Maggie Jochild

Name:	Maggie Jochild
Location:	Austin, TX
Where I blog:	Meta Watershed

My Experience in progressive politics:

I became an anti-war activist in a fundamentalist, right-wing family/county when I was a teenager. I joined the lesbian-feminist movement by age 18 (having come out to myself at age 9 in 1965). I've worked as a street activist in civil rights/anti-racism, labor union, anti-classism, women's liberation, children's rights, anti-ageism, environmental, disabled rights, Jewish liberation, pro-immigration, anti-military and anti-police politics and movements since age 19. Non-stop. Especially through writing and speaking in an articulate, charismatic, working-class voice.

I was a founding member of Lesbians Against Police Violence in San Francisco 1979 - 1981 ( we were responsible for the White Night Riot at City Hall after Dan White was acquitted for the assassinations of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk). I was a member of Lesbian Schoolworkers and BACABI in 1978 in San Francisco working to defeat the Briggs Initiative and the death penalty in California. I was the writing member of the Pleiades (see below in Short Highlight).

I taught poetry to African-American girls living in public housing as part of the Austin YWCA Anti-Racism program in 2003, under the auspices of Sharon Bridgforth's "Finding Voice" training and a Robeson grant. I was a member of WATER House (Women's Access To Electronic Resources) which brought video, radio and internet access and training to underrepresented women and girls in Austin. I was a radio producer at KO.OP Radio, our local community radio station, and eventually became chair of the programming committee there. I was a founding member, writer, and performer in Actual Lives, the page-to-stage theater troupe for disabled adults directed by Terry Galloway, culminating in a show at the VSA International Conference in Washington DC in June 2004, with all states and 64 nations in attendance, where the finale I wrote brought down the house and was mentioned in the closing ceremonies as a key example of where disabled activism and theory needed to be. I have won two Astraea Lesbian Writing Awards for my poetry, and have been published in many national journals as an activist poet. I was a core organizer for the statewide Texas Lesbian Conferences in 1991 and 1995.

My personal volunteering highlight:

In 1980 I became a member of the first women's self-help group for incest and child sexual abuse survivors in the U.S. (and hence in history): The Pleiades. I wrote or co-wrote most of the feminist theory about sexual abuse of children, led the first workshop on it ever at the Michigan's Women's Music Festival, was interviewed for NPR (first broadcast on this topic from a feminist perspective), and led the first Bay Area workshop for women coming out of victimhood into survival and activism. Our actions led, eventually, to changes in law and psychiatric practice.

Steps I've taken to combine on-line and off-line action:

For the past five years, I've been mostly housebound. However, I did teach poetry to African-American girls living in public housing as part of the Austin YWCA Anti-Racism program in 2003, under the auspices of Sharon Bridgforth's "Finding Voice" training and a Robeson grant, and these efforts were published online. I promote local activism on my blog and link efforts together effectively.

Why I want to attend Netroots Nation:

To meet with bloggers such as Jesse Wendel, Sara Robinson, and others who are reprinting my posts and encouraging my career as a blogger, and to expand my comprehension of our common goals as progressives/liberals/radicals.

What I want to get out of Netroots Nation:

Human connection and growthful dialogue with those who are very different from me. I won't be able to obtain that in any other way, not ever at this point in my life. But the use I'll make of it will be public and ripple outward indefinitely.

What is a progressive activist:

Someone who understands not just intellectually but in their heart and spirit that every single voice and experience is necessary to the work of ending on this planet any human suffering which is the result of oppression, and who has found the means to take action on her understanding.

How I think blogs fit into the progressive movement:

I compare this stage of the blogosphere to the advent of self-controlled, cheap offset printing in the early 1970s: Controlling the medium means controlling the message. This time, we have an international reach.

We also have an international obligation. We must jettison prior definitions, language and theories to embrace multi-issue, alliance-building movements. Separatism, identity politics and within-the-system approaches are all still essential, part of the developmental stage, but they cannot be more than a resting place.

Our obstacles center around:
(1) We carry our conditioning with us. We are overwhelmingly white and male on the web in this country, and other voices are treated shabbily, almost continuously and in ways few want to face.
(2) The inherent classism of online access: Only 25% of the world has access to a computer. Only 10% have access to the internet.
(3) The built-in isolation of talking to a screen instead of a human being can, and does, bring out our individual pathology. It's a connection, but it's not the ultimate connection we need to make.

How I think Democracy For America fits into the progressive movement:

The four main goals of DFA are my personal main progressive goals with the exception that number one currently is restoring our Constitution and legal system of checks and balances.

Above my computer monitor is Che's most famous quote: "At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that a true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love." For me, progressivism is love of country, and DFA agrees.

In 10 words or less, create a bumper-sticker slogan against John McCain:

McCain Deserves Retirement (Financed by Taxpayers and His Rich Wife)