared as an anti-war holiday by Julia Ward Howe.

for the month of May we here at Kisses, Bitch. (whether or not the other contributers know this) will be focusing on relationships with our mothers. interviews, articles, complaints, conversations about your mother, on your mother’s activism, or about your own motherhood are the main topic. as well as discussions on why Mother’s Day would be an anti-war holiday.
my sister (tiger crush, who knows this right now as she reads this) and i will be interviewing our own mother.

to kick things off, i’ll tell you a little bit about my own mother. she was an abortion advicate, taught sex ed and worked on counsling hotlines for 15 years. much of my childhood she was in school or working and for about 3 years i almost never saw her. there was a period of time where she worked at the minnesota children’s museum. this was pretty much awesome because i got to go there all the time and wonder around by myself (i was always a loner) and i also got lots of books and toys from the gift shop. everynow and then she’d need to make a sample of something made from one of the arts and crafts kits and we’d get to do art projects together. i developed a love of long car rides when my mother worked nights on hotlines and we would go to pick her up or drop her off at midnight, i remember laying in the backseat watching the stairs and streetlamps (both in texas and minnesota, when/if we had a car), feeling the car move, sometimes when we got there my dad would throw a rock at her window. sometimes i got to be at work with her, she would be on the phone in the other room and i would play computer games or color in her anatomy books. while i feel that my sister and brother were more involved in raising me early on, my relationship with my mother has molded me the most in who i am fundamentally- in both good and bad ways. what about you???

[note, this was partically inspired by the For Your Own Good zine, a British zine about mothers and daughters and eating disorders and their relationships, unfortunately grrrlzines.net doesn't have current info on where to get the zine and i can't find it anywhere on the internet and i have no idea what happened to my own copy, but blame my ex-boyfriends. and my mother.]

is this what a feminist looks like?

i love that ani is the background music (but they spelled her name wrong in the credits…), i love that they have women of all ages/races/styles (and possibly economic backgrounds), i like they had men (who didn’t explain what they thought feminism was). but i still feel like something’s missing.

what’d you think?

Wanderlust

WANDERLUST- a strong, innate desire to rove or travel about.

“i have lost my orgin and i don’t want to find it again”

The makers of the video- Encyclopedia Pictura- said they used psilocybin (the active chemical in mushrooms) to inspire the video. there are a lot of choices they made i find interesting, but also want to know more about. the woman on her back? the cast was made form her, but the woman seems different.

What do you think this means? What does the woman represent? is this personal or political?

oh mah gawd…

I made it. like a starving woman crawling on my hands and knees through tunnels of spiderwebs, licking parched, peeling lips.  i’m here!!! even my melodrama made it.  i gotta hand it to wordpress, they don’t make it easy to get in if you miss your chance that first time around… –cs

strip to end animal suffering

only “feminazis” don’t like it!

the Casa Diablo Club

if sex appeal is used all over our society, why isn’t it okay for us to use it to sell veganism and vegatarianism?

what’s next American Apparel

so, this is another old issue, but lately it seems like i am getting a daily reminder of how fucked uo this company seems to be… i really liked their clothes and the early ads i saw! at this point, however, every ad i see looks more and more like fucking kiddie porn and their clothes are over-priced over-hip badly made
And this in 2007????????

to their credit, apperently this was actually done by the magazine i-D and not AA themselves, but they didn’t check it first? more than that i have only seen one AA ad with an African-American woman in (well, 16 year most likely), besides this one. in general the fashion world only uses African models to exotify them and this seems no fucking different. i read a few responses to this saying it was celibrating “Black Beauty” and “OMG this is so high fashion”, but the responses seemed to be from white people. i read other respsonses that it was art, and i agree that it’s artisticly done with amazing use of color/contrast, but ART is not immune to rascism and an ADVERTISEMENTS/EDITORIALS barely qualify as art. And the “Sweeter than candy, better than cake.”?! that in the end is what sets me overboard. i mean, i could see this as reclaiming or confronting our aunt jemmima stereotypes, but that proves it is about the fetish of it. the fact remains AA is a company owned by a white man and i-D a magazine owned/edited by white people. a women responded on AA’s website: “but we’re not dessert, we are not a statement, we are people, plain and simple, intricate and complicated-just like everyone else.”

i can’t help and feel like even though it wasn’t an offical AA ad, that soon we will see their ads with black women in chains in their “native Africa”. i think we are beginning to see what the fashion world is capable of.

what does american apparel have to say? not much, but read the comments from their daily update. what does i-D magazine have to say? no response i found.

it’s worth noting that i can’t find info or pictures of this model anywhere else and there is an arguement as to whether or not she’s really black, or if she truely is wearing blackface.

also, worth mentioning that AA is NOT offically sweat shop free brand clothing. made in america means made by immagrints making minimum wage.

mostly, i think fashion magazines, clothing companies and ad firms need to be put in check: exploiting race and objecting women isn’t fucking provakative or edgey, it’s fucked up. will things ever change, not as long as they profit from it, not as long as we buy it.

blogging

so, i just read a couple blog entries from some of the thing that says “most read posts” or something. they were both stupid. not in a sense of the writer wasn’t intelligent, but in the sense of being redunant and full of conspiracy theories.

do people really have nothing better to do than read blogs and blog all day and attak policans they don’t really know with accusations that would be true of any/all politicans? i mean, i’m sure they could have at least washed their fucking dishes, instead!!! (oh, i forgot, that’s a women’s job anyway). more than that, are people really that angry? white men with money and access to the internet and obviously a lot of free time? they’re THAT angry?

i’m not posting any links because this garbage doesn’t deserve to be read, i’m sure if you’ve read random blogs you’ve run into the same problem: annoying, reactionary, chatterboxes who talk through their asses. and people who read it. FUCKING SHIT.

so, how do we make sure this isn’t us? well, i think being happy is one way! hahahaha. when you spend all your time being angry and yelling about shit people stop listening and you stop caring. you end up being miserable and, frankly, you catch more flies with honey. also, if your blogs/zines/articles are annoying and reactionary people who have intelligent criticism won’t think you’re worth talking to, you’ll only hear from assholes who think you’re onto something and use your comment box to say some other racist, fucked up stupid shit.

getting off the internet is another way. stand on a real soap box, not a virtual one! or just read, shop local, make dinner with your friends, go on walks, masterbate, go to workshops, accept that you have things to work on, do art, talk to kids, plant a garden, talk to your neighbors, vote for who you actaully want to be president, volunteer, call people out on their shit, call yourself out on your shit, pick up trash, have a party, start a band, go to a protest, organize your own protest, write on bathroom walls, loan people books, share your knowledge, listen to others, interview people at the bus stop with you, &tc.

i find that people who do these things are much happier than people who blog about policains and drugs all day and how angry they are about it. don’t be that angry white man who no one listens to!!! we don’t need another Lyndon LaRouche, we need people who act on their convictions!

having said this, i’m going to get off the internet to clean and make myslef healthy food! (and read more about lyndon larouche).

MONSTERS OF THE ID

what?

A Message to “Anarchist” Men by Molly Tov

this really hit home for me: “The men who vocalize their aggression against rapists, but when THEIR lovers say no, coercion is simplke, and its not rape, because he’s ANTI-SEXIST. There are men who use anti-sexist talk to pick up wimmin. The men who challenge others to call them on their shit and when someone does, on goes the defense mode and he’s appalled that someone could say HE was fucking up, instead of actually thinking about the situation and to start working on it.“

broader than just the issue of sexism in “radical” men, is the issue of isms in all of us and our inibility to confront it or handle criticism. this is understandable: it sucks to feel like you’re being called out for behaivor it seems like everyone’s displaying, it sucks to be judged, it sucks to have a friend tell you that you’re fucked up and it’s super scary to look inside ourselves at the ugliest forms of sexism/racism/aggression/&tcism.

we have this idea “the racist” is some monster KKK member who is less than human, so if we ourselves are racist we must be the same. just like we have this idea that “the rapist” is a monster who hides in the bushes waiting to attack the most vulnerable, so Jonny Nextdoor who gets girls tootoo drunk can’t be a rapist because he’s no monster, he’s just looking to have fun.

these ideas keep up from confronting ourselves. instead we talk about others as “inhuman” “scum” “disgusting” and we distance ourselves from them to make it clear that THEY are sexist/mysogonistic/racist/greedy/evil and WE aren’t. so when someone says “i think what you said is really racist” we hear that we are the same as that KKK member (who we’ve decided is less than human), we know we’re not that monster so we deny and become defensive instead of wondering why that person felt we were being racist. this means the inner racist inside us goes on, as does the racism in the world around us.

the “common sense” thought pattern many of us have is that a select group of less than human people comitt all rapes and murders, say all the sexist things, go to KKK meetings and torture people. 90% of the world is incapable of doing these things, and is “human”. i’d like to point out there is little to no DNA evidence that murders are any less human than marketing reps or students or the people they murder. but, in thinking this way, they prove to themselves that they are not the monster. and people tell them that we all have to change our attitudes in order to prevent these things from happening or that rape is a product of society, they preach the “common sense” that’s it’s the “bad seeds” and not a problem that will be fixed by anything. none of us can be the monster, we can’t be that. never mind that this world doesn’t actually use common sense. because that isn’t one of us! ———–>

several years ago my best friend was raped while i slept in the next bed. the perp in this situation was another friend of mine, and the man in our friend group who everyone trusted the most. when i sat in his living room telling him what he did wrong there was no monster before me, there was a fucked up kid. he didn’t hide in the bushes, he didn’t plan on raping someone, he didn’t do any other form of violence. he wasn’t a less than human monster, he was our best friend (very past tense). when we asked him why he did it he said he didn’t know. when we asked him if he thought it had something to do with power he said no, then he told us of 2 sexual situations where he had felt powerless and of a shit load of situations other situations where he felt powerless over his life. he used the word “powerless”. this kid was so fucked up but he couldn’t confront himself, he couldn’t challenge his mysogony his homophobia or the abuse he had suffered. he was so fucked up he choose to empower himself by fucking up someone else.

this doesn’t make him a monster, this makes him the same as the 8 year old who lived next door to me when i was 6, and the boyfriend i had when i was 14 and many many others who couldn’t hear the word “NO”, thought silence was “YES” or felt like it was ok because it happened to them. a product of a society where they felt marginalized so they marginalized others and got away with it. similar to thousands and thousands of others who when called on their shit become defensive and make up excuses for themselves.

instead of giving up our privilege or using it for good use, we see people challenging society as a threat to it. because (as cliche as it sounds), the inherintly racist/classist/sexist/homophobic society still favors the white, able bodied young man and he(we) doesn’t want to admitt it. and being confronted, having to purge it out for real, means we have to admitt it benefits us in at least some small way. and if change the whole social construct of it, we’ll lose that privilege. and then we have to sit andwonder if we are any different from the rapist clansmen we made so much fun of?

my answer? if you read this whole thing and thought “fuck, i did really violate someone’s boundaries and it’s my responsibility to apoligize and fight sexual assault in my community” or “wow, maybe i did say and do things that were racist and it insulted one of my friends, i should accept my white privilege and learn to fight racism”, then yes, you are different from him.

and until we all think that way, until we accept that EVER LAST ONE OF US has issues with sexism, racism, able-bodism, classism, speciesm, agism, culturism &tc, until we confront those issues head on and look at how they play out in our lives, until we accept that if there is monster in our community it is because there is a monster in all of us, then we’ll never fucking get anywhere as a society/movement/community/revolution.

more than the internet

there’s a lot of stuff i’ve been thinking about that i would like to see happen. specifically a Ladyfest or CLIT fest in austin or a free school in austin. both, really. but i was thinking maybe a fest would be more achivable in the short term, and i guess there was a ladyfest here in 2004. i think a lot of my early empowerment as a women and my knowledge of self healthcare begain at the first CLIT fest in Minneapolis 2004. in fact, there were a couple older punk women i met there who (even though i only hung out with them a couple times) impacted my life in a tremindous way.

a free school, also, i feel like could be a great asset to the austin community (and all communities), i know the bat annex, the belfry and the jack pine were all pretty awesome influences in the twin cities. i also think that as an anarchist helping people learn how to read, write, plant gardens, cook, make their own clothing &tc should be a goal of mine. when we get together to learn how to be self sufficent and teach others how to be self sufficent we create community. i’m sure that there are lots of people in austin that are interested in the same thing/have tried the same thing. AND the rhizome collective has had free classes in the past and free education surrounding sustainability is part of their object/mission statement.
another thing that’s been happening is meeting about starting a food coop in south austin!! i’m pretty excited about this, but have yet to go to a meeting. i found their blog, though, so we can all keep up to date: South Austin Food Coop

And speaking of the rhizome collective AND getting off the internet the Radical Urband Sustainability Training is in a week! it’s kind of expensive, but i think i’m going to try to go.