Just got this and figured it needed to be passed on to all of you Mudcatter's.

Mark Ross



"Voting for the First Time"
    by Carolyn Crane


    Utah Phillips is a folk singer who tours the United States,
    delighting audiences with his outlandish stories and challenging them
    with the ruthless honesty of his insights. A veteran of the US Army
    who served in Korea, he rode the trains for years after coming home
    in despair from what he'd witnessed overseas. He met Ammon Hennacy in
    Utah at the Joe Hill House for Transients and Migrants and discovered
    anarchy and pacifism.

    These tenets have since shaped his life and work. Phillips and I live
    in the same Northern California town, Nevada City, where he was one
    of the founders of our thriving Peace Center of Nevada County. It was
    from the community radio station there that he produced Loafer's
    Glory, a collection of stories, poems and songs set to the
    accompaniment of Woody Guthrie-influenced guitarist Mark Ross. And it
    was to that radio station he went in late September to share with his
    community an important political decision he'd made, which caused him
    great difficulty and pain.

    You surprised many people who are familiar with your work with your
    announcement that you were going to register to vote for the first
    time ever.

    This is not easy for me. I'm an anarchist and I've been an anarchist
    many, many years. The anarchy that I've followed and practiced all of
    that time came to me through Dorothy Day and the Catholic Workers,
    through Ammon Hennacy, the great Catholic anarchist and pacifist.
    Ammon taught me, as he did, to treat his body like a ballot. My body
    is my ballot. And he said, "Cast that body ballot on behalf of the
    people around you every day of your life, every day. And don't let
    anybody ever tell you you haven't voted." You just didn't assign
    responsibility to other people to do things. You accept
    responsibility and see to it that something gets done. That's the way
    he lived and that's the way the past forty, going on fifty, years
    that I have lived. It's a way to vote without caving in to the civil
    authority I'm committed to dissolving.

    But, we are in a desperate situation here. And it's not just us in
    the United States. There are people all over the world who are
    affected by these people who have staged a coup on our government.
    I can see a shopkeeper in Damascus who's threatened by being bombed
    out. I can see a schoolgirl who's collaterally killed by the action
    of these people. There are millions of people in the world who are
    affected by the actions of this government, and they can't vote in
    this election. I have no use for Kerry. I have no use for Bush. I
    don't like either one of them, but these folks can't vote in this
    election. They have to have people vote for them. And I intend to
    be one of those. What's the best chance they've got to keep them
    from being bombed and killed? I don't know. Kerry is an unknown
    quantity. Bush is a known quantity. A crapshoot, isn't it? But I'm
    going to stand in for one of these people. And if I'm wrong, I'm
    wrong by myself.

    When you made your announcement, you talked about women who have
    inspired and influenced your decision. Can you talk a little
    about that?

    I learned a great deal from Judi Barry. I drove and talked with her
    the day before her car got blown up in Oakland in 1990. She had come
    around to the idea that direct action and political action are two
    hands of the same body. I think as an anarchist and when you keep
    company with other anarchists, as I have in the IWW, the Industrial
    Workers of the World, and this is my fiftieth year in the IWW, you
    develop a great antagonism toward the political process, toward
    statism in any form. However, many of us have come to realize that
    political action and direct action are two hands of the same body. We
    have to learn how to work together: the street and the ballot box. In
    places like Philadelphia or Boston, Massachusetts, when they put
    freedom in jail, when they put freedom of assembly and freedom of
    association and freedom of speech in a bullpen with razor wire around
    it, they put freedom in jail. In the bullpen on Pier 57 in New York,
    when my daughter [Morrigan Phillips] was jailed for trying to shut
    down Wall Street in an act of nonviolence civil disobedience.

    They're trying to tie that direct-action hand behind our back. If
    they succeed in that, how long will it be, how long are we going to
    hang on to the other hand, the political action hand? Every
    significant social movement in this country--anti-slavery,
    suffragette, labor movement, peace movement--all started on the
    street. All of them began on the street. Don't give up the street.
    The street's where we win. We vote with our feet. That's where it all
    begins. Made a song about that. Bodhi Busick put a nice tune to it.
    No, I won't give up the street. But in this instance, at this time,
    at this place, I think the situation is so dire that yes, I have
    registered to vote and I am prepared to stand in for one of the
    victims of the kind of brutality that the people in Washington bring
    to the world.

    You've said that your choice to not vote, to not participate in the
    system in that way, is one of the most sacred promises you've made. I
    know what it means to you to make this decision. It's sobering,
    because I think: Are things really that bad?

    Yeah, it is that bad. Now, I am not putting myself forth as an
    example. I'm not putting myself forth as a role model. Anarchists
    don't make rules for other people. You make rules for yourself and
    then people have got to learn how to trust you. And if you blow it
    you have the courage to change, and you do change and an anarchist is
    always something you're becoming. I don't need any congratulations
    for what I'm doing at all. I feel lousy about it. I don't feel good
    about it all. I'm simply going to do it. And if there are
    consequences of my act, than I harvest those consequences. That too,
    is anarchy.


This article can be found on the web at:

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20041025&s=crane