ACTION HAS BEEN ON MY MIND. Child abuse. Oaxaca. The Long War on Mexico. The Imperialist fungus creeping over this world and tainting so much. The Horror we continually rationalize in Iraq. The same fucking conquest rolling on and on and on and on. And my feelings of helplessness. American society, drowning in comfort and mostly oblivious to the corpses and nightmares that our beautiful walkways and malls and economic comfort requires. How we are, and have long been, yoking many parts of the world to pull us wherever we want to go. And here I am. Watching my people vilified and abused while I chill in la casa del Conquistadores.

Turtlebella caught wind of some of my angst/planning/hintage, and requested summa hint. And I wanted to smooth out this post more, perhaps do an Orcinus style, ultra-dense, academic style block of conjecture, theory, and clever analogy. But today [yesterday] bfp brings up the question of what to do in solidarity or to affect change for Oaxaca for those of us who cannot be there, or even at una gran marcha, like the one in LA, or Pittsburgh, in Syracuse, or Pennsylvania, or Chicago, or if you are by no city at all and cannot get there. And my particular thoughts are simply that I need to DO more. You've seen this arise in many posts, I'm sure. It's like this morning, when it was still dark and I woke up to read yesterday's paper, and of how yet another case identical to the Nixzmary one that shook me to the core, has happened locally. Her name was Lacey Folenius, and her bus driver watched her get on the bus every day with new bruises, finally a broken leg....and then she was dead, and the bus no longer had to stop at her house. Up until the end, the bus driver took notes, kept diagrams, was reporting it. I really appreciate that. But I know about that system, and it is ineffective. That is why she died before anyone helped her. AGAIN. Reporting child abuse is very good. But understand that like voting, it is not Doing Something. As Thoreau reminded us, this type of action is only a symbol that shows what you would like to happen. Doing Something—or "action from principle" as he put it—cannot be sublimated or symbolized. Ever.

This is why I risked my own apartment situation in the late 90's when I walked downstairs after listening to my landlord and landlady screaming at their kids and knocked on their door and told them I didn't think it was right. I'm the kind of person who needs to DO something. Because ONLY doing something means a fucking thing, okeh? In this world of matter, mass and motion matter.

Action from principle—the perception and the performance of right —changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with anything which was. It not only divides states and churches, it divides families; ay, it divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the divine.

>- Henry David Thoreau

I was sitting there in the near dark living room, looking at this little girl trying to make a smile to the camera with her bruised face, knowing now that those bruises had finally broken open and drowned her heart and life and I was crying like a fool, and my hands were gripping that paper like it would tear in half any second, and my frame was shaking. You see? I began thinking of what design—and this is why I say artists are like cripples—as I was shaking and crying, what design would go on the T-shirts that I made for the gang of vatos that would walk with me to patrol and look for child abusers. Because that's what I want to do. I want to interrupt motherfuckers in the supermarket. I want to reach in windows and give it back to these men and women, I want to rescue that child. I want to make an actual posse that cares about lonely, beatup, sad, ruined children enough to walk AROUND and LOOK for them. Because they are everywhere and you and I go on living our fucking blah blah lives typing this and that and the other and there are children staring through their dark ceiling every night and giving up silent, copious tears to a blind and deaf god. Every day, every night while we smile and doze off with a glass of wine or tea, there is a child who cannot understand why his very own parents hate him and want to kill him. And I cannot rest or forget the slightest bit of this.

Ultimately, you think to yourself, What will wake people up? What will steer this violently numb dialogue somewhere important? What will CHANGE things? What can I do? And anyone who thinks about these things intelligently and knows the intractibility and slow pace at which the gargantuan head of our social awareness moves eventually considers drastic means. to bring attention to what matters. After all, what can one do to snap a hypnotist's subject out of a trance? Of course, anyone with instincts of self-preservation backs off of these urges. Doing the wrong "dramatic" or "drastic" thing nowadays will get you killed. And I don't mind dying for any of the "causes" or "issues" that move me in this way. But only if it will do some good. I mean real good. And I don't mean "good" as in assuaging my own conscience. I mean good that figures into other people's lives. I understand why this man immolated himself. Many scorned him, but not me. Because I understand. I don't write it off to bad therapy, or Lonely Divorcee. Fuck that nullification of this sensitive soul's plight. I feel the same way. How do I go on living in this world in any sort of comfort, knowing what I do about the Deal? You've read my posts where I ask almost this same question. Many times. How do I make my awareness settle? How do I shut up my conscience and go on as if it's all acceptable even for one half minute?

And I think this is what happens to so many adults. That is why they are glazed and half-game and obvious to children as fools and hypocrites. It's sad, and I've seen it for years. It took me a while to figure out, but I do think I have. Somewhere in life, these people saw the Truth of things. And they cared. I postulate that maybe it was having some real history creep in after HS, in college, but then they suffered from having the words of true thinkers and ideals of conscience smashed up against the practical and numbing reality of the Real World, time clocks, obligations and a need for comfort and inertia and security. We sell our awareness and conscience in small installments. It's the only way we'd ever do it.

So I don't know when it happens for sure, but that's my guess. And whatever it was that daunted them, these people—faced with the ultimate challenge that awaits every true thinker and do-er and potential hero, which is to break down, break away, and break open—they felt themselves too small, or too ineffective to change anything. So they turned away from that truth, and sought comfort or escape from the awareness. And it ruins people when they do this. They begin to go mad in little ways. Eventually, this conflict swallows their inner voice and inner peace, no matter how they run. Because inside, we all feel the urge to Do Something to make this world the place we feel it ought to be. It's the State that tells us that TV is enough, that Xanax + TV is enough; that Job + Title + Zoloft + Allegra + Blog is enough. That voting is enough. That we are weak and ineffectual. That we ought to get along and make do and Get Over It. That Principle and Ideal are for books and teenagers who will one day "know better" (aka "be numb and self interested enough to let it go.")

But all this is a lie. And those stories of amazing movements and deed and change are made of people like

you

and
I.

YOU ARE FREE TO CONSIDER THIS A JUMPING OFF POINT for your own thoughts about action. I don't mean to dictate what anybody should do. As I said in my intro to this blog, it's a big enough job for me to stay on top of my own awareness and role. I can't pretend to know for you. If I do, please forgive me. I forget all the important things from time to time. But I do remember, given a chance. And what is important is that we are all honest about our experience. It is in the nexus and overlapping and conjoining of that truth that we will find Answers for us all. That is why evil movements like the Bush/Cheney/Rummy/Condi/Clinton organisms that find their way to power and secretly and deceptively rewrite the World's experience and keep it from all of our eyes are enemies of the Human idea of progress and Good. As is the recent perversion of language made so trendy by our government. How can anything but Truth save us? It cannot, it can only make the journey harder and longer and more painful to more people.

When I read this, and this, this, and this, I began to think to myself. Wow, I thought. A way to get my body involved, use my natural gifts, further my own role as an Artist, and actually have a hand in starting real dialogue in places that, without my action, might not have it. AND I don't have to get killed doing it! It seemed like the perfect thing. So I began putting together a poster or two. You can see one above (the Oaxaca one). I'm not absolutely sure what will start the right conversations, and I'm not saying that hanging posters is where we should stop with this kind of thing. One needs to look at the area they live in. If I were still living in NYC, a poster would never do. Nor would a spray-painted stencil on concrete. Because new york is a constant hive of art students, actors, artists, people inundated with a billion thousand foot advertisements, you need a different dialogue. And there are some guerrilla artists who do work in NYC. But you have to hit really big ads there, and I'm personally not so much into serious heights, or hanging from building ledges or balconies. I've done it (when DPing films) but I can't say I could make it a regular thing. So it would be harder in NYC, but you could still do it. I've been on trains when people are doing guerrilla theater, and I would say that's a bit more effective. Many conversations begin in NYC (as in other places where so much information and students can gather), but NYC is hardly the only or most important nexus of change or focus of action in this country. We need all of us on this one. Without many, many, many of us coming to awareness, nothing will change. Or change will arrive in miniscule increments that let many children die, many families broken up, many POC kept under the heel of the White Lens, many more tragedies unfold globally in the meanwhile, and eventually will be absorbed into the deeper sea of discord and what will remain will only be the appearance or announcement of change.

I use my advertising mind, my media-slick mind, the part of me that is completely trained and kept in practice by the very Western elements of my upbringing and education to fashion the right messages on these posters. I don't think I can come straight with it, one has to move around the obstacles that will exist to absorbing media the average, media-benumbed citizen of the USA. You can see where I'm going with the message above: "Good Americans should ignore Oaxaca." (Note, the image of men walking downstairs from another poster, I changed it for this one). I want to start conversations that may, I hope, catch fire like those that spread across the Western US every summer. It may take ten posters, or one that is ten times bigger. Even so, I don't think posters in odd places saying odd things—or even graffiti that makes points, or gitmo dolls in disneyworld—will BE the change. Or even spark The Change. But I think we need to bring the conversation out of the blogs, out of our 3D circles of people we may know, out of the common channels. Or let me pull back from that way of talking and say that I know that I need to. It feels right, and it gives me something to do with my body out there in the 3D world, which I've been craving. So watch this space for more posters. You can click that one above to dL the full size and print out.

People are good at heart. We all want happiness for people like us. We all want justice and fairness and love for people like us. We just forget that we are all Like Us, behind our fears and prejudices and learned ignorance and practiced illusion. Underneath the layers of sadness and boredom and fear and the fog and haze of self-pollution and self-doubt, there is a fire raging, a beautiful and pure fount of strength and goodness and fearlessness. Within each and every one of us. Sometimes it smolders when the skies grow dark and wet.

If I can be nothing else in this life, I pray that I may be or might be allowed to be—or may help to bring about—just one tiny spark in that heap of forlorn ember.

Join me.