SHWI repost: Flower Power (Red Europe)

The Seed: Flower Power

Wotcher comrades and fellow travellers!

Some accuse me of concentrating on the weeds instead of the flowers, as
if socialism is some kind of monoculture. I say let a hundred flowers
bloom, and grow more basil, because its delicious.

* * *

The meeting would start late. Meetings always started late.

This Friday the delegated catering workers left their local halls after
washing up the hot lunch. They walked or cycled down the high dirt
roads to the largest central hall and began helping the workers there
who had been cleaning and cutting vegetables since morning.

This Friday the fathers and mothers from the creches trailed long lines
of toddlers behind them. The older children pushed multi-prams over
the earth roads. They detoured past school's work zones, and collected
the teachers and primary students from their Friday Afternoon
"adult-work" lessons. Before the meeting they would all be washed,
unlike the parents out in the fields.

The secondary students would make their own way there. The older ones
and candidate-party-members were walking around like they owned the
place, looking out at the Spring dusk. But the secondary students did
gravitate towards the apprentice workers, lured as much by the
difference in work roles as the chance to kindle friendships and
romance. After hushed words between the students' delegates, the
'prentice's delegates, and the party members from both groups, the
morass of adolescents began slouching off towards the meeting hall like
a herd of cats.

Spring! Planting season. Tending season. Through the cold soil
plants pushed up new life. Germinal. The days started early, but
ended on time. Around five various workers looked up from the vast
flower beds, eyeing their watches. Others had been watching the
watch-possessors, and took this as their chance to stretch, and return
their tools to the little sheds that surrounded the beds.*1 A tramp
took up across the district, centered on the meeting hall. The
party-members walked tall and fast, setting examples, and rushing to
their caucuses.

* * *

They entered. No food or wash for the weary company until the meeting
had decided. The Parties gathered early, vying for the left most
positions at the front in the hall, centered on their leaders. The
others milled, rolled-up, and fagged on about the possibility of late
frosts and the outlook for rain. The youth conspicuously sat at the
rear. Loud cries occasionally went up. Slaps on the faces of over
eager young women. The maturing sound of young men giggling.

The children raced and milled in eddies around the chairs, shouting
with joy until the calming voices of their teachers and care givers
made them quiet, and they took to cat's cradle on the floor near the
education section.

Finally, in strode the caterers. Steam dripping from them from the
bain-marie heaters next door. Hair pulled back under the variety of
uniform scarves: Indian, Turkish and Chinese patterns a dazzling
contrast to their red faces.

The sudden noise of double doors sweeping back made the workers rush
the seats. The meeting would begin. Men sat with men in their
parties. Women sat with men in small numbers. Tonight few heads
turned to notice the solid block on the right, surrounding the care
givers, teachers and children, a block of women.

On the low stage the delegates muttered and the chair began, only to be
pre-empted by a heavily pregnant adolescent with a procedural motion
establishing a new agenda. Seconded in a second. Point of order moved
a voice vote immediately. Party caucuses spluttered, as did the chair,
but "Aye" rang up strong on the right in women's voice.

The meeting that night was a sharp, fast ambush. Fast like the shear
cutting the long stem in the field. A fallacy wilted that evening, an
erect rosebud of revolution scorned. "Pleasure" cried the ambush,
"pleasure in work," "freedom in roles." And the meeting had
been rolled. The usual dry reports were abolished for one night, and
curtailed forever more. The endless party motions of support and
condemnation were rendered limp.

At dinner the women walked in first, proud, together and free. A
freedom they had won not with the fake tools of a red army or revolt,
but with the real force that had made the revolution a reality,
solidarity. The caterers ate first. The caterers ate first. Later,
hesistantly, some of the men stood after eating, and then instead of
rolling-up at the doorways, walked over to the basins and began, for
the first time, to wash up. In hundreds of house holds that evening
new words were exchanged in new voices and new tones. In some houses
that evening as all too common noises rang out, they were silenced by
the intervention of groups of women, and then the old noises rang out
on new drums.

Later the central party newspapers would decry the meeting as a sex
strike, a Greek-comedic go slow, but the hollow articles spawned more
revolts elsewhere until across the fields and factories of tomorrow
Dutch speaking women had rolled meetings. The Parties jumped on the
bandwagon late after receiving sharp prods from some of the leading
lights of Germany and Russia, and from most every woman member.

The woman question was receiving an answer: freedom wasn't just about
work, and work wasn't just about what the bosses had said it was.
Across the fields new life sprouted and bloomed. Across what had been
Holland, the women blossomed.

yours,
Sam R.

*1 Who'd want to get up to the wail of a whistle, work until the toll
of a bell, eat lunch until the sound of a siren, and quit at the
quailing of a klaxon? "Self-"management can mean just that.
 
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