Our comrade Cynthia laid down the gauntlet for us in her "A Call to Action" article (PPWC UpDate Fall/Winter, 2001). Are you ready to pick it up? Are we ready to unite and take our experiences, our insights and our struggles to the next level? I -for one - am ready to step up.

I guess I should introduce myself. -My name (s/n) is Robert Thaxton and I've been a revolutionary, an activist, an organizer and an anarchist since 70 - (I was ten). During a street festival-in Eugene, OR on 6/18/99 I got into a violent conflict with a racist cop and am now serving.88 months as an STG-political prisoner. Despite the anarchist south’s efforts to confine my identity to the events of 6/18, I'm fairly well known within the national and international anarchist community. I need to explain my background for you, though, so you’ll know who you’re dealing with and understand my level of commitment to revolutionary struggle.

I was radicalized by the Vietnam war, particularly by the opposition to the senseless, brutal display of imperialist aggression. As a young child, I was a red-white and blue patriot. Know what turned me around. Three things.

First of all, I was a great fan of Muhammad Ali. Mainly because white folks hated him. Since most white folks hated me, too; that made him my champion. When he refused to go into the military, I was a bit confused, until he explained "No Vietnamese ever called me nigger." Whoa-boy, did THAT blow my mind. Although I’m of Mexican descent, white folks used to call me nigger, too.

From the day I beard Ali say this, I’ve considered being called "nigger" to be a compliment.

TV coverage of the war also enlightened me. I saw some documentary that explained that even

women were fighting against the S. Vietnamese and allied forces: Since my mother and her brown-skinned sisters were my favorite folks an earth and my stepfather and all his brothers and pals were racist assholes, I identified more readily with women, especially dark-skinned ones.·

What made me a Revolutionary, though, was when I read about the Weatherwomen. If women in Vietnam and here in the US. were willing to fight against the U.S. government, my l0-year old mind thought, there must be something seriously wrong with it.

I adopted the Weather Underground’s stance that Third World people could not be free from imperialism until: we in the First World abolished imperialism here! I’ve never backed away from that position.

I’ve also had a healthy disrespect for authority for as long as I remember. That’s what having a violent, sexist, racist, drunken, stepfather does for a boy.

I spent many lonely years inside various activist communities in Texas, until I finally began to seriously study Marxist and anarchist history. Then, at the age of 30,.I·ditched the Marxists and threw myself whole-heartedly into the anarchist scene. I relocated to a city with a visible anarchist presence (Austin, TX)’and joined up with the College and punk rock anarchist south. That’s when I began using the name Rob los Ricos; and put organizing above all other considerations in the way I approached life.

The massive wave of protests against the Gulf War and its complete failure to affect any change or even attract the attention of the general public convinced me that activism is pointless.

Since I’m not a quitter, I had to find a new way to express my revolutionary desires. This meant a long period of soul searching, and Research.

Fortunately, I was not alone in this effort. Several anarchist writers, publishers and theorists were coming up with new perspectives along the same lines.

Inspired in part by Third World people’s efforts to maintain their communal traditions, despite the encroachment of the local state and multinational corporations into their previously overlooked homelands, anarchist writers associated with Fifth Estate and Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed began to stress the need to overcome the alienation of modern technological societies from the earth which sustains us.

George Bradford encouraged us to view the world through the eyes of people who still live as part of nature. Fredy Perlman described civilization as being nothing more than the enslavement of humankind and the ravaging of the earth in order to increase the size and scope of enslavement as well as the power and wealth of the rulers. He and John Zerzan described the psychological, social and technological methods used to enslave us within civilization. Feral faun explored ways that we might overcome those methods. And Hakim Bey suggested that we can do this immediately, without having to wait for some ever distant revolution.

Dozens of activists and former activists across the country and the world have forged a new, more militant tendency that many people refer to as Green anarchy, to put the theories of the 80's and 90's into action.

After landing with a group of fellow run away slaves in the woods of Oregon I realized that the post-revolutionary vision of a loving, egalitarian, earth-centered existence is here, now -if we only choose to grasp it. There are still people - who live on what their homelands provide, and these people me not only my allies, they are my teachers.

This is where I stand today And this is why I fight against institutions that preach economic development and kill to make it happen.

And that's why I'm in prison.

So, now I'm writing to you in the PPWC to ask how I can help take that next step- to create a strong revolutionary movement from within these walls, one that will free our minds, bodies souls and loved ones from the shackles of oppression that enslave every aspect of our beings.

Here's what I have to bring: a network of anarchist prisoners and outside contacts, including numerous publications nationally and internationally; access to (limited) outside resources; and the exposure that goes along with my being the most widely published anarchist writer so far in this century.

I'm not saying this to brag, but just to let you know how I can help: the sale of my writings keeps me supplied with 'lopes, coffee, etc., and also helps finance the anarchist prisoners Legal Aid Network. I want to do the same for PPWC, but I'm sure my views are pretty drastically divergent from most of yours. So I need your suggestions on what to write about. Please write me directly if you can, or through the PPWC Info Center.

I'm excited about the possibilities presented us.