Rogers Park, Illinois--Murals and Quotes

Visions from "the most multi-ethnic Zip Code in the United States" form the basis for enlarging our revolutions against 'COVERT' tyranny.

An excerpt from my 2002 book “ ‘9/11’ “ / Facing Our Fascist State, as reprinted in 2008’s book The World Is Turning: […]

Yuri Kochiyama and Beve Conover were kind in reviewing FOFS. Yuri wrote: ‘This book is an incredily courageous, revealing blockbuster, a magnificent work of investigativwe journalism. It goes deeply into the record of our so-called leaders’ uses or misuses of power and yet it also offers hope for us from collective action.’ Bev wrote in her Online Journal: ‘This is a book about more than 9/11/ It’s about oil, narcotics, war, corporate machinations, government corruption and complicity…. It cries out for the American people to wake up … and take back their country before it is too late.’

This excerpt comes under the heading ‘The Next Generation, the New America’. The entire The World Is Turning […] book can be read for free on my Ur1Light.com Website HERE.

Detail from the Artists of the Wall murals along a concrte Park bench, facing Lake Michigan in Rogers Park, Illinois. The murals change every year. The ones that I saw were offered for 2002.

In June of 2002 I flew from San Francisco to Minneapolis/St. Paul on the way to being the first (and entirely titular) “poet-in-residence” at the 30th-or-so annual Rainbow Family Gathering. Thank you, Diamond Dave Whitaker of Food Not Bombs and Theresa Marquez of Organic Valley Farms. for this most welcome invitation.

The Rainbow Gathering found its home in 2002 among National Forest woods on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

I rented a car and drove into St. Paul. Friday night of June was sultry. Breeze sashayed through leaves the house where I stayed on Goodrich Avenue, Nearby streets were named Pleasant, Fairview and Summit. The house kept its front door open past midnight.

The next morning passersby in the neighborhood volunteered directions. A girl about ten years old rocked in a porch-swing with an English sheepdog on her lap. Such is the old, trusting America for some in this Nation, I thought.

Later in this Summer 2002 trip--after four days of camping at the Gathering--I read at the Heartland Cafe in the Rogers Park neighborhood of northeast Chicago. Pete Wolf, the reading’s host, said that he was “4th- generation Rogers Park.” Pete also said that his Zip Code was now “the most multi-ethnic in the United States.’

On the evening of July 3, eve of the 4th of July, I walked beside Lake Michigan. There was plenty of company despite the day’s jaw-dropping heat (119• had read a billboard beside Interstate 94). Between the lawns and sand of a beachfront Park were Blacks, Latins, Arabs, Russians, Jews and tow-headed Wisconsin girls. Here was such a mélange. They were strolling, pedaling, playing and lounging on such a stlll hot evening..

My notebook from that day says: ‘Here the luminous smiles and ambling walks commonly seen outside the States.’.

It says: ‘Here a segmented mural with richly painted images and slogans fronting Lake Michigan, 8 miles from the Gold Coast.’

The ‘segmented mural’ refers to a concrete bench that faced the Lake--the Lake steaming gray-blue under a temperature still near 100 degrees around 7:00 p.m --across a paved pathway.

Separate designs of colors-and-quotes adjoined along this bench. The designs resembled sections of a skein or storyboard. Many offered inspirational advice.

‘Make no small plans’, one read.

‘Unity, Faith, Service’ was drawn on another.

‘Free To Skate’, another stated.

Buddha and Rumi were quoted.
‘As a mother would risk her life to protect her child--even so one should cultivate limitless heart toward all beings--Buddha’

‘Let The Beauty/ We Love Be What We Do/ There Are Hundreds/ Of Ways To Kneel And/ Kiss The Ground--Rumi’

One hand-painted message was, so far as I know, original:
‘The Day’s Divinity/First thing you see’.

Below a painted trio of girls--one African, one Caucasian and one Asian--was inscribed:

’Children should be raised with Open Minds, Free Spirits and Clear Hearts’

Here, I thought, was the real, new America to be hoped for and worked for. Here was Blake’s and Whitman’s, Jeanette Armstrong’s and Leonard Peltier’s wished-for America.

I remembered what Medicine Story, an elder of the Rainbow Family, had said at our Hipstory performance in the Granola Funk Theater just one night earlier.

There on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula a roaring thunderstorm drummed the tarp strung overhead between the improvised Theater’s trussed limbs. Medicine Story was light-skinned. He’d been for decades “on the Rainbow Path". Lantern-lit but enshrouded by dark northwoods, Medicine Story was lean, long- haired and like grayed leather in his loincloth. He addressed the mostly twenty- somethings who had huddled under the tarp as shelter from the pelting rain.

Medicine Story said that he thought the Rainbow Gathering should be considered “Summer School for a better world.” He spoke earnestly but with modesty and necessary irony.

I also remembered my first time in Chicago, 35 years earlier.

Then, age 17, I was hitchhiking back from Montreal's World’s Fair to my Senior year at Bellinghamn High School in northwest Washington.

Noontime of that day, a salesman from Indiana let me out in the Loop so that I could go to the Art Institute. My jeans, T-shirt and jacket were almost dried by three hours in this helpful and thankfully untalkative salesman’s late-medal sedan.

I’d gotten soaked that morning. In its darkling dawn I’d been woken and rousted out of a Toledo Truckstop Motel and my refuge in one corner of a second-floor staitway. I’d fled with suitcase and sleeping-bag inside from that night’s Midwester thunderstorm, around 3:00 a.m., and slept a few hours more. The Motel’s partly bald manager cussed me. “Dirty goddamn Hippies! You don’t respect nothin’!” Summer of Love, remember. I cussed him back and rolled up my bag as he shouted and then I returned to the still sheeting rain. The salesman pulled over despite my long and sopping hair.

The Art Institute in 1967 let me first see original paintings by Matisse and Van Goghs. Their shocks of brilliance were so much greater than in books. They crossed their Gallery like explosions of the artful supernatural that compelled one to look closer.

What a difference between then and now! I thought in Rogers Park. What a difference over 35 years! How impossible to imagine then that we would now suffer“ ‘leaders’ ” such as George W. Bush!

How impossible to imagine in 1967 that we would look back at a President of the United States named Nixon and lesser, less individual personalities named Ford, Carter, Reagan, Clinton, and George Herbert Walker Bush!

In Rogers Park I thought again about how we of “ ‘the ‘60s Generation’ “ have been diminished What losses have come to the idealistic purposes, sharp minds and warm hearts that were more-or-less everyday—like that salesman stopping to pick up a drenched teen-ager along an on-ramp of I-80—then [….]

We once laughed at sex. We once sided with the struggling majority of Vietnamese, then with the struggling majority of Nicaraguans […}

Now: What a lot of sleep-walking into things! What a lot of PBS programs about otters and operas! [ …] What a lot of funding by Foundations that are used by the ruling few to evade taxes and control opinions! […]

And yet ... And yet ... A great deal for hope is still present and still arising, I thought in Rogers Park beside Lake Michigan.

“ ‘9/11’ ” must wake us from our sleep, I thought again.

Tens and hundreds of millions and even billions around the world already know what I hope this book '[FOFS] has shown: Parts of the U.S. Corporate Government committed the atrocities of 9/11/01 […]

Think of Dick Cheney. Think of Donald Rumsfeld. Think of what they’ve done and said. […]

Think of the Bush and Rockefeller and other families who have tricked and sacrified working-people into Wars over a century or over centuries.

You’ll realize, I hope, that “ ‘9/11’ ” is but one more ‘pretext’ in a bloody skein of horrors, a skein completely different from the colors living and painted in Rogers Park.

You’ll see, I hope, that we the people of the United States and the world can only depend on ourselves to make changes.

We must make changes from the ground up.

You’ll also know by now, I hope, that conspiracies are not theory. Conspiracies are history. Conspiracies are how ruling concentrations of criminal exploitersgrab more of existing power.

Revolutions, on the other hand, are how great masses of people make the changes that are vital for them. You’ll feel, I hope, that resistance unto revolutions is vital for us now.’

Thus, September of 2002, the month of completing FOFS.

By September 8, 2006 awareness had risen among the U.S. Public so much that even the Washington Post wrote about its Poll of readers regarding 9/11/01 : ‘Out of 64,000-some respondents, 59% answered Yes. The Government has left many questions unanwered about that day.’

This month, a far greater majority in every NATO Nation refuse any more injections of ‘vaccines’ for ‘COVID-19’ and thereby register at least their suspicion that we’ve been attacked by those Governments-promoted ‘vaccines’.

Great Britain.

Governments are in retreat. The United States withdraws Mandates.

Even the L.A. Times endorses California’s pullback on ‘vaccinating’ schoolchildren.

Publications such as Health Impact News and responsbile professionals such as in the European Medicines Agency and Dr. William Makis of Canada have helped to compel such freedom-giving, health-giving changes by keeping us informed.

We see mass deaths and injuries in Europe.

We see 96 children in Canada, age 18 and younger.

We now have infnitely greater resources of Media than we had in 1967 or 2002. We face much greater threats to our freedom and humanity.

We’re in a war for the future of those children represented in murals and statements for the public of Rogers Park—and publics everywhere.

‘Make no small plans’ …

‘Unity, Faith, Service’ …

‘Free To Skate’ …

’Children should be raised with Open Minds, Free Spirits and Clear Hearts’

Our own Media—such as Substack and more! Our own Markets—such as exist and can grow! Our own Banks—such as exist and can grow! Anything of further good is possible if we combine resources, resist, and look out first for each other. We are here to shine with our genius and to win even greater freedoms!

(The book “ ‘9/11’ “ / Facing Our Fascist State and the 2008 book that includes FOFS and 2005’s To Prevent the Next “ ‘9/11’ “, along with several interviews and other information, that 353-page book The World Is Turning … are available from many sellers online. (Please try to avoid Amazon.) Also, you know, The World Is Turning can be read for free online at at one of my Websites—Ur!Light.com. HERE again is the link: