ask me about the strike, part 2

Title comes from the t-shirt. Shout out to Amelia and Lauren in Phx and New Haven, respectively, for all of the spray painting back in the day.

Yesterday was fantastic. The picket lines were strong and fiercely optimistic (case in point Dan G. from GESO's sign and the amazing "Give up now/We will win" one Ezra from History was holding). I saw folks whom I hadn't seen in months, and I saw folks i see every week standing up for themselves, their work, and the future of the university to an extent that has never before happened here . I saw GESO alum NYU profs join NYU undergrads (and Phoebe,) guerilla brass bands rock raucous pickets of mathematicians and physicists and comp literati and medievalist historians and computer scientists and small manhattan canine pets of AmStud ethnographers and a large fraction of the Yale American Studies and history departments and the woman who swiped my id card at my residential college dining hall for the two years i lived on the Yale campus. The undergrads did a banner drop and gave us cookies (today it was hot chocolate and hershey's kisses) and everyone held amazing, eclectic, colorful picket signs and shouted stuff like "NYU, NYU, why do we have a W2?" and (my personal favorite) "If we're not workers/then we're not not working." I stayed out all day and didn't eat anything substantial until late in the evening after resting a very aching neck and back.

Today was freezin'. For a reason. We split up the picket lines strategically and hit many of the major class buildings on campusand taught eachother new chants. GSOC likes "on strike, shut em down, new york is a union town," but is not too into "we're not gonna take it" or "we want a contract," which makes sense, since those are two chants which have very specific histories and meanings for folks in New Haven that don't translate. (The intensity of the 2003 strikes, Maris's trumpet, Scott Marks's booming voice over the federation's portable sound system, etc.) And, as i noted above, this struggle, linked to the one in New Haven by far more than just me, BC, AS, MZ, SW, or JL, has its own iconographies and idioms which are often very powerful. I gotta say though, that with the notable exception of that one from the Reclaim Our Campus action where we counted to like 25 (does anyone have that written down?) i'm not generally a fan of "2, 4, 6, 8" chants unless they're really good, which "NYU negotiate" isn't. We could be doing way more with those four syllables, like "the cold is making me irate." A la Justin Ruben's incredible "sit down and negotiate" chant from right before Sweeney spoke on the Wednesday of the March strike. The rat eats gasoline. And you have to take it down when it gets windy or else it will fly away and tragically impale itself on the horn rimmed glasses of the denim clad supercilious hipster who wouldn't take a leaflet yesterday morning. I did try to bust out the "x department, ON STRIKE" chant, which people liked for its general absurdity a la "performance studies: ON STRIKE! Comp Lit: ON STRIKE." We were all interviewed by squadrons of wide-eyed journalism students sent to interrogate us by their professors, who i believe were holding class on campus. Yay to the J-students writing about the strike, boo to the not moving classes off campus. People were holding them in the frigging Washington Square park fountain yesterday, which is totally awesome. I was cold but exhilarated. A lot of my faculty were out on the line yesterday and today, and other grad students in the department i didn't know too well before yesterday, I now know far better.

My op-ed finally got published. The YDN called me way late last night after i'd been up for 18 hours and was totally exhausted and i pretty much just took their edits as they'd made them and added one of my own i'd forgotten about before i sent in the piece. If i'd had more space, i would have made more explicit the connections between GSOC and GESO and GSEU and GET-UP and GEO et al. I would have made the account more specific to Yale and what GESO and the rest of the federation had taught me, but I think that comes across a little bit anyway. And i talk about the Yale fight way too much down here already. So i want to spend the end of this entry, discombobulated and disjointed as my current level of fatigue has made it, by noting how fantastic the organizing going into this strike has been thus far, on the whole, and how thrilled i am at what we're achieving every day on the streets. More when i'm less tired. Which should roll around sometime in july.