For Eric.

Tonight's Show is dedicated to Eric McDavid. June 11th is the day of international Solidarity with Eric McDavid and Marie Mason. If you only get one thing from this blog, I hope that it is to read up on the background of both cases. I'm only going to speak about Eric's case, because it is the one I'm most familiar with.

www.supporteric.org
www.supportmarie.org

Now, imagine you are young and angry. You aren't fooled by sight, by rose colored goggles this world forces on you. You feel that point past where our world breaks you spiritually. You feel that point past hope, past the point of no return. It slams into you like a thousand tiny heartbreaks building up to one awful moment of truth.

"The world is not dying, it is being killed."

You feel that moment of terror, when you realize what "doing what it takes" could look like. You choose to fight. Ideas form, sleepless nights are filled with visions of what the world could look like, but you know you are in for the fight of your life, and you very well may loose. Let's be clear, this isn't like losing a game, or a bet. In this scenario, losing could feel like more and more of your friends growing bitter and older, the weight of age and defeat setting in, entrenchment in despair and addictions. It could feel like losing your loved ones to cancer, to car wrecks, to heart disease, to mental illness. It could feel like working a job you hate to barely survive and then retire at 65 to enjoy your last few years. It could feel like grinding poverty, the criminalization of poverty, like every cop patrolling every ghetto. It feel like a nightstick to your teeth, a disproportionate amount of bullets buried in your neighbors body, for the crime of being the wrong color.

It feels like feet crumbling on the barren soil of a clear cut, like deforestation covering the planet, like industrial fishing devouring the ocean, like a mountain of plastic the size of Texas in the pacific, like oil spills, like temperatures rising.

I feel like one in three women surviving sexual, assault, one in six boys.

It looks like queerbashings, like transgender women being murdered.

It is going to feel like the shining hell of concrete walls and prison bars.

This is the sum and total of our mechanic culture. It hasn't always been this way, and make no mistake, it won't last, another world is after all, not just possible, but inevitable. Right now we are trapped in the abyss, just below the surface clawing for anything to grip, gasping for air.

(Please keep treading water, our day will come)

We are wanderers of a desolate plain of soul, trying to make sense of a dehumanized, dehumanizing world,

Now Imagine, you see all of this, feel all of this and think about taking action against the tyranny of what everyone knows. You talk to your friends, you talk a lot, you talk big. You are inspired and fired up. You forget about caution. You find kindred spirits, you talk long into the nigh of your world, how to mold and shape it.

You and your friends talk and talk, you weigh options. You are young and headstrong, you maybe don't mean anything, but you talk anyway.

Then they come with their guns pointed on your head, you sit handcuffed in the back of a squad car, and look up at the slate grey sky and know your life will never, ever be the same.

As the police car pulls away, you see the look in what you thought was your lover's eyes, and you realize she had been one of this cultures battery humans all along. Working for them, pushing, maneuvering, antagonizing to get you right to this spot.

Your mother and father wish they could hug you through the thick glass of the visitation cell. You feel their hearts break, and you know your life will never be the same.

To make buy a temporary reprieve from hell, your friends eventually point their traitorous fingers at you, your lover set you all up. You know your life is shattered.

It sounds like twenty years in prison for thinking. Thoughtcrime. You know the justice system is set up to crush you, to serve the people who benefit from making the world this way. You know they are going to make such a vicious, unrelenting example of you. You resign yourself to memorizing your 8x10 cell. You sit in the courtroom, watching the people you thought were your friends put the weight of blame on you so temporarily save their own necks, to buy not freedom, but simply a larger cage.

You maintain your faith, you refuse to break, to let them break you. Despite it all, you wish you could hug your mom when the judge pronounces the twenty year sentence. You know you are in for the fight of your life. The fight to keep your life. To stay alive inside.

Tonight's show is utterly and completely dedicated to the freedom of one Eric McDavid. We hold him in our hearts with the deepest sense of love, compassion, and most of all, solidarity this night.

Each record spun, each distorted chord sent out over the airwaves will become a blessing, a colossal spell, unrelenting, unstoppable, dedicated to breaking down, breaking through those bars that keep you imprisoned. Tonight's show is a spell cast to see the day when you see freedom. The kind you can taste on your tongue, on your skin. The kind that can't be bought. Tonight's show is a spell cast to see you through to that day, to sustain you, to warm you on the coldest concrete cell nights.

Until every cell door is open, and every cage empty.