Thank you for 'The Audacity of Depression'

Dear Joe:

As a long time reader of your prose, I've often thought about sending you an e-mail. As I read through your latest essay "The Audacity of Depression", complete with your riffs on musings from Adorno and Lyotard, I knew I just had to finally shoot you a note. While you have often weaved tidbits of forgotten wisdom into your essays (everything from the Rolling Stones to Gui Rochat), your current invocation of a prominent Frankfurt school thinker and one of the more salient French post-modernists is pretty damn apropos of our current political malaise. However, I was actually taken by the more central argument in your piece.

As a life-long community activist and labor organizer, I've made my home in NYC for the last seven years. While trying to stay economically afloat with my wife and 4-year old twin girls in this bitterly class divided metropolis, we like to think we're making our small contribution against the business class assault on working people and their communities. While New York City is indeed a multi-facetted city with a great history of resistance and struggle, I'm often reminded of John Berger's wry comment: "Within the history of capitalism, Manhattan is the island reserved for those who are damned because they have hoped excessively." 

Notwithstanding Berger's salient insight, living and working such a city that displays both obscene wealth and Section 8 housing projects, your essay ironically provided me a potent reminder of why my wife and I remain here. I'm referring specifically to your concluding prelude (before that wonderful E.M. Forester quote) when you suggest that "we should elect to play [the game] out with the best among us, the ones on humanity's side…" With that, Joe, you hit the proverbial nail on its head. As a West Virginia born boy who prides himself on his ability to conjure up on a dime, lyrics from almost every Lynyrd Skynyrd song, I offer one up here: "Drink with the best and to hell with the rest."

In my seven years doing union work in this city, I've had the privilege to work alongside and observe seasoned labor organizers and front-line community activists whose courage, perseverance and political savvy are truly inspirational, as they organize and education in neighborhoods often at a pace of 12 to 14 hours a day, six days a week. Some are professional organizers from the outside and some are home-grown activists and leaders. They can be seen waging campaigns against the market rate condos that invade their neighborhoods like a plague while dislocating the local population (Gentrification has become Katrina-fication) or, they can be found organizing workers, such as private security guards who are paid $7 dollar an hour with no benefits to guard multi-billion dollar financial properties on Wall Street. (We actually have homeless security guards here who sleep on park benches between their two jobs while they try and find an affordable living situation)

Yes, it is these behind the scenes, front-line organizers and activists who represent the best of humanity. They are the ones who get little glory or media attention, but who wake up each morning with a perpetual fire in their belly and refuse to let the bastards win. They remain heroic, ordinary people who determinately and stubbornly walk in the footsteps of great American patriots like Thomas Paine and Daniel Shays. Their actual numbers can not (and will not) ever been recorded because they were (and still are) mostly invisible to mainstream society. Largely because, as Forester observed, "they slip through the net and are gone, when the door is shut they are no longer in the room." They are indeed, as you point out, "deathless." With any luck they will be role-models for my own daughters and countless other young people seeking new ways to fight their way out of the mind-numbing hologram that they've inherited.

Thank you for reminding us all about the significance of these rare individuals, for they are the true antidote to the "rage fatigue" of which you chronicle. Many New Yorkers are oblivious to those who trudge away in the local fights for social and economic justice, since most Manhattanites unfortunately suffer from "pacification by cappuccino" (as one local academic likes to say). I consider myself lucky; however, to be associated with these, as you say, "unassuming and dedicated people". Those who continue to teach, organize, agitate and give many of us the strength to continue to work against the grain in this corporate gulag that looks more like a Margaret Atwood dystopia with each passing day.

As for me, I relish every opportunity to drink, laugh, smoke and strategize with these urban (and suburban/rural) warriors whenever I can. Minus their life-affirming company, their unique insights and their concrete track record of community victories, life itself, would indeed be greatly diminished. And without that selfless and tireless American activist tradition that they embody being passed on to the next generation, we certainly won't have a chance in hell of creating a new society from the ashes of the old.

Yours in struggle,

J.D.
New York City

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J.D.,

Besides being struck by your human and literary eloquence, I am uplifted by the simple fact that you took time to communicate with me in the spirit of universal brotherhood. No one among my tribe, the writers of this country, can even hope for the credibility and understanding activists such as you possess. But we can attempt to describe it.

I am coming up to rural Connecticut at the end of April to help out with the campaign of Todd Vachon, socialist candidate for the second congressional district. I would consider it an honor if I could meet you and some of your fellow workers in the struggle, and with luck, find the words to write about those things you so well described in your email.

Warning -- this would involve my sleeping on some good working man's couch for a day or two and breaking bread. I only stay in hotels when some university speaking engagement or book event forces me to do so. Needless to say, my time is yours, so if there is any way a burned out old writer can help in your work, just say the word.

In art and labor,

Joe