Walls Don't Stop Balloons

Yesterday a group us gathered to launch balloons outside a federal prison near Tucson as part of Running Down the Walls.  This annual event is organized by the LA Anarchist Black Cross Federation to support and raise funds for political prisoners.

Running Down the Walls was an occasion to think about abolition and how abolition connects different struggles for freedom.  It was the day after Hiroshima Day, 65 years later, and I thought of Women Strike for Peace who, in the 1960s, used balloons in their organizing against nuclear weapons to show how wind currents would spread radiation.

Women Strike for Peace, Los Angeles early 1960s
Source: L.A. Public Library

It's still time to abolish nuclear weapons, and Think Outside the Bomb has been organizing around the issues this summer in New Mexico (see video of their Santa Fe action against uranium mining).  The militarization of the border is hard to miss in southern Arizona.  A Trident missile site just south of Tucson is now a museum, and fighter jet traffic from nearby Monthan AFB is ubiquitous.  I imagined the balloons stealing their way across their flight paths.

It's also time to take down the walls holding nearly 500 women in the T. Don Hutto immigrant detention facility outside Austin, TX where that same day community members and ther loved ones gathered to shut it down. 

For me, these balloons mark possibility and remembrance.  They are vulnerable, yet vibrant. They light the sky and laugh at the cactus.  They seem like a good way to think about what Stevie Pearce wrote about healing and harm intervention in Uses of a Whirlwind:

"We might start to seriously challenge the normalization of violence by considering how to mourn and to organize all at once."

"Pudiéramos empezar a retar seriamente a la normalización de la violencia considerando cómo llorar la muerte y organizar simultáneamente." [thanks to Jenn for translation]

With that, it's a time to remember the hibakusha and the people who continue to fight against nuclear colonialism.  It's time to remember Marilyn Buck, who passed away just two weeks after being back on the outside, and Puerto Rican independence leader Lolita Lebron.  It's time to celebrate that Marlen Mareno will not be deported today and can stay with her family, for at least another year.  And it's time to send strength and love to Dara and all the fierce ladies, their brothers, and their lovers fighting big, bad meanies everywhere.  Movements against war, occupation, border walls, and prison cages are the same struggle for healing, liberation and self-determination.