More Than Just Stopping the Locusts

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Check out this hot docu-music-video made by some talented Detroit mediamakers for Invincible and Finale’s track “Locusts.” You can find it on Invincible’s first full-release album, available on the Emergence music website.

I particularly like the parts in the video showing the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization housing takeovers and Detroit youth talking about their visions for their city and what they would do with the empty structures and lots.

There’s also a segment where Mike Wimberley is walking down Forest Ave on the East side, showing the open air markets and performance spaces they built to encourage independent business, local commerce, and community culture. There is a peace zone in the same neighborhood where people can go to work out their problems as a way to combat the violence that is so abundant in a city with one of the highest murder rates in the country.

These are all good ideas that promote a sense of community and healing for people in a city that has been pushed to the brink of implosion by capitalism. The docu-music-video is an inspiring piece; the track offers good analysis and promotes a spirit of struggle and resistance, and the visuals are really powerful.

But how do we translate these ideas into action that will bring us closer to systemic change? What further organizing strategies are being presented to transform the city on more than just a neighborhood level (or on the neighborhood level; who is organizing the markets and who is being outreached to? Who is using the peace zone? What strategies are being used to mediate conflict? What are the solutions coming out of these sessions to solve the problems that people bring there that are alternative to violence?) I really jive with the ideas that are being presented here, and like I said, the youth talking about their plans for taking over empty lots and spaces is really fantastic. But what’s the strategy to get the building into the youth’s hands? And how does that fit into a bigger strategy of taking control of the city at large so that people who are taking over empty houses (like with the MWRO) are not eventually forced out by the city/police?

Is there a strategy for that?

I want to know more.

I’m struggling with bigger picture organizing strategies these days and wanting to know the next steps. As a teacher, I do everything I can to create a safe, positive, environment where real learning can take place; I’m working to prepare my students for a pretty hostile world. Good things happen there. But after they leave school, they are going to a place that does not mirror what we have created in class. Unsafe neighborhoods and/or project housing, profiling by the police, lack of funds to further their education once they graduate, and a lack of work that will feed them, pay their rent, and fulfill them as human beings are all problems that need to be dressed on a larger level than what we can accomplish as a small band of 40 or so people.

So I pose this question to Detroiters (who I have learned so much from and give me energy and hope whenever I’m here) and everyone else: What next? Where do we go from here and how will these tactics that are being used going to create the revolutionary change on a broad scale that we will need for survival and human evolution?

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Filed under Detroit, Grace Lee Boggs, Michigan, america, community building, feminism, media, organizing