To Have a Voice, You Must Trespass
From the streets of Athens to the shore of South Australia, Reverend Billy & The Stop Shopping Choir spent 2019 doing what they do best – getting into good trouble while blessing and serenading the warriors fighting to save the Earth. Reverend Billy Talen writes about his year of living dangerously.
Photo by Simons Finnerty
Earthalujah!
We are The Church of Stop Shopping and we work for the Earth. There are 40 of us – singers, musicians, comedians and dancers. We live in New York and originate from a number of the world’s ethnicities and genders. We’re like a subway car in Queens come to life.
We create songs that help people work for the Earth. We’ve got lots of blessings, celebrations and life-passage songs, parade songs, songs for rallies and sorrowing songs for departures. We love to excite other people who work for the Earth – people saving libraries, prisoners who hear us through walls, beleaguered scientists, survivors of Trump’s immigration aggression.
Political work always needs to start with simple compassion, and that makes the arrest-risking OK. All successful social movements have in common the willingness to cross the line that the powerful say is private property. We say, to have a voice, you must trespass… and it helps to sing while you do it. We take the risk together, and that seems to make the songs better.
Athens, Greece
Twenty of us New Yorkers and an alike number of Athenian activists descended from the old palace at Syntagma Square into the Ermou Hermes shopping district under our street-wide banner – "TOURISTS AGAINST TRUMP”.
This was our semi-comic international social movement.
Tourism, the act of shopping for exotica in the distance, does not regard itself as political. But flying over borders while the rest of humanity is far below being stopped or killed is strikingly political. Consumerism, fraught with contradictions, celebrates stylish violence. We hoped our music would bring the plastic-swiping families out onto Ermou Street and Monastiraki Square below the Parthenon.
As we marched by, the tourists stood in the entrances to the big retail stores with French names, slowly starting to pull out their phones. We were surprised when some of the shoppers stepped into our stream of humanity, which now had people from Syria, Libya, Sudan and Palestine – including those who had walked for weeks or braved the waves of the Mediterranean.
Some buskers with tubas and drums and trumpets gave us music, and a happy decolonising dance filled the street. The drums and harmonies in public space brought us together for a moment, so the person behind the tourist could step out and have a conscience.
Photo courtesy of Rev Billy & The Stop Shopping Choir. Image Credit: Benjamin Shepard
Adelaide, Australia
Activist leaders asked us to bless a flotilla of surfers and kayakers on the shore of the South Australia sea. They were challenging the Norwegian energy company Equinor by planning a “paddle out” with Bunna Lawrie, an aboriginal whale-caller.
The company’s plan was to install a drone-operated drilling platform in the Great Australian Bight, a pristine stretch of blue-sea wilderness that goes all the way to Antarctica and is home to 39 species of whales and dolphins. But the Aussies don’t want another Deepwater Horizon. Amen?
We asked for the Earth’s blessing and started to sing one of our hits, "I’m a Frog, I’m a Tiger, I’m a Manta Ray," and then one thousand radical surfers paddled across the water, bellies down on the boards, slapping the water and sending up streams like fountains.
“Consumerism, fraught with contradictions, celebrates stylish violence.”
Photo courtesy of Rev Billy & The Stop Shopping Choir
New Orleans, Louisiana
Forty-one of us journeyed to New Orleans in April to perform our church services at Southern Rep Theatre. During our short tour, we learned that much of the glyphosate toxin supply in the world was manufactured at a chemical plant a short distance up the Mississippi, among the gas and oil refineries of Cancer Alley. We drove up in a caravan, parking on the backside of Monsanto’s chemical plant. It was an unreal land of smokestacks and bubbling cauldrons of evil crap. Our director Savitri discovered a gate was left open, and she led us right into the plant singing "Monsanto is the devil”.
Within 10 minutes, we were surrounded by gunmen in black security vehicles who slowly but surely delivered us back to the property line, where we were met by a legion of local police. The line between who was corporate security and who was actual police was hard to discern. We stood there being processed, inhaling the stinking air.
Hurricane Katrina tried to knock down the oil and chemical plants, inflicting much damage. Not to disrespect the pain and suffering of the families in New Orleans from the great storm back in 2005, but we do believe in our Stop Shopping Choir that the Earth is sending messages with her extreme weather. She is a radical activist.
“She discovered a gate was left open, and led us right into the chemical plant singing ‘Monsanto is the Devil’… Within ten minutes, we were surrounded by gunmen in black security vehicles.”
Home in New York City
The only NYC office of US Customs and Border Patrol is in the so-called Freedom Tower above the 9/11 memorial. We gathered with the immigrant-led New Sanctuary Coalition outside for a “Vigil for the Disappeared”. We recited the names of those who have died crossing the Cabeza Prieta wilderness in Arizona; many of the names we recited had to be “Unknown”. We rallied in solidarity with No Más Muertes (No More Deaths), who have been charged with crimes for helping migrants in that intense landscape. No Más Muertes leaves jugs of water along the trails, so we made cardboard jugs for our protest, waving the blue-painted cardboard in the air – “Offering Water Is Never a Crime!”
“The job of an effective activist is to harness anger and turn the normal landscape inside out. Take a different approach. Go to extremes. Go ahead, do the wrong thing.”
Among activists everywhere is the sensation that human justice and Earth justice are one and the same thing. The plain truth of it is that when all life is threatened, as it is now, then surviving against the evil is all of the causes at once. No one in this moment of history should have a career without direct action integrated into your daily life. Go shout the truth everywhere! The First Amendment was adopted in the 1790s but remains the evergreen law and the way to keep it strong is to use it, test it and PROVE IT!
This winter, our activist church will offer weekly services as we move into our new home at 101 Avenue D in the East Village. Our non-patriarchal Earthalujah! idea of worship will be politically active there. We’re joining the effort to save East River Park. The park’s greenery and ball-fields are for residents of NYCHA (NYC Housing Authority) housing along the river – 100,000 New Yorkers. Mayor de Blasio will bulldoze the 80-year-old park in March 2020, he says, to build a sea wall – of course, real estate moguls want the riverfront views for their luxury housing. De Blasio is ignoring the community plan that proposes a sea wall that would save the park for this African American and Hispanic American neighbourhood.
We will name each of the 981 trees. The families in the apartments of the Jacob Riis and Bernard Baruch houses will have a chance to express their love of their park. (Our music director Nehemiah Luckett is very good at big singalongs.) All politics is local, and in our songs and prayers and parades for the trees across the street, we will have the same work to do as in Greece, Australia and New Orleans.
Scientists say we have 11 years left before the Sixth Extinction is irreversible. In our little non-patriarchal church, we’ll continue to plunge into the Sacred State Of Exalted Embarrassment. We’ve already been called “those crazy Earthers”, which sounds pretty good. The job of an effective activist is to harness anger and turn the normal landscape inside out. Take a different approach. Go to extremes. Go ahead, do the wrong thing. Earthalujah!
“CRISIS BRINGS THE HATE, WE BRing the rainbows”
So, as it turns out, our beloved Rev Billy was arrested three days ago in Central Park for planting a rainbow flag in the dirt. He was protesting Samaritan’s Purse, a 68-bed respiratory facility led by notoriously anti-gay and Islamophobic preacher Franklin Graham. The doctors offering their services are forced to sign a “I’m Not Gay” pledge. Absurd, right? Well, Rev. Billy thought so too.
Billy is out of jail now but we’re sure he will be back on the streets in no time, causing that good ruckus that is needed now more than ever.
Author account for the Good Trouble hive-mind.
