Earth Riot Radio Reverend Billy and Savitri D

It's tricky. When 10,000 products try to hardsell you every day, promising happiness, sex, wealth, health and beauty, but those products are secretly polluting the Earth creating impossible wind and waves, fire and floods... And the answer to this betrayal is to love the Earth and team up with the Earth against the product toxins, but then the Earth will kill you anyway.... We are trapped in a pincer movement of different kinds of mass murder. But hey... how's your day?

The history of movements is felt deeply in Neil's songs, in "Four Dead in Ohio" and the cracking whip in "Southern Man", the vulnerability of "Comes a Time" and "Searching for a Heart of Gold" and the relentless rock of Crazy Horse when it breaks into "Hey Hey My My (out of the Blue and into the Black). In this Riot we select as an echo to our nightly rock concert - Alice Coltrane, Charlse Lloyd, the Nightjar and the European Robin. The Earth is storming along our tour route, in Texas and New Orleans and Alabama, and the Earth storms in the songs of the struggle for justice.

The powerful thing about this experiment is that we are talking directly to people about the Earth’s crisis.  It’s not graphics, mass mailings, or social media’s pixels. In the first three shows the choir and I played to 21,000 people. Our job is like an opening act, but also we are hosting the event of the LOVE EARTH tour.  Neil and his partner Daryl Hannah came to us to help them convey the meaning of the tour.  
Moving from our storefront “Earthchxrch” in the East Village, we gasped at the shift in scale, like a pleasurable version of the bends. When we wake up on the bus the morning after a show, the pleasure we feel is that we have blasted into the sweeping landscape of messages like “Let’s make a new kind of activism for the Earth!” ….and “Can we be strange enough to change enough?” …and “Love is the Earth’s radical gift.  Let’s use it for Life!”

Would love to hear from you as we disappear into the thousands of people and thousands of miles.

Beatles, Panthers, Standing Rock, David Graeber, Act-Up, Earth First, XR. Today as we prepare to tour with Neil Young, we find ourselves wondering: Can a famous activist or group make change on the level that the Earth needs? Or is Consumer Society always pushing such people to depoliticize?

“There must be more to life!” was the cry as the new movement toward Earth-friendly Love took root in a White Christian Nationalist enclave of rural Texas. Worshippers were stranded with their Bibles as the mass of Trumpers seemed to veer off during a Pentecostal hymn that spun out of control. Senior church officials lamented “You could feel a happy Devil take them away” as congregants began to tumble to the carpet, amid kisses and cries of abandonment.

The Earth is the protester now. We don't know how to join her and - we must. The consume-life economy will oppose any effort to break out of the virtual world of American-style capitalism. We are all the natural disaster. We are inside the tsunamis and quakes and typhoons and heat-waves and fires and floods... We are inside the disappearance of life forms. We cannot oppose the Earth. The Extinction takes life and blesses birth– our wave to ride.
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