Rage Against the Port of Olympia!

Submited to It’s Going Down

Early on the morning of October 30, 2016, we set out into the perpetually damp PNW darkness to respond to the call for solidarity actions with the Standing Rock Sioux and their brave battle against the venomous Dakota Access Pipeline, in which riot cops from five states wielded unprovoked and appalling violence against the peaceful campers of the 1851 Treaty Camp just two days prior.

Our action took place against a backdrop of marches and demonstrations in the Olympia and Greater Seattle area in solidarity with not only Standing Rock but the many struggles against various incarnations of ecocide that the Coast Salish Peoples (on whose land we now stand) have been fighting for years, under the radar of most people living around the Puget Sound. This is also part of a larger resistance effort local to this small port city: the unending issue of pernicious and death-dealing goods being brought in or shipped out from the Port of Olympia, whether in the form of military hardware or ceramic proppants—a key component used in the fracking process.

We decided that our energy was best spent that morning directing our rage against the physical manifestation of the desolate Port bureaucracy in tandem with these other, more public actions. We targeted the Port of Olympia Offices for obvious reasons. We smashed several windows of their headquarters with impressive joy, evaporating at once the façade of a power too formidable for us to fracture. We proceeded to tag NODAPL on the brick wall, delivering our message with unequivocal clarity.

It has been ten years since the pivotal Port Militarization Resistance effort that first put Olympia activists, anarchists, and humans who just give a shit about the Earth within earshot of the bureaucrats who allow and profit from the trading of weapons for their wars and LITERAL poison through our port, commodifying and turning to an industrial wasteland the last vestige of the Puget Sound going south, where otherwise more marine life might teem and one would be able to glimpse unobstructed the awe of the Cascades.

Now, new generations of Olympia residents join the fight, with renewed rationale; the collective “we” will not allow ourselves to be passively complicit in the comings and goings of war shipments or materials used in the rapacious pillaging of our Earth.

Let our action, and all that has been and will be done in solidarity with the struggle of Standing Rock, convey an unambiguous message of noncompliance and absolute defiance of their agenda, until there is nothing left to defend—not even ourselves. We implore others to become inspired and send messages of your own solidarity with #NODAPL and other indigenous struggles—First Peoples are at the front lines of the battle for the Earth.

It’s too late to wait for opportunities to defend the earth, it’s now time to strike against those harming the Earth. Do not let this struggle, which is literally a battle of life and death, fade under the shadows of the next media distraction. #NODAPL!

~Some Olympia Anarchists

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