Letters

To the Editor:

Another crock o' running dog shit at the end of the Rainbow! Here we try to serve this city with Truth, Honor, Items, Courage, Thrift. Determination, Color, Precision, Deviance, Dilemma, Effervescence Excellence, Absolutism, Art, Communityitis, the Old Touch of Midas, and YOU'RE TRYING TO FIGHT US???

 We gave you, the Ann Arbor Sun, the scoop, and you pooped. Just because we gave you the info on the Second Annual Ozone Parade doesn't mean it is true. What's happened to the American tradition of investigative and objective responsibility trends?

We gave you the wrong info, knowing you would TWIST, DISTORT and PREVERT it until it was right. Instead you printed what we told you, doing more damage to this community and this parade that we might have ever imagined in our very minds. And the finality of black and white print did not leave us the essential five days to change our planks.

The Truth:

The Parade is Friday October 19, not Oct. 16. The Benefit is October 4 at the Primo Showbar - with Radio King, a Vaudeville Show and the Ozone Film Festival - bring your home movies and we will show them. People in full costumes admitted half price. Tickets to the Ozone Guessing Contest - not the Ozone Raffle - are on sale at South University Discount Records and around town by twenty assorted Ozonics. First prize is not a trip to Nirvana, Michigan - it is a Trip to Nirvana. And it is not the Ozone Parade Central Committee, it is

Sincerely,

The Ozone Parade Centrifickle Committee

ALL POWER TO ALL PARADES!!! FREEMEAT!!

 To the Editor:

A couple of issues ago the Ann Arbor Sun published a letter from a woman named Jackie Bailey, who signed the letter: "FREE LENI SINCLAIR! Jackie Bailey. Acting Lesbian Advocate, University of Michigan." In the letter she attacks the SUN, the Rainbow People's Party and demands a "definite statement from the RPP in regards to the very real, every day oppression of women and lesbian women, both inside and outside the party." The SUN wrote a beautiful letter in response to it. expressing exactly my feelings on the  subject, and I let it go at that. Then George DePue's slick paper, New Morning, opportunistically reprinted the letter from Jackie Bailey (without the SUN 's reply of course) in their latest issue.

Then just a couple of days ago I heard that' somebody had spray painted "FREE LENI SINCLAIR" on the wall of a University building in town. It finally began to dawn on me that there was some dangerous shit going on in this town. and I began to wonder where these weirdo attacks might be coming from. and began to consider the affect they might have on the community. In the past, I have never responded publicly to any of this bullshit because I thought, in an elitist way I guess, that the people who knew me and my work would already know that it's bullshit. I always felt that I had more important and more constructive things to do with my time than to react to such utter nonsense.

But I realize now that these attacks have nothing to do with me as a person. I realize now that I am being used as a stepping stone for attacks on the whole Rainbow People's Party and especially on John Sinclair who is a public figure, due primarily to his 9 1/2 to 10  years prison sentence for possession of 2 joints.

John has been my closest friend and comrade for almost 10 years and is the one person who has more respect for me as a human being,  who happens to be a woman, than anyone else  I know in the world. To say FREE LENI J SINCLAIR implies that John is a sexist pig  who makes me stay at home to keep house for him, take care of the kids full-time, cook, wash dishes and watch TV. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, if any of the people who are making these accusations ever cared to investigate the truth, they'd find quite a different picture: Through a long struggle over the last 5 years we have been able to almost totally collectivize all reproductive functions in our collective: alI cooking, cleaning. house maintainance, child care is shared equally between brothers and sisters. I personally cook dinner for everybody once a week (every Monday), and get to hang out with our 3 children only one evening every 2 weeks! I wish it was more. Although biologically I have given birth to 2 daughters (6 and 3 years old now), I have ( functionally not been a "mother" for over 2 years.

So what is FREE LENI SINCLAIR! supposed to mean? As a woman who has some self respect and has struggled for her liberation  for 33 years I do feel personally insulted by Jackie Bailey's and George DePue's insinuation That I am somebody's slave or dunce.

First of all, Jackie Bailey has never met me

Dear Sisters & Brothers:

As you may know the Children's Community Center has purchased a house at 317 N. Seventh (across from West Park) with the revenue sharing monies we received from the City this spring. Upon completion of improvements we will obtain a license from the Mich. Dept. of Social Services to operate a child care program for 15 children from 2 1/1 thru 5 years. This is a great opportunity and responsibility for all of us to begin creating an alternative to the present educational system, and we who have been organizing the CCC over the past year would like to invite you to join us in a general orientation and organization meeting on Wednesday, Sept. 26 at 8PM in our new house.

Some of the things we want to discuss and plan are enrollment and staff, raising. building improvements and future expansion (a dome), operating philosophy and methods. special projects. and Tribal Council as a whole. We hope you can make this initial meeting, but if you can't attend and would like to participate in the CCC please contact us. And of course child care will be provided during the meeting along with munchies. . .

Educate to liberate.

-Children's Community Center

PS. If you have time to help us make house improvements and build equipment. please come by the CCC on Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings to work with us. Donations of play equipment, toys, craft and art materials, instruments, tools, books and records, lumber and hardware a small freezer, photo and video equipment and vehicles are very welcome.

to my knowledge and knows nothing of my life from first hand experience, yet makes a totally slanderous statement about another community person in her capacity as University official. That doesn't really surprise me. I have never had much respect for armchair "revolutionaries" - gay or otherwise. Jackie Bailey can throw her official title "Acting Lesbian Advocate, University of Michigan" around to try to give her statements more credibility, but she should not forget that the University she works for and hides behind is the same University that made the Vietnam war possible and is directly or indirectly responsible for the recent murder of one of my greatest contemporary heroes brother Salvadore Allende, in Chile by the CIA. As long as there are still bombs being dropped on yellow people. as long as the CIA continues to murder native freedom fighters around the world, as long as there are children whose parents have to send them to bed hungry at night (yes, even here in Ann Arbor, continued on page 8, Letters continued from page 2 Jackie). I feel that it is utter stupidity to say that the "Lesbian revolution is the only solution.'" It just doesn't make any sense.

In 1964 (after I had dabbled around with student government politics at WSU in Detroit, the peace movement. the civil rights movement, co-founded the WSU chapter of SDS in l962. after I got raped, and after having an abortion, and after bumming around Europe for almost a year in 1963 and 1964) I decided to get serious about what I was going do do with the rest of my life. I decided then that I would try to do whatever I was capable of doing that would help bring an end to exploitation and oppression for ALL the people on the planet, not just women, not just gays, not just freaks, not just Vietnamese, not just black people. To end exploitation and oppression of all the people on the planet, you have to break the stranglehold imperialism has on all the people still enslaved by it! And that means creating a whole new social system, a system built on the needs of human beings, not on the profit motive and the exploitation of other people. And that means starting with where you are, building an alternative to the existing social order right in your own community. That's what I dedicated my life to in 1964.

Back then all my old friends were content to just sit around complaining all the time how bad things were, talking about "being alienated," about "searching for their identity," or, if they were into organizing anything, it was always against something, or in protest of something the government did, or didn't do. That's when I met John. And John wasn't talking about being "alienated." John was talking about a whole different thing. He was talking about creating an alternative to all this madness, about people taking control over their own lives, about self-determination, talking about all the WORK that needed to be done. I was tired of wasting my life away on secondary issues or on my own "personal problems" and started working with John on organizing the Detroit Artists' Workshop in November 1964. I have been working and living with John ever since, except for 3 out of the 8 years that he spent in Michigan's penitentiaries.

Our organization has changed members, forms. and names a number of times. Trans-Love Energies grew out of the Artists' Workshop in 1967, and the White Panther Party grew out of Trans-Love in 1968, and the Rainbow People's Party developed out of the WPP in 1971. But thru all these changes, the basic premise has always been the same : not to react, but to act ; not to destroy, but to create and build; not to concentrate on our oppression, but on our liberation.

I always hated being exploited. My parents were peasants and I hated to see them being exploited by rich land owners. I hated being exploited when I first came over to this country from East Germany and was one of those efficient "German maids" in Grosse Pointe. I developed a profound hatred for my rich domineering mistress and I felt like choking her half the time. I certainly hate being exploited by men and do not put up with it. But I also hate when other women who, in their quest to be so "liberated" and "free" and "independent," oppress other sisters in order to out-macho men. Jackie, if you are so concerned with my alleged "oppression," why don't you COME OUT and introduce yourself to me. I do feel oppressed, but not by John, or by the other brothers in the RPP, as you are trying to make thousands of people believe, but by people like yourself who make it hard for me to progress in my work, who unconsciously or deliberately spread lies about me in my own community to confuse the people and help slow down the people's movement for liberation from all oppression, political, cultural, economic, sexual, etc.

In DePue's case I cannot figure out his motives, unless he is an agent provocateur. I have known George personally for about 5 years, and consider him one of the biggest male chauvinist pigs in town.

DePue's shit just doesn't make any sense. He knows better. He has been watching us closely for years and knows that we are not rich, are not racist, or sexist, yet he deliberately prints lies about "The Rainbow" and seems to base his whole existence and organization on putting us out of business. He is either on a big power and ego trip, or else some kind of agent, whose assignment it is to divide the community and to try to destroy everything we are trying to build. If he seriously considers "The Rainbow" to be his number one enemy in this world, then I guess we'll have to add him to the long list of oppressors we already have been fighting for years and years: Richard Nixon, John Mitchell, Richard Kleindienst, the Michigan State Police, Attorney General Kelley, the University of Michigan, and on and on.

Cool. So this is my personal statement "in regard to the very real, every day oppression of women" and I don't care if you are a Dyke - and damn Proud. So you only relate sexually to other sisters, so what? Why limit yourself to only one sex? It will sound like a cliché, but it's true that you cannot fight sexism with sexism more than you can fight racism with racism. As long as people in Gay Awareness Women's Kollective (G.A.W.K.) and similar organizations go around and attack "straight" women for being so oppressed. I don't have much respect for them. I do have a lot of respect for people who organize to stop rape, to help sisters obtain abortions, to create nursery schools to alleviate the oppression of mothers, to create schools and day care centers, to work constructively in any area that helps end sexism and all the other evils of Western civilization. I will be glad to talk to anyone who is seriously interested in discussing any of these issues with me, anyone who can help us progress and can bring constructive criticism, so we can learn how to improve our day-to-day practice. But anyone who comes off the wall (or paints on the wall) and spreads lies deliberately, later. I "II talk to you when you got something to say to me that makes sense.

More power to the sisters!

ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE!