History on the Hoof: "Suspended in Confusion"

Another of the Minnesota resistance badges by Bryan Hansel, a photographer in Grand Marais. 
This is a favorite: SUSPENDED IN CONFUSION

It fits my mood.

"You should be writing a literary Diary of an Occupation," I say to myself. "You should be coordinating with creatives who are plugged into the action".

Ha, as if I had this poetic clarity, floating above it all.
As I've said before, this is the opposite of a Hollywood movie where the camera is always placed and the actors positioned and the action choreograpahed so you, the observer, know who's who and What Is Happening.

This is not that!
This is history on the hoof.
I am collecting bits and pieces for later reflection.

Anyway, that voice--"you should be more important" is temptation talking.
Hold steady.
Trust Penny Cooper. [Penny Cooper is the lead Girlette. She is eight-and-a-half years old.]

Penny Cooper says, 

"Don't bother throwing rocks at those boys. 
Sneak in and rescue the frog."
__________________________

Oh! I think she's thinking along the same lines as Isaiah Blackwell, the Black man who stepped in an ushered the cornered white supremacist Jack Lang away from an angry mob.

(The water might look harmless if you don't live here. 
But in these temps, flesh will freeze in minutes.
Remember that scene in A Christmas Story when the little boy licks a frozen pole, and his wet tongue freezes to the pole?)

Let us not underestimate our own ability to descend into barbarity.
I can imagine that if I were in that mob, I'd have wanted to rip Jack Lang apart. 
I am old enough that I don't think I would, 
but sometimes I avoid crowds just because of that:
I DO NOT ever want to do such a thing, to become just like him and his ilk at the US Capitol on January 6. 

Blackwell told the Minnesota Star Tribune that he stepped in because

 “I’m a man, and I believe all humans should be treated the same. It doesn’t matter.... I took my voice, and I told them, ‘Don’t touch him. Let him go.’ I made a space so he could get out of there.”

Blackwell said he came to City Hall at that time because,

 “God, my Father, told me to stop by. I just had to stop by.”

---Via msn.com/en-us/news/us/man-reveals-why-he-rescued-right-wing-influencer-jake-lang-from-crowd-outside-minneapolis-city-hall/ar-AA1UxkQm

God invented irony.

                            Also God:

                     
While I’m loving all our creative responses, I see our wolf in the shadows too. And I’m so interested in how God shows up in these things—on all sides…
 _______________

Meanwhile, ICE is literally falling down on ice.
You've maybe seen the18-second video:
youtube.com/watch?v=eiThiPGTbOk

Marz says they need to go to their room and think about their lives.

______________

Anyway... 
Literary? As if writing were a sausage factory? 
That's an approach suitable to AI.

The Action?
This is looking at life as if it were a Hollywood movie, where the important parts are stuff blowing up. 

If you consider, as I do, that the 'important stuff' is what is happening in our own hearts and minds, and the social connections grow organically out of that, it's a different movie.* 
A very slow movie, mostly. 

Though not always.
My favorite thing--and our strongest bet---is creativity, and sometimes it's noisy and visible and not slow at all.

To meet ICE with the same mentality they have is simply to amplify it. Gotta THINK DIFFERENT.

I love this video showing that, from a woman in Portland, OR:
 "Minnesotans show us what American Resistance looks like."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eD4WMIBGc4g&t=118s

She says it's "Effective acts of nonviolence resistance that you might not be hearing. Nonviolent direct action is not peaceful... 
Effective nonviolence must be highly disruptive."

[Effective politically, I think she means. 
Though creativity is also by its nature somewhat disruptive---from Latin disruptus,  "break apart, split, shatter, break to pieces," 
This ^ describes a seed emerging from the ground--do emergent thoughts look like this too? 
Maybe more like lightning storms?]

BELOW: Hippocampus neuron, from Scientific American:
"All the external world coming into our brain has to be filtered through that system,"

scientificamerican.com/article/how-your-brain-detects-patterns-without-conscious-thought

_______________________ 

In the video about resistance above, the brass band musician says Audre Lorde said to make revolution irresistible. 
She did say that, but she was quoting Toni Cade Bambara.

TCB said various forms of it. Here, 
"The job of the writer is to make revolution irresistible." 

Kennedy Prints, by Amos Paul Kennedy, , Jr.
From Library of Congress: www.loc.gov/item/2023634995

These writers, below, all gone now, were well known (in my circles) when I was young. I don't know if they still are, but I loved hearing Lorde quoted, so maybe... in some circles.

_________________________

*Who said that a movie about writing poetry would show someone lying on a couch for hours?

Here! Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska––from her Nobel lecture, no less:

"It's not accidental that film biographies of great scientists and artists are produced in droves.
... Of course [they are] all quite naive and [don't] explain the strange mental state popularly known as inspiration, but at least there's something to look at and listen to.

"But poets are the worst. 
Their work is hopelessly unphotogenic.

"Someone sits at a table or lies on a sofa while staring motionless at a wall or ceiling. Once in a while this person writes down seven lines only to cross out one of them fifteen minutes later, and then another hour passes, during which nothing happens ...

"Who could stand to watch this kind of thing?"
 

Ha. And who could stand to live it?