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

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.

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!!!

Some of you have heard this story.  I’ve told it many times because I still can’t accept that they are gone. I still cannot comprehend how two avid outdoorsewomen (tall and strong) camping with a dog on a holiday weekend, could have been brutally attacked and killed.  My mind wants so badly to know if there was any misstep that I could learn from so I never meet the same fate.  This is at the forefront of my mind because I went camping alone last weekend, for the second weekend in my life.  It was not as hard as I thought it would be but I can’t say that I didn’t have panic as I laid in my tent listening to all of the noises.  I can’t say that I wasn’t scared every time my dog stiffened and lunged at leaves crunching in the night. 

I ponder the details of their deaths frequently.  The last time I went camping with a friend, I asked him how we are to protect ourselves.  Sagely he answered that we don’t expect anyone to harm us.  We are not likely to come out ahead if someone with a desire to harm others targets us.  Above all, we aren’t equipped to fight off a predator we don’t see coming.  And it’s not possible to treat every human as a potential predator.  I don’t want to live in that world, anyway.

The horrors of this story were refreshed for me yesterday, after talking late into the night with an old, close friend.  She has a friend, P., who was brutally attacked by a stranger who entered her home in the middle of the night.  It’s believed the stranger intended to kill her.  Maggie implied that he did everything but. The trump cards: Maggie said P is the strongest person she knows AND she has a dog. The attacker made noise outside.  Stumbling out of her sleep, P opened the door, the dog ran out and the attacker, who had been flattened against the side of the building, stormed in, locking the dog outside. 

How many times have I let my dog into the backyard thinking of this as a method of self-protection?  When women travel in pairs, when women are strong, when women have dogs–and they still are attacked and/or killed. How do we protect ourselves?  I wonder if it is truly so random that all we can do is live our lives.  I have always felt strongly that I cannot stop running, camping, walking, travelling, or biking because of fear. I cannot compromise my quality of life, my love of adventure because that is, in a larger way, letting misogynists I’ve never met hold me back.  And I wonder if instead of instilling fear in all of my sisters, I should not repeat these stories so that when all of us do what we would be doing anyway, we won’t be terrified doing it.

It’s not that easy for me. It’s not that easy for Maggie, either.  She said she can’t stop telling people about it.  I know the feeling. It’s a desperation because ”she” can always be me. I don’t want to have anymore friends get hurt. I don’t want my sisters kidnapped, beaten, raped, murdered, videotaped without their consent, coerced, trapped, or intimidated.  I want us all to be self-aware and cautious, shielded by the armory of knowledge.  But how?

I’m going to keep pondering this.  For step one, I’m going to rig my window so that I can’t be seen in my bedroom at night.  I recently found that my new blinds are useless when they are backlit.  So many predators start off at peepers.  I’m going to think harder about the security of our house and ways we can make it safer.   P is going to the shooting range and getting a gun.  This pascifist says, I would, too.  But we all know that’s not enough, in itself. Any weapon can be used against us.  We can turn to the hope Christina has given us.  She escaped bodily harm in the most hopeless of settings.

Here’s to all of us learning how to escape the demons inside and out.

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

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.

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

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.]

if you’ve read much history of the United States, you know that there was a time in our country when children as young as 4 worked, when people worked 12 or more hour days on average, when there was no weekend, no safety regulations for factories, no fire escapes in factories, no accountibility of companies for the treatment of their workers. the 8hr day, the weekend, most factory safety regulations and the end of child labor were brought to us by the Labor Movement (aka. working anarchists, unionists, communists and socialists who protested, wrote pamphlets, educated their coworkers and spoke out publicly against these injustices).

Mayday was choosen as the International Workers’ Holiday. May 1st 1886 marked the beginning of a national strike for the 8 hour work day. May 4th 1886 was the day of the Haymarket Massacre in Chicago, where a bomb was thrown by an unknown person and police shot into a crowd of strikers and supports killing several people. 8 anarchists were arrested in conjunction with the demonstration, strike and bomb that was thrown. I read about this case in Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and in Emma Goldman’s autobiography Living my Life. Four of the anarchists, including revolutionary Albert Parsons, were hung, 3 were later aquitted (as i said there was no evidence) and one killed himself in his prison cell with a bomb he made out of a cigar.
Mayday is not only a day to comemorate what the struggle of unionists, the labor party and the Haymarket Martyrs for the 8 hour day, but a day to protest the continuation of capitalism, war and the explotation of workers, and a day to celebrate the 8 hour day and all the advances we’ve made in worker’s rights and human rights.

Mayday parades are full of street theater, roller girls, unionists, anarchists, bike gangs, puppet and mask theater, immigrant rights blocks, etc etc etc. Mayday festivals combine the pegan aspects of fertility ceremonies and may poles with political discussions, teach ins and flyering. Concerts raise money for unions, labor and anarchist organizations. Workshops and conferences and teach ins and protests happen all around the world.

Chicago Mayday, in Haymarket Square- you can see the Haymarket Statue!!!!

in the 60′s and 70′s here in America, Mayday protests surrounded the Veitnam War and imperalism. in recent years they’ve had a similar theme with the war in Iraq and American Occupation. these past 2 years immigrant rights marches around the USA have been on Mayday.

more pictures of Mayday festivals

future Maydays?? we’ll celebrate equal pay for equal work, protest the state of fear we live in, celebrate immigrants rights and some day the end of all domination.