Today we left El Paso at 6 am and embarked on the longest single-day drive of the trip: El Paso to Austin. West Texas is a scenic stretch of desert, slowly giving way to greener foliage as we approached the city.
Beautiful Texas sunrise just East of El Paso
Texas countryside on the path to AustinThe drive was long, and it was a relief to arrive in Austin and be able to stand up and stretch. We got in about 5 pm in order to join local SOA Watch Austin in their weekly protest outside the capitol building. We held the sign (seen below) for an hour and had a number of thumbs-up and honks of support from passing motorists. After the protest we enjoyed dinner near the capitol before heading to stay with our host family.
SOA Watch-Austin member Ken Hayes holds up one end of the protest banner. Ken informed 
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An Open Letter to Tiel.
I hope this will stimulate some kind of debate about who should cross the line, and why.
Dear Tiel:
I read your blog entry and wept. I love your courage but you are
wrong. Now is not the right time for you to cross the line.
Your community needs your strong clear voice and you need to make sure that you work on doing what you can to get that voice heard.
Crossing the line and getting a federal rap will make that difficult and that would be a tragedy. Your work is to speak out, to shout out for the
people in your community who have no voice - to be a voice for the
voiceless. Crossing the line, for you, would be an act of
self- destruction. I don't know you, but if I read between the lines of your blog entry, I suspect you have grown up in a place where there is a lot of societal pressure on you to self-destruct, to end up in
jail. I know, because I lived through those pressures too, although not without some scars.
You ask "why am I so scared of getting hurt?.........." My answer
would be that fear is a very natural and smart reaction to a
potentially dangerous or destructive situation. Your reaction, like mine would have been, is to ignore that fear, and tough it out, to cross the line, to show how brave, how strong, how angry you are, and in the process, get wounded again. It took me a long time to learn how not to hurt myself with my own bravery and courage. Can you cross that line? Can you cross the line to a place where you are brave and
strong and do good work but don't hurt yourself? Can you?
If you were from an elite background, I would encourage you to cross the line. You're not. You enjoy a level of privilege that, comparative to most other people at the vigil, is minimal. A jobless, homeless organizer? That is not privilege, but a brave voice attempting to find a way out of the nexus of oppression.
And I disagree with you that it is the duty of the young to do the
work that the elders are currently doing. It is the duty of each to
do what they can best do, to do what no-one else can do, to do what
can have the most effect.
When older middle-class protesters cross the line, it sends a very clear message to others like them that they too should be outraged, should speak out against the SOA. If you crossed the line, it would not send that message. I think that the media, the SOA, and US society at large would find it easy to manipulate perceptions of that act and characterize it as "a young radical student-type going through the rebellious stage of the early twenties is kicking against the establishment". The act of crossing the line would be easy for the establishment to dismiss, diminish and use to
trivialize the movement as a whole. This is hard to do when you are jailing priests and nuns
and lawyers and accountants.
You say you have 'punk'd out'. That is the voice of the oppressed
speaking! That is the voice of the ghetto ethos that says running
away from a dangerous situation is bad. That is the voice of your
homies who need you to lead them out of oppression by showing them
another way is possible. Crossing the line, going to jail, getting a
federal rap, for whatever reason, would be, for you, in this instance, just another way of living out the oppression that you were born into.
Turn away, Tiel. Don't let the oppressors do this to you! You are more valuable for your community on the outside.
And yes, you're right. This vigil is a call to those from "the slums,
ghettos, and projects of this country, to STAND UP" But everyone's battle is different. For the middle-class, for those of privilege, standing up means risking privilege, standing with the oppressed. For those from the ghettos, standing up must mean firstly being able to redefine yourself outside the terms of oppression. Standing up means
being able to define your own existence, in your own terms and not in the terms of a society that sees brown skin as a marker or
criminality, not in terms of society that tries to define the working class as lazy, stupid, criminal and incapable of good. Standing up for you, Tiel, means learning to silence those voices that live silently, deep in your every cell, the ones that you've soaked up like a sponge on the TV, on the bus, in the supermarket, at school, on the backstreets of the barrio, the ones that tell you that the only thing for you is to fight, to self-destruct, and Tiel, crossing the line, for you, would be an act of self-destruction.
It sounds like your Mom spent time behind bars - you don't need to
follow her. You have a lot of courage. Do you have the courage to live a different life? Who will you be when you step away from the soldja mentality? Do you have the courage to learn to live in both worlds? To be an advocate for your homies and to walk the halls of Congress? Do you? Can you cross those lines?
Do you have the courage to go back to your community and speak about
Fort Benning and educate people so that they see what is going on in
this country? Do you need the badge of Federal jail time to earn
their respect and attention? Do you have the courage to do it without that badge?
What will happen to your work while you are in jail? Do you think you will have it easy in jail because you crossed the line at SOA? To your cellmates, you're just going to be another kid from SOLA who fucked up.
If you really want to work for your community and act against
oppression, Tiel, you're right. You need to be a line-crosser. But
not the line at SOA. You need to be the person who can go back to
your community and speak to them in the voice they understand and
respect because they know you came up with them. You need to be able
to take their concerns and cross the line out of the barrios and go to the legislature, to the scholarship foundations, to the schools, and to find money and to build organizations and lead them towards a place they don't even know exists. Do you have the courage to cross the line to that place? To be that kind of leader?
Carlos speaks very, very highly of you. He says you are a young woman
who has huge potential as a leader. Live out that potential, Tiel. Getting a federal rap will silence a voice that needs to be heard, perhaps forever.
Dear, dear Tiel. If I were you reading this, I would be both
angry and confused. I've made a lot of assumptions about you and some of them will be wrong. You've made a public commitment to cross the line. Do you have the courage to cross the line back? To say, I've changed my mind?
With love, in support and sisterhood.
Ruth
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