Revolution #134, June 29, 2008
Letter from a reader
Revolution Posters at
the Haight-Ashbury Festival
Dear Revolution,
I want to let you know about our experience distributing Revolution newspaper at the Haight-Ashbury Festival in San Francisco. This is a really great event every year. It has a very diverse crowd, very multinational, all ages, including a good number of people from countries around the world. And the event overall really has a good edge—it has that feeling of freedom associated with the ’60s, that young people respect about the’60s. In this whole atmosphere we had a lot of freedom to get the paper out and talk with people and we got an overwhelmingly really good response from the masses. There were tens of thousands streaming by all day.
The main thing I want to report here is the role of the giant enlargements of posters from Revolution. I really want to pass on to the newspaper how appreciated these graphics are. They have a sharp political edge and really draw forward the masses to talk to us. They really draw out people’s political lines. We had a long line of the big posters, one after another, covering about a whole traffic lane of a closed-off area. We had 36 x 48 mounted enlargements of: The Bush Regime “Wanted” poster, right next to the “Humanity Needs a Whole New World...Not a Rotting Empire”; “The Two Weddings, Two Dreams” (the police murder of Sean Bell and murder in Iraq), “The Catholic Church... Is Still a Horror”; the one addressed to: “Those Living in the American Empire All Worked Up Over the So-called Immigrant Problem”; the “We Need A Lot More of This....Not This” (with the 1968 Olympic protest by Black Athletes... and football player Terrell Owens pointing up to “god”); and the one titled, “Living in the House of Tony Soprano...” (all available to download in PDF form at revcom.us/s/graphics). All day, people were stopping and reading these and talking with us.
One important thing that would have been good to add to this is the enlargement advertising the “7 Talks” by Bob Avakian, because when you put that next to the other posters, it provokes a higher level of conversation.
We met all kinds of people, for example, a couple—the guy was from Ireland and the woman from Brazil—and both really dug the poster about the Catholic church, the Tony Soprano poster and the guy talked about how Soprano and the Pope are one and the same. They bought the Away With All Gods! book by Bob Avakian. A professor from San Jose State University who teaches Religious Studies said he would be interested in having us talk to his class about the Away With All Gods! book. One woman read the Sean Bell/Iraqi wedding poster and then the “All Worked Up Over the So-called Immigrant Problem” poster and said she knew about the mass ICE raids and really wanted to know why all this is happening.
One woman, a Latina, commented after reading the poster about the Sean Bell murder and the immigration poster, “What kind of person does these raids and puts people through this; how can these people even do that kind of thing?” She was aware of this planet of slums thing also. Made her question how can we change the whole setup.
So again, I wanted to let Revolution know how enormously helpful the posters are—and keep them coming!
These posters and many others are available for download and reproduction online at
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