The announcement of her forthcoming release follows the orca’s belated “retirement” last year. Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut is the second-oldest known living orca in the world.

The Miami Seaquarium, its parent firm, the Dolphin Company, and that firm’s owner and CEO, Mexican multimillionaire Eduardo Albor, are hailing the announcement as a big win for animal rights activism. Albor has associated himself and his company with billionaire-funded nonprofit corporation Friends of Toki. He presents himself to the public as a concerned philanthropist, environmentalist, and animal lover.

The truth of the matter is that Albor is, first and foremost, a capitalist — a profiteer — and that his decision to release Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut was made, first and foremost, because holding her in captivity is no longer profitable. She is too old to continue performing; the stress has undoubtedly shortened her lifespan, and would kill her if she were forced to continue. Her death by overwork would doubtless bring a wave of negative publicity crashing down on the Miami Seaquarium and its owner, damaging the company’s public image and, ultimately, hurting its bottom line. Now, after decades of profiting from her misery, the firm that owns Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut has agreed to release her. This is not charity. This is not justice. This is a public relations stunt.Meanwhile, since 2018, far in the “background” of the corporate media buzz surrounding the “philanthropic” pursuits of “concerned” capitalists, an Indigenous-led campaign for Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut’s freedom has carried on, gaining international support. The campaign is directed by the Lummi Nation through their nonprofit organization Sacred Sea. The Lummi, also known as the Lhaq’temish, are a federally recognized tribe native to a part of the Salish Coast, with a reservation in present-day Whatcom County, Washington. The goal of Sacred Sea’s campaign is to “right the wrong of Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut’s capture, and safely and responsibly bring her home to the Salish Sea.” To this end, the nonprofit has prepared a “comprehensive” operational plan, summarized as follows:

Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut lives in a concrete tank that is barely bigger than she is. She cannot dive and swim freely; she cannot escape the relentless Florida sun or hurricane dangers. The chlorinated water in which she swims is devoid of all life. Killer whales see with sound, as well as with vision. Her acoustic isolation is an extreme cruelty, akin to solitary confinement in a prison cell far from home.

By contrast, the Xwlemi Tokw [Lummi Home] that has been designed and would be custom-built for her is a large netted structure within a secure and protected area in her natal Salish Sea waters. She will have ample space to swim and dive; the waters will be full of natural life. She will breathe the air of the Salish Sea, she will hear the birds, keep company with the fish, swim over kelp beds, feel the pull of the tides and currents. We believe that water is alive, and has memory. Her home waters will embrace her. 

The Xwlemi Tokw will give access to spiritual practitioners, scientists, and veterinarians who will continue to assess and fulfill her changing needs. The Operational Plan details every aspect of the Xwlemi Tokw, including maintenance systems, long-term environmental assessment protocols, and on-site risk management.

Since the Lummi Nation’s 2018 resolution to fight for Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut’s freedom and return, Lummi activists and their allies have employed protest and public awareness tactics. Moreover, according to Sacred Sea,

In 2019, two individual Lummi women invoked the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) and announced their intent to sue Miami Seaquarium if the Seaquarium would not agree to collaboratively work out a plan to safely bring Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut back home to her family in the Salish Sea.

Whether such legal action would meet with any success within the white supremacist U.S. court system, dominated by capitalist and settler interests, is doubtful. But such “lawfare” tactics could prove ruinous to the Miami Seaquarium’s public image, and hit the firm where it really hurts: its revenue stream.

Fortunately for the Lummi Nation’s campaign, theirs isn’t the only potential legal threat the Dolphin Company faces.

In 2021, the U.S. Department of Agriculture investigated the Miami Seaquarium, and reportedly found that Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut was suffering in abhorrent living conditions. The water in her tank, drenched with chlorine, was “turbid” with filth, plastic, and chipped paint. She had endured years of malnutrition caused by the Seaquarium’s policy of chronically underfeeding her; her diet consisted of mostly rotten food, despite the objections of a veterinarian. She had sustained major injuries, including a jaw fracture, after being forced to perform dangerous jumps and somersaults, despite her advanced age. She was provided with no shelter from the oppressive Miami sun, which, in addition to painful overheating, can damage orcas’ eyes.

The protesting veterinarian would be fired by Miami Seaquarium shortly after the USDA’s report on Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut’s living conditions was published.

Now, in 2023, the Dolphin Company has at last agreed to cooperate in implementing the Lummi Nation’s “operational plan” for Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut’s rehabilitation and rematriation to the Salish Coast. In all likelihood, mounting pressure from multiple sides was the true impetus for the Miami Seaquarium’s sudden “ethical” awakening. Capitalists know no other morality than the profit-motive.

The announcement of Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut’s forthcoming release and reintroduction to her northern Pacific birthplace has again brought into the light that the horrific abuses of capitalism extend not only to humans and livestock animals, but also to any animal, no matter how rare or remote, that the capitalists can harness and exploit for profit.

All available evidence from scientific research indicates that orcas are sentient. They have magnificently complex social structures, rivaled in the organic world only by simian primates and elephants. They feel, by all appearances, a range of complicated and nuanced emotions and have intricate interpersonal bonds. They communicate with each other in something resembling language, and separate pods (small social units) even have varieties of this “language” resembling unique dialects. They are capable of abstract thought and planning, and of applying elementary logic and mathematics in novel ways in order to solve problems. They cooperate in teams when hunting, quite literally “herding” and corralling schools of prey fish, in a method known as “carousel feeding,” similar to how human hunters might pursue herds of deer or bison. They evidently have long memories, as pods can navigate thousands of miles of ocean together to complete regular migrations. Mothers affectionately sing to their calves, passing down “pod songs,” unique to each social unit, that the newborns remember and recite for the rest of their lives. The orca’s enormous, highly developed brain contains spindle neurons, a rare class of neurons associated with intelligence, found only in hominid apes (including humans), some monkeys, raccoons, and elephants. Most males live for 30 to 60 years; most females, 50 to 80 years, with some recorded living into their early 100’s.

While we believe that we should avoid anthropomorphizing (that is, reading human traits into nonhuman animals), it is difficult to deny that we can see many aspects of ourselves — our human minds, emotions, relationships, and societies — reflected in these animals. We can only speculate about the subjectivity, the mind, the internal life of an orca (in other words, what it is really like to be an orca, from her own perspective), but it seems undeniable that orcas, as with some other nonhuman animals, are endowed, in their own ways, with sentience.In a 2021 article, Lummi Nation leaders Raynell Morris and Ellie Kinley discuss the “people below the waves” in strikingly empathetic terms — terms of relatedness:

Our teachings hold that we have kinship bonds — as well as cultural and spiritual ties — to a particular clan of killer whales who live in the Salish Sea. They are our relatives, and so we call the J, K, and L pods of the Southern Resident orcas by their Lummi family name, Sk’aliCh’elh (Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut means “daughter of Sk’aliCh’elh”). 

We are taught that our Lummi and Sk’aliCh’elh families mirror each other. Our connection to the Salish Sea defines our people, as it does with the orcas. Salmon is essential to our identity and survival, as it is with the orcas. Our Lummi notion of “self” is inseparable from kinship and community; so, too, it is with the orcas. Family is sacred to us all…

In the 1960s and ’70s, about one-third of the Southern Resident orca population was captured and sold to aquariums and theme parks. For several decades, many of our own Lummi children were taken and sent away to boarding schools and foster care. Bringing those children back into our families and community has been healing. Sk’aliCh’elh children were sold to marine parks, where most of them died.

The authors also relate a heart-wrenching account:

This past spring, Lummi tribal members traveled to Miami and joined with members of the Seminole tribe, on whose homeland the Seaquarium is built, along with a nontribal filmmaker. After paying for their tickets to see “Lolita,” they took their seats in Whale Stadium, the arena surrounding Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut’s tank. The tribal members began to sing, drum, rattle, and pray. Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut began her routine. The filmmaker, who had attended and recorded previous shows, noticed that Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut was not responding to the trainer’s cues as usual. She would not perform. Many people have spoken for her, but we believe that this time, in the presence of ceremony, she was speaking for herself.  

Despite their sentience and our relatedness, when orcas are captured and forced into the inhumane and dehumanizing process of capitalist production, they, like all organisms, including human beings, are reduced to mere objects — commodities, profit-generating machines, privately owned means of production. A whole entertainment industry has been built upon kidnapping orcas from their natural habitats, stealing orca calves from their mothers, caging them in distressingly small and solitary enclosures, isolating them from fellow orcas and depriving them of social lives, perversely compelling them to breed and to bear offspring, subjecting them to cruel experiments, torturing them in order to “train” them as show animals, and forcing them to perform for crowds of human onlookers.

For her part, Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut was forced to perform for over 50 years before she “retired.” Only at the relatively advanced age of 57 will she be allowed to return to the waters where she was born. Unfortunately, her release cannot be immediate: She first must be taught by veterinarian specialists how to hunt in a specially designed enclosure — for she was deprived of the chance to learn from her pod — and she needs to grow a substantial amount of muscle — for the conditions of her captivity, inhabiting the cramped tank to which she has been confined since adolescence, have caused her muscles to atrophy. Only after a few years of rehabilitation will she have a chance to find her way back to her pod.

According to Morris and Kinley, “Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut still sings the [pod song] her mother taught her when she was a baby. Family is everything to these killer whales. Bringing Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut home will heal a very specific wound: It will make her family whole again.”

We hope that they’re right; we hope that their prediction is realized.

We look back with horror, and rightly so, at the depravities of mass entertainment in past epochs — for instance, the bloodsport competitions forced upon Rome’s slaves in the Colosseum. Future generations will look back with similar horror upon the depravities of our own, capitalist epoch, and their horror will be no less justified. Our grandchildren, or their grandchildren, or their grandchildren, and on, will wonder with disgust at how we could abide the caging and torturing of sentient animals for the purposes of live mass entertainment and, above all, capitalist profit; they will judge us and our times unkindly; they will feel immense gratitude at the circumstance that they were born into a more civilized, repaired world, a world in which such barbarities have receded into history.

Why are we writing about this issue in a Communist newspaper?

Communism means the universal and total liberation of humanity from all forms, modes, and structures of oppression — including the abolition of all colonial regimes and the decolonization of all stolen and subjugated lands. Communism means not only the abolition of social classes and of private property, and therefore the elimination of poverty and exploitation, but also the abolition of all other manifestations of social and interpersonal violence inherent to class societies — an end to all wars, genocides, deportations, occupations, plundering, and other violence between populations. This has been well established since Marx. We hold that the first step in the long historical march of Communism on this continent, North America, must be, and can only be, its complete decolonization — the abolition of the illegitimate settler-colonial empires occupying it, the U.S. and Canada, the rematriation of all Indigenous lands, the liberation of all colonized peoples, and the eradication of all racism. Moreover, we believe that Communism would be incomplete, if we failed to also champion the liberation of nonhuman animals, to work for the ecological restoration of our planet — our only home — and to safeguard the continuation of life as we know it in this and future eons.

Morris and Kinley write as follows: “Our late beloved hereditary chief of Lummi Nation, Tsilixw, told us that if we heal our orca family, if we heal the salmon, if we heal the Salish Sea, we will heal ourselves. We believe he meant our Lummi selves and also, broadly, our human selves, our species.”

We believe it is the duty of every Communist to wholeheartedly support Indigenous liberation struggles, and to unite these struggles with the struggle against the capitalists — the struggle for the emancipation of the working classes and the poor of all countries, without distinction of ethnicity, race, or religion — the struggle for socialism.

Housing prices are skyrocketing, forcing impoverished people to move further out to the city’s edges and into a food-desert apartheid created by disappearing grocery stores and rising food prices. These struggles are exacerbated by deteriorating public transportation as a result of divestment and  increased policing, resulting in fewer social services and increased police terrorism. This is a horrific, but all-too-common, example of U.S. capital’s  assault on the working classes, which continues to intensify as another periodic crisis in capitalism looms. 

White people are indeed suffering the consequences of a settler-colonial empire in decline — an empire their colonizing ancestors built, and an empire they carried forward with a regime of racial apartheid — but these hardships are much more severe for working-class Black and Indigenous communities across Oregon. The same is true of other racially marginalized and nationally oppressed peoples across the state. Capitalism in the Pacific Northwest is grounded in settler colonialism, chattel slavery, and racist and xenophobic immigration and property ownership laws. Oregon became Oregon through the dispossession and genocide of Indigenous and Black people, mob and legislative violence against Asian immigrants, and the state-sanctioned support of white settlement, wealth, health, and property at the expense of all others. Oregon is a white supremacist state. Progressive? Hardly! Today’s problems have been centuries in the making. Consistent racist and patriarchal policy throughout the entire U.S. Empire’s history has brought us to this moment.

From 1804 until 1806, the U.S. Army Corps of Discovery carried out a military operation to chart the geography and learn how to economically exploit the land acquired in the Louisiana Purchase. This would become known, and is today taught to schoolchildren as, the “Lewis and Clark Expedition.” While an express goal of the operation was to study the terrain and wildlife, Lewis and Clarks’ notes also conflated the many Indigenous peoples with the flora and fauna. This practice went on to influence the historical work on the frontier until about the 1980s. Left out of the fictionalized, classroom retelling of the expedition are the indispensable contributions of Sacagawea, an enslaved 14-year-old Agaidika girl and child-bride of a French-Canadian fur trapper, and York, an enslaved 34-year old African man, whose request for his freedom was denied upon the expedition’s return. The violent coercion of Black and Indigenous labor quite literally paved the way for the settlement of Oregon. Once the operation had concluded, the U.S. military sent soldiers to establish forts along their expanding empire’s so-called frontier, with the express purpose of defending the encroaching white settlers and permitting them to conduct terror-raids and attacks of extermination against the Indigenous populations of the territory. These settlers were guided by Protestant ideas of private property, enclosure, and “rights of conquest,” as well as the wink-and-nod lie that the land was “uninhabited.” Fort by fort, settlement by settlement, the U.S. moved further West until its Destiny was made Manifest.

Just before the American Civil War, the provisional government of the Oregon Territory passed a law banning slavery. Far from a triumph of abolitionist progressivism, the same law required all Black persons to leave Oregon Territory at once. The white legislature then passed another law — one that forbidding free Black persons from entering the territory. The punishment for the violation of any of these new laws was public flogging, repeated every six months until the offending Black person left the territory — not dissimilar from the punishments enslaved would experience. 

The white property owners in Oregon passed these laws not only because the Territory could not be admitted to the Union as a slave state, but also because they needed to exclude Black people from the workforce, in order to prevent them from owning private property. Black private ownership of the land would undermine the white-supremacist order, predicated on the theft of Indigenous land and its repurposing into a “reward” for white settlers. Any white male could receive 650 acres of land upon arrival, plus an additional 650 if married, encouraging as many as 400,000 white settlers to flock to Oregon during the mid-19th Century. The ultimate goal of this policy was to relieve the economic (class) tensions on the East coast. To reduce the conflict between white workers in the East and their industrialist bosses, the government engaged in systematic dispossession of land in the West through broken treaties and military occupation of the “frontier.”

Oregon’s white supremacist policies of exclusion also applied to Indigenous people in the state. In 1919, an Indigenous Tillamook woman, Ophelia Paquet, wished to claim the property of her recently deceased white husband of 30 years, Fred Paquet. The Tillamook county court recognized her as his widow and appointed her as the administer of the estate. “Two days later, though, Fred’s brother John [Paquet] came forward to contest Ophelia for control over the property.” The legal battle took place over the next two years and was eventually seen in the Oregon Supreme Court. Despite John’s horrible reputation (described by a county Judge as “a man of immoral habits… incompetent to transact ordinary business affairs and generally untrustworthy”) his status as a white man under the Oregon miscegenation laws was enough to ensure that he won his case against Ophelia. Not only were her people dispossessed of their ancestral lands by the state, but Ophelia, as an individual, was excluded from legally reclaiming even a small parcel of that land under the new private property regime. 

These horrific events are merely local instances of the systemic dispossession of oppressed nationalities, primarily Black people, across the U.S. Empire. Property relations have always been racialized in this country.

One of the many Supreme Court cases that helped codify the boundaries of racialization in the U.S. Empire comes from Oregon. In 1923, an Armenian immigrant, Tatos Cartozian, gained citizenship; this was challenged by the state in 1924. Cartozian argued that he was a white man and was, by law, guaranteed a pathway to citizenship and the right to continue his business as a rug dealer. In the resulting 1925 Supreme Court case, United States v. Cartozian, the Court ruled that Armenians were white and not Asian based on the provided “scientific” evidence. Race is not a biological fact, but rather a social construct and a legal category. The boundaries of whiteness can be restricted and expanded to suit the needs of the ruling classes.

Oregon eventually “allowed” Black settlement at the beginning of the twentieth century. Black persons were relegated to the Albina neighborhood in North Portland through a myriad of interwoven systems of discrimination carried out by the state and private institutions, but most notably through a process called redlining — a process in which banks refuse to give mortgages to Black people or extract unusually severe terms from them with subprime loans. During World War II, Portland’s Black population grew significantly, from roughly 1,800 to about 15,000 in five years. Three major shipyards were established in the Pacific Northwest, two in Portland, Oregon and one in Vancouver, Washington. These shipyards employed about 97,000 workers in total at their peak, and the prewar population of 340,000 was simply insufficient to meet the amount of ships commissioned by the U.S. Maritime Commission. Only fulfilling 27% of the commissioned vessels by the end of the war, it was clear that white male labor alone couldn’t maximize the market potential that was begging for ships. Thus, Oregon’s white capitalist class opened the doors to more workers and the general entry of women into the industrial workforce. To house the massive influx of people, Portland established a new, racially integrated city called Vanport to serve as temporary housing. The city was built in a dried lakebed between Portland and Vancouver and surrounded by locks to keep the water from the Columbia River out. Intended only to serve for the duration of the war, the buildings lacked foundations. In 1948 the locks gave way. Vanport was flooded, and the racially integrated, effectively autonomous, growing city was razed and swept away by the Columbia River. Portland refused to rebuild Vanport or compensate residents for the loss of property. The Black residents who could not find housing in Albina were then forced out of the area — through redlining. 

During the Second World War, Oregon and Southwest Washington also dispossessed 3,676 Japanese of their property via Executive Order 9066, issued by Franklin Roosevelt. The state imprisoned the Japanese at the Pacific International Livestock Exposition Center, known today as the Portland Expo Center. Upon their release, most families found that their homes, businesses, and personal belongings had been auctioned off by landlords or the state and were now occupied by white families. In commemoration, “Portland artist Valerie Otani created Voices of Remembrance (in the form of [traditional Japanese torii gates] most commonly found at the entrance of a sacred space)” at the Expo Center MAX Station. Each gate is adorned with hanging metal luggage tags to represent the individuals who were interned there. There is no sign or indication of what the art installation represents to passersby.

Throughout the twentieth century, Portland continued to wage economic warfare on the remaining Black population in the Albina neighborhood through various “urban renewal” programs. Programs like the 1961 Albina Neighborhood Improvement Project were established by city officials and were then awarded to private construction firms. From 1956 to the 70s, the city ripped through the neighborhood, splitting up the community with various construction projects and highways—specifically Interstate 5 and Highway 99 (ironically, OR-99 was named Martin Luther King Boulevard). Most notoriously, the Legacy Emanuel Medical Center expansion plan, which covered 76 acres of land,  dispossessed 300 Black families of their homes and businesses. The area was razed, but the hospital expansion was never actually built. Today, a fenced-off empty lot is all that remains. 

City officials had proposed the project at the height of the Black Panther Party’s Portland chapter. The Panthers had built interracial solidarity between the Black community concentrated in Albina and other poor communities, including white workers, in Portland. The City effectively ended the Black Panther Party’s solidarity work through aggressive dispersal of the Black community, robbing the Panthers of a place to organize. Today, minor and insignificant-looking signs dot the sidewalk of Albina’s North Williams Avenue — a pitiful attempt to tell the story of the historic neighborhood. 

Since the 1980s, conditions for Black people in Portland have not improved. Under the so-called Urban Renewal projects, Black residents were either forced out of their homes or continued to live in the increasingly disjointed neighborhood. Redlining has further prevented Black people from creating new communities outside Albina. Banks and policy-makers have worked hand-in-hand to prevent the reappearance of significant Black communities. Systemic disinvestment in Albina gave rise to further problems, ultimately resulting in more families abandoning their homes. Across the United States, the 1990s abounded with gentrification projects, and Portland was no exception. This project continues today with the unrelenting construction of expensive apartment buildings, expensive restaurants, and boutique shops in historically poor and majority-Black neighborhoods. 

Free and fair trade are nothing but capitalist fairy tales, meant to justify the obscene wealth of the rulers and the obscene poverty and deprivation of the masses. When the underlying logic of an economic system is to generate endless profits and amass unlimited wealth, why would the powerful allow “fair” competition? The capitalists and other property-owning classes mitigate competition through exclusion; they nurture and manufacture racism, misogyny, and other prejudices to suit their own ends. Whiteness is an elastic identity that can include or exclude groups of people depending on the needs of a given moment in time. Blackness, however, is a highly policed identity, allowing whiteness its elasticity through exclusion. Non-white nationalities, so long as they are not Black (or in the case of the U.S., Indigenous), may be incorporated into whiteness (i.e., Jews, Irish, Italians, light-skinned Latinés and Asians, etc.). The “right” to the various spoils of exploited labor is mainly bestowed upon those considered white, while privileges and benefits are granted to assimilated non-whites (re: Armenians). At the same time, the U.S. Empire frequently intervenes to thwart the “anomaly” of capital accumulation by Black and Indigenous people — those who cannot be subsumed by whiteness and the colonial project. The history of Portland provides a stark local portrait — unfortunately, only one among many across colonized North America — of how vile, cruel, and relentless the capitalist U.S. Empire is in its construction of race.

A little while ago, Red was given his final prognosis in the battle against cancer. He has only a few weeks left and is making his final preparations. We have to say goodbye to Red, but we aren’t saying goodbye to Red the soldier. We’re saying goodbye to Red, the gardener. We may miss his soldiering in the days to come, but it is his gardening that will have had the most profound effect on those around him and on the revolution that’s coming.

Around ten years ago Red and Lindsey, the Chairwoman of FTH, started up aid in their local community in Seattle. When COVID hit, they transitioned to a more intensive, full-throated community organizing project among the unhoused. For the first time in Seattle’s history, houseless encampments became permanent thanks to the suspension of sweeps and clearing laws. FTH and CRC are community survival programs with no precondition of adhering to Communist or even broadly leftist or progressive positions. Like all real red aid (as opposed to “red charity”), conversations about Communism and the road to revolution are never foisted upon attendees; their needs are met, by unabashed and unashamed Communists. And that’s the goal.

What is the difference between red charity, mutual aid, and red aid? Red charity is charity disguised as mass work — throwing food, clothes, whatever else at a problem without engaging with the masses or, alternately, demanding that those coming for help listen to a lecture about socialism. Mutual aid is the process of mutual — two way — exchange within a community to help meet survival needs. Exchanging labor on a collective farm, for example. But red aid is something altogether different: it is meeting the survival needs of the community while assisting in the self organizing of that same community. Giving the tools needed — mass meetings, procedures, and above all the answers to the burning questions that face the community that only Marxism can provide — while at the same time standing at the forefront of struggle.

This is what FTH and CRC provide, and what Lindsey and Red have worked to establish. As their work intensified, Red and Lindsey split up responsibilities between the “front of house,” that is, service and medicine handled by FTH, and “back of house,” that is, logistics, money, and protection, handled by CRC. Red has always worked to ensure that marginalized and oppressed individuals are placed into positions of power within both CRC and FTH — he trains, but does not command.

Red is a Taoist. As he put it, “it doesn’t make sense to expect a tree to be anything other than a tree.” For Red, it’s the revolutionaries who are the trees, the grasses, and the flowers. He cares for his cadre, learns what each member of his team is suited for, what kind of revolutionary work they naturally want to do (what kind of “tree” they are), and sets up networks of support to enable them to do that revolutionary work. He’s not a gardener of plants and flowerbeds, but a gardener of revolutionaries.

We will mourn the gardener but celebrate the garden. Over ten years, Red has helped to build a powerful engine of revolution. He has contributed to the safety and well-being of hundreds if not thousands of people served by FTH and CRC. Quietly, without drawing much attention to itself, a powerful seed of revolution is gathering strength in Seattle. That seed was watered by the Red Gardener. We may be losing Red, but his contribution to the revolution will live on — and when the revolution is victorious, those of us who knew Red will know that he forged the links in the chain of victory.

A comrade never fades away,

A comrade lives forever.

For though the body may decay,

The bond cannot be severed.

A comrade never fails to breathe;

Their voice is ours, unbroken.

Their struggle and their surety,

They live through words they’ve spoken.

A comrade’s earthly reach extends

Beyond their mortal tether.

A comrade never dies, my friends,

For struggle lasts forever.

Dremel, Requiem for Red

A comrade lives forever.

For though the body may decay,

The bond cannot be severed.

A comrade never fails to breathe;

Their voice is ours, unbroken.

Their struggle and their surety,

They live through words they’ve spoken.

A comrade’s earthly reach extends

Beyond their mortal tether.

A comrade never dies, my friends,

For struggle lasts forever.