An open letter to whoever wants to be concerned

An open letter to whoever wants to be concerned,
Two months have passed since the police execution of Mark Duggan tipped the
already-fragile balance of power in the UK, unlocking an orgy of defiance across
this island. A well of frustrations finally boiled over and the system was left
reeling by a determined insurrection from a wide range of people. Following these
days and nights of brazen attacks in Bristol (as in other places) a house is raided
in a police and media orchestrated scene as part of their revenge operation for the
blows they have both received in the uprising – they leave without the hostage they
sought there, but I am made aware by their blunder that I am on their wanted list.
Two months have now passed of successful evasion, and meanwhile the winds of
insurgency still blow in many towns and moments – indeed, for many they started long
before this summer. There have also been at least two more deaths at the hands of
the Law in August alone…
My decision is not to comply with my judicial persecution, and I greet D.C.I Will
White and their kind reading this by the names they are known here and everywhere in
different words and tongues: COPS – PIGS – MURDERERS.
I am one of those who simply cannot and will not stomach the social, economic,
moral, psychological, physical conditions not of our making that we are born into at
this point of history. I have never sought to decorate the walls of my cell with
exam certificates, job promotions, sports prizes, status-symbols borrowed from the
wealthy by our labour. I curse those who sell themselves so cheaply to buy such
unimaginative dreams at the expense of a possibility of a freedom truly of their own
making. Since an early age this unwillingness and refusal has put me in conflict,
like countless others, with that reality. And our understanding is growing along
with our fury.
We are the “lost kids” angry and disappointed by false promises, the “uncontrollable
youth” unsatisfied with the paltry futures offered to us, the “useless components”
who reject or are excluded anyway from wage-slavery or the “disruptive elements” who
fight to destroy it from within, the “minority of trouble-makers” within the
constructs of obedient-hierarchical-racist-patriarchal normality, the “hooded
rioters” within the constant revolt against all that and more. We are your children,
and those of your society. And it is time today for the components of that society
to decide if they will be the hand trying to stop us, or the hand lighting their own
conspiracy for self-determination.
Today we are here. Today we throw our rage and anarchy against the station that this
order would prescribe us: an open-ended contract to be locked in the cage of modern
living, of humiliating routine, withdrawn into quiet desperation despite all
distractions, cast into inexplicable loneliness, into inner exile from any greater
values, divorced from any connection to the Earth, walking commodities to be used
and discarded.
Each day, be sure that we are faced with constant battle as each individual must
strive to make their own path and decisions against the flow of the conformity and
submission demanded of us by the jailers of everyday life – if the revolution is not
here, truly it is nowhere. Let us live proud lives of rebellion and compassion,
reclamation and antagonism, poetry and fire.
So, in the midst of this incessant war underlying all in this world – I acknowledge
with a glad and thankful heart all who have ever stood next to me, with the rebels
wherever and whoever they are against the disguised violence that is passivity, the
disguised violence in the suppression of the hostilities and tensions around us that
urge to be realised. Here’s to those who make choices that in different ways break
out of line when everything in the dominant culture advises silence, assuring us of
their strength and feeding us poisoned whispers of our own powerlessness and
insignificance.
And of course as the clash continues and escalates with increasing recognition that
everything we desire lies beyond the ruin of their rule, the enemy will carry on
retaliating against those people with every vile method in their book: propaganda to
misrepresent our passions and aims; the loyal “opposition” of political parties and
unions presented as the democratically acceptable way we should amend our “extreme”
expressions to; the surveillance, infiltration and invasion of our friendship groups
and spaces; the arrest, interrogation and imprisonment of our comrades-in-struggle.
We don’t forget, and we don’t forgive.
Enough silence.
Action replaces tears.
for solidarity and self-organisation,

just another fugitive.

Bristol

October 2011

http://leedsabc.org/