Benjamin Britton’s Reviews > War in the Neighborhood > Status Update

Finally the storm troopers forced their way into the upper floors, they found, to their diappointment, no noses to break, no wrists to cuff, no bodies to drag downtown to central booking. The bilding was empty, with only the sound of reggae
music echoing through the corrdors.
“Get up, stand up . . .
stand up for your rights!”

"... women shall be able to occupy positions of leadership in the organization.”
-- Women’s Revolutionary Law of the EZLN

“A young man who throws a 40 ouncer usually has consumed the contents thereof.”

“What a relief!
I feel like a soldier and I look like a thief.”
•the Clash

“It must come from the poor, a rebellion of the spirit, that reaffirms their intrinsic human worth, based upon who they are, rather than what they possess.”
- Mumia Abu-Jamal

"...nothing to thrust out the window, no white flag
this flesh is all i have to offer, to make the play with this immediate head, what it comes up with, my move
as we slither over the Go board, stepping always,
(we hope) between the lines”
--Diane DePrima

"It's as if we don’t count. The whole world treats us as if we don’t count, and the only interest they ever take in us is when they hear we are a menace. They treat us like a menace and try to drive us away as enemies.”
--League of Homeless Youth, 1933

What Seth Tobocman unfolds in these pages, though, is just that, the story of community forged and tested in the heat of emergency.

We turn street corners into liberated zones” recalls Tobocman in his Conclusion to War. “For a moment ... a space opens up and we are in control.”