As nascent activists, we begin to see ourselves as agents of creative disruption. When we stand on a street corner with a sign in hand, we make a small step to alter the repressive limits of propriety regarding street corners. Street corners are re-imagined as active spaces, places of communicative possibility via body, voice and image. A march, a rally, a protest all serve the same function. They disassemble unquestioned assemblies, and allow us to create new terms for re-assembly. Within this ruptured space is our great potential for creative awakening. Our marches turn to parades, our rallies become theatrical, our voices become song, our song becomes viral.
As with all creative endeavors, we begin to find our heros, triangulate their successes as we assess our own humble yet increasing efforts. Today I looked at a masterwork put forward by Greenpeace: ambitious and astonishing activism on a high coal stack of the Fisk Power Plant in Chicago.
Imagine ascending thousands of feet into the air on vertical brick, climbing like Spiderman to a distant parapet, establishing bivouac in order to make the smokestack visible in its looming presence. By painting the words QUIT COAL vertically down its face, they changed the stack from a thing to a sign. As a sign, it now advertises its negative value to the community. No longer commodity, it now pronounces its status as liability.
The weather was horrible this morning, rain was pelting cold sheets, lightning arced across the skies. The
Smokestack Occupation is now over. Some of the activists rappelled down and dangled over the Chicago River like spiders ascending from the treetops. They boarded a coal barge to expand the circuitry of their symbolic action. The archaic policies that allow such dirty energy are dependent upon an expansive detrimental assemblage of invisible factors: land acquisition, extraction (remember that disaster in Kentucky?), labor exploitation, transportation, commodification, utilization, environmental pollution... a massive web of industrial relationships symbolized by a large brick smokestack belching toxic particulates in a densely populated area, a monument to its own obsolescence.
Neighborhoods at night gathered in the shadows of the stack, breathing their own sweet sigh of thanks, a gesture of gratitude for the activists' work. They've been struggling with this issue for years.
This, then, leaves me in awe. I go back to my own piece of our struggle inspired by the intelligence, creativity and scale of Quit Coal. What are the limits of my own conviction? How far am I willing to push my engagement as a citizen? The beauty of our range of possible responses lies within the robustness of scale. From the most humble street corner to a towering chimney, we are able to disrupt the flow, awaken - even momentarily - from the constraints of control systems.
For background on the politics of coal in Chicago, read this Kos diary by Phil Radford II Greenpeace.
For further inspiration and the full story, go to Greenpeace. Read the activists' blog posted here.