“Seeds” – Erin Flegg

For two weeks straight we lay flagstone, my head emptied of any thought that isn’t engage your core, what happens when we’re married, lift from your legs, how do bodies shift, protect your wrists.

We work every day, more hours than we’re used to, to finish the job before a deadline imposed by a surgery that will change everything, but only a little.

When we finish you tell me you have a surprise for me. We get in the truck packed full with tools and gravel and lunch scraps and you drive me to the nearest nursery, tell me I can have any plant I want.

In my excitement I forget to lock the passenger door, drop dust and crumbs from my clothes as I touch dry hands to shelves of zinnias and calibrachoa, different colours than the ones already hanging in a pot on our deck. On the boulevard is a bed of poppies, paper thin and swaying yellow and orange. I’ve been trying for years to grow poppies but the morning glory always ravage them below ground. Shadowy invaders hide behind pale blooms and grow large on a diet of my tulip and crocus bulbs. Seeds and seeds and seeds and no fruit.

In the spring I planted seeds in plastic pots indoors, hoping to keep them safe on the second floor. I worry about them more than I did last year, probably something to do with turning 30, ticking clocks and revolution.

In the back of the nursery there are Icelandic poppies, big and showing pink at the tips of their pods, about to burst. I consider one, its stalk thick and hardy, its tallest pod independent but inviting. I imagine it in the backyard, then take a step back from the display. I think about my existing allegiances, the potential still buried in poor dirt and plastic. I want it, but I shouldn’t. Too much is already at stake, too much time spent comforting my own frilly green leaves as they attempt to sprout stalks and pods of their own. I have to give them a proper chance. They’re so delicate, the comparison might crush them, and I can’t sacrifice any more flowers.

One shelf over are the anemones, white with yellow centres. They’re nice but they’re not enough. Don’t fuck it up, you say, poking me gently in one rib and smiling. This is very important.

There’s a plant I don’t recognize. There are no flowers, just wide flat green leaves on narrow stems, fanned out like enormous nasturtiums. On the tag is a dark flower. It’s a hollyhock, or at least it will be. The tag says it will bloom deep burgundy and solid, almost black except for tiny yellow centres, by late summer. I pick it up and try not to imagine what it will look like, leave space in my mind for it’s unfurling.

I carry it on my lap in the passenger seat, dig a hole in the ground in front of our house and plant it. I press the dirt in with my hands and sit down next to it. Everything will change, but only a little.

these words by Erin Flegg were inspired by the work of Olaf Hajek

10 Reasons ‘Acceptable Protesting’ Is An Oxymoron

1. The clearest example of dominance is the ability to determine the legitimacy of ‘acceptable questions’ and how they are asked.

You can only question me if you ask my prepared questions. Raise your hand – wait for my answer. I’ll get around to answering if it doesn’t threaten my control.

‘Kettling’ tactics in Montréal on an ‘illegal’ protest

2. Riots in Baltimore exemplify that oppressed people have never sat idly by: a voice and resistance exemplified in violence is more a reflection of the violence they are subject to on a daily basis than an aberration or ‘deviancy’ of which they are often presumed guilty before innocent.

3. When you’re doing well in a game, the last thing you think is to question if the game is fun or fair for everyone: because you judge the world from your treatment, your bias brings you to believe that if things aren’t bothering you, people who are bothered must be overreacting.

Celebrities who question those who do not have faith in the game because they are being slaughtered are assuming that everyone enjoys the same privilege, and that only questioning in an ‘acceptable way’ will bring about change.

“The anger and the selfishness of the brutality of those claiming the right to violence in Freddie Gray’s name needs to cease,” said David Simon, creator of The Wire.

4. “Designated protest-space” is an oxymoron.

Let me count exactly how many of you there are so I can plan exactly how to erase you – don’t move.

5. The revolution will not only be realized through one-hundred and fifty character sentences.

6. The revolution will be realized on twitter and in protests and riots and speeches and community centres and cooperatives and within state institutions and on the lawns and in what companies grocery stores support and on our highways and ports and in the design of our video games.

Dwelling on the legitimacy of a method produces rust in the movement. People of all skills and activities come together to articulate the practical application of a question in different ways and none are less valid.

Divide and conquer is a tactic used to suppress dissent by wasting the valuable energy of people who believe in the same idea in fighting each other.

No protester should be told to go home and write because they are protesting the wrong way.

No tweeter should be told to go in the streets.

No writer should be told to go and cook for the movement.

No cook should be told to start designing posters.

No artist should be told to cook.

No politician should be told to write.

Past revolutions have been a product of many talents and types of people converging for a single goal. The diversity of their talents, physical and mental abilities, their interconnectedness, and their dispersion was necessary for the change.

7. The goal of the anti-oppressive revolution is to confront and radically change a fundamentally insecure system that requires dead bodies to show its supporters that it is doing something.

via ahscolwara

8. Focusing on the reaction of an attacked community rather than the act of their being attacked is a useful tactic to sidestep accountability.

9. But non-violence is the only way, because MLK.

MLK, who was threatened by the FBI and then assassinated by the US Government (the Government was found guilty of conspiracy that resulted in his assassination)… that MLK?

“A riot is the language of the unheard.”

-Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

10. The narrative of ‘our city’ in talks against protests assumes the city was working well for everyone in the collective ‘our’ and not systemically destroying people. It reveals a care more for buildings than human beings.

Awareness of social and economic inequality and the profit-driven push to incarcerate, murder, and erase entire groups of people is prompting a revolution, today.