LAILAH NAESH

“LIVE YOUR LIFE”  

An American Mayakovsky Production

A PLAY

Written By 

Walter Sebastian Adler 

CAST

Adoneav, a Fugitive

Sasho,  a Voorhi

Medvinsky, a Gangster

Dmitry, a Lawyer

Entwisle, a Patriot

Maria Silverstova, a Prostitute

Appleovich, a Subversive

  Anya, a Martyr

Newey, A Prisoner

Reed, a Marine

Rhubarb, a Mystic

Abu Hamsa, a Fixer

  Mountain, a Professional soldier 

Spirit of War, a Guerrilla

Goldy, a Courtesan

A MIDDLE EASTERN WESTERN

Synopsis: A volunteer returns from a foreign war to “Newyorkgrad”. He is re-united with old friends at a Tavern he is hiding out in, many of which he believed had died in the war. The secret police pursue him. Someone wants him dead. He is haunted by a woman that wrote to him every day on the front, Goldy, a singer who is about to marry her wealthy patron. Adonaev is soon joined by a shot girl, police spy, a gangster, an anarchist and a person who plans to kill him. 

Framing mechanism: A man hides out in a Tavern. He is joined over the course of Act 1 by many of his “dead friends”. They inquire about varying matters and engage him in drinks, poetry and song. It is not ultimately clear if he is himself dead, in some purgatory, or living out an unhinged non-reality confined in a mental hospital. It is revealed that at midnight tomorrow the love of his life will marry a wealthy man for citizenship. 

In Act 2 varying charterers previously introduced take hostages at the Millennium Theatre, in an effort to stop the marriage, which the media declares an “act of terror”, related to the unknown foreign war. Sebastian and his group are ultimately killed with bullets and poisonous gas.  

Conflict: In Act 1, tension builds as 1 or more of the “Old and New Friends” are planning to kill fugitive Sebastian. Ends with a shoot out. In Act 2, the friends take hostages at a theatre, they all are ultimately killed when the police pump in poison gas and then raid the building.

ACT ONE

SCENE 1

SET IN:

NEWYORKGRAD

Adonaev, a fugitive is being hidden in a Tavern. A soldier returning from a foreign war, losing his mind. A shot girl, Maria Silverstova with forty bullet shots, sells Vodka based drinks. Ever present smoking a cigar is Sasho, the owner. Also, the Gangster Medvinsky, an old friend of Sebastian and Peter, a marine and decorated war veteran. They are later joined by Dmitry, a lawyer bringing bad news of a wedding. Watson Entwisle, newly returned from the colonies with news of an uprising there. Alexander an anarchist, and a professional Solider “Mountain Rock” are all veterans from the war. And Siegfried Sassoon, a Cuban Actor shows up to warn Sebastian the police are looking for him. 

Improbably in walks Anya Campbell, who died in the war. Dan Newey, who was last known to be in Prison; a young sultry Lebanese debutante Anya Rhubarb, the Fixer Ayar Rassool and the burly Guerrilla commander Jansher the Georgian.)

One or more of these old and newly dead friends plans to murder Adonaev. He is told that around midnight the next day Goldy his confidant will soon marry her patron after curtain call at the Millennium Theatre.

SONG

Well I guess I didn’t die in the war!

I’m alive!

But my friends are dead.

I survived to say the most and do the least.

We are the ones who held the barricades

I just returned, 

On a shuttle from the fires of the Middle East,

I survived, I survived by happenstance,

This I know!

When dozens that I slept beside are now in coffins,

In the ground below.

This revolution is a first, and perhaps also a last chance.  

Their fearless faces,

 Are now martyr posters on a wall,

Reports are now coming in, the Turkish Army is fast advancing;

Rojava will likely fall!

Well I guess I didn’t die in the war!

I’m alive!

But my friends are dead.

I walk in concentric circles, I try to tell our story,

A story etched upon my brain.

I tell the tale to many scared civilians, they look at me like a mad man,

A foreign person person gone insane! 

Thanks to the fallen, the Islamic State is now defeated.

Thanks to to the YPG and YPJ these bandits have retreated.

Now raise the glass or the flag!

For what we’ve done! 

American thanks, still it remains unsaid.

There was a clear and present danger,

A vile Jihadist menance,

Lives lost, flags flown high, the dead cannot mourn the dead. 

Thanks to my training:

I can stay awake for days,

Here I am! 

Here I am.

I’m alive, I’m alive but my friends are dead,

Find me the means, count me in all the ways! 

Back in this fortress of a city,

In the heart of the Empire,

Make a stand;

You know the way!

This is your land.

What we gave and what we lost is a nightmare, that forever will replay!

On the very soil of my homeland, 

the total safety of this place,

I beg my God, I beg my family and my lovers,

Give me bullet.

Let me not die in disgrace!

In my adopted not-a-country Kurdistan,

The enemy advances 

The Turkish Army kills my people, burns our cities,

Aims to defeat our revolution,

What are the odds,

What are the chances?

I know forever I will carry, the faces of my dead friends, dagger etched inside me the on the inner most compartment of my mind,

There so much hurry up and waiting, there were bodies on the road,

40,000 died for Kurdistan!

Everything around you could explode!

There was fire on the mountains there, there was bloody murder in the streets,

There was marching, there was dying,

And defeating

There was attacking,

There was terror,

There going forward then retreating.   

Thank to my training,

I can take apart a rifle. I can put it back together. 

Thanks to my training,

I can engage in democracy, I can believe we can do better. 

Well I guess I didn’t die in the war!

I’m alive! I’m alive!

But my friends are dead.

I was hiding in that Tavern, then Adonaev said: 

ADONAEV:

I had spent my 33rd birthday in a Chinese bathhouse, if your could call it a bath house in Sulymaniya. During our border re-entry run from Rojava back into Iraq, most of our column was blown apart in missile strikes, we hid in a P.K.K. dug out for two days. I was covered in piss, shit blood, mostly other people’s blood, mostly my own piss. 

Jansher, my commander, I think he died. Died getting us out of Rojava before the Turkish invasion began. I turned 33. An Armenian volunteer bought me an oriental woman, but all I wanted to do was take a long hot shower. Wash the filth and death off of me. Get out of that fucking uniform forever, get on the next evacuation shuttle. Get back to Daria Andreavna alive. 

Now!I am back in Newyorkgrad, far from the war in Iraq, Syria and Yemen. But! The war and the ghosts never leave me. I ride the train with plump and ignorant civilians. Some Chornay put on an obnoxious show time. 

By way of Baghdad then Cairo, now I am back. My mind isn’t where I had thought I’d left it and nether are any of my friends and family. Is it March? It’s March or it’s April. I have just done a forty day bid in the hospital. Might have been eighty with a two day run for the mountains in between. I might be facing an assault charge. I might be tailed. I hide in the only place I think I can fit in. A Tavern on Ludlow street. I call Sasho from a pay phone. He says to lay low and head to the Tavern riht before night fall.

I don’t know what the hospitals did to me, actually. I just want to kill myself. 

I show up to the Tavern very early. The place is empty. The owner Sasho isn’t around nor is my friend and associate, the Gangster Medvinsky.

On the wire, I heard Ms. Daria Andreavna will get married tomorrow on her 29th birthday, right after the curtain call on a play she sings in, in Midtown. She wrote me every day during the war. I think I’m just too late.

I think I’m being followed. I threw my phone in the river. Now I don’t have a phone. I’m either chasing myself in a circle around the Isle of Man, or the follow follow men are trailing me. Seeing who I meet with, before the pick me up again. 

Well anyway, there’s only one way in, but four ways out of this Bulgarian tavern.

Other than a pity coffee here and there, everyone is nervous about me and giving me tons of space. Avoiding me that is to say. Not Medvinsky, he’s buying me drink. Out in the wide open. Like he doesn’t give a fuck!

In walks a Shot girl Maria Silverstova.

ADONAEV

Zdrastvistia.

SILVERSTOVA

Why Hello my very strange one, my wayward and my leeward Amerikanski. You can say to me Privet, my old new friend. I know you naked.

ADONAEV

I had met Maria at the Bulgarian Bar the very night I got off the evacuation plane. I had met her again on international working woman’s day.

She gave me a good price. There are 70 Rubles in Dollar. Her shots, they cost 280. Her body much more.

SILVERSTOVA

I tell people I’m from Moscow, though of course I am not.

My waist is tight and breasts are quite ample. It is all contained under a little black cock tail dress. Holding around forty plastic bullets of Vodka; I sell them in the Tavern for 70 Rubles apiece. Ethnically speaking I am clearly one of Russia’s 157 sub-ethnicities, perhaps a Chechen, perhaps part Tajik or Uzbek. I think I am a very good listener.

Sasho said you were coming to hide out with us.

ADONAEV

I’m looking for Medvinsky.

SILVERSTOVA

 And Medvinsky, he looks for you.

SILVERSTOVA:

Sasho said “try and make him happy”.

Sasho has a long history with him. Aiding and abetting a terrorist. The Bulgarians have never really expelled him from that ugly little tavern. In an on scene kind of way, maybe they encourage him. Giving him a refuge.

Adonaev doesn’t remember meeting me 80 days ago. He came here right from the airport. Had Sasho the Voorhi sort him out some work and some papers.

He looked and still looks like a terrifying person, a real mad man.

He had just gotten that very same night in a stupid fist fight, beat a Chornay half to death yelling racial epitaphs. And almost been asked to exit, relinquish his tavern card last Saturday.

I draw him over to a small table, though on duty as shot girl I remain an inquisitive journalist.

ADONAEV

Maria, Tovarish Maria how goes the life of night?

SILVERSTOVA:

I’m alive. It’s a start. Would you like a drink?

ADONAEV

    Not on your ruble.

SILVERSTOVA:

There’s other Rubles to pour from. Let’s sit.

Tell me about the Civil War. A little bit, enough to have a sense of what anyone is supposed to do about you or your friends who came back to us.

ADONAEV:

More good was done than any evil, by my otriad anyway. I’m sure the others killed more Jihadists and I did more medical care, but it was all a group effort. But really, few of my friends survived the war. 

The Arabs and Kurds are just going to grind away until Turkey rolls in to squash the entire revolution.

SILVERSTOVA:

What Otriad did you serve in? I’m a little familiar with actors.

ADONAEV:

I served in the Shahid Firat Tabor of the People’s Protection Units, the Y.P.G.

SILVERSTOVA:

Y.P.G.?

ADONAEV:

The Kurdish Militia recieving American support to defeat the Islamic State.

SILVERSTOVA:

Freedom fighting or U.S. Imperialism, maybe both?

ADONAEV:

We were defending the only Democracy in the Middle East besides Israel. Turkey was bombing us from the North, Al Qaeda attacking from Idlib in the West, the Hashid Ashabi Popular Mobilization forces from the east and ISIS from the south. 

You take guns from who offers them in that situation.

SILVERSTOVA:

So, on the news tonight. Turkey has begun a new Operation against Rojava. You are aware Afrin Canton is almost completely over run and Mambij is next and the Turkish army will probably undo all if any progress you all had made out there, against who ever it was the Americans had you fighting? And have now abandoned.

ADONAEV:

I don’t sleep well anymore. I use combinations of masturbation, drinking and drugs to put the lights out, I guess some emphasis on the drinking too. I get it. We all died or almost died or didn’t die and it was all for nothing. I get it. And Daria Andreavna and will never see each other again, and I writhe in pain avoiding my face in the mirror.

I need from you, or Medvinsky. A different kind of bullet.

SILVERSTOVA:

Prosto! You need a new whore! Someone to pay to love you ever better. Not me, I’m too much for you too. I too want luxury carrots remember, not paintings or any poems. The couple times we eye to eyed, we french kissed, it just makes me pity you a lot.

You’re basically not a man to me or Daria Andreavna. You have no car, no good job, no property and for right now no ability to move beyond your own paralysis. I and she and others like us have to think about papers.

ADONAEV:

Ne-yet Prosto. Not simple. I need a revolver so I can restively and decisively shoot myself in the head like a man! Or turn it on her fat ugly Patron. That will be enough. I should have died with my friends in Afrin.

Do you even possess the understanding to know what is on the table there? Do you even have the care? They were liberating the women, they were instituting a democracy and they were planting trees. I feel like I briefly defended a utopia, only to be cast out.

Sent back here where I am less than a man. Less than criminal!

SILVERSTOVA:

Prosto! (Simple) Go back to the begging of the narrative and explain me your motivation!

Tell me how your valiant and slightly suicidal mission began and the connection between your ideas on free life verses a meaningful life in motion. Be, fucking linear! Tell the tale from beginning to end instead of dancing around like a crazy person.

ADONAEV:

Tovarish Maria, I would like a dance from you first. I will pay the full amount in dollars.

SILVERSTOVA:

Your money Tovarish, they say is no good here. You can’t pay for a bullet or dance. You can’t pay in Rubles, Dollars or faceless Dinars. 

You can buy time with or with out sympathy.

ADONAEV:

Sympathies with the resistance?

SILVERSTOVA:

Sympathy with an American Mayakovsky, and those who enjoy his performances. Shamelessly flailing, shamelessly throwing himself in front of armies and trains, over what?

ADONAEV:

You do in fact know what!

SILVERSTOVA:

You know I don’t partake in the lap land for free. Don’t you have a forest wife in Nizhny Novgorod as well as a son somewhere? It will cost you nine hundred dollars to degrade yourself and me tonight.

That actually 64,800 Rubles an hour. Supply and demand.

I don’t think you even have enough for a bullet. Certainly not enough to buy the only thing you really want.

ADONAEV:

I don’t have 100 Rubles to my name.

SILVERSTOVA:

Then you get what you pay for, which is nothingly nothings.

ADONAEV:

What is my story worth?

SILVERSTOVA:

It’s worth less than a lap dance.

ADONAEV:

I need her you know.

SILVERSTOVA:

Oh that we all know.

“It doesn’t take a weather man or woman, to know which way the winds blow.” Old American saying?

   ADONAEV:

I don’t follow pretty your little allegory.

SILVERSTOVA:

Old Russian saying, “I want to dance on your face until your mask falls off.”

    ADONAEV:

     That one I understood, perfectly.

SILVERSTOVA:

As if I was making reports in Russian, or Turkish.

“He has just returned from Syria. The duration of the self deployment was around nine months were we to include Cuba and Russia and also Iraq, Turkey and Egypt. He is haunted. And despondent, a veteran of the People’s Protection Units; called the Y.P.G, you pronounce the G as ‘gay’. He has been with out any doubt ideologically indoctrinated by the Kurdistan Workers Party and given some basic military training. Brain washing. He is to be watched, if necessary eliminated.”

Well I guess you didn’t die in the war.

ADONAEV:

Well I guess I didn’t die in the war.

There was a lot of shame in that. I was mysteriously back in New York, trapped and totally useless. All my best efforts forgotten and amounting to less than one nothing.

SILVERSTOVA:

Stop talking and thinking only about yourself for a minute blat. Tell me about your murdered Comrade Anya Campbell. Tell me about your soon to be dead Kurdish friends.

Enter the Gangster Medvinsky

MEDVINSKY:

But Sebastian Adonaev, being the Sebastian Adonaev, who I invest too much time and energy in; he hopes to fully con-volute the narrative.

Blur apart the story war and Islamic militancy and revolutionary fervor with busty sex-escapades, pornographic poems and perhaps some borrowed prophesy and Haitians. Chornay dancing about the room waving their flags in the air.

Maria, call up some of your friends this man needs a serious distraction.

SILVERSTOVA:

A simple patriotic task.

MEDVINSKY:

One night at the tavern, about one year after Sebastian arrived home. I was sure he was being followed. His quest which began in Cuba, then Russia, then Iraq, Turkey, Iraq, Turkey, Iraq and then finally Syria), or also about eighty days since he returned a version of his former self. He tries to tell me about his time in Kurdistan.

In the end, the sad conversation always goes back to Daria Andreavna.

ADONAEV:

What news do you have about Daria Andreavna?

MEDVINSKY:

Listen man, not again.

She’s all cleaned up. Singing on Broad Street.

ADONAEV:

She wrote me..

MEDVINSKY:

…every single day of the war?

ADONAEV:

Da.

MEDVINSKY:

They have apps that can do that now. Robots can also write you every single day too. You don’t even need to pay them, or sponsor their citizenship.

ADONAEV:

She loves me. And I love her. And the rest of the details can get figured out. For nine months she urged me to come stay alive and come home. I need to find her.

MEDVINSKY:

You can’t even consider supporting Daria, look at the state you’re in.

Even if you were rolling in it, why would you support a woman and her son, who isn’t your son, to stay here? Out of made up imagined duty to act? A perverse Russian American love sickness? 

The kind that sent you to Syria in the first place. You can’t even be your own damn Patron. She’s taken anyway man. Someone else has been paying her rent, credit cards and keeping her papers in order.

ADONAEV:

Sergei? Dmitry? The Chubby Brahman? Corporate Bruce?

MEDVINSKY:

What does it matter? Other people’s property now.

ADONAEV:

I need to see her tonight.

MEDVINSKY:

Impossible. She’s a kept woman. Kept a lot closer now. 

ADONAEV:

Well I have her tower address. Maybe leaning towards possible.

MEDVINSKY:

No. Certainly. What do you care or know about children, much less someone else’s children. The boy will need Russian language school. He has ADD so maybe a specialized school. Where will you live? Where are you living now? How will you even get that bitch a visa? Leave her alone anyway. 

ADONAEV:

These are all unanswered questions. I love her though, I feel like I need to do this. She wrote me every day during the war.

MEDVINSKY:

Nope. You do not. In a month you’ll have another woman, or girl if you want. In the meantime is Daria even talking to you?

ADONAEV:

No, she is not. She cut the letters off a couple weeks ago.

MEDVINSKY:

Prosto, that’s it. You too were an okay team once. You supported each other, in a very strange way.

But really, that Suka is curse.

ADONAEV:

She’s only with, who ever she is with for some money and the green card.

MEDVINSKY:

And you actually want a paper work marriage and world of work?! You’re not stupid Sebastian, but your head is not on the right way again. Go slap yourself in a bath room. Go jump on the shot girl for a ride.

You have less than 100 Rubles. Two whole fucking American dollars.

You cannot afford a woman like Daria Andreavna, I will just come out and say that. You do not have enough shiny gold things.

ADONAEV:

Not yet.

Next thing we know a Martyr and a dead Guerrilla enter our Tavern.

ANYA:

In video recording a deceased Ana Campbell tells us, “Yes, forgive me loved ones, I died immediately in an airstrike in Afrin. My body was in, smithereens.

Afrin was shortly overrun by Jihadists and the Turkish State. It was the Western most canton of Rojava; the besieged revolutionary movement called Democratic Confederalism that defeated ISIS and took over 45% of Syria, until the Turks began to bring a genocide upon us in April 2018.

I died pretty. I was a true believer. Sebastian blames himself for my death, but really I was a true believer in the cause. I could have died much worse if the Turkish Army or its proxies took my alive. I would have been gang raped. And had my head cut off eventually. Like all the others.

Sebastian lives with his guilt but Dan Newey another guerrilla I almost once kissed, he does not.

Dan Newey is in a British prison accused of terrorism. As are his brother and father. He mourns me loudly. Honestly, we all lost a lot and much defending the Revolution, but we internationalists that the papers now call “the new Chechens”, we were actors on a stage of world events, but we didn’t do that much.

Now I’m dead, which I’ll tell you seems like being on the mountain without being shot at. It’s peaceful, I’ll have him tell you that. I died with my A.K. in hand. I believed in this, I wasn’t mentally ill. I wasn’t a bandit girlfriend. This was, this is, big and important, but sadly as far as self-defense; a mirage.

Without American airstrikes to back us up we melted under Turkish air power.

At the time of writing this my corpse is still behind Turkish lines and it looks like Mambij is next and then all of Rojava will fall to the Turkish Army, a U.S. ally and second biggest in N.A.T.O.

I was happy alive and happy also dead. But vicariously, I grieve for my Arab and Kurdish comrades who prepare to make Shahid Namorey, immortal martyrdom.”

JANSHER:

Alcohol is Prohibited in the Party.

  I’ll order a water or a Tonic. Drink it in a pint glass like a man. When I was young, I worked seedy places like this.

Actually, I tried to prepare them for a lifestyle of revolutionary militancy. Kill the enemy. Kill the enemy before the enemy can airstrike, execute, torture or disappear you and your friends. I don’t think they all got it. The training was just too short. They retained much of their Western bourgeoisie privileges. They thought it would maybe be like a movie. It’s a shame the woman died, she was the one with possibly the very most potential, excluding the Germans. That’s all I can say about that, Heval.”

Heval is the Kurdish Kurmanji word for friend.

Now that our breathe has been held on the latest nonsensical peace plan.

I’m just trying to get up to date, on modern thought process? After “the occupation” ends, hypothetically by raw demographics and a South Africa style global movement in say 2050, when it ends and the Islamic resistance succeeds in bringing an end to ” Israeli apartheid”, will the 4 to 5 million non Palestinian Israelis be allowed to bring their 200 nuclear missiles to New York City, or should we hand them over to the Palestinian unity government? Or neutral broker Iran?

Second, once “the Zionist entity” is replaced by a clearly unprecedented Human rights observing, pluralistic democracy, will Palestinians avenge themselves on virtually every regional power who exploited or massacred or expelled them and side with Iran? Or, use their high level of literacy to collaborate with big Christian or Chinese super powers. Or go their own way?

Third, will Palestinians accept a state in West Bank, Gaza, all of Sinai, all of Jordan, Southern Lebanon and half of Jerusalem and a 100 year Hudna? In an Israeli and Iranian lead Confederation? Or is anti Zionism so profoundly entrenched that only the sea will do?

I’m not making fun. I seriously am curious if anyone actually has a plan besides put Jews into the sea.

January 4^th, 2012

It has been two years since I first arrived in Port-Au-Prince. It is remarkable how short it feels, the eyes close just for a second and flashes of the dream on fire emerge in a slew of most visceral memories; as if they were the lips of a lover parted with just one moment before. Yelizaveta, how I miss her already; and if the last two years has erupted now in snap shots, bombastic escapades and grind; well in just eight hours I miss her as if it were a month, then a year, a forever passing in rapid cycle. Time is relative, memory subjective but for the past two years, really two human moments, there has really been only the desire to possess Yelizaveta juxtaposed with my total solidarity with the Haitians. The moral empathy, endless struggle to know them as a people so that I might wed my trade and toil and talent to the cause of their inevitable liberation.

    The attainment of human rights long deferred and structurally denied.

    I am now on a plane. It is Continental Flight 1647 and Victor Emile Cange, my stalwart comrade and partner in this operation slumbers silently, Christianly even. Next to me. We have succeeded in moving 840 kilograms of Basic Life Support medical equipment past U.S. customs and home land security. Long boards have become surf boards, bags loaded with stethoscopes, sphygmometers, training manuals, wound care supplies, are all just our non-declared tourist items. The second anniversary of the quake is eight days away, it is 4th January, 2012, by body is tried still from the ethanol athletics of New Years. Yelizaveta is still on my very lips, I can still feel where she grabbed the blue collar of my uniform and pulled me in.

    Victor and I are wearing the unmarked blue battle dress uniform fatigues of the movement we are affiliated to; the Banshee underground, and the z.o.b. We suspect these uniforms will allow us more scrutiny going into country while lending less scrutiny to our bags. There is an embargo on all bulk items entering the country not coming in as declared and taxes humanitarian cargo until January 15^th. 

    Like most Blan initiatives pre/post-quake; the dynamics of doing any so-called good are maddening and inexplicable; and have many factions to blame themselves on. Principally always the tiny 5% of the Neg, Mulatto and Arab bourgeoisie, followed by the MINUSTAH UN authorities, the cartels, and the Republic of NGO technocrats. And also the heat, and also history and illiteracy, and famine and rampaging Nepalese Cholera too. 

    Once again, we are flying into a hell. Flying into the city of lost children and shattered dreams; the land of many mountains. Ayiti Cherie! We are the third wave of the reinforcements from New York. We will meet Tiputti Capois, our oldest associate and brother at Toussaint L’Ouvature International Airport. And re-supply the Gwoup Ayisyen pou Ijans, the Haitian Emergency Group. We will meet their members and prepare them rigorously. EMT practical drills and negotiations on their future, and plans. We will ready them to stand before the archangel Michael Mastroianni who arrives 21^st January to administer a witnessed practical and written EMT exam. For whatever good it will do I pray we find them stalwart and reasonably well organized.

    I pray too that the city isn’t exactly as I left it two years ago.

    Around us on the plane are the faces of Haiti; noire, mulat, blan and representing all things. Things tragic, things ineffective, things self-serving, self-dealing, against and for human dignity, faces of perseverance, of calm of nervousness of taking and of giving. There is also the hard face of Haitian pride, indomitable. 

    So many trying with the mandate of science, God, and reason to remake the face of Haiti; save her somehow in some small way.

    So many never even asked the Haitian people. Too many are simply short sighted interventionists. Or cowered by the ten million masses shackled in the modes of survival. Today we will ask the GAI and their members where to from here? Victor, myself, Michael, all of us in Banshee and LAHAF; all the supporters of the movement; all the veterans of the first and second waves; one and all are fighting for a small dream too.

    But thankfully none have died for it, yet. I remember so many faces from the first time; from 15 January, 2010 to 28 January, 2010; the first wave. The Bed Stuy-AMHE Detachment. Our tumultuous landing in the 6^th day of relief, before the bodies were buried or the smoke had cleared. Indomitable will; fearlessness and selflessness and all of that faith we had in our humanity. The cooperative solidarity of a Kombit Medikal. That two weeks, that slaughter of so many Haitians; who knows whether it was 1, 2, 3,000,000 people; no one knows at all. That laid the basis of my dream, the dream I sold to Victor, to Cassidy, to Dominich, to Lou Auguste Jr and LAHAF, to Jenn Slitter, to all of the Banshee underground, well I’d sold the dream even to myself convincingly. We dreamed that the Haitians would have the training, will and organization to save lives.

    I must always remember the steams of the bathhouse, where me and my first partner, my first co-conspirator beautiful Yelizaveta Kotlyarova gave me true support and true unflinching council. Must also keep my parents in mind, or in a heartbeat I would lose myself in the people of Haiti and never return to America at all. Go big or go home, banshee-motherfucka-if-ya-ain’t-running-with-it-run-from-it.

    Victor knows this well.

    We were both there in the blood and rubble of the trembling earth. Our tears and their lack of tears our blood and their blood, mixed into the casement and cracks on the pavement. I may have the face of a blan, but my heart is that of a Haitian. My constitution to take the struggle to where it must logically go, all the way up the great mountain, to secure this people, my adopted people from vicious exploitation, mismanaged sympathy, foreign rape and plunder. For two whole years we organized volunteers, we supplied the GAI with trainers and gear. And reinforced the shared dream. Not EMS in Haiti! Not mere ambulances! The power to respond to human and natural disaster on their own, the ability to rescue their own people. Liberty through control of their own social services, full human rights would come later, full reclamation of sovereignty. Realization of emancipation and the conclusion of the revolution. Haiti, finally in the hands of Haitian people. 

How am I such now a major patriot for a foreign people? In their eyes I see my own people, maybe I see myself in another life. That is what the earthquake showed me about myself and my destiny. I see my reflection as a human in them. I see a way to reclaim my own humanity, restore my own life through something much more important than mere me.

And I have lost so much on this battle already, they think, some think I am a mad man possessed by the spirits. Which spirit I do not even bother to guess. Something had entered me in those grisly days of the first wave. I saw the world to come.

I saw that were I to show ineffable might, like a Haitian; I would live to see the liberation. I would live to see our victory over that oligarchy.

    The Haitian oligarchy first and then the tyrants in my own nation and all of the other plantations too. For it was in this country, this was the beginning of the Great Revolt, it was the very first time a rebel alliance took on European hegemony, slavery and colonialism; and for a time won.

    There was no only Yelizaveta and the slaughter I saw from the quake. Both opened my eyes to hating and to loving, to despair and to a possible freedom. With my eyes opened now they can never close until I am cold and dead. Haitian and foreigner, blan, mulat, neg; l’union fait la force! We are here to keeping laying a base.

The ability to heal and help is not the ability to save. Wounds and sickness across a body politico cannot be helped with small cosmetic Band-Aids. The blame for what happened here is a shared blame. There are so many people black and white and in between that have conspired to ruin Haiti. To keep her people backwards and maldeveloped as lesson to all those who would join the revolt.

Haiti hemorrhages now for 200 plus years and they kick her when she is down, they steal whatever there is to steal, they plunder and they rape and they abuse her while she lies long vanquished. 97% of the fucking trees are gone! 84% of the people live below $2 a day. No one even knows how many died in that quake because there was no census since 2004! When US marines kidnapped the first and only elected President Aristede and dragged him off to house arrest in the Central African Republic. 

But Haitians will never be exterminated. Or long brought to their knees. They are capable of incredible resistance. Résistance to both foreign and domestic enemies. A year ago Jean Claude Duvalier (Baby Doc the last dictator) returned to a city of barricades and a populace demanding his arrest. Aristede returned to be celebrated though his party Lavalas is banned an illegal still. Resistance to and beyond death. In one generation or two in diaspora Haitians have become doctors, lawyers, nurses, lawyers and business men. More millionaires than any other Caribbean diaspora. They make up 1/5 of the Greater New York healthcare work force. Who knows if these statistics are true, they reflect a fact on the ground.

In Haiti, despite the best efforts of 10,800 non-governmental organizations (Klass ONG), charities and missionaries unleashed in the 1980’s after the fall of Duvalier in 1986; things have gotten as bad as sub-Saharan Africa. A UN garrison of roughly ten thousand Brazilian and Argentine soldiers occupies the only UN peacekeeping mission in a nation with no declared ceasefire between combatants; neo-Duvalierist oligarchs and the Famni Lavlas party. 

Here everyone is dying.

Of cholera, of being a restovik child slave, of preventable disease, of Cholera, of road accidents, of child birth, or exposure and tropical storms, of hunger. Life expectancy is below 58. There are over 46,000 mostly white development technocrats here, they live well. On the top of the hills with servants and drivers. Parts of Kenscoff and Petionville look like high society France. With chipping paint. There is an opera house at the top of the mountain called Tara’s. You can see plays there or famous international musicians. There are so many Haiti’s except the one that most of its citizens live in; one of early death and great squalor.

If you are blind to that then you have not really been to this place. Or you are part to blame for it.

Many but few, have made Haiti what she is. The iron heel is elusive and complex. The violators are of all colors and creeds. NGO imperialists, human and drug traffickers, Dominican businessmen, the local oligarchy. But before we can know our enemies we must know our friends. Tiputti and his sister Tipudine Capois do not talk politics. They are not affiliated with Lavalas or any faction we are aware of.  They met us during the quake and have told our grand alliance; Alliance 01 that they will organize their people.

We began with 68 EMT trainees and I am told we now have only 25 or 26 that are ready to test out, a year later. The other possible 100 members of GAI dropped the course Paramedic Instructor Howard carried out for 6 months, but they hang around the club and see what will be offered. Their motives are as diverse as our own collection of idealisms, but they want jobs in the medical sector. They want to leave the island some. They have varying degrees of patriotism, none speak English except Tiputti and his sister Tipudine. Many were original responders like Tiputti Capois who met Victor and I two years ago during the first wave in “unit C” when we enlisted several hundred to secure the General Hospital. Many are new. Most of the serious opportunists are gone allegedly. The GAI has held out with no pay for nearly two years, we sent a scout Wilkinson Francois to assess them three months ago, he reported enthusiasm but virtually no command structure of program for the future. He reported 25-30 possible EMTs and 40-100 first aiders, Haitians despise making rosters and lists of names, so they don’t do it. 

These 25 potential EMT trainees, and 100 some odd responders, their family and friends are what we are here to properly assess the operational capability of.

Are they young bold visionaries seeking change in Haiti? Or are they opportunists as so many warned. Do they want real change, or do they just want jobs and livelihood? Well only Wilkinson had asked. Paramedic Instructor Howard has disappeared. Wilkinson as a Haitian and speaker of Haitian Creole had reported to us that they were sincere. And also a bunch of disorganized civilians in their early 20’s.

His report was what got authorization for Victor and I to proceed with a third Wave.

All the experts and much of the diaspora had told our Alliance that EMS in Port Au Prince is simply impossible. They told us our volunteers would be kidnapped, our supplies stolen or killed. They told us Haitians don’t do anything without being paid. Thinly guarded racism, a lot of it.

Victor has faith. I have zeal. And Michael Mastroianni has a great deal of expertise and we all wish to see if two years of effort had a result. Hundreds of other members and volunteers are waiting for our unit to validate or invalidate a lot of sacrifice. They came from Atlanta, from New York, from Miami, from Las Vegas, from Seattle and Chicago; 104 in the first wave, 28 medical and communications volunteers in the second wave. Now, just 3 in the third. Civilian volunteers all, mostly EMS, fire, and communications backgrounds kept this going for two years. GAI survived without pay or resources cut off from LAHAF and BANSHEE in the states except phone calls and email, periodically. They and we are fighting to give the people here and abroad something to believe in.

Hope floats? Maybe.

Soon people will testify. Haske & Mapfre, Greenlee, Denby, Marriana, Fishman and Resnick who shot a lot of film and took a lot of pictures. Hundreds of hours of never gonna be seen footage. How this occurred was wrongly held faith in the power of the media. No film was ever made. Thomas later made a short one.

Victor and I are emergency medical professionals, I’m an EMT, and he’s a paramedic. We have to determine alongside paramedic Mastroianni; was this all for nothing or is the GAI real. Can GAI pass BLS exams, take multiple choice tests and pass? They never even had power points or text books. Can they complete the eight stations of basic life support practical skills, can they hold up as real EMTs? Are they school kids or potential heroes and avenger of their people? We have to testify in less than 20 days.

Testify about the birth of Haitian EMS, and if a clandestine Haitian human rights movement can grow from that or not. In an hour we land at Toussaint L’Ouvature.

This time I bet they stamp my passport.

Thank god this is all finally happening. Despite all the struggle and all of the loss and hardship I feel as though we are close to the edge as well as the tipping point too. Real change. I pray I will never forget Yelizaveta’s face, how could I? More I pray I never fail to separate FACT from EMOTION, as all too many do in Haiti coming from the outside. I must make sure I sleep more, a little more. We have a lot of work cut out for us. Making the GAI ready for Michael, the 22 January test, the 26 January Consortium on EMS in Haiti, a lot must be done in just 22 days. 

If you ain’t running with it, run from it. That’s what my life coach Lil Wayne told Yelizaveta and that’s what she told me.

NOTES

It is not that any of us longed to die. It was only that we believed that in this transience, this short human life, it was preferable to die on ones feet moving towards a just idea. Moving in solidarity, in defense of the powerless. Then it would be to die on our backs or our knees, half lives, shuffling along like zombies. Always asleep. With meaningless, un-free lives wasted. Lives spend like serfs and slaves.  

Have you ever had an amazing noble idea in your head? That simply refused to translate itself or find traction in reality? Have you ever risked everything, sacrificed absolutely everything for such an idea? Myopically, almost psychotically pushing forward in the face of a stubborn, intractable cruel reality. When you can bring yourself to do that. To engage in nothing short of overwhelming zealotry. Pursuing a new reality, a reality where the vast suffering of this world is mitigated. Where the chaos and carnage and daily humiliation that is the lot of most humans is undone by rights, by hope, by heroism. That is called the motivation for the fight.  

It has been a very long hard bloody road to the mountains and back from them. From Manhattan to Jerusalem to Havana. All the trips to the City of Port-Au-Prince. To Greater Boston. Back to Brooklyn then to out Russia. Across Russia on a train then into the Middle East to fight in Rojava. Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Egypt and then back to the Big Apple again. Riding on the backs of armored trucks and flying carpets. On horses, on tanks on airships. Over the great rivers and through the woods. Mountains beyond mountains beyond mountains. With stopovers where all civilization has come to a resolute end in the Fertile Crescent. Smoldering villages. Enormous cities razed to the very foundations. Once historic places, simply crushed and undone. Burning down river by river shore to deep sands of desolation. A revolution within a civil war within an endless third world war. A place called Kurdistan which exists not on maps but in the hearts and dreams of perhaps forty million stateless, long oppressed people. Engaged a very long fight for their right to exist.  

How do you make any sense of such carnage to people that were not there? How do you make an enjoyable narrative about bloody chaos? Articulate ideas that when they become facts on the ground, have vast contradictions. Has a highly improbable capability to ever survive!  

The revolution itself has hardly been secured. The struggle is hardly over. The iron heel and might of the Turkish army looms right over the border to the North. Ready to descend quickly and murder us all. Undo everything that has been fought for against the so-called Islamic State. The Forces of the bloody dictator Assad backed by the Russian army and Hezbollah dig in to the south of the Euphrates river. The collaborationist Iraqi Kurdish K.D.P. Peshmerga, the Iranian supported Hashid Ashabi popular mobilization forces, the Shi’a dominated Iraqi Army and all manners of Iranian revolutionary guards to the south east in Sinjar. To the West the Jihadists of Al Qaeda’s latest rebrand and Islamists of different types in Idlib.

Enemies of the revolution on every single side! In fulfillment of my promises I will try and present our little part of the story as the defense has really only just begun. Everything might be wiped away before you even paid attention to vastness and hope of it. I worry, no sadly I expect, that long before this manuscript is ever published anywhere, all will be lost. My remaining Hevals will all be killed. The Turkish Army will literally roll over the border and everyone will be slaughtered. This isn’t really speculation, since it has happened many times before.

#038

Moscow Hostage Crisis 

Part One 

Life of the slave show!

    I will remove you from your castle and make you watch the way we live in the wilderness below.       

And she slips off her high heels into a star-crossed stare down, 

    She always calls the shots,

    Gun shots to blood soaked makeshift cots.   

The shots she calls are complicated.

             She must find me highly dedicated. 

She mostly deals with the haves, and I am the have nots.

The rules are anything goes, but no know one “knows”.

    If she’s been known to steal the weapon from my over coat,

    I’ve been quick to remove my clothes.

       I spill_ for the thrill of those invited, I can kill on compunction, I still have the will; 

To activate the full facilities, 

Of word play, and use of allegory_

       To execute deliverance of a blue-blood-bleeding testimony_ 

A Former Soviet love story.

    Involving a Chechen peasant and a woman once of Penza now mostly of night.  

    It will be of little glory, the way I tell the story.

    It’s based upon real people. Real blood_ and real bleeding_ 

Of taking-of wanting-of feeding the need. 

Of fucking and fighting and the will to survive in a City of glass, steel, and greed. 

           Real emotional explosions_ her eyes are always so bright,

 She has long since urged me to put down the weapon and give up the fight. 

But I have a last name that is easy to place,

I could buy some new papers, but not a new face.

They can spot us on site!

It’s the ongoing struggle of those who lead: 

A tragic_ unyielding life of night.  

We’ll sell a sordid tale. 

I wish I had found her back when she was nineteen or twenty_ 

Before she had to do what she did,

And does what she still do, 

To keep from starving in the shadow of plenty. 

My objective and travail_ is to recruit the members of this audience into a clandestine apparatus_ And harness our collective clandestino_ 

To force a mighty train to prematurely jump the rail.  

         I wear suspenders with buttons, a Mayakovsky cap, and iron plated under shirts. 

I dreamed up a plan to get revenge on a man, or a series of men, hit them in their pockets, 

Hit them where it hurts.          

    I called her late at night_ bleeding all over the place,

      She said don’t get your bleeding heart on my red carpet, 

And her mother fixed me midnight supper.          

Herring, beets, Palemni.

        And she wiped the cake of crimson off my bloody Chechen face.

    (Small talk)   

 “And the snow fall is phenomenal this year”_ 

She retorts”

 “Don’t get French with me my dear.”

_They really punched yer ticket_ did a number on you in the district, this time.

          (She loves the way I make the Ameikanski noire lingo mix out elequently with a touch of old Fenian rhyme.)

The pay phone call cannot be traced_

The weapons hidden in the drywall_ 

In the space your men replaced_ 

The ice cold taste of 9 proof Baltika is refreshing, albeit haram_

Those good patriot informers_ those zombies_ those follow-follow men.

They beat me for a fortnight, 

Demand I sign a grim confession,  

Attesting to the building and/or placement of some near but unexploded bomb.

        “Why can’t you be like normal men?”

 I told her: “I’m hungry for my freedom and I’m never going hungry again!” (Sung)

And she says;

 “I cannot love you if you’re dead.” 

Please put the house in order, 

Use the lithium, 

Use Russian Standard Vodka; use my lips if necessary, 

To rectify the madness as it expands inside your head.

       I’m not saying that I love you now or later, 

Simply I refuse to cater_ 

To all the “incidents generated lately” when you do not behave_ 

Explain how you plan to court me_ 

From a black-bag-disappearance. 

In frosty, shallow, unmarked open grave.

       If you’re going to dedicate, in your exacerbation, 

Resistance efforts to a woman (me) who can only love you out of pity, 

In this bleak and foreign city_

Even if the words sound epic, also pretty_

Fuck it man! You’re doing it again!

I sigh and then reply:

“Did I tell you lately you’re my dorogaia and if not for loving you_I’d surely be dead a thousand times at the hands of ten thousand lesser men?”

Oh, when last we wrote I spoke of devouring her, for hours. 

To tease her- to please her_to want her to need her- amid a bed of hand-picked, Peonies; or provincial-wild-flowers.

She isn’t one for single serving dancehall roses, she moves too fast for poses.

Her bright eyes beckon as they dart about the room filled with bluff and imitating glee_

“Accelerate your tempo of evacuation_ 

The checkpoints separate the have everything’s_ 

From the people who are dressed like you_ 

And carry paper work like me.”

I suppose you and only you_ the woman that I trust and choose_ 

Can entrap these men of business with their whoring, 

With their thirst for further treasure_

With long lines of china white running from the mouse trap to their nose.

How many slaves does it take to keep this neon play ground running?_

I know via your profession you can undertake a series of transactions_

Blonde dynamite distractions_

Before any know exactly what’s in store.

Reduce the need for automatic weapons, 

Acquire us the proper routes and channels_

And guide us through a tunnel to the vile trading floor.

    She looks at me and rolls her eyes and says in Russian “Lord have mercy.”

    I said “I don’t have imaginary friends; there ain’t no need to curse me._   

Where we met is unimportant. 

Did I mean to enlist her? 

I couldn’t resist her. 

I had causes and struggle and vengeance and plan.

I shouldn’t have kissed her 

And longed for her touch,

For surely she lays nightly in the arms of some husband, some man.

We have become a most curious spectacle_lately.

     You hate me? Push further,

Took you home from the bar stool, 

Bite me_

Kick me_

Bait me.

She could have killed me that first night, just with things that she said:

I looked at her once. 

And the wheel was turning quickly but the hamster was dead. 

The wheel was her cold rationale, 

The hamster was the morals that once governed the wheel.

And there were bright lights, that up lit her eyes_ and whatever that implies.

Separating what she does_ 

From that which she’s still willing feel.

“You take up so much clock! 

Blood from a rock! 

I must return to District work which begins at moon rise.

And the steel trap will slam shut_ 

And bind me behind those District walls.

        And the men of that vile district,

    Will use their credit cards_

To try and pay for my flesh and access to between my thighs.”

She said “root for me.”

I’m going voodoo out tonight_

To earn my money the City.

         If you truly are my friend, 

Understand that I’ve been hungry and I’m never going hungry again.” _(Sung)

I am looking down the barrel at my pin striped enemy. 

      And the columns we’ve been shaking 

And lives we’re always taking, 

I was seeking sweet surrender and I sought it at her feet. 

You think you’re not a target? You pay your taxes don’t you?

        Are you blind to their transgressions? 

A cavalcade of charging bulls rampaging down the street.

       Everything from here out, it’s true,

My bones rust, from your star dust, your fairy eyes_

     I loose myself to you.

She says, “Oh the things you might do,” 

Our harsh and untenable positions have emboldened us_ as we know no one cares or pays attention, or even has a clue.

If we want it bad enough we can get it:

     “For the rest of our lives_

_we do.”

Even if that life, she says, will last no longer than another a day or two.

Kiss me _fight beside me Dorogaia, 

Even if to you my name and words are sometimes strange, 

For what they do to your body and mind,

     And what they did to my family,

     Help us create a major crisis at the Moscow Stock Exchange.

You’re crazy she said, 

You’re crazy won’t get me dead. 

Well talk about your ridiculous plan in the morning.

It’s all a slave show, and if you didn’t know.

Russians who help rebels aren’t even given a funeral, much less a warning.

#14: Sometimes the Vodka Drinks You

I.

What does a half Jew know about the Ghosts of Christmas past? 

Arrogance vast! 

If sirens of suffering call-free-for-all_ 

_then have your crew insert wax in their ears and bind your bleeding heart to the mast! 

Look at your most tragic failures, 

Look at your past! 

Your sister, your brother, your comrade, the love of your life: raped and abused

Self-murder imprisoned and her young body used: 

The die is cast.

You toast to our fortitude? 

Look in the mirror and see the accused!

Who put the world on your shoulders man?! 

Whoever asked!

         Labriut.

         There was nothing one person ever asked you to be, 

Nothing they asked you to do.

         No one expected a miracle. 

You battle demons still in their name, 

And when it was done the world was exactly the same, man it’s too true:

Sometimes you drink to remember, 

Sometimes you drink to forget.

And sometimes the vodka drinks you.         

II.

The card said:

        “Ya tbya verejnum glaz najom.”

         So I went up to Brighton Boston.

         To consult with a gangster named Medvinsky. 

         “Droog.” 

         You had better turn that walk into some kind of fearsome-forward-run.

        “Get gone, Get done.” 

        Get yourself a final lavish Turkish bath,

You lost a lot, 

She lost a bit, 

We’ve all lost something over flesh chase bullshit,

                                         A fait complit_ it’s done. 

      Since you won’t take a lap dance down on Brighton 7 as down payment on your solitude, 

We can’t build you back until you repay the debt accrued, 

Pass port change your latitude, 

It’s your very Westy attitude we’ve come to question!  

                                    So make adjustments to the clout,

 You thought you could throw about. 

Without suggestion: 

          Settle up and out.

          Take a shot then,

Run.  

          You have to settle up with the Voorhis down in Oceania, 

That won’t be fun.

        “Gde bolit tovarish?”

“Did you even stop to think about the things that you two unleashed?  

             With passion pens, with cold war sword play, and with gun! 

              It was your morals that she prayed on with her callous kick box on the night she almost killed you.” 

“For sport?” 

 “Not for sport.  For fun.”  

“You had best turn in your 8 shot, because she’s gone and punched your midnight ticket now!” 

“She’s removed the bullets from your gun.”

              There’s no blame in this situation. You two just forgot your host nation, class and social station.

    And lost in excited trepidation you made war.

But in all that war you’ve been making, 

You were changing nothing

See the score?  

And shortly one dead Russian escort 

And one badly tortured gun man is all there will be to show totality of foolishness:

The things, you and she were fighting for.

Let’s do a shot for good intentions now a bloody mess under duress:

What Medvinsky says is partly true:

Sometimes you drink to remember, 

Sometimes you drink to forget.

And sometimes the vodka drinks you.         

III.

Sometimes, 

I get drunk. 

And I drive my car 

In figure eight circles around the Adler Loop in coop city,

The only street which bears my name. 

       And from the wheel of my Civic I survey a high rise brick kingdom. 

All I can see!

Sometimes I drink to remember, sometimes I drink to forget.

And sometimes the vodka drinks me.

It’s a bevy of victimless crimes. 

          There are no children playing at these midnight hours, 

Most of the times, 

Or those that are carry various calibers as they carry on trade in West Indian nickels and dimes.

           With each kiss of Stolichnaya I get further from all the accusing faces of friends lost, 

And lubricated by the demons still waters I am forgiven for my yet unfulfilled promises. 

And that which such promises cost.

            I sip and shoot shot and bottle tip. 

And the ghosts of past make clever cheers: 

Nazdrovia! 

They say as I sip. 

More shots! 

To the last drop, a fast viscosity, a deadly drip. 

              Cheers to little Malka who’s daddy abused her, and who’s foreign baby’s father used her like a Siberian doll and fled leaving a teenage mother with child in the slums of Shahoun Daled! 

Shot to the head. 

               Cheers to Maya captured and bonded to brothels at the age of sixteen, 

Pale white tits all the gawk of Montreal’s flying flesh carnival scene. 

Long white lines of supine mortgage, 

Traumas of the slave trade never fully known_ what they made her do.

Time supine, also prone.  

Third shot for Rahula, also called Jeremy McGaffey, 

A soldier, a comrade now dead, and all the dark things he saw before putting two rounds in his tough brilliant head.

               For all that they went through these three in particular abused an accosted,

I empty the bottle to my useless gestures exhausted, 

Having arrived too late to have saved them and too weak to have healed them, and play pretend knights making promises into a sad mock-ery.

Sometimes I drink to remember. 

Sometimes I drink to forget.

And sometimes the vodka drinks me.

IV.

        I awoke in hand cuffs black hood folded blind.

And it wasn’t just another Saturday night wilding-wild-West Indian 

On the loose in Coney Island of the mind,

                               Truncated by tell-the-boys-in-blue I won’t be easy. 

       They had laid their hard hands on me. 

Stop the tape. Pause. 

Rewind.

Wam! 

 Something struck the Gulliver out of nowhere_ it gyrated my warbles.

      This time, maybe; my past had caught me.       

That then said;

       My first thought was of my baby, my lady who is even tougher than I am. 

                 Good thing your woman’s hidden said the voice in my head.

                 Simmer-on-sinner,

 A loser or a winner is in the end always picking up taps for the devil at dinner. 

      When I say baby, I should say goddess, she’s a warrior.

          Or just several shots short of serial killer, 

A base sinner invited into your house for the small talk most certainly, also her chest, high heels and the promise of dinner.

              She loves me because I am a good man. 

    You can, only hurt a Real man by destroying his goodness and if he be a hard man, 

No kid’s gloves_ 

_you can only do that by hurting people he loves.

        I’ve been interrogated before.

There many ways to do it,

        You can purchase a good deal of information via third party use of shill, mark or whore. 

When people don’t know what they’re fighting for…

Or stacked shocks, shock headed peter_a drill with a small bore.

      But who’s keeping score, anymore.

      I was trained in district Florentine. 

      I have mental blueprints to up the ante of an occupation, or increase the flicker flame of fire on a low boiling international class war.

    What for? What was in it for me?

      I was tapped long ago on my shoulder by a series of sirens 

And enlisted in a long simmer struggle to even a score, 

Against the forces of Razpizdia, general a-pathology bloody feuds based little more than mistranslated folk lore.

 To Hit back, 

          And coordinate the American arm of a general attack on behalf of the wretched run miserable, the abused and the victimized poor!

Oh that’s adorable, he’s a man with ideals. Let’s get him out of his country and rip out his teeth with some plyers so he can see exactly how real change making feels!

         The prelude to a good long torturing is an offer you can’t refuse.

         Already assume you have nothing to lose.

False positive clues to dissuade and amuse as they work to disfigure, 

And of course to abuse.

 They said I was born chosen, but I keep on choosing battles that my lady says that I’m destined to lose.

      That’s what she said.

      And when panting and longing and holding me tightly, through the calling of names 

But only she is the one I allow in my head.

      The trick is to talk in circles, 

Keep asking for cigarettes, 

     Saying nothing makes them think you know more than you do.

Once the beatings begin you must meditate your way through the blood and the swelling. 

So master art of storytelling.

So when that occurs you can only betray yourself via you’re capture and give long accounts of imaginary conspirators.

 And try and make sure you don’t know where your woman is being hidden 

      A pale horse with pale rider will give no account of the devastations witnessed passing though places he’s ridden.

              You can beat a man into saying almost anything. 

You can try and buy him, make him sing tunes you want him to sing. Strike his face with a truncheon cuffed to chair he’s got nowhere to run.

        And if they know who you are they just might do it for fun.

              But having done this before, if you want to get to my family you’d better be legion, better have monstrous tentacles, bottomless pockets, or know how to properly swim. 

For I know the face of the devil and Invest adequately in keeping my loved ones from him.

              I hide my woman in Haiti. Just cause you can see her golden blonde hair from space, well that don’t mean you can fight your way through eleven million Haitians. Has nothing to do with race.

               I’m one popular fucking blan these days. They say no good deed goes unpunished, and but I have my ways.

              Russians have counter insurgency down to a T. 

      The Ts for torture the shit out of everyone. Best believe these days several are gunning for Vasa, Vasa is me.

        Its a long game, its a late stage in the war.

        A fist crunches my face, then a bucket of water.

        I’ve brought a box cutter on a plane before.

       Before  it was cool.

        Who am I?

        Fool, If you allow yourself to be coffined they will attempt it using desriptive pejoratives.

    I’m new school. 

        I have spoken to you at length in babalonian, but parable take away, here’s the golden rule: 

         Don’t pose a question that you do not intend in a timely fashion to unravel.

       I am a man of three colors. Red black and green. I’m in the business of chechen resistance, this involves travel. 

   In my rounds and deployments you’d have no idea of the suffering I’ve seen.

       Its less a riddle to fuck the answers out of me. But just incase they get me, know that when my families safe, and Ichkerias free, and most of the world is a place where its safe for your pasty white children to be, and then we can agree that when you open your eyes and turn off your tv, then you will collaborate with a chechen like me, and the resistance generally. 

           These are hard cuffs. I’m not going anywhere. I zone out and I dream of the mountains, the scent of my babies hair. I know she’s safe, I know they gonna break me out. Unpleasant nights until that occurs, no doubt.

   Soon as these wolves know they got Vasa the gunslinger, I can hear them shout. 

Ya tbya verjnum glas najum.

I’m gonna cut your fucking eyes out.

        Do your worst motherfuckers. I’ve heard these words before.

 You aint getting nothing but nonsense from the lips of a rebel implore, 

ladies and gentlemen my name is Vasili Pveada, the world is one fire and you’re all in a tower on top of a hill,  for the blood that they spill, for our loved ones they kill, listen to me.

 The armed wing of the human rights movement has long arms and old soul memories, we will not stop fighting, until every last man woman and child is free.

Al Prelude

It is not that any of us longed to die. It was only that we believed that in this transience, this short human life, it was preferable to die on ones feet moving towards a just idea. Moving in solidarity, in defense of the powerless. Then it would be to die on our backs or our knees, half lives, shuffling along like zombies. Always asleep. With meaningless, un-free lives wasted. Lives spend like serfs and slaves.  

Have you ever had an amazing noble idea in your head? That simply refused to translate itself or find traction in reality? Have you ever risked everything, sacrificed absolutely everything for such an idea? Myopically, almost psychotically pushing forward in the face of a stubborn, intractable cruel reality. When you can bring yourself to do that. To engage in nothing short of overwhelming zealotry. Pursuing a new reality, a reality where the vast suffering of this world is mitigated. Where the chaos and carnage and daily humiliation that is the lot of most humans is undone by rights, by hope, by heroism. That is called the motivation for the fight.  

It has been a very long hard bloody road to the mountains and back from them. From Manhattan to Jerusalem to Havana. All the trips to the City of Port-Au-Prince. To Greater Boston. Back to Brooklyn then to out Russia. Across Russia on a train then into the Middle East to fight in Rojava. Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Egypt and then back to the Big Apple again. Riding on the backs of armored trucks and flying carpets. On horses, on tanks on airships. Over the great rivers and through the woods. Mountains beyond mountains beyond mountains. With stopovers where all civilization has come to a resolute end in the Fertile Crescent. Smoldering villages. Enormous cities razed to the very foundations. Once historic places, simply crushed and undone. Burning down river by river shore to deep sands of desolation. A revolution within a civil war within an endless third world war. A place called Kurdistan which exists not on maps but in the hearts and dreams of perhaps forty million stateless, long oppressed people. Engaged a very long fight for their right to exist.  

How do you make any sense of such carnage to people that were not there? How do you make an enjoyable narrative about bloody chaos? Articulate ideas that when they become facts on the ground, have vast contradictions. Have improbable capability to survive.  

My name is Sebastian Adonaev, but the Kurds named me “Blacksmith Winter”, or Kawa Zivistan. The Arabs, they needed to name me too so they called me “Abu Yazan”. Because my then part-girlfriend, part-confidant Polina has a son named Yazan. I was 33 when I deployed but looked and felt a bit younger. I felt brave or stupid enough to volunteer for a war. At the most desperate heights of the conflict, which would end up killing over 500,000 people, there was a cry for some extra hands, some Hamsas. Every side called up all available reinforcements. Just before Baghdad almost fell, the mostly Shiite al-Hashid ash-Sha’bi Popular Mobilization Forces called up half a million Iraqis to hold I.S.I.S. back.  The Assad Regime enlisted thousands of Russian, Iranian and Lebanese Hezbollah to fight Daesh and other Sunni rebel factions aligned with ISIS, Al Qaeda, the Free Syrian Army brands and the Al Qaeda reboot H.T.S. The Islamic State took in over 40,000 foreign fighters and the mostly Kurdish forces in the “Syrian Democratic Forces”  enlisted just 500. I fought alongside the Iraqi Special Operations Forces in Iraq and for the Syrian Democratic Forces, in the Y.P.G. Militia defending the idea of Rojava in Syria. I contributed very few bullets, mostly serving as combat medic during my time there. Mostly stopping hemorrhage and carrying the wounded to ambulances. Mostly trying to train people to save lives, actually, at a time when almost everyone wanted to kill.

After defeating the so-called “Islamic State” as a force holding any territory, the United States military all but completely abandoned their Kurdish allies and Turkey invaded Rojava.

We who survived to talk about the Syrian Civil War, we often found there were not easy words to describe what we took part in. This is story grounded in history and ideology. The tale of a stateless people spread over 4 nations, 40 million strong. This is a love song after a series of hard fucks in Spanish and some love making in Russian. This is a Post-Soviet Lullaby, written in Imperial English about Western privileges. I have heard on the wire that the Turkish Army is fully mobilizing to crush Rojava. A fully modern army of over 435,000 soldiers. That Anya is losing her mind in Baghdad and Ana Campbell, that optimistic young woman I once gave hand grenades to, well she died in an airstrike in Afrin. Here I am in Capitalist Modernity’s very heartland and loving embrace. Doing nothing useful for Kurdistan. Just writing stupid love songs. Composing vain self serving propaganda plays.

I’m not sure exactly what I’m supposed to hide and what I can give away. I’m actually very detached from Western thinking so I don’t even know what actually makes compelling propaganda in the West anyway. Actually, the sly and looming enemy knows most of our real names, and frankly were there not many informants amongst us, it is simply a matter of sad fact that to get their passports back many of the French and British volunteers gave us away. Not to snitch jacket, but with a little lean on anyone can make a person flip. Really, there were not that many of us internationalists to keep track of. As the mad China-man Andok said, “the hard drives containing our data were barely even secured and this place is awash in spies.” Our overall numbers were estimated to be around 500 strong of which around 50 later perished. Mostly in combat, some in a wave of alleged suicides. We were small enough therefore for the various security services to keep track of.

So what is the actual purpose of this little manuscript? It is certainly not to glorify or denigrate the volunteers. I think it brave we went there but I don’t think we game changed a single thing. Perhaps we were all only there to bear witness that the revolution has even happened. It is surely not my aim give away military secrets and name names, because I am many things but not a Josh, a ‘donkey ass betrayer’. Suffice to say the C.I.A., MI5 and the M.I.T. know all our names.
I heard some comrades sang like little opera singers to get their European passports back. All speculation, none can actually say. Americans, we had the easiest deal. After ISIS is finished maybe it will not be so black and white, fighting a N.A.T.O. ally and what not. Assisting a revolution for stateless democracy, womens emancipation and social ecology in the heart of the war torn Middle East. ‘Heval Ciya’ the Scott always used to say that the 231 Sniper Unit changed the entire game, but really only the United States and the Coalition airstrikes probably, certainly did. When the last of the under 2,500 U.S. Special Forces leave the Turks will invade in force and try and undo everything.
There’s a story we heard about a Y.P.G. Euro volunteer vacationing in Turkey immediately after his tour. He was of course arrested and will serve life in prison. He probably should have made better choices for leave and decompression. There are lots of crazy people here. You have to be little crazy to travel half way across the earth to enlist in a revolution inside a bloody brutal civil war amid a great power confrontation placing Russia and Iran directly against the United States and N.A.T.O.
I was told by ‘Heval Jansher’ the Y.P.G. guerrilla who helped train us that, that if I survive the war I should “write something about Rojava that does justice to the over 12,000 martyrs. That does justice to the cause of Kurdistan. Honors Abdullah Ocalan and upholds the values of the revolution.” That it should humanize this resistance struggle inside a revolution inside a civil war inside a great game for the Middle East.

“Maybe Heval, just make it a kind of strange fucked up love story,” Jansher joked with me over cigarettes and endless black tea. 
So I hope this account manages some of that, compiling the oral history, experiences and many martyrdom’s shared amongst the approximate 500-600 foreign Y.P.G./Y.P.J./I.F.B. Internationalist fighters. At the very least I’d like to capture what it was that made us enlist in this hell to take part, to fight and die and kill and try and help, to be less than a foot note in the epic tale of Kurdistan. But still a part.
“It has to be a love story or they will never make a movie about it comrade,” Heval Jansher once said, “to the West without a Movie, it is perhaps like this struggle is not even happening at all.” But he also said a ‘real revolutionist’ has no love except for his or her people. That any romantic love is a “bourgeois luxury for civilians”.

“Our love story is for the Resistance of the Age” he used to say, but then Heval Jansher also laughed and noted Jake Gillenhaul was then already shopping around a script where he plays an anarchist falling in love for a beautiful Y.P.J. fighter and another action exploitation of the Y.P.J. was coming out soon in France. But that will likely not go anywhere useful.
“You see, in real life we would probably platform and deport this stupid volunteer and the Y.P.J. comrade, she would be shamed and sent briefly to prison” Heval Jansher told me. A famous saying states that the “Kurds have no friends besides the mountains.” Well that’s no longer completely true. The 500 who served and the 45 who died besides the 12,000 Kurdish and Arab martyrs of the battle to defeat ISIS and defend the Rojava Revolution will live forever in the Kurdish tradition, since in Kurdistan ‘Martyrs never die’. Shahid Namarin. These were kind of talks we had at the Qerechow Academy.

That then said this is not a love story at all. It’s not even “a Middle Eastern Western”. The revolution itself has hardly been secured. The struggle is hardly over. The iron heel and might of the Turkish army looms right over the border to the North. Ready to descend quickly and murder us all. Undo everything that has been fought for against the so-called Islamic State. The Forces of the bloody dictator Assad backed by the Russian army and Hezbollah dig in to the south of the Euphrates river. The collaborationist Iraqi Kurdish K.D.P. Peshmerga, the Iranian supported Hashid Ashabi popular mobilization forces, the Shi’a dominated Iraqi Army and all manners of Iranian revolutionary guards to the south east in Sinjar. To the West the Jihadists of Al Qaeda’s latest rebrand and Islamists of different types in Idlib.

Enemies of the revolution on every single side! In fulfillment of my promises I will try and present our little part of the story as the defense has really only just begun. Everything might be wiped away before you even paid attention to vastness and hope of it. I worry, no sadly I expect, that long before this manuscript is ever published anywhere, all will be lost. My remaining Hevals will all be killed. The Turkish Army will literally roll over the border and everyone will be slaughtered. This isn’t really speculation, since it has happened many times before.

False necessity, or anti-necessitarian social theory, is a contemporary social theory that argues for the plasticity of social organizations and their potential to be shaped in new ways. The theory rejects the assumption that laws of change govern the history of human societies and limit human freedom. It is a critique of “necessitarian” thought in conventional social theories (like liberalism or Marxism) which hold that parts of the social order are necessary or the result of the natural flow of history. The theory rejects the idea that human societies must be organized in a certain way (for example, liberal democracy) and that human activity will adhere to certain forms (for example if people were only motivated by rational self-interest).

False necessity uses structural analysis to understand socio-political arrangements, but discards the tendency to assemble indivisible categories and to create law-like explanations. It aims to liberate human activity from necessary arrangements and limitations, and to open up a world without constraints where the possible becomes actual.

Background

Modern social theory contains a tension between the realization of human freedom and the necessity of social rules. Liberal political theorists of the seventeenth century, such as Hobbes and Locke, saw the issue as one of sacrificing some individual freedoms in order to gain others. They understood social rules as enabling constraints—necessary impositions that limited activity in some spheres in order to expand it in others. (For example, traffic laws compel us to drive on one side of the road but allow us to travel more freely than if we were constantly assailed by oncoming traffic.) In the socio-political realm, these early liberal thinkers argued that we agree to surrender our freedom for political authority in order to gain greater freedom from a state of nature. The sovereign authority is a constraint, but it allows freedom from the constraints that other individuals might impose upon us. In this way, rules are always seen as a means of increasing freedom rather than rescinding it.

These early Enlightenment thinkers opposed existing religious, aristocratic, and absolutist institutions and organizations as the natural state of the world. However, they did not argue for the absolute freedom of the individual outside of any constraining rules. For them, human activity was still subject to certain types of social arrangements that followed a historical necessity.

Inspired by Kant‘s thesis of human freedom, which argued that there is no evidence to disprove our absolute freedom or capacity to resist external domination, thinkers at the end of the eighteenth century addressed how human freedoms were constrained by social institutions. Thinkers like Fichte, Schiller, Schelling, and Hegel argued that those institutions that constrain human freedom and subject the individual to fear and prejudice insult human dignity and deny the individual his autonomy. But they attempted to formulate universal laws, which in turn led to deterministic social and political arrangements. Marx, for example, put humanity at the mercy of historical and institutional necessity.

The contemporary theory of false necessity attempts to realize this idea in its entirety, and to escape the limitations of liberal and Marxist theories. It aims to realize social plasticity by decoupling human freedom from any necessary social rules or historical trajectory. The theory recognizes the need for social rules, but also affirms the human potential to transcend them. Humanity need not be constrained by any structure.

Development and content

The development of the theory is credited to philosopher and politician Roberto Mangabeira Unger. His main book on the thesis, False Necessity: Anti-necessitarian social theory in the service of radical democracy, was first published in 1987 by Cambridge University Press, and reissued in 2004 by Verso with a new 124 page introduction, and a new appendix, “Five theses on the relation of religion to politics, illustrated by allusions to Brazilian experience.”

The theory of false necessity attempts to understand humans and human history without making ourselves the object of a law-giving fate. It rejects the assumption that certain and necessary laws of organization and change govern the social, political, and economic institutions of human activity and thereby limit human freedom. It holds that the problem with traditional deep structure theory, such as Marxism, is that it couples the distinction of deep structure and routine practice with both indivisible types of social organization, and deep seated constraints and developmental laws. The theory rejects the constraints and focuses on how human behavior is shaped by the deep structures of these institutions, and how they can be remade at will, either in whole or in part. The aim is to rescue social theory and recreate the project of self-affirmation and society.

Rather than “enabling constraint” or “universal structure”, the theory advocates “structure-denying structures”—that is, structures that enable their own dissolution and remaking. Since these structures normally constrain our activities, this would increase our freedom.

Sources of entrapment and emancipation

The problem of false necessity arises due to the failure of transformative practice to realize its stated aim. This can take form in three different scenarios:

• the ideals fought for (democracy, decentralization, technical coordination, etc.) result in the development of rigid institutions
• an oligarchy effect in which groups and rulers clash at the summit of power and drum up popular support
• the survival effect in which there is a fear of disturbance of contemporary arrangements.

Unger points to mass politics as a means to counter oligarchy and group identity. However, if these forms are only disturbed and not destroyed, democracy is limited and becomes a quarrel about forms of power and seizing advantage. Likewise, enlarged economic rationality provides another source of emancipation by shifting economic and social relations in the ability to constantly innovate and renew.

The radical project

The theory of false necessity develops the idea that the organization of society is made and can be remade—we can rebel against the worlds we have built; we can interrupt our rebellions and establish ourselves in any of those worlds. By emphasizing the disembodiment of institutional and social structures, the theory provides a basis to explain ourselves and our world without using necessitarian thought or predetermined institutional arrangements.

At the extreme, the theory of false necessity criticizes and thus unifies strands of the radical tradition. It frees leftist and liberal ideals from institutional fetishism, and emancipates modernist ideals from structural fetishism. The theory further detaches the radical commitment from utopian claims and provides a theoretical basis for transformative action. That transformative action, Unger believes, does not have to be a complete overhaul or total revolution, but rather is “a piecemeal but cumulative change in the organization of society”. The key to the project, in the words of one critic, “is to complete the rebellion against the naturalistic fallacy (that is, the confusion of accident with essence and contingency with necessity) and to effect an irrevocable emancipation from false necessity”.

Thinkers and opinions

Contemporary^[when?] political thinkers and philosophers have developed and advocated the theory of false necessity. Roberto Mangabeira Unger has employed the theory in developing social, political, and economic alternatives, as well as in his political activism and appointments in Brazilian politics. Richard Rorty compared the theory’s move towards greater liberalism with Jürgen Habermas, and called it a powerful alternative to the postmodern “School of Resentment“. Other thinkers have said the theory is “a challenge that the social disciplines can ignore only at their peril”. Bernard Yack wrote that it contributed to “a new left Kantian approach to the problem of realizing human freedom in our social institutions”.

See also

• Determinism
• Empowered democracy
• Formative context
• Historical determinism
• Necessitarianism
• Negative capability

1 Now that the heavens and the earth were ordered and completed, they had to be named.  All known and knowable existence became subject to the measure of soon sentient woman and man. Host to their speculation and inquiry. Through humans Hashem subjected raw creation to rational existence and subsequent use. Subjected a raw matter to rumination and use.

2 Hashem completed all this by the seventh day. Hashem then abstained on the seventh day from any further creation, work or even naming. On the 7th Day Hashem rested. Infinite matter and all newly made things paused to rest, to reflect on purpose, an all seeing and all knowing creator paying respect to the finite, fallible and temporary matter it created.

3 Hashem blessed this seventh day and sanctified it for thereon none of creation, sentient, simple, complex, animal, plant or even miniscule measure of matter was expected to labor, for the 7th day was a day of pure rest, relaxation, rechargement and peace.

4 The heavens and the earth when they were created would also need rest, on the day that the Lord God made earth and heaven Hashem invented the concept of fragility. Honoring fragile new creation with a sense of rest.

5 Now no tree of the field was yet on the earth, neither did any herb of the field yet grow, because Hashem had not brought rain upon the earth, and there was no human to work the soil.

6 A mist ascended from the earth and watered the entire surface of the ground.

7 Hashem formed humans of dust from the ground, and breathing into their nostrils the soul of life, and thus woman and man became instilled with living souls. Become conscious and sentient beings.

8 And Hashem planted a garden in Eden from the east, a refuge in the mountains above Mesopotamia and Hashem placed there the humans whom it had formed.

9 And Hashem caused life to sprout from the ground every tree pleasant to see and good to eat, and the Tree of Life in the midst of the garden, and also the Tree of Knowledge of good and of evil. So newly created humanity might learn of of morals, learn of ethics, learn of options. Humans might learn of vice and valor. Might experience temptation, betrayal and the temporary fragile nature of life. Might come to know good and evil. Might through this choose good over evil. Of free will make good triumph over hollow selfish vile evil.

10 And a river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it separated and became four heads flowing out from the fortress of mountains.

11 The name of one is Pishon; that is the one that encompasses all the land of Havilah, where there is gold.

12 And the gold of that land is good; there is the crystal and the onyx stone.

13 And the name of the second river is Gihon; that is the one that encompasses all the land of Cush.

14 And the name of the third river is Tigris; that is the one that flows to the east of Assyria, and the fourth river that is the Euphrates.

15 Now Hashem took woman and man, and He placed them in the Garden of Eden to live, learn, work, play and also to guard it. For their progeny would be heirs to the garden, the river, the evil and the good.

16 And Hashem commanded woman and man, saying, “Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat.

17 But of the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat of it, for on the day that you eat thereof, you shall surely die.”

18 And Hashem said, “It is not good that first woman and man is alone; I shall make them children as a helpmate opposite them. My creation will thus create. “

19 And Hashem formed from the earth every beast of the field and every fowl of the heavens, and brought [it] to humans to see what the would call it, and whatever the woman and man called each living thing, that was its very first name.

20 And they named all the cattle and the fowl of the heavens and all the beasts of the field, but for woman, she did not find a joy in this naming.

21And Hashem caused a deep sleep to fall upon woman and man, and they slept, and together as woman and man they created humanity. The first born twins a girl and boy.

22And Hashem built humanity from his first two templates.

23And man said, “This time, we are bone of bones and flesh of flesh. This creation is fragile flawed and finite”

24 Therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother, and cleave to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.

25 Now they were both naked, the man and his wife, but they were not ashamed.

Emergency Medical Technicians (EMTs) and Paramedics practice a largely non-scientific, protocol driven form of medicine, in completely uncontrolled non-sterile field environments with little to no direct supervision.

No matter what valid grievances other sectors had, it was the EMS members in and out of Covid infected households with 1 N95 for a week or 2 issued at most, with no access to 3m Respirator Masks. We all got exposed. 18 of us died in the tri-state area. 6 in the FDNY. Everyone clapped and kept it moving. But some of the therapies we were using of our own initiative were the right ones.

The most widely accepted treatments for Covid-19 are not outside of the practice of a regular EMT or Paramedic. They are part of our regular regime of clinical management before and during Covid-19.

According to the University of Oxford and the British National Health Service a simple set of procedures and medications routinely used by Paramedics on the basis of common sense, protocol and discretionary orders could soon be by the future routine protocol for managing COVID-19.

This combination of common procedures involves a) placing the patients prone to maximize lung surface area, b) providing hyper oxygenation via a nasal cannula set to 6 lpm and a non rebreather set to 15 lpm on two tanks c) Administration Intramuscular or Intravenous of Dexamethasone 12mg an anti inflammatory steroid d) using CPAP with mild sedation to delay or prevent intubation.

A host of expert and lobbyist driven options have all failed. There is no vaccine. Remdesivir used to treat Ebola is very expensive, in short supply and only may only mildly shorten the time it takes to recover from the infection. The FDA just withdrew emergency usages of the anti-Malaria drugs Hydroxychloroquine and Chloroquine as viable treatments for Covid-19. The overwhelming majority of Americans intubated and placed on ventilators have all died.

The Covid 19 virus directly attacks cells lining the patient’s airways and lungs which triggers a rapid oxygen desaturation and an overwhelming immune reaction called Cytokine Storm.  Cytokines are part of the body’s normal immune response to infection, but rapid release in large quantities causes multisystem organ failure and death.

Dexamethasone greatly reduces inflammation caused by the immune system, protecting the tissues. In the latest British study, dexamethasone reduced deaths of patients on ventilators by one-third, and deaths of patients on oxygen by one-fifth.

This week Britain’s National Health Service has begun using the Dexamethasone as the standard treatment for coronavirus patients. The drug costs less than $1 per day of treatment on a single patient. We need these protocols properly established in New York City and the USA.

Paramedics intubate in the field (an anesthesiologists job at the ED), interpret 12 lead ECGs (a cardiologists job at the ED) and administer around 40 medications all of by protocol and clinical judgement. Critical Care Paramedics manage ventilator settings and Rescue Medics carry out field amputations, cricothyrotomies, fasciotomies, escharotomies and other field surgeries. We do all of that for not alot more than minimum wage.

During the Covid-19 Crisis, as many now know, over 17,389 people in New York City alone have perished while much of our medical establishment has remained baffled, terrified and confused.  Over 120,000 largely elderly, re-currently sick and largely poor Americans have died so far. The majority of those people died inside the ER.

Push your politicians to invest in EMS. We do not have advanced degrees but we have common sense and our fingertips directly on the pulse of the community.

The Real Difference Between EMS, Police, Nursing, Sanitation and Firefighters

It takes a special person to be a first responder. There is a great deal of real danger involved in any job where a person is asked to drive and run towards an emergency that the majority of people are running away from. We compensate first responders for the readiness for that danger. In the case of EMTs and Paramedics, the city and state have basically refused to. The difference between an EMS provider and a Cop or Firefighter is not the risk involved, as Mayor DeBlasio has claimed. The real difference is rooted in demographics and failure of the EMS workers to unite and engage in industrial action as a unified group.

The New York City Council has just passed a non-binding resolution calling for parity with Police and Fire. We need to organize and lobby for even more.

EMS is a fully diverse service, the majority of which is composed of Blacks and Latinos from the city’s most underserved districts. Its members and officers are over ⅓ female with many openly gay, including the FDNYs EMS Bureau top Chief Lillian Bonsignore. Muslims, Asians, Jews and new immigrants make up a large percentage of the workforce. Approximately 13,500 Emergency Medical Technicians and Paramedics divided in four sectors and over 100 responding agencies, the FDNY being the largest unified group of 4,300.

But the real difference lies in three distinct variables. EMS daily saves human lives. EMS turns a huge profit. EMS is overwhelmingly people of color.

The real “difference” between EMS and all other services is that we are actually worth way more, though we have been bullied and self censored from declaring it. Everyone says “the very worst enemy we have is ourselves”. There is always some truth to that statement. But, we currently also have a great deal of actual external opposition to our call for parity and justice. Arrayed against our members are an array of powerful actors that by action and inaction purposefully block our progress to parity. 

That opposition can be isolated into the following groupings. The FDNY Management, the Firefighters Union, Hospital Management, the Nursing Unions, the ownership of all private ambulance companies, the political establishment of the City and State, the current Mayor DeBlasio and very importantly our own unions which perpetuate the status quo through a “management of expectations”.  With the exceptions of FDNYs 2507/3621, 1199/SEIU and the IAEP/SEIU none of the other unions are actually dedicated to or specialized for EMS workers. And what happens is we are divided amid nine separate unions each negotiating for limited possibilities.

Of course the nurses, firefighters, cops and sanitation workers are completely essential. Vital and important. If not for all those heroes, and I don’t say that tongue in cheek, the city would probably come undone. Of course each of their unions and PR machines would like to sweep away the memory of when each went on strike, repeatedly over the years. The Nurses of NYP, Montefiore and Mt. Sinai NYSNA nurses with start pay around $97,000 voted to go on strike just last year. Time and time again our heroes paralyzed the city and threatened the lives of New Yorkers for exactly the kind of normative middle class wages and benefits we in EMS are asking for today. Of course EMS will not ever be going on Strike for so many different reasons. Most importantly because people might actually die. But make no mistake every other group of heroes has put their economic well being before their service to the city at some point or another, repeatedly.

Nurses are the integral workhorses of the entire Healthcare system. 

Like a Nurse, EMS members need to understand concepts of medicine and are supervised by a doctor. In some precise ways our Paramedic skill set is on the practical level is above the entry level nurse. Nurses definitely do not intubate people or interpret EKGs, or administer medication autonomously. Nurses work very, very hard, but they do so in controlled situations with a great deal of supervision, guidance and support. During a 1998 nurses strike at Maimonides Hospital in the recent past Paramedics were used in the ER, with beyond adequate performance. The Nursing unions would like to make sure we are never allowed in an ER again. The nurses unions quite actively would like to prevent any clear bridge from Paramedic to RN or PA because it would lead to a realization that people paid half what they make, with almost none of the science background can do their job just as well on the ground. When people start whispering about an ambulance strike, which is also against the law, people say “So cruel, selfish and nearly evil, people could die.” But a nursing strike seems to be as American as apple pie. Could it be that in all the previous Nursing strikes, no one died, no one sued? That was because even higher paid nurses were bussed in to temp for them. 

“Without the Department of Sanitation a plague would overtake this city. Or at the very least trash would pile up high, the city would stink and rats would have field day.”

Like a Sanitation worker, EMS members operate a large vehicle in cumbersome urban traffic and all weather conditions, with near total disregard from the public, especially in the Bronx. We must get through the streets making pickups while the public blocks streets with their cars, darts in front of our vehicles and basically flip out when a street is blocked operationally. Like sanitation, we have to lift and carry,  albeit not in a rapid repetition. Sanitation doesn’t have to carry 125 Ibs of equipment up six flights of stairs and carry down people around 250 pounds or more. In some ways, like sanitation, a pause in delivery of service will potentially cost lives. Like when Sanitation went on strike during the Blizzard of 2010. “New York’s Strongest used a variety of tactics to drag out the plowing process — and pad overtime checks — which included keeping plows slightly higher than the roadways and skipping over streets along their routes.” Although the Department of Sanitation has a logo somewhat similar to EMS,  and is engaged in a vital part of public health, they have regularly blackmailed the city with strikes and slowdowns. Also went on Strike for 9 days in 1968. In the DSNY today after 5½ years, the salary jumps to an average of $88,616 dollars. They have a 20 and out pension.

Like Nurses, EMS members practice medicine. Like Sanitation workers we pick things up and we put them down. But EMS isn’t at the educational level of an RN or engaged in the physical rigor of a Sanitation worker. Parity is thus pegged to Cops and Firefighters. The two most similar jobs, jobs we basically share a navy blue uniform with and see on the majority of our calls.

The real difference between Cops, Firefighters and EMS is not only $50,000 in wage disparity, but in what we all actually do on the job. As well as the physical and mental toll it takes to constantly be around death, dying, sickness and trauma. What our job actually results in, not theoretically results or results in by default,  is a daily struggle to keep people from dying. A daily struggle to promote health and wellness. The police protect a system of law and order. The firefighters protect property. EMS protects human life and well being.

The police spend the vast majority of their careers fighting quality of life crime and taking reports. 

The very limited amount of instances they are ever being shot at, they rarely and statistically have been killed. Statistically meaning, taken as a whole, numerically, over time.

111 NYPD officers were killed on duty between 1980 and 2010. Another way to think of that is 4 per year. A total of 331 NYPD employees have died in the line of duty since 1950, 5 per year. Deaths peaked in 2001, when 23 officers died in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but the effects are still being felt today. 206 NYPD officers have died from 9/11-related illnesses, which are separate from the 331 officers who died in the line of duty. Police work is still on the 16th most dangerous American job, but decreasing in the number of deaths and injuries per year.

The job of the Police department is “to be a deterrent to crime and enforce the laws”. Statistically speaking they do not get in that many fire fights and they also do not save that many lives directly, except in a noble indirect way by keeping human tribalism and criminal instincts at bay. In 1971 the NYPD staged a Work Stoppage occuring for five days between January 14 and January 19, 1971, when around 20,000 New York City police officers refused to report for regular duty. While officers maintained that they would continue to respond to serious crimes and emergencies, they refused to carry out routine patrolling duties, leading in some cases, to as little as 200 officers being on the street in the city.

In 2014 the NYPD held a work “slowdown” for about seven weeks as political conflict between protesters, Mayor Bill de Blasio and the city’s police unions intensified. Legally, police officers can’t strike, but for 7 weeks in 2014-2015 the NYPD engaged in a near total work stoppage, arresting no one except in violent crimes. For the week of 22 December, citywide traffic tickets dropped 94% from the same period in 2013. Court summons for low-level offences, like public intoxication, also dropped 94%. Parking tickets were down 92%. Overall arrests were down 66%, as well. Nobody noticed.

Though their publicists and the writers of their many TV serials would like the general public to think they do save many lives, “get the bad guys off the streets” and risk their life every single day, they really don’t. Mostly they write reports, hand out quality of life crime related fines and make quota quality of life crime collars. To justify what amounts to a highly respectable middle class wage a Salary after 5 ½ years of  $85,292 which include holiday pay, longevity pay, uniform allowance, night differential and overtime, police officers may potentially earn over $100,000 per year. 

The public didn’t even notice the Police were on strike in 2014. It had almost no impact on violent crime or quality of life. It was as if their main job was needless fines and upholding a “broken windows theory” now widely discredited. But sometimes they do get executed in their squad car, they do get shot by criminals and they do die. And while being a cop is hard work, it sure doesn’t directly keep people alive. It doesn’t seem to slow any link between quality of life crime and descent into anarchy and most importantly, quota based policing it has led to mass incarceration, illegal/unconstitutional racist methods of policing like “stop and frisk”, and contributed to the deaths of around 1,200 people of color in police custody or killed during arrest in America each year. 1 in 100 Americans are behind bars, on probation or parole.

The NYPD has a clear resentment to the FDNY Firefighters, who are paid more to do a lot less. 95% of FDNY calls do not involve the risk of actual fire fighting. 

The Firefighters after 5 ½ years earn around 110K, they have 20 and out pensions, they work 2 days a week and they have the enduring love and admiration of much of the public. 

As they should, because encountering flames in close quarters is dangerous and risky. Although it is something done mostly by volunteers across America and tens of thousands are on the FDNY waiting list. There is also a strange macho ideology called “interior attack” which worked its way into FDNY methodology, not used anywhere else in the country. Fighting fire inside a building of a working fire instead of dumping water on it from the outside. They proudly claim this is about “saving lives” but it is actually about endangering working class people to protect property. However, because of building codes and modern technology fires make up only 5% of their total call volume. 

The FDNY Firefighters have lost 421 members in line of duty deaths since 1980. 343 on 9.11 and 222 more of lung disease and exposure later.. adjusting this in the same way NYPD deaths are arranged, that is 10 deaths a year factoring out 9.11, that number would be 2 a year.

The International Association of Firefighters says cancer is now the leading cause of death among firefighters. While thirty years ago, firefighters were most often diagnosed with asbestos-related cancers, today the cancers are more often leukemia, lymphoma or myeloma, officials say.

On Nov. 6, 1973 for five and a half tense hours, most of the city’s 10,900 firemen (they were all men) picketed outside their firehouses or simply watched as some 80 fires burned citywide, chanting ”Scab! Scab!” at makeshift firefighting crews.

Today, 95% of the time the FDNY and fire houses across America respond to medical EMS type assignments. Engine company CFRs show up on priority 1 to 3 EMS jobs, just a little bit before the ambulances because they get the call 30 seconds before. The “enthusiasm” they have for battling combustion in the shadow of 9.11 is not translated into an enthusiasm for medical first aid. Very well documented by now is fire fighters leaving calls without being released or even assessing patients, firefighters not giving even the most basic report before asking “if you guys got this” to EMS, as well as firefighters abandoning EMS crews before anyone even knew the status of the patient.

Firefighters do sometimes give oxygen and do CPR, in varying combinations of one or two hands, which is to say they don’t do it well a great deal of the time, they do give “lift assists” and they vary radically in level of respect by fire house. They do anything they can to get off the scene as fast as they can. Although they have around 48 hours of CFR training, and many of them are or were EMTs and Paramedics, they don’t ever take vitals. They rarely if ever give any meaningful reports. Then, they remain out of service for 30 to 40 minutes after the release of care. It is also very expensive to send 5 firefighters to participate in this insulting charade. By the hour the same cost would fully fund 4 or 5 entire BLS ambulances. Thus also ending the excuse of their wider geographic distribution.

During the Covid 19 Pandemic they were released of these responsibilities for the worst 2 weeks. For the next worst 4 weeks they slowed down and regularly abandoned EMS crews in the field. 

They had so much time on their hands they took to feeding nurses on television and turning out for the daily public clap. During the course of the pandemic over 30% of the FDNY went out sick. Over 1,000 EMS members and over 2,000 firefighters. The rapidly overwhelmed 911 system had to call in hundreds of the very same private ambulance EMS providers they so regularly denounce and make life difficult for on a daily basis. That is because the FDNY was unable to manage the pandemic response, as it is unable to manage the normal daily call volume.

9.11 type terrorism, Superstore Sandy or Covid 19 style pandmeic aside the FDNY only manages to staff ⅔ of the 911 ambulances on a regular uneventful day because typically it’s EMS members resign after just 4 years from poor conditions and low wages. It is also the lowest paid 9.11 employer in the City of New York.

There are of course many very brave firefighters, no one begrudges them their good wages and benefits, but they don’t treat EMS workers very well, especially not the 4,300 FDNY EMS workers they share a uniform with. On every conceivable level of abandonment, FDNY firefighters use a combination of the 9.11 legacy and the leverage of their political weight to force an inefficient model of response on the taxpayer. We are literally paying for a loud and nearly useless show since there is no reason that 2 EMTs and 2 Paramedics and a Lieutenant with a Lucas automated compression device cannot manage a cardiac arrest. There is no reason to have 11,000 firefighters when 95% of the calls are EMS calls. There is no reason the FDNY cannot pay its members a living wage in their city.

The realization that our workforce is also a billion dollar operation means that not only do we get exploited, we are propping up the establishment which exploits us.

Parity is a justice whose time has come for people who serve this city. We deliver your babies, we bring back your dead, we carry your wounded off the bloody streets. We check on your grandparents, we bring the ER into the homes of the poorest most vulnerable, we head to the fires with the firefighters, we careen with ungodly speed towards the shootings of police and gangsters alike. We are there when you are born and when you die. It takes an unknowable toll on our bodies, minds and backs.

Amongst ourselves we must defeat ethnic, garage, agency, union and sector tribalism. No single faction or group has enough members to win this fight.

The cops, the firefighters, the nurses, the sanitation workers, the teachers and bus subway operators. They have all used their “essential nature” to bargain for better wages and workplace rights.

EMS will never strike. Because people will actually die, because every day in big and small ways we actually are simply essential. So we are left with two strategies moving ahead and we need to unite 13,500 strong around them. First, we need to tighten the belt, unite the ranks across all sectors and step up the hearts and minds game in all districts. Second, we need clear concise united demands backed up by escalation of industrial action.

If the City Council is allegedly now behind us on parity and the public knows how hard we grind for them before and after Covid 19. We must look our mayor,  managers, unions, institutions namely the FDNY Management, the Hospital Groups and the CEOS in the eyes. We need to say in one voice, “As long as there blood in our eyes, there’s pain in our backs, as long as our kids can’t afford the right schools, we can’t afford to live here and you are unwilling to help us advance our lives, we won’t turn our backs on the public ever, but we will hit you in the pockets.”

Never forget that the price of one ambulance ride is billed at $724 to $4,000 and that our median wage is $18 an EMT and $30 a paramedic per hour. Never forget that we do over 4,000 911 calls and 2,000 private calls per day. Never forget that we are essential. The time for Parity and Justice is now.

The New York City Council has just passed a non-binding resolution calling for parity with Police and Fire. We need to organize and lobby for even more.

EMS is a fully diverse service, the majority of which is composed of Blacks and Latinos from the city’s most underserved districts. Its members and officers are over ⅓ female with many openly gay, including the FDNYs Em@ Chief Lillian Bonsignore. Muslims, Asians, Jews and new immigrants make up a large percentage of the force. 

But the real difference lies in two distinct variables. EMS daily saves human lives. EMS turns a huge profit.

The real “difference” between EMS and all other services is that we are actually worth way more, though we have been bullied and self censored from declaring it. Everyone says “the very worst enemy we have is ourselves”. There is always some truth to that statement. But, we currently also have a great deal of actual external opposition to our call for parity and justice. Arrayed against our members are an array of powerful actors that by action and inaction purposefully block our progress to parity. 

That opposition can be isolated into the following groupings. The FDNY Management, the Firefighters Union, Hospital Management, the Nursing Unions, the ownership of all private ambulance companies, the political establishment of the City and State, the current Mayor DeBlasio and very importantly our own unions which perpetuate the status quo through a “management of expectations”.  With the exceptions of FDNYs 2507/3621, 1199/SEIU and the IAEP/SEIU none of the other unions are dedicated to or specialized for EMS workers. And what happens is we are divided amid nine separate unions each negotiating for limited possibilities.

Of course the nurses, firefighters, cops and sanitation workers are completely essential. Vital and important. If not for all those heroes, and I don’t say that tongue in cheek, the city would probably come undone. Of course each of their unions and PR machines would like to sweep away the memory of when each went on strike, repeatedly over the years. The Nurses of NYP, Montefiore and Mt. Sinai NYSNA nurses with start pay around $97,000 voted to go on strike just last year. Time and time again our heroes paralyzed the city and threatened the lives of New Yorkers for exactly the kind of normative middle class wages and benefits we in EMS are asking for today. Of course EMS will not ever be going on Strike for so many different reasons. Most importantly because people might actually die. But make no mistake every other group of heroes has put their economic well being before their service to the city at some point.

Nurses are the integral workhorses of the entire Healthcare system. 

Like a Nurse, EMS members need to understand concepts of medicine and are supervised by a doctor. In some precise ways our Paramedic skill set is on the practical level is above the entry level nurse. Nurses definitely do not intubate people or interpret EKGs, or administer medication autonomously. Nurses work very, very hard, but they do so in controlled situations with a great deal of supervision, guidance and support. During a 1998 nurses strike at Maimonides Hospital in the recent past Paramedics were used in the ER, with beyond adequate performance. The Nursing unions would like to make sure we are never allowed in an ER again. The nurses unions quite actively would like to prevent any clear bridge from Paramedic to RN or PA because it would lead to a realization that people paid half what they make, with almost nine of the science background can do their job just as well. When people start whispering about an ambulance strike, which is also against the law, people say “So cruel, selfish and nearly evil, people could die.” But a nursing strike seems to be as American as Apple pie. Could it be that in all the precious Nursing strikes, no on died, no one sued? That was because even higher paid nurses were bussed in to temp for them.

“Without the Department of Sanitation a plague would overtake this city. Or at the very least trash would pile up high, the city would stink and rats would have field day.”

Like a Sanitation worker, EMS members operate a large vehicle in cumbersome urban traffic and all weather conditions, with near total disregard from the public, especially in the Bronx. We must get through the streets making pickups while the public blocks streets with their cars, darts in front of our vehicles and basically flip out when a street is blocked operationally. Like sanitation, we have to lift and carry,  albeit not in a rapid succesion. Sanitation doesn’t have to carry 250 Ibs up six flights of stairs and carry down people around 250 pounds or more. In some ways, like sanitation, a pause in delivery of service will potentially cost lives. Like when Sanitation went on strike during the Blizzard of 2010. “New York’s Strongest used a variety of tactics to drag out the plowing process — and pad overtime checks — which included keeping plows slightly higher than the roadways and skipping over streets along their routes.” Although the Department of Sanitation has a logo somewhat similar to EMS,  and is engaged in a vital part of public health, they have regularly blackmailed the city with strikes and slowdowns. Also went on Strike for 9 days in 1968. In the DSNY today after 5½ years, the salary jumps to an average of $88,616 dollars. They have a 20 and out pension.

Like Nurses, EMS members practice medicine. Like Sanitation workers we pick things up and we put them down. But EMS isn’t at the educational level of an RN or engaged in the physical rigor of a Sanitation worker. Parity is thus pegged to Cops and Firefighters. The two most similar jobs, jobs we basically share a navy blue uniform with and see on the majority of our calls.

The real difference between Cops, Firefighters and EMS is not only $50,000 in wage disparity, but in what we all actually do on the job. As well as the physical and mental toll it takes to constantly be around death, dying, sickness and trauma. What our job actually results in, not theoretically results or results in by default,  is a daily struggle to keep people from dying. A daily struggle to promote health and wellness. The police protect a system of law and order. The firefighters protect property. EMS protects human life and well being.

The police spend the vast majority of their careers fighting quality of life crime and taking reports. 

The very limited amount of instances they are ever being shot at, they rarely and statistically have been killed. Statistically meaning, taken as a whole, numerically, over time.

111 NYPD officers were killed on duty between 1980 and 2010. Another way to think of that is 4 per year. A total of 331 NYPD employees have died in the line of duty since 1950, 5 per year. Deaths peaked in 2001, when 23 officers died in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but the effects are still being felt today. 206 NYPD officers have died from 9/11-related illnesses, which are separate from the 331 officers who died in the line of duty. Police work is still on the 16th most dangerous American job, but decreasing in the number of deaths and injuries per year.

The job of the Police department is “to be a deterrent to crime and enforce the laws”. Statistically speaking they do not get in that many fire fights and they also do not save that many lives directly, except in a noble indirect way by keeping human tribalism and criminal instincts at bay. In 1971 the NYPD staged a Work Stoppage occuring for five days between January 14 and January 19, 1971, when around 20,000 New York City police officers refused to report for regular duty. While officers maintained that they would continue to respond to serious crimes and emergencies, they refused to carry out routine patrolling duties, leading in some cases, to as little as 200 officers being on the street in the city.

In 2014 the NYPD held a work “slowdown” for about seven weeks as political conflict between protesters, Mayor Bill de Blasio and the city’s police unions intensified. Legally, police officers can’t strike, but for 7 weeks in 2014-2015 the NYPD engaged in a near total work stoppage, arresting no one except in violent crimes. For the week of 22 December, citywide traffic tickets dropped 94% from the same period in 2013. Court summons for low-level offences, like public intoxication, also dropped 94%. Parking tickets were down 92%. Overall arrests were down 66%, as well. Nobody noticed.

Though their publicists and the writers of their many TV serials would like the general public to think they do save many lives, “get the bad guys off the streets” and risk their life every single day, they really don’t. Mostly they write reports, hand out quality of life crime related fines and make quota quality of life crime collars. To justify what amounts to a highly respectable middle class wage a Salary after 5 ½ years of  $85,292 which including holiday pay, longevity pay, uniform allowance, night differential and overtime, police officers may potentially earn over $100,000 per year. 

The public didn’t even notice the Police were on strike in 2014. It had almost no impact on violent crime or quality of life. It was as if their main job was needless fines and upholding a broken windows theory now widely discredited. But sometimes they do get executed in their squad car, they do get shot by criminals and they do die. And while being a cop is hard work, it sure doesn’t directly keep people alive. It doesn’t seem to slow any link between quality of life crime and descent into anarchy and most importantly, quota based policing it has led to mass incarceration, illegal/unconstitutional racist methods of policing like “stop and frisk”, and contributed to the deaths of around 1,200 people of color in police custody or killed during arrest in America each year. 1 in 100 Americans are behind bars, on probation or parole.

The NYPD has a clear resentment to the FDNY Firefighters, who are paid more to do a lot less. 95% of FDNY calls do not involve the risk of actual fire fighting.

The Firefighters after 5 ½ years earn around 110K, they have 20 and out pensions, they work 2 days a week and they have the enduring love and admiration of much of the public. 

As they should, because encountering flames in close quarters is dangerous and risky. Although it is something done mostly by volunteers across America and tens of thousands are on the FDNY waiting list. There is also a strange macho ideology called “interior attack” which worked its way into FDNY methodology, not used anywhere else in the country. Fighting fire inside a building of a working fire instead of dumping water on it from the outside. They proudly claim this is about “saving lives” but its actually about endangering working class people to protect property. However, because of building codes and modern technology fires make up only 5% of their total call volume. 

The FDNY Firefighters have lost 421 members in line of duty deaths since 1980. 343 on 9.11 and 222 more of lung disease and exposure later.. adjusting this in the same way NYPD deaths are arranged, that is 10 deaths a year factoring out 9.11, that number would be 2 a year.

The International Association of Firefighters says cancer is now the leading cause of death among firefighters. While thirty years ago, firefighters were most often diagnosed with asbestos-related cancers, today the cancers are more often leukemia, lymphoma or myeloma, officials say.

On Nov. 6, 1973 for five and a half tense hours, most of the city’s 10,900 firemen (they were all men) picketed outside their firehouses or simply watched as some 80 fires burned citywide, chanting ”Scab! Scab!” at makeshift firefighting crews.

Today, 95% of the time the FDNY and fire houses across America respond to medical EMS type assignments. Engine company CFRs show up on priority 1 to 3 EMS jobs, just a little bit before the ambulances because they get the call 30 seconds before. The “enthusiasm” they have for battling combustion in the shadow of 9.11 is not translated into an enthusiasm for medical first aid. Very well documented by now is fire fighters leaving calls without being released or even assessing patients, firefighters not giving even the most basic report before asking “if you guys got this” to EMS, as well as firefighters abandoning crews. 

Fire fighters do sometimes give oxygen and do CPR, in varying combinations of one or two hands, which is to say they don’t do it well a great deal of the time, they do give “lift assists” and they vary radically in level of respect by fire house. They do anything they can to get off the scene as fast as they can. Although they have around 48 hours of CFR training, and many of them are or were EMTs and Paramedics, they don’t ever take vitals. They rarely if ever give any meaningful reports. Then, they remain out of service for 30 to 40 minutes after the release of care. It is also expensive to send 5 firefighters to participate in this insulting charade. By the hour the same cost would fund 4 or 5 entire BLS ambulances.

During the Covid 19 Pandemic they were released of these responsibilities for the worst 2 weeks. For the next worst 4 weeks they slowed down and regularly abandoned crews in the field. 

They had so much time on their hands they took to feeding nurses on television and turning out for the daily public clap. During the course of the pandemic over 30% of the FDNY went out sick. Over 1,000 EMS members and over 2,000 firefighters. The rapidly overwhelmed 911 system had to call in hundreds of the very same private ambulance EMS providers they so regularly denounce and make life difficult for. That is because the FDNY was unable to manage the pandemic response, as it is unable to manage the nor.al call volume.

9.11 type terror, Superstore Sandy or Covid 19 style pandmeic aside the FDNY only manages to staff ⅔ rds of the 911 ambulances on a regular uneventful day because typically it’s EMS members resign after just 4 years. It is also the lowest paid 9.11 employer in the City of New York.

There are of course many very brave firefighters, no one begrudges them their good wages and benefits, but they dont treat EMS workers well, especially not the 4,300 FDNY EMS workers they share a uniform with. On every conceivable level of abandonment, FDNY firefighters use a combination of the 9.11 legacy and the leverage of their political weight to force an inefficient model of response on the taxpayer. We are literally paying for a loud and nearly useless show since there is no reason that 2 EMTSs and 2 paramedics and a Lieutenant with a Lucas device cannot manage a cardiac arrest. There is no reason to have 11,000 fire fighters when 95% of the calls are EMS calls. There is no reason the FDNY cannot pay its members a living wage in their city.

The realization that our workforce is also a billion dollar operation means that not only do we get exploited, we are propping up the establishment which exploits us.

Parity is a justice whose time has come for people who serve this city. We deliver your babies, we bring back your dead, we carry your wounded off the bloody streets. We check on your grandparents, we bring the ER into the homes of the poorest most vulnerable, we head to the fires with the firefighters, we careen with ungodly speed towards the shootings of police and gangster alike. We are there when you are born and when you die. 

Amongst ourselves we must defeat ethnic, garage, agency, union and sector tribalism. No single faction or group has enough members to win this fight.

The cops, the firefighters, the nurses, the sanitation workers, the teachers and bus subway operators. They have all used their essential nature to bargain for better wages and workplace rights.

EMS will never strike. Because people will actually die, because every day in big and small ways we actually are simply essential. So we are left with two strategies moving ahead and we need to unite 13,500 strong around them. First, we need to tighten the belt, unite the ranks across all sectors and step up the hearts and minds game in all districts. Second, we need clear concise united demands backed up by industrial action.

If the City Council is allegedly now behind us on parity and the public knows how hard we grind for them before and after Covid 19; we must look our mayor,  managers, unions, institutions namely the FDNY Management, the Hospital Groups and the CEOS in the eye. We need to say in one voice, “As long as there blood in our eyes, there’s pain in our backs, as long as our kids can’t afford the right schools and you are unwilling to help us advance our lives, we won’t turn our backs on the public ever, but we will hit you in the pockets.”