Revolution Online, January 20, 2009
Report from DC: Taking out Revolution at the Inaugural
We received the following correspondence from a Revolution distributor in Washington, D.C.
Hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions, are descending on Washington D.C. for various events around the inauguration of Barack Obama. And you really see the reality of the editorial in Revolution that talks about how people say Obama makes them "feel good" about being an American and then makes the analogy to having a cocaine addiction—how it makes you feel real good and it makes you think you can do great things; how you tell people who warn you, “don’t worry I know how to handle it” and then you get angry at them for not letting you enjoy the high...and then one day you’re doing shit you never would have believed you could, and you wonder how it happened. (see “The Promise of Change, The Rules of The System...And The Real Revolution We Need” at revcom.us)
Revolution distributors are out in the midst of the inauguration events, staging a political intervention on behalf of humanity, going to people with the reality of where this addiction is taking them and challenging them with the Malcolm X spirit of “I didn’t come here to tell you what you want to hear, I came here to tell you the truth.” We are welcoming the contentious sharp struggle, that comes about when people are challenged in this way, because how people think and how they act right now, matters tremendously. Our goal is to distribute thousands of copies of Revolution newspaper over four days around the inauguration, along with stickers that say “Stop the War in Gaza” and “Stop Thinking Like Americans, Start Thinking About Humanity”, raising thousands of dollars and building the revolutionary movement…the real revolutionary movement. It has to be said Revolution newspaper is unique in doing this.
The main event in D.C. today (Sunday, January 18) was a concert for Obama with artists and many significant cultural figures.
For those watching at home or those here on the ground, what you see is a celebration of the inauguration of the first Black president. Couched within this and emerging in many forms all equally as harmful and alarming were sickening displays of patriotism and “pledging allegiance” to the U.S. empire. U.S. military helicopters flew overhead and people cheered. Some people said outright that yes, we do need to send more troops into Afghanistan knowing all the horror that means. One Revolution distributor noted that they had never seen so many Black people with American flags.
In the 60s people saw times when millions of people weren’t swallowing the lies, let alone drinking them down and liking it, but were hip to the reality that there is a system, and the oppression of Black people is at its foundations from slavery to today, and many of those people were even for revolution. Now, some of those very people, of different nationalities, are reveling in that system. While they expressed that they agree with us, they’re with us, they think what we’re saying is true, but “now is the time to celebrate.” We challenged them that there is nothing to celebrate about 30,000 more troops in Afghanistan, or the massacre in Gaza going on right now, or the murder of Oscar Grant in Oakland, shot in cold blood by the police.
Not far beneath the surface there was a lot more going on in a positive, yet still contradictory, direction as well. People are compelled by a real honest yearning for a different world even while it is getting channeled back into the service of the empire. Like the Black woman, Howard student who considers herself a socialist, hates what this country does around the world, and despises the racism and oppression, but was elated about Barack Obama and Michele Obama.
Yet, people were stopped in their tracks and could not look away when they saw the striking enlargement of the poster from Issue 153 of Revolution, that reads, “Uncle Bam, wants you to fight in America’s Wars of Empire. Don’t Do It!” This made some people really want to get the paper, especially a lot of younger people both Black and white who were really opposed to the War. Other people refused to confront this reality and did not want their bubble to be burst. This got expressed in many different ways and was also the case with the situation in Gaza and people looking (or refusing to look at) the centerfold in the paper on the reality of the massacre there.
Yesterday we went to Union Station, engaging crowds of people who came because they heard Obama was arriving. There we confronted a double addiction, when many people employed the opiate of religion when challenged to think critically about Obama. “It’s in gods hands” they told us, we replied “There is no god! And if the god in the Bible were real, allowing such a horrible world, he would be awful!” And we were off into the debate again.
Within all of this many people thanked us for being out and donated to Revolution newspaper and the revolutionary movement. Sometimes when we came across people who were deeply concerned about so many drinking this Obama-laid, and starting to look at just what kind of change Obama is going to bring, they really welcome the fact that Revolution is out there, and with some struggle, themselves took stacks of papers to get out and even joined our distribution teams there. We will be writing in with correspondence on the events of the weekend, bringing you the stories and the lessons from this intervention—what we learn and accomplish and the challenges we face.
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