Bradley Manning is on my mind. At 25 years old, he may seem a remarkable hero to some, and a traitor to others.
He is neither to me. But this is because I had the good fortune at 25 or so - almost 25 years ago, in fact - to be surrounded by aspiring men and women just like him. Queer and anti-war, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist activists, drag queens, radical faeries who put so much on the line.
They taught me so much, and they are why to this day I am a bit embarrassed claiming the Queer or communist or anarchist label. They made something of those words, and I still feel I am striving to live up to their good example.
They broke windows. They stopped rush-hour traffic in downtown San Francisco. They infiltrated temp agencies and sabotaged machines. They surrounded bigoted Christians who came to San Francisco to pray the queers away and shouted "Bring back the Lions." They organized. They studied up and went to meetings and made demands. They always made demands. It was too late in the day to beg.
They are my peers. They are a high standard.
Civilized people who want to remain civilized have no other choice than to speak truth to power, speak truth about power, and dismantle the structures of power altogether. This is natural to me.
Instead of asking why Manning turned all those files over to Wikileaks to expose and stop US and British war crimes, I asked why no other soldier did so. I asked, how could a human being sit back and watch that, cheer it on, or look the other way.
What kinds of monsters raised those military officers, and who were their peers and role models, these silent, complicit, SS-type soldiers?
When I meet mid 20's people - especially if they are gay or lesbian and/or of color, but even if they are white and straight, what astounds me is not the Bradley Mannings among them. I expect that. What baffles me is the wealth of mediocres, the Step-N-Fetch-Its, the Tap Dancers, the "Are We Sick, Master" men among them. I work with some. They will turn your ass in to the Overseer in a heartbeat.
I look at them as an anthropologist or explorer might and wonder: where the Hell did you come from?
I read that Manning, for exposing US war crimes, has been found guilty of 19 indictments. A society that kills the messenger will have more messengers. They - we? - will not disappear. Trust. A society that acquits white supremacy and Nuremberg Principles and pardons the SS officer but hunts down, tortures, imprisons the Resistance will only get a more angry, militant, vocal Resistance.
Many of us, enough of us, were not raised and reared by beasts to be monsters, and we have peers we think too highly of to sink so low into the gutter of this nation-state.
No comments:
Post a Comment