Yes First Another Apology; Occupy Wall Street's Revolutionary Resurrection of Activism and Hope; Proposed Hospital Agreement Underscores Just How Powerfully We're Oppressed by Capitalism and Theocracy

Stephanie, spring 1971. Photo by Loren Bliss copyright 2011. Details below in “Visual Thinking.” (Click on image to view it full size.)

*****

AGAIN MY APOLOGY for being so long away from this space, but this time the reason is wholly positive: I've become involved with Occupy Tacoma, the local manifestation of Occupy Wall Street, and I've been so busy as a member of its media working group I haven't given much thought to anything else.

To be once more so involved is an exhilarating experience, intensity of a degree I have not felt for 41 years – not since the immediate here-comes-the-real-revolution aftermath of the government's campaigns of murder and mayhem at Kent State University on 4 May 1970 and Jackson State College ten days later.

But now – in reassuring contrast to the tyranny of betrayals that followed the martyrdom of Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer and William Schroeder at Kent, Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green at Jackson (and let us not forget Kent's Dean Kahler, struck in the spine by a round of M2 Ball, permanently crippled and forever robbed of the infinite pleasures of sexuality and sexual love) – today's Occupation Movement may in truth be the rightful bearer of the title so arrogantly claimed by Wall Street: “too big to fail.”

The fact the Movement has gone international, that it is articulating the grievances and anger of our entire planet's Working Class – and most importantly that it is relentlessly militant while remaining implacably nonviolent – would seem to guarantee its sustainment.

Its unprecedented magnitude may even nullify one of the four hitherto-absolute historical prerequisites of revolution: organization, ideology, technological mastery and the support of a major (presumably invincible) foreign power.

The obvious question – a new question for a new time – is whether a movement that is genuinely global needs the support of any government.

No doubt we shall soon know the answer.

Meanwhile the welcome and profoundly healing sense of useful and purposeful commitment I thought I'd never feel again is marred – though only slightly – by what some athlete whose name I don't remember called “deja vu all over again.”

Just as I have seen happen in these parts before, the pacifists here tried to seize the levers of power at the very beginning and now try to censor any words with allegedly “military” connotations – the reason we are not allowed to “mobilize” but must “gather” instead – which guarantees Occupy Tacoma's communiques to the public are so non-confrontational, many of my neighbors assume OT is “just a band of left-over hippies.”

Never mind the hippie phenomenon died when 1967's Summer of Love turned into an Autumn of Death (both of which I covered), Occupy Tacoma astonishingly chose the two-fingered “peace-sign” – an emblem that long ago became a stultifying cliché – as its very own logo and now brandishes it as if it were cutting-edge art.

Exactly as my neighbors' reaction demonstrates, the resultant message is more suggestive of retro-rock than of political confrontation.

I cannot doubt this choice was at least subconsciously motivated by the we-hate-New-York-City xenophobia that is a big part of Puget Sound's cultural undertow. Whatever, there's no denying Tacoma's use of the peace-sign is deliberate defiance of the clenched-fist, militant-workers-of-the-world symbol employed by Occupy Wall Street and seemingly by most other such organizations including Occupy Seattle.

But this is merely my most recent encounter with the struggle that has sundered the U.S. Left ever since the 1960s, when it became more a bourgeois fad than a vessel of Working Class activism. The transformation, which the late Jack Newfield repeatedly decried, began with the devastating clash between the sneeringly draft-exempt elite (the petite bourgeoisie) and those of us who served, whether willingly (as I did) or because Working Class parents could not afford the college tuition that bought exemption from compulsory military service.

The result was a class-schism that lives on today, albeit mostly in more subtle forms. For example Occupy Tacoma's unawareness of labor – this despite endorsements from local unions – was painfully apparent during a recent discussion of potential demonstration sites, when Tacoma's industrial areas were omitted until I rather forcefully spoke out in favor of adding them.

(Tacoma is a seaport town of about 195,000 persons and – yes – there is still a lot of industry here. There is a lot of unflinching unionism too, especially on the waterfront.) 

After my remarks, the group proved its inclusiveness and intent by adding these locales to the list of places for informational marching. And plans were soon underway to invite more union members to participate in Occupy Tacoma's general assembly meetings and to establish direct communication with the unions themselves.

A problem I fear won't be so easily solved is the ongoing confusion about the meaning of the terms “pacifist” and “non-violent.” As a consequence the two are often taken as synonyms when in fact they are polls apart.

Pacifism, at least as manifest in the U.S., is too often an ultimate form of non-confrontational submission to authority and thus functions all-too-easily as camouflage for cowardice. By contrast, non-violence (note the examples of Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela) is implicitly confrontational while very deliberately avoiding any provocation the Ruling Class might use to rationalize unleashing its murderous powers of oppression.

Non-violent confrontation – precisely as Gandhi, King and Mandela have proven – is therefore the boldest tactic available to today's revolutionaries. Indeed – given the high-tech arsenals of death and surveillance the Ruling Class now owns – it is the only tactic.

But that should never excuse downpressing non-violent confrontation into non-confrontational submission. If the revolution fails (and I am 99 percent certain it won't), it will be because its own activists failed to comprehend this distinction.

*****

Medical Controversy Underscores Dangers of Capitalism, Theocracy

SEATTLE--A coalition of advocacy groups here worries the proposed affiliation of avowedly secular Swedish Health Services and devoutly Catholic Providence Health & Services will force Swedish facilities to adopt Catholic prohibitions against reproductive freedom for women and end-of-life services for terminally ill patients.

In response to this alarming report I wrote my first Internet contribution in more than a week:

Kudos to Crosscut and Harris Meyer for reporting on a pivotal issue Ruling Class Media is often too cowardly (or too controlled by closet theocrats) to adequately cover.

Now as a long-time (voting) member of Group Health, I wonder what reproductive and end-of-life rights might have been surrendered by its own alliances with Catholic organizations -- for example St. Joseph Hospital in Tacoma or St. Peter in Olympia.

Apropos Group Health, I intend to learn – and publicize – the answers to the questions Mr. Harris evokes.

Meanwhile I would be derelict in my duty if I failed to point out that here is yet another example of the horrors of capitalism.

At its core, this issue is a byproduct of capitalism's innate opposition to human rights -- in this instance capitalism's denial of the absolute right to health care recognized by every industrialized nation save the United States.

The profound concern evoked by the pending Swedish/Providence agreement is also a logical reaction not just to Catholic authoritarianism, but to capitalism's traditional albeit woefully underpublicized preference for theocracy.

What used to be called "industrial psychology" -- psychology in service to workplace oppression -- long ago recognized the fact the most devout adherents of Christianity and Islam make the most dependably submissive, reliably anti-union employees. Note for instance the notoriously church-sustained anti-unionism of the Bible-belt South.

Thus we witness once again our worsening subjugation by run-away capitalism and its carefully hidden theocratic agenda.

*****

Visual Thinking: an Enchanting Woman of a Compelling Time

I met Stephanie in the City in 1969. I was hired in 1967 for an extended project photographing the people and neighborhoods served by the free clinic program of Manhattan's Beth Israel Hospital, she came aboard two years later as a member of the public relations staff. Though our roles were very different, each of us answered to the brilliantly competent woman who headed the PR department, which often brought us into the same office space.

Stephanie was formidably intelligent and uniquely articulate, and the more we knew of one another, the closer we became. Discovering just how very much we had in common via extended conversations over after-work drinks, we soon became a typically New York sort of couple, too mutually independent for formal commitment, too fond of one another to long remain apart, the beginning of an on-and-off relationship that lasted ten years.

Originally from Oregon, Stephanie returned to the West Coast a year after my Summer 1970 adventure left me stranded in Bellingham – a tragi-comic story for another time – and there we connected again. Not long after I made this photo, near Samish Bay at the south end of Chuckanut Mountain in April 1971, Stephanie bought two horses and a Model 600 Remington carbine in .308 Winchester and spent that entire Summer riding solo down the Crest Trail all the way from this side of the Canadian border almost to Mexico.

Later she became a Registered Nurse and worked for the United Nations in Latin America. Alas, we somehow lost track of one another in 1979.

The film, another of the negatives dug out from the ashes of the 1983 fire the following Spring, is Tri-X. I remember I exposed it at 400 but pushed it to 800 or maybe even 1200 with D-76 to achieve maximum midrange detail in some work pictures shot a few hours later in available darkness – probably fast breaking news or I'd have taken the time to load a fresh roll first. The camera was a Nikon F, most likely with the 50mm Nikkor f/2.

Wherever you are, Stephanie, whatever you might be doing, I feel profoundly blessed to have known you – the most fearlessly adventuresome woman I have met in this lifetime.

LB/12 October 2011

-30-