Holiday in Greensburg

[proud2BlibKansan]

Banned from the tornado cleanup effort, Lawrence anarchists stick it to the man by helping anyway.
By Carolyn Szczepanski
Published: June 7, 2007

Dave Strano stood at the edge of a crowd on Massachusetts with a bright-red clown nose on his face, admiring his reflection in a restaurant window. Around him, a dozen young Lawrence residents loaded shovels and work gloves and yellow boxes of Tastee-Os cereal into a green-and-purple school bus with the anarchist flag pasted above the windshield. Aware that his fellow travelers were bound for a place they weren't welcome, Strano joked that the ripped foam nose he'd found in a dumpster behind Jayhawk Towers might be enough to fool an army of police officers.

"That'll get me into Greensburg," he announced sarcastically.

The joke earned cautious laughter from the other members of Kansas Mutual Aid, an anarchist collective that organizes anti-war protests, tends community gardens and advocates on behalf of prisoners. The group was about to pull away from the Solidarity Revolutionary Center and Radical Bookstore to spend Memorial Day weekend in central Kansas, removing debris from the EF-5 tornado that chewed through Greensburg and spit out its contents across miles of surrounding fields. The week before Memorial Day, Strano and four others were escorted out of the ravaged city limits and told they'd be arrested if they returned.

Joe Carr, a member, says the group mobilized after the May 4 storm. Unlike countless church groups and individ- ual do-gooders, Kansas Mutual Aid approached the disaster from a political perspective. Its members were concerned about residents' human rights and civil liberties in a newly militarized city. They worried about the location of the prisoners in the county jail. And they predicted an inept state-run cleanup.

more . . .
http://www.pitch.com/2007-06-07/news/holiday-in-greensburg/1