A handful of days ago, author Meg Tuite put out a call on social media for writers and artists to participate in a video about how we should not just survive the coming year(s) but also fight back against political and artistic oppression under a new regime. The result is “Standing Together,” a video I am proud to have participated in.
I’m embedding it here, but please, click through to the Jan. 15th issue of Connotation Press and send them some traffic. If you’re able, donate to them to help support work like this.
Many thanks to Meg Tuite for organizing this video, to Ken Robidoux for editing it, and to Connotation Press for publishing it. Thanks, too, to all the beautiful, creative people who participated, many of them I’m proud to call friends:
- Bethany W. Pope
- Jordan Blum
- Jack Cooper
- Joanne Adams
- Indigo Moor
- Lidia Yuknavitch
- Malacki Rodriguez
- Meg Tuite
- J. Bradley
- Ravyn Stanfield
- David Snow
- Kari Nguyen
- Ramon Lovato
- Teisha Dawn Twomey
- Len Kuntz
- Robert Vaughan
- Cynthia Lee Ameli
- Paul Beckman
- Laura Stride
- Anne Elizabeth
- Leif Miller
- Sheldon Lee Compton
- Kevin Ridgeway
- April Bradley
- Josephine Adams
- Joani Reese
- Vivian Faith Prescott
- Matt Tuite
- Cass McMain
Here are just a few of my favorite lines from the video:
If you know that you’re an artist and you know you have a chance to influence people, now is the time.
~ Indigo Moor
We need to love each other fiercely into the otherness.
~ Lidia Yuknavitch
Reach out, take a holy risk, and find your voice.
~ Gerri Ravyn Stanfield
This is the year of the rebels.
~ Teisha Dawn Twomey
No action is too small. We have to move on, fight on, and, now more than ever, kick complacency to the curb.
~ Cynthia Lee Ameli
Words are my fists and my knives.
~ Vivian Faith Prescott
Samuel Snoek-Brown 
I think what America lacks right now is anything approaching a counter-culture. I’m thinking back to the 1960s, when it seemed that a whole generation identified with a song that said the times were changing – yes they were, indeed they were, to a swift retrenchment of conservatism as soon as that generation got married. But right at that time America had never heard such radicalism as it had in the 1960s. Certainly there had been struggles before, the bosses had shot trades unionists, socialists, and anarchists, but in the 1960s there were mass media that had not been around at the time of Sacco and Vanzetti. Gil Scott Heron may have boasted that “the revolution will not be televised”, meaning of course that it would not be tailored to corporate media wishes, sponsored by breakfast cereals or this year’s new car, but when demonstrators at the Democratic National Convention in 1968 chanted “The whole world is watching!” it was because the whole world WAS watching. Now, in 2017, we have false news. The same mass media that were caught flat-footed in 1968 now know how to marginalise the radical.
It’s not a case of ‘surviving’ 2017. It’s a case of SEIZING 2017. The old road is rapidly ageing – don’t let them re-surface it! I call on all my creative brothers and sisters in America to think and speak and act outside the box. I call on the youth of America to think outside Boy Scout and Girl Scout. Think outside the two-narrative paradigm of Democrat/Republican, think outside the Constitution, think outside Wall Street and Washington, think outside Trump and Clinton, think outside the flag. Create a difference! Seize every moment – every moment belongs to you – and create that difference!
This is no time for wringing your hands, but rather for rolling up your sleeves.
I’ll leave you with that song that I find it difficult to listen to without a nostalgic tear; but I want you to listen to it not with that attitude, listen instead to its confidence, its challenge, its courage. Find that in yourselves.
[Sorry, it is impossible to find the original pressing on YouTube, so much has revolution been subsumed into corporate interest! Don’t take this lying down!]
I think we have as strong and vibrant a counterculture now as we did then, only it’s not as monolithic as it seemed in the ’60s — we’re more aware today that we have countercultures, plural, which is both a beauty and a fragmented bane. But those countercultures are finding common purpose at last, and we are, I think, going to seize the holy shit out of 2017 and beyond. I’m still working toward a peaceful, cultural/political revolution, but a revolution is coming one way or another.