"I wasn't sure which ones were mine."

I had tea with a friend whose two sons are Antifa activists who practice Black Bloc tactics. She respects her sons' choices, and of course she fears for them as they face the power of the militarized State. As a Jewish woman she has an elemental fear of the virulent anti-Semitism the Alt Right espouses. She isn't a meditator, so she didn't join our meditation group on September 10, but she did go to the counter-protest. "What else could I do? My husband had to work, and he was afraid for me to go by myself, but I couldn't stay home. I went, and I looked at that large group of Bloc-ed up young people, grateful for them. I wasn't sure which ones were my sons. Maybe they are all my sons." 

Today Truthout published a powerful op-ed by Avram Alpert. "...if it is going to be possible to live in a world that is less violent, then there must exist a group of activists who are partisans of causes that involve violence, while refusing to commit violent acts themselves. They will not sit on the sidelines while others fight; rather, they will courageously put their own bodies on the line, as Gandhi, King and countless others did and do. And when acts of violence against racist and fascist violence occur, such as those by John Brown, or by antifa, or countless others on their side, they will not simply condemn the violence absolutely as a rupture of true principles. Rather, they will say, to modify Du Bois, "We do not believe in violence, but we do believe in antifa." Or, to modify Garrison, "As a peace man, an 'ultra' peace man, I would never punch a Nazi, but I am prepared to say: success to everyone who punches a Nazi.'"

I continue to work with these concepts. Is nonviolence even possible in a violent state? A young intellectual I respect wrote in a comment on Facebook, "I question whether mass mobilizations and sort of super orchestrated non-violent direct actions are tactics which are going to continue to serve us in the future. I feel like we're butting up against their limitations even now, and as the state and fascists become more effective, coordinated, and organized when it comes to identifying and retaliating against us, it's pretty likely that we're going to come to regret the current level of documentation sooner rather than later." That was in a comment to an article called, "Your Camera is a Snitch," that basically suggests all photography of protest and protesters is potentially harmful. Devastating. I am sitting with all these thoughts.