Tree Story

My cottonwood tree has transitioned from male to female. For twenty years it was happy to be a male, as were we with it being a male, as female cottonwoods drop that eponymous stuff every June all over everything, like snow falling in January.

We were OK with the cottonwoods down by the river doing their thing, far enough away to be kind of pretty rather than annoying. But our transgendered cottonwood sits in our front yard, where we planted it 22 years ago as a cotton-less cottonwood, or male, to shade what would become our beautiful courtyard full of flowers, bushes, and grass. It quickly grew to enormous size, as tall as our two-story, 30-foot tall house. And never once did it shed cotton, because, after all it is/was a male. 

When it began raining down its cotton this year I of course went to the Internet to try to figure this out. I found out that nurseries sometimes make mistakes in their gender classification, but the fact that our tree never released cotton for 20 years seems to negate that possibility. Sometimes, female trees take a few years to produce cotton, leading you to believe you have a male instead. A “few years” does not translate to 20 years.

Like so many other places across the world, New Mexico has had an unusual spring and early summer: it’s been raining. Ordinarily, after a few April showers things dry up, warm weather descends, and by the beginning of June it often reaches 100 degrees in Albuquerque. This year, in typically 10 degrees cooler El Valle, I was dressed in wool socks, long pants, and a jacket until about two weeks ago, when temperatures finally reached near normal and the rains abated, at least a little (this is not a complaint, but a celebration). So one could surmise that maybe all the rain and cool temperatures caused the cotton release. Except that MALE COTTONWOODS DO NOT PRODUCE COTTON.

What has my transgendered tree wrought? Well, the largest, most beautiful columbines I’ve ever grown—definitely the product of rain and cool temperatures—are coated with cotton that makes them droop and moan. My green grass is blotted white. Cobwebs of cotton fill every nook and cranny of window casings and doorways. Every time I open a door, cotton blows in to cling to anything soft, particularly the rugs. My dogs make sure it gets distributed upstairs where they join me at night. 

Yesterday a quick rainstorm, with lots of wind, blew through El Valle dropping what I fervently hope is the last of the cotton. I raked up as much as I could from the yard but the columbines took a beating. It kind of reminds me of what’s happening in the transgender world of people. Seems to me that all that fury and disdain dumped on the feminists who created beauty out of hard work and growth, much like my columbines, just clogs the relational paths that we all share

Pilgrim and Waldo on the Appalachian Trail

On the one hand, you have Bill Bryson, the out of shape middle-aged journalist (and his even more out of shape friend Stephen Katz) failing, over many months, to hike the entire 2,100 miles of the Appalachian Trail but giving us a marvelously funny book full of historical, naturalist, and intellectual ruminations in A Walk in the Woods. On the other hand, you have ultrarunner Scott Jurek’s Instagram postings of an ultra fit man running up and down the trail in his attempt to speed through the entire route in 42 days.

In the middle, you have the 2015 hikers who started out in Georgia in April and are in fine form at the beginning of June in Virginia. That’s where I saw almost 50 of them on the Appalachian Trail near Roanoke, day hiking my measly 9 miles. I wonder what form they’ll be in when they reach Maine in September.

They’re called “thru hikers,” but they also give themselves trail names. The first one we met (I was visiting my friends Elaine and Richard, former Taoseños, now Roanoke residents) was Pilgrim. A German, he looked like he’d just stepped out of an outdoor catalog: polypropylene matching shorts and shirt; Osprey mid-weight backpack; state of the art accordion pad for sitting and sleeping; telescoping hiking poles; mid-weight boots. He told us his basic pack weighted just 20 pounds and he carried 10 pounds of food. A slim, trim, hiking machine.

A thru hiker outfitted in the ubiquitous gear

A young woman—the vast majority of them are millennials—soon came up and bumped him with a “What up?” They weren’t exactly friends—both started out alone and only occasionally hiked together—but as thru hikers they were bonded. They all are, I guess. It helps that they have to share the shelters and campsites spread out over the course of the trail, but affinities are found or formed over the endless days of 10 to 20 miles hikes.

When we reached the overlook at lunch, there were about 10 of them resting on the rocks eating their high energy fare. Soon the sweet smell of pot wafted over us as they broke out the dope. I think I’d be tempted to bring along some stronger stimulants as well, but they seemed very happy with weed as they chatted away during their brief respite.

We met many more coming up the trail as we headed down after lunch. While the gear was identical—Osprey packs with rain covers, hiking poles, etc.—the bodies and apparel weren’t. There was the man with the full Paul Bunyan beard with his tank top/short shorts partner. There was the shirtless man with the wraparound headdress. There was the woman with the umbrella and her backpack-carrying dog (it started to rain but no one wore a raincoat as it was too hot). When we stopped to chat with Waldo, the young man who informed us that he usually hiked 19 or so miles a day but stopped when his body told him to, I asked him why everyone carried the same brand backpack, figuring there was an online promotion of said Osprey. But no, he said, everyone shops at REI where brand Osprey rules.

To someone from the west—me—it was all a bit claustrophobic. The ubiquitous deciduous forests (full of blooming rhododendron) were lush and thick, but without the diversity of terrain and ancient feel of the mixed conifer western forests I’m used to, and with the crowd of thru hikers (albeit they were congregated in Virginia because of the season), it felt a little redundant. Here’s Bryson’s description of the same forest I walked in Virginia:

“So the forest through which Katz and I now passed was nothing like the forest that was known even to people of my father’s generation, but at least it was a forest. It was splendid in any case to be enveloped once more in our familiar surroundings. It was in every detectable respect the same forest we had left in North Carolina—same violently slanted trees, same narrow brown path, same expansive silence, broken only by our tiny grunts and labored breaths as we struggled up hills that proved to be as steep, if not quite as lofty, as those we had left behind.”

The word that is often used to describe the Appalachian Trail environment is pastoral. There’s nothing wrong with pastoral: in other essays I’ve quoted Bryson in his eloquent defense of the mix of wild/domestic terrain that characterizes the trail, as one leaves and enters civilization along the route. I don’t buy into the lament that to have wilderness one must exclude people, the cry of the deep ecologist. 

Pilgrim, communing with nature

I guess it’s just what you’re used to. The operative words in Bryson’s quote are “at least it was a forest.” During our conversation with Pilgrim, he mentioned he’d hiked the Camino de Santiago from the French border through the Pyrenees Mountains of Spain (everyone is Pilgrim there). We questioned him about details: one only has to carry a daypack, with hostels, hotels, and cafes at every night stop along the way. He called it a “cultural hike.” So take your pick: a pastoral hike along the Appalachian Trail (but with plenty of hard work); a wild hike along the Continental Divide Trail; or a cultural hike along the Camino de Santiago. I’ll take them all—as long as I’m not trying to do any of them in 42 days.

Mother's Day Treat

My son Max sent me this slide show for Mother's Day. It's "Unf*#!ing Believably" clever, funny, and spot on with references that only someone who pays attention to my life and work gets. The first link is the photo/story slide show; the second is with the sound track. My love overflows.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/27638048/Mom%20Birthday%20Powerpoint%20%20Songs%201.pptx

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/27638048/Mom%20Birthday%20Powerpoint%20%20Songs%202.pptx

Russell Brand Tells it Like it Is

I watched Russell Brand on Democracy Now! not long ago. Despite several stupid questions from Amy—“would you run for London mayor” or “would you run for parliament” when he’s sitting there telling her that the elected power elite don’t represent the interests of the people—it was a very entertaining 45 minutes. Humor always makes radical political pontificating more digestible. (And all us ‘Mericans love his accent.)

One thing in particular that Brand said struck me. He called the class of people who used to work in manufacturing the “throwaway class.” Because of the outsourcing of these jobs and the changing nature of manufacturing itself, these people are now seen as the dregs of society, sapping the welfare system because they can’t get jobs, holding back the economy and those who engineer it.

Does this “throwaway” language sound familiar? How about the Facebook page of the Albuquerque cop who described his job  as “human waste disposal.” Or one of the cops who shot homeless James Boyd in the Sandia foothills, talking to a state cop before the shooting: “For this fucking lunatic? I’m going to shoot him with [unintelligible] shotgun here in a second.” The homeless, the mentally ill, the PTSD vets who are in and out of treatment are fair game, it seems, for those in APD who think we’d all be better off without them, but picking them off one by one is not very efficient.

Benjamin Netanyahu is much more efficient. He bombs the Palestinians he wants to be rid of in Gaza and smashes the houses and destroys the crops of the ones in the West Bank. He’s been documented saying he’ll never agree to an Israeli state for anyone other than the Jews, and his foreign minister is quoted saying, “I want to get rid of these people [the Palestinians] through transfer, or exchange.”

What they are all getting at is eugenics, of course. The man who coined the term was another Brit like Brand, albeit of the ruling class, very much unlike Brand. According to Francis Galton, his ruling class was “genetically superior” and should therefore rule the world. Across the ocean, this translated into American policies to protect the Puritan gene pool from inferior “stock” through immigration laws. And while people of color have felt the brunt of this discrimination profoundly over last few centuries, it doesn’t mean that the ruling class is opposed to throwing away other white people.

Orwell brought the conception to its nadir in Nineteen Eighty-four, where the Proles, the rabble that lives outside the brotherhood, are left to their own ignorant devices. Except that the tables are turned: the Proles appear to be the only ones who have the capacity to enjoy themselves, even in their abject conditions and exclusion from power. The carefully conditioned Inner Party can’t remember what a good time might be.

Our “Proles” may end up spoiling the elites’ party, in a different way. With all those good manufacturing jobs gone that raised so many from working class to middle class, who’s going to be buying and consuming the goods—all those iPhones and video games and flat screen TVs rather than cars and washing machines and lawn mowers—that keep the American economy afloat? And when folks can’t pay for healthcare or home mortgages they’ll end up sapping the welfare system even more. Aha! Remember the industrial revolution when workers couldn’t afford to buy any of the things they made?

One could argue that the solution to alienated labor is no labor at all. There is enough wealth in the world to provide every human being enough money to meet our basic material needs. I can just hear the reactionaries screaming that that would be the end to civilization as we know it, but a lot of us would be screaming back: thank god! Feed and clothe and house all of us and see what we’re capable of.

Is That Supposed to be Funny?

It’s time to take on the New Yorker cartoon contest (and I don’t mean with alliteration). I’m certainly not the first—or last—person to do this. When I googled “New Yorker cartoon caption,” the second entry, under the New Yorker website itself, was this: “Every week, the New Yorker has a caption contest. Every week, it would be way funnier if they just talked about sucking dick. By Nate Heller & Emily Heller.”

For example:

"I made this wall so we have a place to hang those artsy photos we took of you sucking my dick."

On the other hand, the caption my son Max and I came up with was this:

“I couldn’t find an iron curtain.”

Succinct, subtle, allusively political, brilliant, no? The three finalists: “Which kid do you want?”; “I think we should stop seeing each other?”; and “Happy anniversary!” Pedestrian, trite, unimaginative, yes?”

Film critic Roger Ebert once complained that he submitted approximately 2,000 (or some such outrageous number) captions before one of his was chosen. I’m sure there are many Roger Eberts out there who ask themselves, on a weekly basis when their cartoon isn’t chosen, “What the f*#! do they want” and “Who the f*#! chooses the winner??!!”

I was going to ask the New York Times a similar questions last year about the couples who appear in Weddings in the Sunday Styles section but someone else beat me to it. This is what she/he asked the Public Editor: “How do editors select which announcements to publish, and why don’t editors make a sustained effort to include different types of couples?”

The editor answered that essentially those who are profiled are the ones who manage to make their way out of the herd and end up at the “top of their medical school class at Yale or Stanford.” I proceeded to write a profile on my blog, Unf*#!ing Believable, of a couple who defined a different kind of achievement, and thoroughly enjoyed my endeavor.

I’m assuming most of us who submit these “Succinct, subtle, allusively political, brilliant” captions think that the opposite criterion, i.e, “in the herd,” applies to the New Yorker contest. So I’m inviting all of you who want to express a different kind of achievement than what gets chosen for the cartoon caption to submit your “Succinct, subtle, allusively political, brilliant”—or whatever— caption to my blog. Send it to kmatthews1018@gmail.com and if it’s fit to print—and funnier than “suck my dick”—I’ll post it on my blog for my many (not!) loyal readers to enjoy.

New York, New York, It Used to be a Wonderful Town . . .

Every few days there’s an article or essay in the media about why someone is thinking about leaving New York City, why they’ve already left, or why they think their friends should leave. This is nothing new: the complaining has been going on for years, but at first, when the wealthy pushed out the poor, people said, well, maybe it’s not so bad, now there won’t be as much crime and I won’t have to feel guilty about all the homeless sleeping on the streets. Now that the wealthy have succeeded in pushing out the middle class, the complaining has gotten louder.

I decided to go see the city for myself on what I figured would be my last visit. Mark’s uncle Bernie, the “favorite” uncle, died at the end of the summer after suffering many years with Alzheimer’s. His daughter, Marian, who lives in Los Angeles, and his son Jamie, who still lives in Greenwich Village, asked the family to meet in NYC for an informal memorial: spread Bernie’s ashes, talk about our relationships with him, and have a party with some of his former colleagues and students (he was a professor of psychology at New York University).

The last time Mark and I had been in New York was to see Marian and Jamie’s mother Lorrie, who was dying of lung cancer. Bernie had already been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and Lorrie was heroically trying to get him into an assisted living facility before she died. If that wasn’t depressing enough for Mark, just walking from 22^th Street, where Bernie and Lorrie lived, down to Jamie’s condo on 10^th street, was more than he could handle. (Bernie and Lorrie had only recently moved to their overpriced apartment on 22^th Street after he retired and they were forced to vacate their NYU apartment on Bleecker Street.) None of the ethnic restaurants Mark used to frequent were still there. None of the record stores or bookstores were still there (not that they’re anywhere). New dorms and office buildings owned by NYU towered over the apartments where lower and middle class people used to live.

Mark was born in Brooklyn, in Williamsburg. While his family moved out of the city when he was very young, he came back often to visit his grandmother, who remained in Williamsburg, to visit Bernie and Lorrie in the Village, and to briefly live on 2^nd Street between Avenue A and B, the lower east side. Those were the days when bathtubs were still in the kitchen and Thompson Square Park was the center of the heroin trade. How he ended up in rural New Mexico is a story unto itself, but he observed the changes to the city on his forays back and joined the chorus of complainers lamenting its lost soul.

So I knew my visit was going to be a bag of mixed emotions, and it was. Getting there set the tone: my early morning flight out of Albuquerque was cancelled and while running to get on another flight I left my cell phone on the TSA conveyor belt. Ten or twenty years ago, flying all over the country or to Mexico or Europe, I managed to do just fine with no cell phone. This time, I panicked. The phone numbers of everyone I was meeting in NYC were in my phone and I knew none of them by heart. Fortunately, I do know my kids’ phone numbers so when I got to Phoenix (I know, I was going the wrong direction) the airline let me use a courtesy phone and I called Jakob, who called Max, and they called and e-mailed Marian and my brother-in-law Mike to let them know I was going to be late.

It took me two hours to get from JFK airport via bus and cab, to Spring Street, in Soho, where we had rented an AirBnB. If you had asked me what an AirBnB was a year ago, I might have guessed it was some kind of gun that shoots air instead of BBs? (Which would have been a nice switch for the Florida State University football players who’ve been running around shooting real BBs at people and property.) But now I know it’s an apartment that Marian had rented online, to house Mike, his partner Betty, Marian and me during our stay in the city. It was actually quite lovely, just below street level, fully furnished with two bedrooms, large living room, kitchen, and bathroom, except that the toilet didn’t flush all that well, there was no hot water in the kitchen, and on Friday and Saturday nights, our first two there, every hipster in Soho was out partying. Marian and I, trying to sleep in the rooms closest to the street, ended up wearing our iPod ear buds with pillows over our heads (after dropping a few Valium as well).

Was it really that long ago that the streets of Soho or Noho or Lodo—I have no idea what distinguishes these neighborhoods from one another—were lined with factory warehouses sheltering a few galleries and lofts where struggling painters set up shop? People were already starting to complain of gentrification back then, but my friend Lucy Lippard got a great deal on a loft that, if I recall correctly, cost under $10,000.

There was a real estate office a couple of doors down from our apartment. As out-of-towners are wont to do, we looked at the prices of places listed in the window. Now, I remember being flabbergasted by prices in Telluride, Colorado, and Point Reyes, California, but let me tell you that in the Spring Street window there was no listing for anything less than a million dollars. Actually, the lowest price there was $1.4 million for a 450 square-foot condo. Four hundred and fifty square feet. That’s the size of my living room in El Valle.

Onward to Brooklyn.

 Bernie grew up in an apartment on Driggs Avenue, in Williamsburg. On Saturday we took the subway into Brooklyn and found the apartment, still there although no doubt renovated, at the juncture of what appeared to be a Latino neighborhood and the beginnings of gentrified Williamsburg. As we walked further along we entered a re-creation of Soho: bars, restaurants, twenty and thirty somethings out on the street partying down. At a bar we bought cocktails for $13 and small, finger foods for significantly more. It all tasted great, which it better, in what must be a cutthroat market.

Bernie and Lorrie first lived together in Crown Heights, on the far side of Prospect Park from Park Slope, headquarters of the baby industrial complex and the authorial Jonathans. That’s where we headed on Sunday, to scatter Bernie’s ashes comingled with some of Lorrie’s that their kids had held onto. The scene in the park could have been anywhere USA: ducks begging for handouts from kids on shore; couples holding hands; joggers with kids and dogs. When I’m in these environments, though, full of people who obviously have lots of money, I wonder who they are, how they got there, and what they have to do to stay there. One of the complainers who wrote an editorial in the Daily News had a different take, however: The ones jogging in the park and feeding the ducks are probably doing the only fun things they can afford instead of going to Yankee Stadium or Madison Square Garden or the Met or out to eat because all their money goes towards paying their rent and buying food.

We ended the day at a lovely Italian restaurant that Bernie and Lorrie used to frequent, around the corner from their apartment on Bleecker. There, colleagues and former students told stories and shared memories, and the family sat around afterwards with our own stories. The trip home wasn’t much easier than the one going, but the cab driver who took me to Grand Central Station to catch the bus to JFK found out I was from a rural village in New Mexico and asked me all kinds of questions about what it was like: Did I grow things, did I have animals, how many people lived in my village, etc. And every time I answered he sighed and said, “Oh, that’s so nice,” or “Oh, I wish I could live there.” I asked him how long he’d been in New York: 40 years he said.

I had to wait until the next day to get my phone back from the TSA people who had it at their headquarters in Albuquerque. Then I drove home, and as the cab driver had put it so simply, it’s so nice—damn nice—to be in El Valle.

“Get out of the new one [road] if you can’t lend a hand for the times they are a changin’ . . . .”

I’m bombarded daily by e-mails from the Democrats—Tom Udall, Barbara Lee, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi—asking me for 5, 10, or 25 dollars to fund their “Paint the South Blue Program” or fend off the Republicans who are targeting Udall as “one of the most vulnerable senators,” although I suspect a majority of New Mexicans don’t even know the name of his Republican opponent (Allen Weh). The e-mails convey a sense of desperation—I’m scared of a Tea Party takeover myself—but there’s also a strong component of righteousness: we’re the good guys and we’re going to do the right thing.

But Udall has come under some heavy criticism lately for his position on Israel—uncritical support—and his promotion of nuclear weapons production at Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories. Not surprisingly, the La Jicarita article I wrote on the Santa Fe protest at Senator Udall’s new office on August 2 generated more comments than any other posting on our website. All of the commenters are appalled by the devastation of the Israeli attack on Gaza; most of them also agree that protesting the assault is a moral imperative (Zionists either don’t read La Jicarita or don’t want to waste their breath). What they don’t agree on, however, is what kind of protests they should be, what kind of strategies and tactics are most effective, and what constitutes private property or open meetings.

At the Santa Fe protest Udall’s staff, in reaction to the morning’s protest at his office in Albuquerque during which some folks inside loudly voiced their disgust with Israel, was on high alert at the union building that houses the office. They asked everyone to sign in and at first told activists that they couldn’t distribute any literature regarding the assault on Gaza. That limitation then morphed into telling demonstrators that they couldn’t come in the building at all, that it was “private property.” Jeff Haas, one of the organizers, was allowed to read a statement from the podium but only before Udall and Senator Al Franken, a well-known Israeli supporter who I assume was either chosen as a fund raising partner before the anti-Israeli demonstrations heated up or, more cynically, because of his Zionism, showed up. Democratic solidarity must reign in the presence of the senators. However, the jeering and booing that emanated from the audience when demonstrators tried to interrupt Udall and Franken during their speeches revealed how tenuous that solidarity is between progressives and party stalwarts over Israel.

I’ve always had a cordial relationship with Udall—Mark and I interviewed him several times for La Jicarita and worked with his New Mexico staff on land grant and acequia issues. But at the protest I felt compelled to get his attention and confront him about the complicity of the senate in arming Israel. I had no desire to be “polite,” as some commenters believe the protesters should have been. I finally pushed my way to the front where he was shaking hands with constituents—and listening to a few others who also wanted to talk about Gaza—and got his attention:

Tom: Hi, Kay, how are you doing?

Me: Why won’t you have a dialogue about what’s happening in Gaza?

Tom: We are talking about it.

Me: When?

Tom: With our constituents who we meet around the state and who come to the office.

Me: We’ve come to your office. Why aren’t you having a conversation here, with us?

He moved on to the next person.

I’ve also been after him about his calculated support of the nuclear mission at LANL and Sandia. In an August 25 e-mail his office sent me there’s a picture of him sitting at Sandia with Senator Richard Durbin, who chairs the Defense Appropriation Subcommittee, talking about their support of the B61 Life Extension Project, a GPS guided 50-kiloton mini-nuke bomb that is, as he calls it, “important for our national security.” They also talked about the great “tech transfer” programs at the labs that will supposedly create businesses and high tech jobs in New Mexico.

An article in the Santa Fe New Mexican during the same week talks about the push to increase the production of plutonium pits, the triggers for our stockpile of nuclear bombs, from 30 to 80 by 2030. After Rocky Flats near Denver, Colorado was shut down in1989 the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which runs the nuclear labs for the Department of Energy, has looked to LANL as the only possible site to produce the pits, even though its primary function has been research and development and it lacks a facility large enough—and more importantly, safe enough—to manufacture such an increase in pits (between 2007 and now 30 pits have been produced). La Jicarita has covered the abysmal history of the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement Nuclear Facility, originally intended to house the production, which was finally put on hold after a cost overrun of billions of dollars and concerns about the seismic potential of the Pajarito Plateau, where LANL is situated. The NNSA now wants to use an unnamed modern pit facility that consists of tunnels from the plutonium facility (PF4) to the Radiation Lab (RULAB), from which six or eight small labs and workrooms will branch off.

Greg Mello of the Los Alamos Study Group (LASG) wasn’t “polite” in his pointed debunking of the longstanding claim of politicos that without LANL’s economic engine New Mexico would grind to a halt. We’ve been stalled for years even with the billions of federal pork flowing into the labs:

“As lab spending rose over three decades, the state’s relative income rank fell dramatically. Over seven decades, there has been no major “tech transfer” from the labs here, especially from Los Alamos National Laboratory. Our economic potential is now limited by our human development policy failures, exemplified by Udall’s choice to promote nuclear weapons at the expense of human and environmental needs. Unless we change those priorities, why would any (non-exploitative) business locate here?” (See LASG’s July 2006 analysis Does Los Alamos National Lab Help or Hurt the New Mexico Economy?”.) 

While most of Congress is hopeless on the issues of Palestine and nuclear weapons production, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be out there confronting politicians like Udall, whose reelection is a given. He could step out from under the cudgel of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), whose formally bi-partisan flow of money on Capital Hill now flows to the right as it allies with the Likud Party in Israel, and as the senior senator from New Mexico he could push mission change at the labs. 

Let’s not spend any more time arguing over “being polite,” “not pissing people off,” “not creating a backlash.” Night after night the protesters in Ferguson, Missouri stayed in the streets to vent their anger and frustration at the killing of the unarmed teenager Michael Brown and night after night the police department met them in camouflage with tanks and assault rifles and tear gas and rubber bullets. Protesters in Albuquerque faced off against the same militarized police force on the streets and their administrative enablers in the city’s offices to decry the use of unnecessary force on the citizen population (for those of you who haven’t heard, the bogus felony battery charge against protester David Correia, my co-editor at La Jicarita, has been dismissed). Other acts of police violence have been protested and posted on Internet sites across the county. Finally, a conversation has begun about the American militarization of the police that began in the 1970s and has escalated today to epic proportions: millions of dollars worth of surplus military equipment from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan given to police departments; soldiers trained to use this equipment to shoot and kill a foreign enemy are now police officers who see American citizens as the enemy.

It’s extremely hard to maintain the momentum these kinds of movements require to remain effective. If you’re not prepared to join in the struggles—in the multitude of forms they may take—don’t sabotage them with internecine bickering. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, just get out of the way.