Yes, I Burned Your Flag--So What?!

Afterall, shouldn't the Salvadorean families who lost their children to the U.S.-orchestrated massacres during the U.S.-manufactured "civil war"--shouldn't they receive some kind of memorial? Some kind of acknowledgement?

Let the children of all those parents who survived the decades of political strife warm their hands in the flicker and flame of a brighter future . . . .

Burn, Old Glory, burn!

"If you don't like this country, go back to where you came from!"

Go back to where the flood of capitalist interests pushed us to the surface? Pushed us to these war-torn US sidewalks? Pushed us to MacArthur Park on May Day 2007? Pushed us the way the LAPD pushed--and beat--the innocent crowds of brown skinned bearers of this nation's shameful past, shameful present . . . .

Why were my friends and comrades shot with rubber bullets? Because real ones would have caused . . . another 1992? Another Watts? Another Pine Ridge? Another Wounded Knee? Another Languna Park? Another Xicano Moratorium? Another Silver Dollar Cafe?

We ask that you fire your real ones . . . so that you can remind us that we are alive, that we can bleed for a cause, a real cause.

We are not afraid of dying. We celebrate the dead.

You who call those your ancestors separated "separationists," hear me! Yes, I burned your flag--so what? You burned my entire history!

And yet, here we are, still standing proud; not because we are "obsesssed with our ethnicity," as the McIntyres of the world would have others believe, but because we are human beings who understand that before the European arrival we had so much more; so much more of what we need today in order to continue forward, in the spirit of our ancestors, fighting on, fighting on.

Burn the blindfold of old glory, I ask even the moderate. Burn the lie telling you that 10% of my people are out in the street committing crimes when the real heads--including cops, critics, convicts, and kids--know that it's only about .5%.

Gangsters? Or confused young people sucked into the cement that surrounds them and lured into a sick game of egotistical cutthroatism playing out in their neighborhoods since the beggining of neo-colonialism, that is to say, since the U.S. Conquest of Northern Mexico?

Gangsters? Or rebels without consciousness? Without a grasp of the larger picture? Without depth of knowledge? Without light?

Burn the flag so that we will not be kept in the dark any longer.

Why is it that the ones fighting to stop the real bullets on the street are the same ones running from rubber bullets at the park?

Our adversaries are quick to blame the elders in the community for spreading the seeds of radicalism, but they forget that barbarian law enforcement and prosecutorial fanaticism stir up the flames of anomosity much higher. They forget that, in reality, they are only doing us a favor, by making it so black and white, so blatantly brutal to our faces and souls.

In the end, WE will turn this country around for the better, as we transform May Day 2007 into May Day 2008 into May Day 2012. . . and Seven Generations from now . . . .

Don't waive the flag, my people--paisanos!--burn it! Till we force them to see us for who we are. Till they learn to treat us with dignity. Till they realize they cannnot stamp the word "illegal" on any human and non-human life.

Warm your hands, little ones, in the smoke of our struggle, of our memories, of our ways.

The Sixth Sun is coming................................................................................................................................................. ://

-huitzilopochtli