Okay, comments interleaved...
``Cox] Chuck -- we just can't know. Probably those on the scene; even the leaders of various groups, don't know. It really fucks up thought to project...''
You don't understand. I am not projecting. I am trying my best to reflect, to bare witness, what I see combined with what I know about resistance. This isn't resistance anymore. It is a revolution. Tahrir has already moved beyond me and my experience and that is precisely why I dream with them.
All I could do against the US Army was one location for dissertion. Get out of Oakland's US Army Intrasite Personnel Center in my lawyer's car trunk. Put them up for a few hours and they left to unknown fates... scared out of their minds... I knew the drive they took, because I had already done the drive four years before, ad hoc with a queer friend and probably his buddy... This was radicalism in 1963-4 on the street... I did most of the long drive back to LA from the Canadian border to near Reno which is (I don't know) a thousand miles flying at 100+ mph for hours... I got back late Monday to finish a class or two at CSUN.
I tell you this only because it bares on Tahrir. Who saves AJE? Tahrir. Who saves disserting military? Tahrir. I feel a great unity with Tahrir. I feel like I am with them in Tahrir and understand them. This is what it means to be at the cliff of revolution... Yes revolutions can fail. But they can also succeed.
This why I want to stress the meaning of dawn, that horrible time of doubt as the red light creeps over the mountains in the horizon. Your sleep shuck eyes open in dread, not joy. Will I live? I don't care? There are jobs to be done. There are duties to fullfill, places I must go, people I must meet, terrors I must face... This is the thinking in Tahrir...I am almost absolutely certain.
I know this feeling well, because of rock climbing mostly, but also this ancient past of the terror bus ride to the Induction Center riots...
The bottom line is death. Hemingway tried to capture it, but he failed. It is the understanding that each day you live is another day of life in a world that wants to kill you by any means necessary.
CG