Richmond, VA: Against the Leviathan and the ACP

The Final hearings for the ACP will be held by the State Water Control Board at the Trinity Family Live Center at 3601 Dill Rd, Richmond VA 23222. Monday, December 11th will predominantly be a period of public comment. On Tuesday, December 12th, we expect the SWCB to vote on the ACP. We appreciate any and all who wish to attend these meetings and will welcome you with love and solidarity.

In the morning a banner was dropped from the rail road trestles by some quiet and anonymous neighbors. It is a simple banner, five massive block letters, NOACP, in defiance of the vicious project known among more polite circles as the Atlantic Coast Pipeline.

These five letters are hanging in clear view of the bridge that provides the descendants of the Great White Flight a pleasant route through the affluent plantation ghosts of the West End and into our city. As they idle their engines on that bridge, we hope that their eye is caught again and again by those block letters. For those who work for Dominion, for those whose opaque suit and tie jobs have their fingers woven into the corporate leviathan that dominates our so called state, we hope that these five letters are burned into the backs of their eyes. It is a simple message to remember, a simple enough demand, yet contained in that demand is everything.

We know what is coming, yet we fight it. We know where this road leads and we walk it. When we say NOACP we say no extraction. We say no to the cowards in the Department of Environmental Quality, who so truly embody the hypocrisy of environmental capitalists. Old, weak profiteers that they are, who cower behind state troopers as they sign away the lives of thousands, knowing perhaps even more than the rest of us, just how minutely destructive their decision is. Fuck the DEQ, and the State Water Control Board, may your children choke on what you have brought about.

We say no to the desecration of stolen indigenous lands, to the biting machinery, to the piss bottles thrown on the sides of our roads, to the transient cities of work men from far away, quietly stalking us in our communities, permanently glaring from behind wrap around sunglasses. We say no to the violence, murders and rapes that follow these Ford Cities from place to place, we say no to their obscene disinterest in what they destroy.

When we say NOACP we say no to the physical eviction of rural farmers in Appalachia, to people who have nothing but their small plots of land now forced to sell or surrender. We say no to the erasure and eviction of Union Hill, a community, predominantly black, that has endured and grown in their own love and autonomy since their forebearers were unceremoniously “freed” from the plantation on which they had been bound in chattel slavery. We say no to that same land, being sold willingly back to that now more nebulous but no less violent structure that is the modern plantation.

When we say NOACP we say no to the democrats who built this while cynically playing the card of the oppressed, we say no to the slave hives that are called prison, to AR-15s pointed at old women, to the raids on the homes of the most vulnerable who oppose this, to the tanks we have already seen, to the quiet ears and electric eyes of the circling planes who stalk our poorest neighborhoods. We say no to money, we say no to our slow emaciation, we say death to the sick and pathetic gluttony of the dying global empire that is capitalism.

We say NOACP and we know what it means. We know because we have lived in defiance of this for our entire lives. We know because we broke our bodies driving back an army of sick men who came to Charlottesville to spew filth and kill our loved ones. We know because the same men who let them beat our friends nearly to death will come in school bus convoys. We know that just as they stood idly and stared at us, their boots caked in our blood, they will stand idly by again, with whoevers blood is most available. We know because we have seen the ICE raids and hidden our friends from this new Gestapo, we know because we have seen the concentration camp in Farmville.

We know because we have lived and loved and broken bread with each other, because we come from this land, because we come from Standing Rock, from those who fought in DC, in Hamburg, in Rojava, in Palestine, in Nigeria, in Charlottesville, from a thousand thousand thousand other places. We are defined by this, even to our deaths, we stand against the Black Snake.