Inherit the Earth

By Barbara G Louise

In an obscure corner of the multiverse, on an alternate-Earth, in the mid-21st century, the right to vote of millions of Working Class Americans has recently been destroyed, freeing the Ruling Class — with the power their money gives them — to dictate the shape of national government. The Rich are afraid that without the vote the worst of the Rabble will revolt, destroying Elitist civilization. So the Rulers prepare to have protestors shot in the streets.
Learning to share, Working Class people organize themselves to grow free-food for the Poor and the homeless; they create Tent Neighborhoods in public parks for those running from sea-coasts devastated by melting glaciers; and create the Anarkhist Army of the Appendix to aid ordinary people in the Revolution they know is coming, as the Rich use violence to keep their money and their social power.
Soon after the COVID pandemic has worn itself out — with variants killing elderly people, small children, and those who refuse to believe in science — a special, secret committee in the US Senate — in order to get rid of worthless, excess, unemployed Workers — releases mutated, antiviral-resistant Smallpox on a nation which is completely unvaccinated for that devastating disease, since vaccinations ended in 1972 after the disease was eradicated in the USA.
Totally unsupported by a government dedicated only to protecting and enabling the Rich Elites, ordinary working-Americans — desperately seeking to control their own lives, their ailing planet, and their civilization — struggle onward toward a effective anti-Capitalist Revolution.
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
~ John Fitzgerald Kennedy

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: May 12, 2022
• ISBN: 9781663235015

Barbara G Louise

Barbara G Louise was born Barbara Louise Whittum — the first child of white, ‘middle-class’ parents — in November 1943 in Niagara Falls, New York. She has one brother, a retired Marine and a newspaper publisher. After graduating from Riverside High School in Painesville Township, Ohio in 1961, she attended Kent State University, graduating in 1970 with two bachelor degrees, one in Biology, one in general Science. She became a Jew-by-Choice at the age of thirty. Barbara spent her working career as a Registered Medical Technologist: MT (ASCP), beginning in the Pathology Service Laboratory of University Hospitals of Cleveland and then in the Hematology Laboratory of Mt Sinai Medical Center in New York City, before returning to Cleveland at the age of forty-seven. When she retired after a mild stroke in 2000, Barbara began to write the Science Fiction novels she had always wanted to read, about societies without Racism, Homophobia, or Sexism; but being human societies, they have other problems. When the book-in-hand was published, Barbara was 79, living very happily in Cleveland Heights, Ohio with her long-time same-gender Partner and the latest in a long line of well-loved rescue-cats.

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Copyright © 2022 Barbara G Louise.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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ISBN: 978-1-6632-3502-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6632-3501-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022904301

iUniverse rev. date: 05/10/2022

Contents

Prologue

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

AFTERWARD

for

Monica, Martha, Craig,

Susan, and Minnie Bruce

and in loving memory of

Leslie and Ted-&-Frances

Working Class Heroes

all

Illustration%201.jpg

the Rabble and the Rich series is a work of science fiction, set in a little-known corner of the infamous multiverse.

In the series, a tetralogy, the first two books depict the beginning of a clandestine attempt at making a NON-Violent Revolution in North America in the twenty-first century.

In the second two books, an unfortunately violent Revolution is described.

Speaking sarcastically, in no sense is the author suggesting that an anti-Capitalist Revolution is necessary in the United States of America, because, of course, we have a Perfect Democracy and a Superior White Civilization.

Inherit the Earth is the fourth and concluding book in the Rabble and the Rich tetralogy. Each book in the series is a complete story, and can be read alone, in any order.

"Anarchism is that political philosophy which advocates the maximization of individual responsibility and the reduction of concentrated power — regal, dictatorial, [financial], parliamentary, [two-party representative-democracy]: the institutions which go loosely by the name of ‘government’ — to a vanishing minimum. It has no connection with bomb-throwing radicals; it has, in fact, been a point of view which has attracted biologists, such as [Peter] Kropotkin, the founder of [the science of] ecology; and also [academic] anthropologists. To advocate [anarkhism] one must practice considerable self-abnegation, because the type of community it envisages cannot, for obvious reasons, be prescribed. . . . It is [the People] themselves who have to choose."

~ Alex Comfort

in his Preface to People Without Government

An Anthology of Anarchism, by Harold Barclay

Prologue

The meek shall inherit the Earth, no doubt after the Rich have squeezed it dry.

~ Rita Mae Brown

Southern Discomfort

voiced by one of her dystopian characters

Commentary by Heather Treedottir-Solley, the Historian-Editor:

When I first began to write an account of our Anti-Capitalist Revolution as it was manifest in Cuyahoga County in the former state of Ohio in the old United States of America, almost two hundred years ago, I had no idea how long the story would become.

The local Archives-Committee of the Cuyahoga Assembly in our People’s Solidarity of North America had made available to me the Revolutionary Memoirs of several ‘ordinary’ participants in the Revolution, as well as numerous letters and e-mails of Revolutionists, hand-written and as text-printouts.

I believed I had enough information about the experiences and the emotions of enough of our ancestors in the Cuyahoga Valley and surrounding areas to make a good solid book of Revolutionary History, an historical novel, which I would title —brilliantly, I believed — The Rabble and the Rich. I also meant to add accounts of controversies after the violent time of Revolution, because human societies — even very Progressive ones in which people have great individual Freedom — always have social and political disagreements which must be resolved, and the Revolution itself must always be defended against Creeping Authoritarianism and other impediments to individual Freedom.

(More than one philosopher in more than one cultural context has commented that human individuals are somewhat evenly divided — in terms of world-views and the need to control others — between fascists and anarkhists.)

To my surprise, I had enough fascinating, first-hand material for two books. In the Prequel (Learning to Share) to the book-in-hand, I told the interlocking stories of how various kinds of people organized themselves and prepared — before the Revolution — for a better world to come. Then the Revolution began, which engendered more stories of tragedy and heroism.

In this second book, Inherit the Earth, the stories continue of the actual Revolution at the end of the twenty-first century, how it bled into the twenty-second century, and then needed to be defended on into the twenty-third century and beyond. . . .

The book in hand is a fictionalized account of that Revolution, its culmination in our People’s Civil-Rights Constitution, and the continuing stories of other struggles after the Revolution by descendents of the original Revolutionaries, up into the present time.

~ Heather Treedottir-Solley

Historian and Editor

Summer, 2266

Cuyahoga District

People’s Solidarity of North America

1

"Before a Revolution can take place, the population must [completely] lose faith in both the police and the courts."

~ Robert A. Heinlein

in his 1982 SF novel, Friday

Commentary by Heather Treedottir-Solley, the Historian-Editor:

Our Revolutionary History begins on a day in late spring, just past the middle of the 21st century. Sally Angeline Solley was nearly sixty years old and long past menopause.

Despite already being involved with three other women—Rita Greyborn, Jenna James (Jay-Jay), and Luba Stankowski—Sally found herself, to her great surprise, besotted with a new lover, Allison Severence Beckwith, an energetic, elegant white womon in her late forties.

‘Elegant?’ Frack it, Sally thought. Allison is a little-Boogee — a scion of a petite-bourgeois family—and that family owns a lot of property in the Greater Cleaveland area. So why is an anarkhist-Lesbian having a hot affair with a rich womon? she thought to herself.

I can’t help myself! Frack it.

* * *

from the Revolutionary Memoir of Sally Solley:

This is something perhaps no Lesbian would want to admit—but testosterone, and testosterone alone, is the human hormone of sexual desire. When a human being of any gender — cis, trans, genderqueer, etc — is feeling horny or passionate, it is because their body is flooded with testosterone.

Estrogen is not a sex hormone, is not a chemical of sexuality. Estrogen has to do with egg production, I think, and female ‘secondary’ gender characteristics: reproduction only. (Also good, incidentally, for preventing heart attacks.)

If men are continually suffering from testosterone poisoning — which compared to women, they are — then I can understand why they are always thinking about sex and trying to get laid.

I am certainly thinking only with my clitoris and not the nerve bundle atop my shoulders whenever my adrenal gland floods my female body with testosterone.

Allison! Oh, Allison, my lust for your over-privileged bourgeois-body is surely a perversion for a thinking anarkhist —

* * *

Commentary by Heather Treedottir-Solley, the Historian-Editor:

Bouncing on her flat heels, eager as a young girl, while stifling the complaints of her life-long Leftist conscience, Sally arrived at the apartment complex in Pepper Hills owned by Beckwith Holdings, Inc.

A perfumed elevator from the quietly fancy lobby whisked her silently up to Allison’s floor. The Beckwith scion’s suite was at the end of the corridor, on a corner of the main tower, with more windows and a wider view than the apartments of renting, non-owning, non-family residents.

The two of them were served lunch in a small dining area on Allison’s level of the tall turret gracing the southeastern corner of the apartment building. Windows all around gave a broad view of the heavily wooded, affluent, residential regions of Pepper Hills off Gates Mills Boulevard. Sally was always uncomfortable being served by a liveried servant, but Allison had taught her not to give any attention to servants, not even to thank them, so she guiltily ignored the male-server, a fellow worker.

After lunch, while the servant hand-washed dishes, Sally and Allison indulged in passionate lovemaking in the rich womon’s opulent pink and rose bedroom. Awash in afterglow, aging Sally trembled with exhaustion and still felt as giddy as a young girl.

"How are things going with your radical politics?" Allison asked. Her pretty, sculpted face smirked a genteel smile. Her head on the satin pillow beside Sally was crowned with the bright, golden blond hair Sally knew was carefully bleached, dyed, and cared-for by an expensive hairdresser who made semi-weekly house calls. Her eyebrows were perfectly groomed by a professional, and Sally knew that Allison’s subtle ‘makeup’ — the light-rose color of her lips, the tiny round dot of her ‘beauty’-mark, and including the faint bloom of her cheeks — had been expertly tattooed on.

Breathing deeply, trying to preserve the good feelings the excellent sex had given her, Sally wondered — why?-oh-why! — she had ever revealed her political beliefs to such a vapid womon across class lines. My naiveté knows no bounds, she thought.

Well, she answered Allison, I’m glad we have at last a sensible federal minimum-wage law tied to inflation, passed by a very narrow margin, considering how often we had to demonstrate in Washington to get it.

Oh, t‘Hell with politics, Allison said. "That’s not important. I can’t get enough of you, you silver-tongued devil! " She pulled Sally into a close embrace and passionately kissed her. Sally’s intellect dissolved and disappeared again in bodily pleasure.

After more lovemaking, they resumed talking, lazily, dispassionately, thoroughly satiated.

Allison, I don’t think you and I will ever agree about politics, Sally said, gazing up at the bedroom’s sculptured ceiling so skillfully plastered and painted it appeared to be made of the softest linen, like a tufted comforter or a quilt overhead.

"Oh, Sally, it doesn’t matter, as long as we’re having fun. And I’m glad you don’t mind me not taking you to family events, like several other lovers I had, who imagined I could help them social-climb—"

Yuk, not to my taste. Sally shuddered.

"I’m glad. I always have to show up with my second cousin Delano, so we can beard each other and avoid the homophobic horrors."

"Funny how the ‘best people,’— supposedly you rich folks — haven’t gotten over the stupidity of homophobia, as has most of our society outside fundamentalist religious nuts," Sally grinned wryly.

Real control of the family money is in the hands of heterosexual males, the Old Man’s arrogant sons, each with several sons himself and a supposedly adoring wife who ignores the many mistresses.

Would they cut you off if they found out you were Queer?

Probably.

Wow. Then you’d lose this beautiful apartment, your dishwashing housekeeper, and have to work for a living, like us Proles.

I wouldn’t know how.

Will you marry Delano, for camouflage?

O’course. Next spring. We’ll even have a couple of kids. I cryo-froze several of my eggs when I was twenty. To placate my mother.

Artificial insemination? A surrogate?

"Certainly. I have no interest in fucking, or in the work of pregnancy, and I don’t think Delano could get it up for cunt. He’s not the least bit bi-sexual, as I also am not."

Then it’s real good you have each other.

Yes.

* * *

The next week, it was an ordinary Wednesday in May near the end of the 21st century. Sally Solley had the day off from her job as Chief Tech in the Pathology Laboratory at Cleaveland Hills General Hospital. She was home, in her small one room apartment just off her factory-laboratory where she had spent a lifetime perfecting her production of cloned, animal-derived, cruelty-free vat-protein, so she could feed people in a crisis and the ruling class could never Starve her Neighbors into Submission.

She looked forward to a date with Allison that evening.

Needing a few groceries, she threw on an old tee-shirt and trousers, and shod in a pair of bedroom slippers, she walked a half block along a peaceful suburban street to the Clarence Family Kwiki-Mart. The store was clean and neatly stocked because Ned and Tiffany Clarence had several kids they kept busy sweeping the floor, dusting the shelves, setting out and pricing all the available stock.

Due to the incompetence of corporate farming, causing the near extinction of honeybees due to pesticide over-use, wheat crops had years-ago failed throughout North America. Sally collected a loaf of imported Argentinean wholewheat-rye-potato-nut bread, a gallon of goat’s milk, a box of frozen Palestinian / Israeli kosher spinach puffs, a bottle of olive oil, and a dozen eggs. She took them to the checkout.

Tiffany Clarence was a handsome middle-aged white womon of common American ancestry Sally had known for years in the neighborhood before Ned Clarence had swooped in and talked the beautiful teenage-girl into becoming his life-partner and giving him a bunch of kids. Their Kwiki-Mart had been a staple of the area since soon after their wedding.

Sally! Long time no see, Tiffany said, smiling. I was afraid you’d left the neighborhood.

Never, Sally said, emptying her shopping basket onto the counter.

Tiffany rang up the loaf of bread. "Carrie—you know? my oldest—was just telling me the other day that—"

All right, hands up! On your knees! Get down! Get down! This facility is now under Martial Law! Nobody move! Several soldiers wearing desert-camouflage uniforms, shouting and pointing nasty-looking automatic weapons, suddenly swarmed into the little store. Sally dropped to her knees with the other customers.

"Listen, Boys —" Still standing, turning with Sally’s bottle of olive oil in hand, solidly in possession of her sense of white bourgeois privilege, Tiffany said firmly to the soldiers, with great dignity, as if she were addressing her own employees, her own children — I’m conducting a legitimate business here. Go bother someone else.

"Hut!" screamed the officer in charge, swinging his weapon and opening fire on Tiffany. Other soldiers joined him in the attack, splattering Sally’s head and shoulders with Tiffany’s blood, brains, and bits of bone, as well as olive oil and shards of glass. Sally lowered her hands very very slowly until they were resting, fingers intertwined, on her head. She knelt frozen, head down, bleeding herself from minor cuts, afraid to react in any way, hoping to be somehow invisible.

Other customers, shocked and hysterical, were also shot.

from the Revolutionary Memoir of Sally Solley:

That was when I suddenly ceased to be a Liberal who believed — desperately hoped, despite what I had learned about reality in prison — that ‘legitimate’ citizen agitating would ensure capitalism evolved to the point where it would ‘work for everyone.’ Like many Liberal people before the Revolution, I had foolishly ignored the glaring truth that those who truly succeed in capitalism do so only through theft and violence. They have no interest in changing capitalism to be ‘gentler and kinder’ so it could ‘work for everyone.’

Mis-using the simple Darwinian concept of Survival of the Fittest, successful Capitalists believed they were absolutely correct to be vicious predators. They wanted to win, to own everything and everyone. As a consequence, no one of the Working Class, white or Black (especially Blacks), straight or Gay, man or womon (especially women), was a person to them. We were all just Things. Things to be used to make the rich richer.

In that moment, frozen stiff with mortal fear, surrounded by hard-faced boys pointing guns at me—guns still smoking after casually murdering Tiffany and other human beings—I was terrified, kneeling in a puddle of my own urine. That was when I became a determined revolutionary, dedicated to replacing the dog-eat-dog ideology of Capitalism with the more human-centered ideals of Socialism, particularly Anarkha-Socialism — that is, Voluntary-Socialism.

The idea of Sharing—which Poor and other Oppressed Communities are very good at, and was in fact hugely responsible for their survival under Capitalism—was always considered by the Rich to be unrealistic, starry-eyed nonsense, and against basic human nature; (the Rich believed that competitive-nastiness was basic human nature).

As a Liberal, I had been un-willing to face the obvious fact that Capitalism was the ultimate power trip—that a world in the lockjaw-grip of Capitalism could never be free.

Meanwhile, with a small business owner—a neighbor I had known and liked for years. (I had danced at her wedding!) — dead in pieces splattered all over me, I hoped desperately to survive the military takeover intended to forestall the impending Anti-Capitalist Revolution I had suddenly realized was absolutely necessary.

The imperatives of history swept me up, and I never saw my rich lover Allison again, never learned if she survived the Revolution nor if she ever married Delano and made those kids.

* * *

Commentary by Heather Treedottir-Solley, the Historian-Editor:

Over and over, early in the twenty-first century, right-wingnut ultra-Conservative politicians, with impunity, gave speeches calling for a covert uprising against the USA Federal Government. This was anytime Congress, a liberal President, an agency of the government, or the voters themselves did anything which endangered the privileges of the Rich. They were helped by some in the ‘Middle Class’ who had long-held fantasies of themselves as upwardly mobile. They believed they were not part of the 99%, not part of the Rabble.

Martial Law was an attempt by the right-wing-dominated USA government to return ‘democracy’ to a incorrect, nauseating, outdated version of America as a bastion of ‘Christian’ white-male-supremacy. The military itself had long been a stronghold of those with ultra-‘religious’ super-conservative, ‘fundamentalist-Christian’ world-views, believing Progressive Ideals, such as Feminism, Gay liberation, Union Organizing, Latinx-Equality, a multi-lingual society, and most especially Anti-Racism, were destroying Western Civilization.

(Actually, what Progressive Ideals were destroying was the idea of perpetual, unending, eternal white-male-‘Christian’ privilege. At that time in history, many white people — even a significant number of white women (including white lesbians), and white Gay-men (both of whom should have known better) — believed destroying that Privilege would be ‘the end of Freedom.’) Face it: Racism makes people stupid.

Once Sally escaped from the bloody chaos of the Clarence Family’s ruined Kwiki-mart, she was more than ready to join her relatives and friends in fighting the Anti-Capitalist Revolution she at last understood was an absolute necessity for the survival of both the human species and our embattled planet Earth.

DURING THE REVOLUTION

2

"Trades Unions [are] the embryonic group of the future ‘free society.’ Every trade union is . . . an autonomous commune in process of incubation."

~ Albert Parsons,

Haymarket Martyr

Commentary by Heather Treedottir-Solley, the Historian-Editor:

Sally Solley had called in ‘sick’ at her job, and, avoiding the patrols of the soldiers enforcing Martial Law, had gone down to the ‘Flats’ — the flat land in downtown Cleaveland on either side of the Cuyahoga River — to the Cleaveland Steel Works on the west side of the river, one of the few productive factories still extant in North-Eastern Ohio. The Capitalist owners were a corporation so small they could not afford to take the factory overseas, so they had retooled to make special-order alloys with the steel their Workers fashioned.

In order to compete economically with the ‘Big Boys’—who had Workers without unions earning only pennies a day in China, Laos, Bulgaria, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Rumania, Alabama, and Mississippi—the Capitalist owners of the Cleaveland Steel Works had speeded-up the unionized Workers. They believed ‘their’ Workers would do anything — even violate their union contract — to keep their jobs, since jobs were so scarce. But one of the last steelworkers’ unions in the USA, the Cleaveland local had, just before the imposition of Martial Law—despite the objections of their AFL-CIO leadership and, of course, the Federal Government—struck for better working conditions and the reinstatement of civilized benefits, like sick pay, overtime pay, healthcare insurance, paid holidays, and paid vacations. The Cleaveland Steel Works Corporation, ignoring the Union contract and backed by Martial Law, had sped-up production levels and imposed onerous, mandatory overtime. Then they had added the more draconian cutbacks other employers on American soil had imposed in order to further cut costs and increase profits for their stockholders.

The striking workers locked themselves in the plant. They knew if they picketed on the outside, they would be overwhelmed by scabs because so many people were desperate for employment.

Giving only lip service to concern for rising unemployment, the federal government — no longer ‘democratic’ in any realistic sense — had produced only false words of sympathy, and empty promises of legislation to create more jobs. The promises were empty because Legislators knew the government’s primary responsibility was to use government money (taxes) not to fund new jobs — such as repairing the crumbling infrastructure of the nation: (the bridges, roads, harbors, power plants, National parks, schools, etc, as FDR had done when he saved capitalism in the 1930s. But instead the government meant to pay interest on the loans (the National Debt) past legislative sessions and administrations had taken-out — adding to stolen Social Security Funds — to pay the ongoing expenses of keeping the government open, so it could continue to administrate the country in favor of the Rich.

The super-Rich had paid no taxes for the whole of the 21st century since the Reagan Administration at the end of the twentieth. The Rich not paying any taxes inevitably caused a great decrease in government funds which forced the government to borrow even more money, paying interest to the owners of privately-owned banks. Those banks had been bailed-out with billions of dollars of tax-payers’ money because they were ‘too big to fail.’ Those Banks which were being paid had loaned government the money to bail them out in the first place. They then proceeded to rake-in interest on those loans, interest paid to the banks from Workers’ taxes. It was genius financial manipulation. The military junta implementing Martial Law had then backed those amazing anti-Worker policies. While the Rich (who owned the Banks) continued to pay no taxes.

Since then, the Workers on strike — holed up in the Cleaveland Steel Works factory—found themselves to be among the continuing revolutionary sparks for similar actions all over North America; also in countries with factories owned by the American bourgeoisie around the world wherever the forced austerity of the Great Recession was hurting people who were not comfortably Rich. (The extremely low-wage foreign (and Southern USA) workers knew their jobs had once in the USA paid one to five hundred times as much, with union-mandated benefits such as safe working conditions, healthcare, paid sick-leave, and weekends, as well as paid holidays and vacations.)

In her mid-sixties, with her newly developed passion for true Revolution, Sally had been delighted to answer a call that morning from the Revolutionary Socialist Coalition’s Flashmob Network to defend the Workers’ Takeover of the steel works by standing between rebellious Workers inside the plant and the USA’s government forces who were coming to defend the ‘Sacred Right of Private Property.’

Able and willing that day to defend their local well-spring of the People’s Revolution, an eclectic group of mostly young people, plus Sally and a few of her friends and comrades, were standing arm-in-arm waiting for the conflict to begin. Many of them were praying to their personal understanding of God that the forces of the new military US government would hesitate to kill ‘ordinary’ citizens of the USA so early in the Revolution, before they could be sure the rule of Capitalism was actually in serious danger.

Sally was arm-in-arm with her good friend Johnny Richardson, a handsome, middle-aged, straight Black man, on one side, and Zora Heatherstone, her white college roommate, on the other. Both of them were fellow anarkhists. Earlier, she had seen her younger lover Jay-Jay, a Black womon nearing middle-age, further down the line.

Rita Greyborn, another of Sally’s lovers, a middle-aged, white, divorced mother of three, was several people down from her. Rita wanted to do anything she could to get back at the dominant power structure, which had forcibly drafted her oldest son into the US Combined Military. Sally had told Rita about the strike defense, knowing her now-homeless friend could use the activity, and that Rita was not at all reluctant to believe Revolution was necessary for the future safety and freedom of her two remaining children.

A Sergeant from the Anarkhist Army of the Appendix (the AOA) had been with them earlier and had advised them all on what to expect, and how best to react to various situations.

Then the Police arrived, and an older cop with a crisp white supervisor’s shirt, a gold badge, and a bullhorn began giving orders and lecturing: "All right! Break it up! This is an illegal gathering. The National Guard is coming to take back this facility for the rightful owners. I know you people aren’t really lawbreakers. You don’t want anarkhy!"

Yes, I do! Sally thought, feeling sad that the cop with the bullhorn was her cousin, Jon Spoling Jr, a brother of her Communist friend Haddi. She hoped he wouldn’t notice her. She hadn’t seen him since her great aunt’s funeral thirty years before.

But anarkhy and violence is what you’ll get! he boomed, "if people like the criminals inside that factory are allowed to get away with stealing private property!

Now, go back home to your families. Don’t trouble yourselves with matters that don’t concern you. The economy is improving. There is nothing to worry about. Our democratic government has the situation well in hand. Those irresponsible criminals inside the factory will only drag you down with—

An injury to one is an injury to all! Not far down the line from Sally a young white man shouted a long-time Anarkhist slogan.

A blue-uniformed policeman standing beside Jon Spoling ran over to the young man and without hesitation hit him over the head with his billy-club. The boy fell to the ground like a broken puppet. Fortunately, the people in the line around him had listened to the black-garbed AOA Sergeant and they made no moves to respond to the cop’s violence.

His head dripping bright red blood, the young man was dragged away by the cops. They were followed by a small inoffensive-seeming womon—a WOLF legal representative (Workers and Oppressed Liberation Front) — a progressive lawyer, whom they all knew would be a witness and would see to it the boy got the emergency medical care he needed, even if she had to risk arrest herself. They all knew that if anyone in the line had tried to fight back, the cops would have started a riot and hurt a lot more people, and the defense of the Sit-Down-Strikers inside the plant would have failed.

Now go home! Jon Spoling roared through the bullhorn at them. You see what will happen to those who try to destroy our American-Way-of-Life! Go home to your families. Trust the government and Martial Law. You voted for it! We are the best and the free-est country in the world. Don’t let the spoilers—like those dirty thieves inside the plant—ruin our wonderful country. Don’t help them! Don’t be here when the National Guard gets here. Go home!

Huh, Sally thought silently to herself: My cousin Jon knows this is not just a local flare-up. He knows the Revolution is happening. He thinks he can stop our Solidarity by giving us the same old lies, the same old capitalist crap: Look out for number-one; See everyone else as competition; Solidarity is foolish and doesn’t work; Rebels are trash; Everything is going to be fine if you just don’t complain; Vote, we’ll count your ballots fairly; Ha! Martial Law will protect you. Bah! Too late, Pig! The Rabble is awake!

She looked at her sisters and brothers in Solidarity around her. First at Johnny, then at Zora, both her long-time friends with whom she was solidly elbow-linked. Zora’s un-legal husband, OakTree, nodded grimly at her from Zora’s other side.

Oh, Dear Goddess! Sally prayed. Help us! Let that angry, over-eager white boy be the only casualty today!

"‘Coom-by-yah,’ my Lord, ‘coom-by-yah’." A light, peaceful song came rolling down the multi-coloured line of bodies arm-in-arm around the factory. Many could also hear the tune coming from the cell-phones in their pockets. They sang softly and swayed lightly, gently smiling as Sally’s top-cop cousin—with his out-dated, anti-people worldview—nastily lectured them over his bullhorn.

Sally’s section of the line was stationed in front of the factory. They saw big canvas-covered trucks pull up and the troops get out, each clutching a civilian by the upper arm. The local Police faded away in the face of the National Guard in their jungle-camouflage combat uniforms.

Marching on American citizens, the Guard carried old-fashioned rifles with fixed bayonets. The Guard ordered the civilians from the canvas-covered trucks to put their hands on their heads. Then those civilians — men and women of mixed colours from white to beige and Black — were marched toward the human barricade in front of the factory, each of them with a bayonet at their back.

Sally was terrified for them. She fiercely reviewed in her mind the advice of the AOA sergeant. "Don’t panic!" was the hardest part of the advice to follow. She was terrified for herself as well as for the hastily-drafted civilians. Her guts were cramping up, she was so afraid of the bayonets. Her legs began to shake and she was certain she would fall down or at least shit herself. Steady, you old dyke, she thought miserably. You’ve lived long enough. This is your chance to stand—up! Up!—for what you believe in. Remember what they told you to do! Remember! Stand up! She held on fiercely to Johnny and Zora. They seemed to be in better shape than she was. I sure hope they’re in better shape! Dear Goddess! Be with me now. Help me! she prayed fiercely.

When each of the civilians was forced at bayonet point against the line, one person—Sally was the one in her group—stepped quickly backward where each of the civilians was forced by the Guard. Then automatically, the soldiers were surrounded. Sally pulled a civilian away from the soldier behind the bayonet and fell to the pavement with the stranger, relieved she no longer had to force herself to keep standing. Her legs twitched painfully against concrete. Simultaneously, Johnny grabbed the soldier, Zora grabbed his rife, and Johnny yelled, Get down!

They were on the pavement of the parking lot in front of the factory. Sally lay on top of the hefty, white, middle-aged man she had just rescued. She looked around at the confusion resulting from the actions the AOA sergeant had advised. She heard gunfire, shouting, and people screaming, but no one in her line of sight seemed to have been shot or stabbed. She saw Rita Greyborn had acquired a Guardsman’s rifle and was trying to remove the bayonet. They heard a crash as someone threw a rock through one of the factory windows. There was the sound of a small explosion from around the side of the building.

A large Black man not in any uniform walked quickly past them, helping Zora’s adult daughter Anna, who limped. The back of her right, khaki-colored pant-leg was soaked dark with blood. They went into the factory, where the AOA medics had set up an emergency field hospital.

Several of the Guardsmen, non-officers, seemed to have joined the ad-hoc group of Strike-Protectors, taking off their shirts so they weren’t in uniform. A few womon-soldiers were wearing only a khaki army-bra on top. Rita Greyborn was helping to hold at gunpoint those National Guardsmen who had retained their uniforms, apparently people still loyal to the old USA and its governments’ persistent defense of Capitalism.

The revolutionists had won that battle, and for now, the Strikers were safe. I hope we can win the war! Sally thought.

Umm, Lady, uh, I think we can get up now, the stranger under Sally spoke.

Oh! Sure. Sally scrambled off him. He stood and reached down his hand to help her up. He was actually a tall white man—not hefty, but big and tall—and rather handsome. He smiled at her. Thank you. I was sure I’d never live through it.

Me too, Sally said.

I’m Carmine Bonatello. I’m recently single. Give me your phone number, and I’ll take you out tonight for a steak dinner and drinks to celebrate.

Carmine, I’m too old for you.

You saved my life. We don’t need to be conventional about age. I’m flexible.

I’m a Lesbian.

Oh, come on. Can’t you make an exception? We’ve just survived a battle together.

I’m not that flexible.

"Ah, well, umm, thanks again." He looked chagrined.

My pleasure. I couldn’t have stood up much longer. Sally heard her younger lover, Jay-Jay, calling her. I’ve got to go. Nice to meet you, Carmine, she said. She gave him a quick hug, in Solidarity, which surprised him, and then ran off to join Jay-Jay.

* * *

from the Revolutionary Memoir of Sally Solley:

I hope our descendents in the future will not make the mistake of believing that only a few unique individuals made or led our Revolution. Because no matter the moral strength, leadership ability, or masculinity of an individual, no one person is ever responsible for the massive turning of a culture from one paradigm to another. As an old poem by ‘anonymous’ I once read as a child said:

Each age is a dream that is dying; or one that is coming to birth.

All any one individual can do is participate in history where her heart and her mind are most comfortable.

At a time when the Capitalist system had clearly failed us all, and that failure was aggravated by the vicious and supposedly-legal actions of armed men set among us, the Revolution ‘began’ when spontaneous actions by crowds of Workers—whom Martial Law had taught exactly who the Enemy was—all coincided. I was just lucky to be in one of those crowds.

Later on, in Cleaveland Hills, I was with Zora’s daughter Anna — recovering from the wound she suffered at the strike-defense — and her partner Carol, attending a concert by a pair of gay men—Philkovsky and Reynolds—when right in the middle of a rousing song: It’s Getting Hard to Tell the Breeders from the Queers!—a small group of white boys, homophobes screaming, "God Hates Fags!" broke into the back of the hall and began firing privately-owned, rapid-fire assault rifles, cutting down the performers and moving on to the audience.

People began screaming and trying to run away. Some of us dropped to the floor with the dead or wounded and began crawling. I was near the back of the auditorium, so I was able to see when people in the very back rows turned and attacked the riflemen, trying to pull them to the floor and disarm them, proving that fairies and dykes are not cowards. Many were killed outright.

I cannot brag I was close enough to help. The panicked audience trampled the dead, the homophobic riflemen, and their wounded victims as they ran from the carnage. Anna, Carol, and I escaped together. We stopped to pick up out of the trampled bodies a young Gay Man Anna and Carol knew. He had a freshly broken leg. He was hysterical and in tears, having seen his lover killed right beside him. We took him to an emergency room.

I picked up a .38 revolver off the bloody floor. It became my personal gun for the rest of the Revolution.

Other Solidarity actions happened at about the same time:

When militarized police in riot gear attacked a peaceful demonstration outside a new