Soledad en masa

It may be lonely. Certainly painful. It’ll take time. We’ve got time. That of course is an unpopular utterance these days. Instant coffee is the hallmark of current rhetoric. But we do have time. We’d better take the time to fashion revolutionary selves, revolutionary lives, revolutionary relationships. Mouths don’t win the war. It don’t even win the people. Neither does haste, urgency, and stretch-out-not insistence. Not all speed is movement. Running off to mimeograph a fuck-whitey leaflet, leaving your mate to brood, is not revolutionary. Hopping a plane to rap to someone else’s “community” while your son struggles alone with the Junior Scholastic assignment on “The Dark Continent” is not revolutionary. Sitting around murder-mouthing incorrect niggers while your father goes upside your mother’s head is not revolutionary. Mapping out a building takeover when your term paper is overdue and your scholarship is under review is not revolutionary. Talking about moving against the Mafia while your nephew takes off old ladies at the subway stop is not revolutionary. If your home ain’t in order, you ain’t in order. It is so much easier to be out there than right here. The revolution ain’t out there. Yet. But it is here. Should be. And arguing that instant-coffee-ten-minutes-to-midnight alibi to justify hasty-headed dealings with your mate is shit. Ain’t no such animal as an instant guerrilla.

Amen.

From “On the Issue of Roles” by Toni Cade Bambara.

Tirado has an easy game for bloggers to follow.

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open it to page 56.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST

“One took issue with Columbus’ original use of the term ‘Indian’ and saw ‘West Indian’ as continuing to embody colonialist views of the region.”

Mary C. Waters, Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Realities, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2004.

Now go and do the same for yourselves, and please try to post an image of the books’s cover for embellishment.

I read this in a mariachi discussion forum. There were discussions about Proposition 8 and a mariachi wrote this against Prop. 8:

hey people remember more weddings more chamba… lol

Oh, oh why
Why should I feel
So discouraged?
I want to know why
Should the shadows come
Oh tell me why, why, why
Why should I feel so, so lonely, so lonely
And long, long for heaven and a home