The Uprising

It’s the worst of times and the best of times. We now face the power of the ultimate destroyer. Major institutions re-ignite their consumer democracy, showering detractors with greenwashing rhetoric as CO-2 emissions rise every month. There is commitment by leaders to a deadly gradualism. On the other hand, we don’t have a social movement. Have we ever needed one more? There’s no uprising.

Everybody wonders if we’re running out of time. No-one knows what a social movement would look like. We’re texting each other madly. We’re gathering at borders and shouting at surveillance cameras. We always feel just a bit too far away, around the bend, ten feet or a hundred feet off. The point of power is elusive.

There is a sense that corporations and governments know an invisible terrain. Say we are talking to a citizen at the ATM, “We have evidence your bank is involved in strip-mining.” Quickly, I’m in jail. I realize I was using the most ordinary notion of democracy, a conversation about power, but got too close to the real vote.

They take my belt and shoe-laces. They take my note-book and pen. I sit on on the bench covered with initials carved into the paint. It occurs to me that I’m not supposed to remember why I’m here. They want me overwhelmed with a vague remorse, a kind of amnesia. I can’t have a sharp object and carve a symbol of my identity in the wall.

I struggle to remember what happened. We completed our Holy Hex of the ATM, glowing before us with the sky-blue swastika of JP Morgan Chase. We intercepted customers at the bank’s cash machine, with our plate of mountain soil and our statistics. The police appeared in the doorway, the lead officer with a black film camera.

Now we’re in Chase’s cameras and NYPD’s cameras simultaneously. They see that we are here remembering ourselves. We are introducing our real names to the student “Tiffany” who wanted her Fast Cash and the retiree Ezekial who shuffled in with his pension check. They look at our sculpted little mountain and smile and wonder. Now is when we cannot be protesters or environmentalists. The experience must replace the labels.

We cannot be texting or pixelating. We scramble their expectations to get personal. What’s this preacher and choir doing in a bank? We are hoping to have a simple conversation in the window of time that we are given by the police, because they’re calling downtown to pull our files.

This is our window, remembering our own names and offering them, exchanging confidences and straightforward opinions. The choir is singing a song with the word “Mountaintop Removal.” This is our window. “We have evidence that your bank…” The police return.

I sit in jail and I remember those few minutes together. That was the uprising. A billion people would have to have that talk. Well, we touched it. We were there. Now we can go back to the mountain and await further instructions.