A note of thanks....

To the organizers and creators of "The Fall '01" art performance, the NW Labor Arts Festival and the Helmets to Hardhats event on Veterans' Day.

...especially to Jim Cook, Dan Shea, Linda Taylor, Twig Deluje, Agnieszka Laska, Jack Gable and Petros Evdokas,

This weekend I had the honor of participating in one of the most moving experiences I've had in a long time. And I wanted to share my thoughts and my thanks with those of you who helped to shape it.

The past three years that I've been in school, I decided to lessen my involvement in politics and organizing in order to focus on schoolwork. It was a good decision in many ways, however it has also led me to feeling a sense of loss and of being lost in the everyday commercial life that seeps into every nook and cranny where there is not something of meaning. Being involved in the events that took place this weekend was a part of my re-entry into finding meaning.

It was great to be welcomed into the fold to work on the NW Labor Arts Festival with a group of people dedicated to not only making an event happen, but to the principles and values expressed by the event. It gives me a sense of meaning in life to be able to organize around shared values and to share that work with others. To see that work bear fruit - to see people connecting, enjoying themselves in a meaningful way, to see people touched by the lives and works of others, and to find their own lives being represented by the works of others - is beautiful. It is also beautiful to see a celebration of radical politics - it is such a contrast to the trite and commercial world that permeates our everyday lives. We need more of it!

It also brought up for me the conflict that I feel about unions today. For a period of time, I was a union member (CWA), and am proud of that. But at the same time I recognized that the union was essentially a tool of the management, not a tool for the workers. Sure, there were individuals who honestly believed it protected us and our rights as workers - that's why I joined! There was a wonderful sense of solidarity that came primarily from the workers who were still working there who had been a part of the struggle to unionize the physical plant department at UNM, in which I was working. Most of them had also been members of the Brown Berets, and they remembered first hand the struggles of the '60s and '70s. But we were constantly reminded that the union was essentially a cushion for the management, and it held a comfortable place in their pocket.

The culmination of Saturday for me was the performance by Anne Feeney, and especially the grand finale of the Internationale / Solidarity Forever - it was so moving to see the audience standing and singing along. It brought tears to my eyes and a glimmer of hope to my heart. The tears were different than those that sprung up during her song "How Long" which spoke to the sense of despair that I feel all too often - just how long do we *really* have to wait for things to change? We've done a lot of good work all these years, and yet things only seem to keep getting worse.

Unfortunately I was absent from most of the "Helmets to Hardhats" event on Sunday, but did get to see some of the artwork and to hear bits of reports about the speeches. It's wonderful and tragic to see even a small piece of the world through the eyes of the vets - a vision that is shaped by their experiences of the military and war. I'm glad to have been able to help out, even a little.

The weekend was topped off by the performance of "The Fall '01". It hit me like a wall to realize that the opening scene with the dancers was not merely bodies randomly gyrating in front of the World Trade Center buildings, as I had thought when I first saw the performance on DVD, but that they were the people falling from the Towers! Those images will be forever burned into our minds and our souls. Not only because they were horrendous on their own (which they were), but also because while watching them on the news, the most upsetting part was knowing that we were witness to a monumental moment in time, a turning point: one that we would not easily recover from, and one that would precipitate a new way of life.

All these elements came into my awareness that most often are just left there dangling and I never know what to do with them. The end of so many lives in that moment, and in the years to come. The changes in mood in the country from shock, to anger, to horror, to the inhumanity that was embodied in the scenes from Abu Ghraib. The photos of the torture, the "trophies", that were so hard to look at and to not look at, and then so hard to forget, only to have them thrust back into our faces during the performance. In particular the scene of the woman dancing with her panties around her knees, as she torments her victim on the ground. To be reminded of that extreme horror of war - that women, so often the victims of such behavior, in a very public way became twisted and became the perpetrators of such violence and violation. Is this the same world that I live in? How are we supposed to deal with such highly politicized works of art - is it okay to be sitting here, watching it as if it's just "entertainment"?

Do we leave the manufacture and usage of images and the art of evoking feelings only in the manipulative hands of media and the politicians? Are we ok with the efforts by our own people to witness the reality of our times, to depict it in the way we see it, to evoke feelings in such a way so as to un-manipulate people, even if the feelings evoked are upsetting and unsettling?

It's a question we pondered on the way home. And as I walked my dog around the park afterwards, I decided that we must - there's a need for it: This is *our* world, and we need to have ways of keeping sane in it and ways to not ignore or forget what is being done in our names. And we need to do so in our own way and on our own terms, not in the manipulative, emotionally twisted and twisting way that the media and the powers-that-be would subject us to. This performance was uncomfortable, but a part of the sanity-restoring process, a fitting accompaniment to the rest of the weekend's events of reclaiming our lives as workers, soldiers and conscious beings living through historical times.

Thank you for having the inspiration to put these events together!

It's been an honor to work with you.

--Sue