Building Bridges, Not Barriers:
Mark Andersen has done outreach, advocacy, and organizing in inner-city DC since the mid-1980s. He was a co-founder of the punk activist collective Positive Force DC in 1985, and is the author (with Mark Jenkins) of Dance of Days: Two Decades of Punk in the Nation’s Capital (2001) and of All The Power: Revolution Without Illusion (2004). He lives with his beloved Tulin Ozdeger and their three cats in the Columbia Heights neighborhood of Washington, DC.
“The rain of tears is over. The slums will soon be a memory, we will turn our prisons into factories, our jails into storehouses and corn cribs, our men will walk upright. Now women will smile, children will laugh, hell will be for rent.”
“Everyone seems to be striving for utopia in the underground scene, but there are so many factions and they’re so segregated that it’s impossible. If you can’t get the underground movement to band together and stop bickering about unnecessary little things, then how the fuck do you expect to have an effect on the mass level?”
A skeptical interviewer once asked if I really expected everyone to stop drinking and eating meat, if that was what my “revolution” looked like. My response was to laugh quietly, smile, and say something like, “No, my revolution would look like each of us reaching toward the best of who we really are, while also looking out for and standing up for each other, past our many differences.”
Her more pointed—and interesting—follow-up question was simple: “Well, how do you expect to make that happen?” Ah, but isn’t that the million dollar question! (Image 29.1)
Image 29.1: Mark Andersen, Washington, DC, ca. 1990 Karland Killian
There is no simple answer to this query, and I am not going to pretend otherwise here. Instead, I am going to suggest one possible response by telling the story of a dance. Both very personal and deeply political, this is the dance between three partners: the idea called “straight edge,” and two interrelated—but distinct—concepts, “personal empowerment” and “movement/community building.”
The choreography here is not simple. As someone involved in punk since the mid-70s, it is easy to recall a myriad of ways that I have been empowered as a result. Moreover, I’ve seen literally hundreds of other people find purpose and liberation from the punk world, including through straight edge, of course.
However, as the above quotation from Kurt Cobain suggests, personal empowerment is no magic wand that automatically brings about anything approaching “revolution” in a broader sense. And, contrary to the utopian vision of Prohibitionist Billy Sunday, neither does our own freedom from addiction, chemical abuse, or other mind-clouding, obsessive behaviors.
No matter how developed or strong our own individual sense of direction or power, we human beings tend to divide into small tribes, with often arcane and exclusive rules. Our feeling of power can come not from inclusion, but from exclusion, drawing a clear line between “us” and “them,” the “bad” people and the “good” ones. Straight edge has too often been an example of this dynamic.
This approach is seductive, but ultimately futile, at least to the extent that it cuts us off from a more profound source of power: people standing together.
In many ways, individual empowerment is far easier than bringing folks together, much less keeping them united for some common cause, i.e., building a movement. Still more difficult is to build truly just, caring, and inclusive community, where we lift each other up towards our best possibilities, and look out for each other, past our differences, simply as a matter of course.
Yet, it is these less self-congratulatory, more self-demanding goals that we really need to aspire towards, past our own life drama and soul-search, at least if we hope to contribute to something as ambitious as revolution.
As I argued at length in All The Power: Revolution Without Illusion, while I truly believe that “revolution can start now with you,” I also know that there is no one-person revolution. Personal empowerment and a certain degree of balance, sobriety, and clarity are pre-conditions, yes; but they are only the beginning of a life-long process that, in the end, has to involve broad, diverse masses of other people to be worthy of the over-used and often devalued word “revolution.”
It is easy to say, but not so easy to do: real revolution means people together, becoming ever stronger, standing up consistently for a new vision of life, love, and liberation. In order to do this, we need each other ... and not just the people within our little group, who already agree with us, but the broader populace, filled with challenging but powerful diversity.
Honestly, this can be a special challenge for those of us committed to straight edge. Given that most people (at least in our North American society) are deeply wedded to a way of life that includes alcohol and other drugs, as well as meat, how can we expect to find common cause without fundamental compromises? After all, straight edge is unique in that it is an anti-drug philosophy that comes from a largely secular radical counter-culture. That unusual balance of apparent opposites is what gives straight edge much of its power as an idea.
But let’s set aside mainstream society for a moment, and return to Cobain’s quote: sad to say, few concepts within the punk community have been as divisive as the simple, smart idea that we might have an edge on fighting the system, being ourselves, and uncovering truth if we didn’t befog ourselves with drugs or other obsessive, addictive behaviors. To some degree, this simply shows how radical that notion is—but it also suggests the shortcomings of straight edge supporters.
As a co-founder of Positive Force DC, the first organized political voice from within the DC punk scene—birthplace of straight edge—I have necessarily had to wrestle with the complications of mixing an anti-drug philosophy with an effort at political mobilization ... and I know that to strike the proper balance is not easy.
In fact, it has been tough enough to suggest perhaps the most unsettling question of all for those of us simultaneously committed to straight edge and the pursuit of fundamental transformation: could it be that straight edge is actually counter-revolutionary, a barrier that keeps people apart, divided?
The short, honest answer is yes, straight edge can be a barrier—but it doesn’t have to be. If we do the dance in the right way, straight edge can help empower us, and provide a bridge to other communities ... and, thus, to revolution.
“Without community, there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression.”
For me, the process of reclaiming straight edge as a friend to revolution begins by simply remembering the community I came from: a rural, largely Scandinavian immigrant population rooted somewhat uneasily on and adjacent to the Fort Peck Indian Reservation in Sheridan County, Montana.
My initial punk rebellion was against what I saw as the “twin temples” of the rural working class: the church and the bar. This is to say that alcohol—and the community that grew up around consuming it—assumed an almost religious significance in my home county, as in other working class communities around the country.
As far as I could tell as a teenager, this faith was no liberation, but, rather, a tyranny. Perhaps even more than organized religion, alcohol seemed to be “opium for the masses” that kept people enslaved to a corporate-dominated, dead-end system, where one’s life was literally consumed by work, tedious back-breaking labor that mostly benefited rich people far from northeastern Montana. On the reservation, the ugliness was even more obvious, as alcoholism was a plague in the native population, nearly completing the genocide begun by the guns, treachery, and territorial expansion of white people a century before.
For reasons I still don’t fully understand, from the outset, I rejected drinking, smoking, and casual sex. In part, a dim awareness of alcohol-related domestic violence in a nearby native family (whose kids were my closest friends and play mates) must have had an impact. Also, learning about the drug-related deaths of early inspirations like Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Jim Morrison surely helped turn me against that aspect of the 60s counter-culture.
New insights arrived as I grew older and struggled with the harsh grind of manual labor. I became outraged at the role of alcohol and other drugs in preparing my peers for a life of conformity and toil by providing an outlet for frustration, a way to dispel—temporarily and often at great cost—boredom and lack of meaning.
Finally, my critique was hardened by peer pressure to “fit in” by drinking or drugging. Embittered by the push to conform, I vowed to follow my own conscience, and sacrifice the social support of my peer group.
In these days before there was a movement called “straight edge,” I was lucky to have encouragement in my otherwise lonely stand—doubly isolated, given my estrangement from the church—from the likes of Ted Nugent, Jonathan Richman of the Modern Lovers, and early west coast punks, the Dils. Nugent’s crazed Detroit rock, Richman’s gawky, vulnerable-yet-defiant anthem “I’m Straight,” and the Dils’ idea of punk as a rebirth of personal integrity, rejecting clichés of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll—these were the life-preservers I held to my chest in the stormy seas of teenage life.
This history is precious to me, and the sense of personal power I discovered was truly life-saving. Yet, it holds darker lessons as well.
Ted Nugent’s steady slide to the far right over the past three decades suggests that simply not consuming drugs is hardly a guarantee of progressive—much less revolutionary—politics. Indeed, those back home who shared my anti-drug stance tended to be conservative religious folk, who generally would have been horrified by my other opinions. At the same time, my outspokenly self-righteous stance tended to create an immense distance from my peer group, as well as most of my home county.
At the time, this hardly concerned me, as I was, in effect, saying “goodbye and good riddance to it all!” In short, my struggle was all about “me,” not really at all about any sort of “we,” any sense of commitment to collective action.
At the time—as with most disaffected teens—it probably couldn’t have been any other way. I was seeking identity, personal purpose, and power; without this foundation, I was just an alienated, verging-on-suicidal kid. However, as I exited Sheridan County at the end of the 1970s, settling into college life in western Montana, I began to shift from a solitary rebel pose to a broader activism.
At college, drugs and alcohol were, if anything, even more ubiquitous. Nonetheless, I began to connect to other students—neo-hippie types, church-goers, even a tiny number of other punks—on the basis of shared activist goals.
I heard about “straight edge” and the DC punk scene for the first time there in 1981. I adopted the label, and the knowledge of this broader movement strengthened my own personal position. Still, that stance started to retreat in importance in comparison to my activism, my deepening education, and my broader connection to punk. I studied radical ideologies like Marxism, anarchism, feminism, gay liberation, and deep ecology, reveling in the connections I discovered to the ideas in my favorite punk songs.
My imagination was captured by a new idea: a potentially revolutionary movement of misfits and throwaways celebrated by Tom Robinson Band (TRB) in their anthem “Power in the Darkness.” TRB didn’t want a solitary, purist stand; they wanted to bring the outsiders—punks, gays and lesbians, hippies, poor folks, labor unionists, racial minorities, immigrants—together to take over and remake society in a fundamentally more just and inclusive way: revolution.
For me, this was a huge step forward. Not only did this vision make sense ideologically, but it suggested, in principle, how to organize; i.e. broadly, not in a narrow, exclusive counter-cultural sense. While I could try to uphold a drug- and illusion-free lifestyle, my politics required straight edge as such to be, at best, the firm foundation underlying my engagement with other issues, issues that could provide common ground for collective action.
In fact, as I grew in my political consciousness, it became apparent that this meant that I had to make peace with Sheridan County and its people. Why? Well, simply because they were part of the people the revolution was for, the ones who were needed to build the movement, part of the power needed to make it real!
Moreover, the actual positive aspects of the bar (and church) scenes, as places where people met, became friends, and laughed and worshipped and shared their truths, however imperfectly, became increasingly clear. It seems ridiculous to have to say this, but say it I will: I came to recognize that not everyone in the “twin temples” was addicted, deluded, or a hypocrite; in retrospect, many led lives of admirable character and insight.
The dilemma for me as a would-be revolutionary became ever more apparent. While my personal integrity (sense of righteous superiority?) was intact, where was my community? After all, as the trailblazing African-American lesbian feminist writer/activist Audre Lorde argued, without community—a broader mass of people standing together—there is no real liberation.
Also left unanswered was the question of how to bring this broader mobilization about, especially for someone like me, who had survived as a solitary misfit, cut off from people at large. I was supposed to now be a “people-person,” an organizer, a community-builder? Bit by bit, in group after group, with issue after issue, I tried to stretch to fill this new role.
My dance had taken me from personal empowerment to my first efforts at collective action. However, the ongoing challenge to grow implied by straight edge as much as by revolution was bringing me to a cross roads, caught between seeking a countercultural enclave or trying to help build a mass movement.
“Isolation is the biggest barrier to change.”
In 1984, I left Montana and said hello to Washington, DC, and its renowned punk scene. In the two years after my arrival, I helped to co-found Positive Force DC (PF), left behind my academic studies, and immersed myself in the DC underground. This was, I would come to realize, both a step forward, but also potentially a detour into counter-cultural illusions, with straight edge playing a significant—but not always positive—role in this volatile mix.
PF’s original statement of purpose borrowed the above phrase from a young Crass-inspired band with an odd name: Chumbawamba. Simple but telling, the quote suggests that, from its very beginning, PF sought to break down barriers, at least within the punk scene, to lessen the divisions that kept people apart. The reasoning was simple, inarguable: even as society’s misfits, we need each other.
This was true even if we were simply seeking our power as individuals—but it was even more necessary in order to discover the far greater power we could have together. We helped each other to be powerful; simply by getting punks in the same room together, speaking the dreams of our hearts to others, perhaps for the first time, PF helped to bring those dreams closer to realization.
This was even more true given that the dream we were stretching toward was not simply personal empowerment, or some general social change, but revolution itself: a broader, deeper social transformation, “radical” in the sense of going to the roots of our terrible social divides and economic injustice.
This was powerful for me, as for the first time I found myself within an activist group that was at least trying to ask the fundamental questions—including around drugs and youth culture—and grope towards some answers.
At the same time, another version of “radical” was left largely unexamined: how to go to the roots of power relations, to build the power necessary to address these issues by drawing a mass of people together. By creating a group so clearly based in a punk underground, even as we were able to ask deeper and broader questions, in a way I was regressing from my earlier, more diverse community engagement, moving—ironically enough—towards a more isolated context.
In college town Montana, there had been no punk subculture to embrace in the early 1980s. Illusions of a “pure” punk counter-cultural enclave were ludicrous, as there were so few punks around—and misfits of every stripe tended to flock together as a result, to build our own bit of “power in the darkness.” In DC, however, punk and other radical communities were large enough to survive on their own, to go their own way, and the resulting distance between different groups could be immense. The shortcomings—and irony—of this approach would soon become obvious.
As for straight edge, from the beginning PF sought to strike a balance that mixed both principled and practical concerns. Although our original statement of purpose rejected the idea of “excessive drugs and drinking as the only means of rebellion or escape,” this anti-drug critique was neither absolutist—in that it didn’t require complete abstinence—or exclusive, in that it was only one element of many in the mix of ideas that made up our group. In any case, being straight edge was never a requirement for PF membership.
Still, this was an advance in certain regards, as no other activist group I had been a part of even raised the issue. To be fair, some 60s radical groups such as the Black Panthers or the Progressive Labor faction of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) had explicitly anti-drug stands, at least at points in their history.
Now, as then, however, most were under the sway of the siren song of “drugs-as-liberation,” the romantic idea of chemically-assisted rebellion that stretched back to Bohemia, absinthe, and drunken gutter poets; an image cemented by the Beat Generation and offered up for mass consumption by the hippie movement.
Even if most counter-cultural groups that were effective at all quickly moderated their chemical excess, the idea was still left out there festering, the idea that recreational drug use was progressive, even liberating. Again, to be fair, perhaps drugs could play this role in certain limited circumstances, but the danger of crippling addictions and chemical-fueled illusions surely outweighed the benefits. In addition, as many a rueful 60s radical came to recognize, the romance of chemicals could lead to distracting wrangles with the law.
PF was attempting to provide a counter to this wrong-headed history. Our alliance with the Dischord Records community during “Revolution Summer” of 1985 helped to advance our work within the limited confines of the underground. Our meetings were a vibrant, diverse—if often chaotic—brew of generic leftism, heavily tinged with anarchism as well as a dash of revolutionary communism. Ideology was never our forte, but action on issues like nuclear war, Central America, South Africa, homelessness, hunger, and animal rights. In all of this, we went far beyond simple straight edge dogma.
When PF started its own communal house in January of 1987, straight edge was a fundamental part of its operation, as drugs and meat were explicitly banned from the premises. In part, this was a principled matter—taking the anti-drug idea a couple steps further—but there was also a strong practical aspect to it as well. After all, we were trying to create a free space for radical political work that would inevitably involve many teenagers, not of legal age to drink. To allow drinking or other drug use in that context was to invite issues with the police, and on terms that were highly disadvantageous to us as a group.
The wisdom of this approach was soon vindicated, as the infamous Meese Is A Pig poster campaign (largely coordinated from the Dischord and PF houses) brought scrutiny from not only local police but the FBI as well. As it happened, the illegal actions of the authorities soon boomeranged on them; the subsequent press firestorm proved embarrassing in the extreme to both Meese (who soon resigned as Attorney General) and the FBI who abruptly pulled back from its harassment.
Over the years, the drug-free aspect of PF House was sometimes debated—and occasionally flouted in various ways—but despite ongoing attention from the authorities over the fourteen years of its existence, our work was never significantly disrupted. Moreover, by creating a space that encouraged a certain anti-drug stance while never regulating what people did away from the house and the work, an equilibrium was created where all parts of the scene could work together on shared causes without a divide between straight edge adherents and drug-takers becoming significant. The relatively high profile of the group in the DC area also provided a clear example of how straight edge ideas could co-exist with collective political action, offering a quite different version of youth rebellion than Sixties—or Sid Vicious-related-punk—clichés.
In other words, PF had successfully danced around the limitations of straight edge as a barrier to collective action. But was this revolution? Yes, in certain ways. However, in other, deeper aspects? No, it wasn’t, not yet, not really—because we were running the risk of trapping ourselves in the underground.
“Most of the murders in DC are not ‘drug-killings’ but ‘money killings.’ It’s capitalism at its best. Drugs should be legalized. I’m not into any dope, I think it’s stupid shit, but I know about economics, I know about people who are poor and I know about people wanting money quick. It’s the American Way, isn’t it?”
The shortcomings of PF’s counter-cultural approach were highlighted by our attempt to step outside the underground, through our engagement in the crisis of poverty, violence, and drugs erupting in DC’s inner city. By the end of the 1980s, DC was the “murder capital of America,” facing an unprecedented spike in killings and other violence generated by the arrival of a new drug—crack cocaine—in a desperate and despairing urban environment.
By this time, I had begun to do outreach and advocacy work with low-income seniors in areas of DC that were ground zero in not only the “war on drugs” but this exploding “drug war.” I was not alone in this; numerous DC punks had begun to step towards direct engagement with these issues so close to home.
Straight edge would appear to have a lot to contribute to this discussion, at least for those who were willing to look past the surface, to not let our approach to drug policy be impaired by our dislike for drugs. As a group, PF didn’t support drug use as a group, of course, but neither did we support the counter-productive laws that were sending thousands of inner-city youth to jail.
This stance was expressed not only in our direct service work, but also by a series of benefit shows headlined by Fugazi, including a “Freeze the Drug War” event with Sonic Youth, an inner-city fundraiser with Chumbawamba, and an anti-drug-war rally in Malcolm X Park, near—as were most of our benefits—to areas in Columbia Heights and Shaw where the violence was raging.
As the above words of Fugazi’s Ian MacKaye suggest, our version of straight edge did not simply amount to counseling abstinence. We tried to look deeper, ask the uncomfortable questions of ourselves and of the system. The answers were not reassuring; to us, it seemed almost as if the system was set up to kill or criminalize an entire generation of inner city African-American youth.
This was not news to many inner city residents, some of whom muttered darkly that drugs were a form of genocide; rap superstars Public Enemy spoke of “One Million Bottle Bags” in a 1991 anti-drug rant.
Still, with shoddy schools, scant economic opportunity, and a sense of despair and abandonment in their neighborhoods, the only way for many of these kids towards the “American Dream” of material success was through illegal drugs. Indeed, it was the major economy in parts of the areas where I worked, and where PF was increasingly engaged delivering groceries, visiting seniors, handing out safe needle kits, and helping with tutoring programs for school kids.
As this suggests, PF had an ambivalent and reasonably humble stance, informed by our intimate engagement in such communities. Not all straight edge-related voices spoke with this tone, however. In the song “Firestorm,” influential band Earth Crisis railed against the “poison” flooding the inner city, calling down righteous, almost biblical wrath on such communities: “a firestorm to purify the bane that society drowns in.”
The rage expressed in “Firestorm”—and by other straight edge voices in less dramatic but just as real forms at the time—was well-intended and surely understandable. The social costs exacted by drugs were truly immense, with the inner city bearing the burden of being the dope market for the broader metro area. Seeing the cost up close and personal, I was bereft, straining at the edge of reason, almost lost in a sense of the terrible waste of drugs and the drug war.
At the same time, however, there was a certain lack of understanding in this knee-jerk straight edge response. This was not simply a moral question; powerful economic forces were driving youth to the street corners to sell drugs. There was a pathology at work, yes, but not simply of the inner city, but of our unequal, drug-demanding, money-mad society as a whole.
Clearly, jailing thousands upon thousands of inner city kids was not going to solve this problem; nor was a self-righteous call for “total war.” In 1919, Billy Sunday had touted the revolutionary transformation that Prohibition was supposed to bring about. However, in the end, revolution was hard to find; the rise of bootlegging and organized crime was a more obvious result.
While Earth Crisis plainly wanted to “take back” the inner city, rising to the call of the immense suffering there, their approach ran the risk of simply fanning the flames of police repression and rampant incarceration without touching the root causes of the tragedy.
At the same time, for all our engagement with these issues close up, and our resultant more nuanced stance, PF had no real strategy to do anything but provide a bit of fuel for organizations serving the front line communities, and to make a largely rhetorical statement against the drug war.
This effort was not without value. Our experiences could help transform us and those whose lives we touched. But we were just band-aids, unable to shift the broader social forces of the Reagan-Bush-Clinton years, forces that were shredding “safety net” programs and initiatives of social uplift. How could we actually “turn the tide” (to use the words of Earth Crisis) and bring about the fundamental change needed?
The answer: we couldn’t, not simply from one relatively insular community, reaching out from underground. The immensity of the forces we were engaged with, compared to the tools at our command, suggested a cosmic mismatch. Quite simply, we were just not up for the task ... not alone, anyway.
Comfortable but all-too-contained in our underground circles, we had little hope of rallying the massive cross-class, cross-race movement necessary to shift the equation of economic inequality and racism, to turn the tide of inner city abandonment and tragic human waste.
This showed the flimsy nature of our “revolution.” We were correct in recognizing this shortfall, but were perhaps not as willing to acknowledge its lesson: our desire to engage in a constructive, comprehensive way was bound to push us further out of our tidy subcultural nook into a tricky dance with broader society, with those different from us, even with the mainstream we disdained.
“Advocating the mere tolerance of difference is the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic ... Community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist ... It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths.”
My growing understanding of the limits of the underground roughly coincided with punk’s post- “Smells like Teen Spirit” explosion into the rock mainstream and, through that, into mainstream society in general.
It was in this context that Kurt Cobain made the insightful comment quoted at the outset of this essay. If perhaps a bit self-justifying, the truth of Cobain’s words can’t be denied: if we were serious about anything approaching revolution, how could we remain so divided, even within our little tribe?
I consciously chose the Cobain quote to press this issue, partly because—for obvious reasons—he is not highly regarded in straight edge circles. The truth is the truth, however, no matter the source. As always, we need to be careful, lest we listen to a far too narrow set of voices and find ourselves caught in an echo chamber that communicates little more than our own self-satisfaction.
This is a danger inherent in this very collection, as something as narrow as “hardcore punk” naturally limits the reach of the ideas contained in these pages, in this very essay. That self-limitation can be overcome only with sustained, thoughtful engagement outside our comfort zones, in open-ended conversation and mobilization with broader communities.
I have written an entire book about this challenge— All The Power —so won’t tarry with it much here, except to focus once again on this critical point: if we are not careful, straight edge—or any other counter-cultural fixation—becomes a barrier to effective coalition and community building. While I still try to live a drug- and illusion-free life, I recognize that how we do something can be almost as important as what we do.
Put plainly, if we approach straight edge as something that makes us better than others, rather than as an aid to being fully aware and engaged in dialogue with other people and communities in order to be more effective in our learning and our work, we have lost the game. Quite simply, we need to live in a way that doesn’t cut us off from others, as without each other, revolution is impossible.
This doesn’t mean that we should turn away from our ideals or deny the obvious value of straight edge ... but it does mean that we try to live this idea, to preach our gospel—as it were—with our actions, and not with self-righteous rhetoric.
A possible answer begins by clarifying what we do ourselves, and why we do it, while clearly distinguishing that from what we require of others. We need to explore our own reasons for being straight edge, and make sure they are sound, coming from a place of honest self-challenge rather than intoxicating self-righteousness.
Nor is just not taking drugs or not eating meat enough to qualify as “straight edge.” No, we need to look more deeply, to see how other things can become addictive, blinding us to reality, shrouding us in illusions that keep us self-satisfied but ineffective. If straight edge is to be anything real in a revolutionary sense, at base it is a commitment to truth, to being willing to grow.
This is simple to say, and awfully hard to do—but if we don’t build from the right foundation, heading toward the proper goal, how can we ever succeed? Straight edge helps us to have this foundation ... but it can’t end there.
Taken in this way, straight edge is the delicate, demanding ballet that allows us to truly connect to others, the exact attitude that we will need in order to stay true to the process of revolution.
This essay is a story of that dance, the process of opening up to life, to growth. If we are committed to revolution, we need to judge our activism, our straight edge lifestyles on whether they are effective in connecting us to build power together with other people. If they are not doing this, if they are just successful at making us feel superior, better than others, they are an enemy of transformation.
The revolutionary call of straight edge, then, as of punk, is that of a place to start, not an ending in itself. Its promise and possibility is to make us strong to go out into other communities, able to listen, learn, and grow, even as we try to bring broader social change. This is a process that is profoundly aided by the clarity and health that drug-free, meat-free lifestyles can bring—but it is not the victory itself.
From a solid base, however, we can hope to see how to be able to harness our personal power to connect with, touch, and build transforming community with other people, while taking them as they are. This is a path not towards purity, but balance; a way for straight edge to not be a barrier, but a bridge to community—and thus to revolution.
If we take straight edge in this best, most self-challenging, and open way, we can be present for the critical, creative spark which Audre Lorde rightly claims that the meeting of differences can bring. If we are really aware and attentive, we can do much a better job of reaching out, befriending those quite different from us, slowly building a broad, mass, majority movement for fundamental change from diverse, unexpected elements.
For me, this is the essence of what Positive Force DC—and its close ally, the We Are Family senior outreach network—now tries to do. Relationships are key, and particularly building them with people quite different from us. Let me repeat that: relationships are key. In the end, we absolutely, positively need each other.
Our differences can be our greatest strength, as Lorde says. If we are awake enough to be truly present for this moment and for each other, we will find much to learn as well as to teach.
In the end, we will discover that together—and only together—we can overcome.