By Reverend Billy
I was in a two-seater airplane with my father piloting. I wasn’t a teenager yet. We were flying way up for such a little plane, maybe 10,000 feet and we were flying west from our home in Watertown South Dakota over the green prairie below us.
The grassy expanse went on forever. The plane felt tiny, like we were vibrating in this tin box stuck in space.
Then a strange black line appeared in front of us dividing the great plains and the sky in two. I told father that I thought it looked like a blacktop road going up to outer space and he smiled good-naturedly and said “Yes, maybe that’s what it is Billy……. Lets’s go down and see where the blacktop road starts…
We floated down out of our altitude and we could see there was a fire, a whole ranch-house was in flames. There was a mom and dad and kids standing in the yard as their house went down in a ball of fire. We could see dogs barking at the fire and a horse and some goats in the corral nearby staring at it..
Dad said, “So your road in the sky is smoke and these people… it’s so sad for them…. watching their home burn up…”
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Staring At Our Burning Home
Skip to a half century later: On Tuesday March 21st about 350 of us gathered at the Dag Hammarskjold Plaza near the United Nations, a couple days after the publication of the latest IPCC report. Hundreds of natural scientists from around the world stated in unison that all sectors of society, even people that never think about it like hospitals, sports teams, restaurants – but especially big fossil fuel industries – need to make plans to stop using gas and oil. They called for a drastic action.
One thing we shouted on Tuesday was OUR HOUSE IS ON FIRE!. Its a way to make the emergency more direct and personal, not so abstract. This crowd was full of climate elders, who had been shouting Fire! for many years and today they were formalizing a group around Bill McKibbon for older activists called Third Act. Their opening campaign – already very successful – was to get everybody to pull their savings out of the dirtiest big oil banks, Chase, Citi, BofA and Wells Fargo.
We were all dancing like we wanted Emma Goldman to join our revolution! The Stop Shopping Choir and Batala the Brazilian drummers, the XR theater troupe and Climate Clock, Ayisha Siddiqa, whom we first rallied with when she was with Greta Thundberg’s school boycotters, Fridays for Future.
We worked up such a fury we couldn’t help but march straight west on 47th Street toward the front door of JPMorgan Chase, home of the Al Capone of the Apocalypse, he of the $100k pay each day, yes the top polluter in the world, are you in your office today Jamie Dimon? Our surging crowd of earth-lovers had so much angry wind in our sails that we tried to get inside the bank through the wall of police and then we lay down in the doorways as the bankers tried to leave for lunch dates.
Soon the chanting theme was the Weelaunee forest and the memory of Tortuguita the young activist murdered there by police paid by Chase and Wells Fargo. Then the hands on and current politics of Atlanta’s militarism was mixed with more general messages like “You are funding The End of the World!”. Less courteously, people started shouting “Get a real job. You could be in health care helping people, you could be a school teacher, you could be a mechanic or a hair dresser…. ANYTHING BUT A CHASE BANKER.”
The bankers stepping over the pile of bodies in the doorway were in some cases executives with the tailored suits, but this was the all-peoples doorway of the bank, computer programmers and sales people and receptions mingled with the upper class investor types….
Then Savitri D, director of our “church”, decided to drape her body across this threshold, forcing the bankers to step over her, but soon the other Stop Shoppers joined in a general body-flop. The police, obviously instructed not to make us martyrs with arrests, tried to find pathways for the oil bankers through our splayed arms and legs….
I thought our activism was effective that day. We got into the bankers’ memory, those who had to negotiate their footwork to get in and out of their criminal bank. Our bold dance moves and verbal admonitions must have stuck, at least for some. The bowstring was pulled back and we arrived with a penetrating brazenness. We came down out of our altitude and saw the people standing there watching the gas fire. We crashed through the barrier of capital, the great silencer, the separator that keeps us isolated in markets, only talking to each other through acts of consumerism.
We got into their dreams that day. And ultimately will have to find our way into the 100,000 workers who make their living at Chase. Somehow our virulence and sense of breaking into public space, bursting out of the fake politeness of consumers. Maybe this is how to respond to the call from the climate scientist.
We will have to invent new activism. Sometimes dancing in their windows and body-blocking the way to work is inspired – but we will have to descend from our flying. We will have to give support to the people who are watching their home burn and don’t know what to do.