Bloomington: Strike Solidarity, Day 3: Noise Demonstration

Submitted to It’s Going Down

On the night of September 10^th, 30 rebels took advantage of the first home-game of the season, when most law enforcement were kept busy elsewhere ushering crowds and responding to drunk bros (college towns take note!), and staged a simple yet raucous demonstration outside of the county jail in solidarity with our friends and family locked inside as well as the hundreds of prisoners across the country currently on strike.

Noise was made, smoke-flares set off, and fireworks lit, illuminating the air as chants echoed off the walls in tandem with the honking horns of the blocked traffic. 800 flyers advocating solidarity with striking prisoners and condemning prison slavery were both strewn about and passed to curious passersby/motorists.

When the state kidnaps people and throws them into these concrete tombs it is because they wish to isolate them from “the outside,” from their families, communities, and support networks – in other words, to bury them alive and erase them from our memory so that prison officials may do anything to their captives without fear of repercussions. But we will not and do not forget, and we do not forgive.

While we lament not taking full advantage of game-day policing strategies, small gestures against policing and the prison industrial complex such as these let those locked up know that they are NOT forgotten, that prison officials may NOT do what they please with impunity, that there are people out on the streets who understand that we are one small mistake from being locked away ourselves and thus choose to stand with those on the inside who have already fallen into the state’s clutches.

For a world without prisons and police!

For total liberation!

Forty-five years after Attica, the waves of change are returning to America’s prisons. This September we hope to coordinate and generalize these protests, to build them into a single tidal shift that the American prison system cannot ignore or withstand. — This Is a Call to End Slavery in America, 2016