Today I went to Justin Herman Plaza in downtown San Francisco to celebrate May Day. I'm going to tell you about it because the mainstream news never will. There's a reason for that, a very sound reason. May Day is an anarchist holiday and TPTB don't want you to know we exist. First of all you should know that Justin Herman Plaza is named after one of our enemies. Herman was a Redevelopment bureaucrat. During the fifties and sixties he single-handedly destroyed the affordable housing market in SF. The repercussions are still being felt. He demolished the working class family neighborhood south of Market St. where the Moscone Convention Center and all those new hotels now stand. He gutted a thriving, middle-class Black neighborhood called the Fillmore. He was a bad man. He was one of the prime movers in the federal/ruling class conspiracy to alter the class structure of what was once the most radical city in America. It is fitting that we take back the park named after him to celebrate May Day. Everywhere in the world except in America labor Day is celebrated on the first day of May. In America this day is called "Law Day," but nobody celebrates, not even lawyers. Though it has since been coopted by commies, socialists and social-democrats, May Day was originally an anarchist holiday. It commemorates the death of the Haymarket Martyrs who died in the 1880s, murdered by the state, while fighting for something we all take for granted today, the eight hour work day. There is a longstanding conspiracy by the ruling class to erase anarchists and our achievements from history. Like Orwell said, he who controls the past controls the future; he who controls the present controls the past. The history was erased. The erasure was forgotten. The lie became truth. History is the propaganda of victors. May Day also takes place on Beltane, the second most important Wiccan holiday. It is second only to Samhain (SAH-ven), the Wiccan New Year. Many, though certainly not all, Wiccans are anarchists. There is a large anarchist community in the Bay Area. there is also a large Wiccan community. Since our communities overlap we pool efforts to celebrate the day. The best organized Wiccan anarchists are the Reclaiming Collective. They teach, publish books and a magazine, and put on big public events. They are also very active in the anti-nuke, anti-war and environmental movements. The were organizing against what is now called the New World Order before the right wing even started calling it that. Reclaiming put up the money to rent Justin Herman Plaza from the city for the day. They also brought the May Pole. The theory behind the May Pole is that if you don't dance the May Pole, the crops wont grow this year. I find this hard to believe. However, in all fairness I must say that a scientific test has never been done. The May Pole is always danced and has been since way before Bible times, way back into at least the late neolithic/ early bronze age period. There has never been a year when the May Pole was not danced, so who knows, maybe the crops do depend on it. Probably not, but what the hell, it's fun anyhow. The San Francisco Mime Troupe brought their stage and sound system and did a couple skits. Food Not Bombs fed everybody a delicious, gourmet meal. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people came. I lost count. There were old people, young people, children and dogs. There were giant puppets, stilt walkers, jugglers and acrobats. There was all kinds of music and dancing. As always, some people came in costumes. Wings were big this year, mostly angel and butterfly wings. I didn't see any bat wings but they're more of a Samhain thing anyway. A bunch of radical union people were there, too. I saw steelworkers, longshoremen, garment workers and the Service Employees International Union, who are sponsoring a labor conference in Oakland on May 12 and are organizing the labor contingent at the Mumia march and rally at 11AM in Justin Herman Plaza on the 13th. A couple of alphabet soup style leftists showed up and tried to peddle their paper. They got the cold shoulder and left early. For a while I watched one group of young acrobats at the edge of the crowd. They weren't putting on a show, just having fun. But you could tell they were good at it and worked out together often. At one point one of them, a young woman with spiked hair and blue lipstick, stopped in the middle of some somersaults and danced a hornpipe. It is not very often that you get to see a woman in blue lipstick and spiked hair dance a hornpipe, but there she was, dancing like a tar. An a capella group in overhauls and cardboard angel wings sang. Some rappers did spoken word poetry about sweatshops and AIDS. No gangster rap there. No gangsters, either. Not welcome. A folk group sang a bunch of Woody Guthrie and Joe Hill songs about working class struggle. An English theater group did a very funny skit about frankenfood. Then the best dancing happened. Three Irish boyos, Casey Neill and his crew, took to the stage with a mandolin, guitar and flute. Immediately the crowd right in front of the stage virtually erupted. Hundreds of people jumped to their feet, began whooping and hollering and burst into a furious mass jig. A couple of the giant puppets joined in. You haven't lived till you've seen a couple of giant puppets flailing about in an Irish mosh pit. My favorite part of the day was when Starkawk (http://www.webcom.com/cauldron/starhawk/welcome.html/) from Reclaiming cast a spell against the WTO, the IMF and sweatshopism in general. Starhawk is arguably the best known witch in America. She's good at it. She asked everybody to remove one article of clothing and look at the label to see where it came from. Then she said to remember that it was made by human hands. The people who made it have just as much right as we do to decent working conditions, decent housing, a livable wage and health care. She had us all imagine that piece of clothing unraveling into a single thread and that thread connecting us to the person who made it. Then we visualized all those threads as part of a mammoth web that connected us all. Then we sang this little Wiccan song that is alleged to date back to the Burning Times. I'm pretty sure it was actually written by a guy named Charlie, back in the seventies. But, as Starhawk herself points out in the intro to the twentieth anniversary edition of her first book The Spiral Dance, it doesn't really matter. Is Buddhism any less valid, she asks, because archeologist haven't found Buddha's grave? Is Christianity any less valid because there is no proof whatsoever that Jesus even existed? Of course not. Nevertheless, while the spell was tremendously focusing and uplifting, the NWO didn't even flinch. For some things, magic doesn't work. That's where direct action comes in. The NWO flinched in Seattle. It flinched in DC. If we all stick together we'll live to see it twitch it's last death throw. But it will take more than magic. It will take solidarity. It will take direct action. All in all, May Day was a glorious day. A splendid time was had by all. And you missed it. Oh well. There's always next year. Do come. You'll be glad you did. <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! 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