Too many of us spend our time vibrating between rage and despair as we strive to act in ways that will directly benefit and change the status quo for those most oppressed. Let’s use that anger to fuel our action, but let’s not stop there, let’s also decide to remember to celebrate our resisters and revolutionary thinkers and doers.

For each of us, this picture might look a little different. In Canada, we would focus on the Aboriginal women who have taken our federal government to the United Nations and forced them to look past the rhetoric and crap from the official reports, by forcing them to look at the inadequate housing, poisoned water and land, causing Canada to drop from #1 to, I believe it was #7, in the world ratings of the standard of living for citizens, by forcing the international gaze to fall upon the inadequate housing and other basic human rights on Reserves, not to mention the issues of poisoned land and water.

We would focus on the workers who led the Winnipeg general strike and other labour leaders who helped bring us our work weeks – and, perhaps more importantly, our weekends. We would toast the working class feminist organizers who insisted that women and children no longer be considered the property of the men who sired or married them, who insisted that violence against women and children must no longer be tolerated, while hiding those same women from the men who tried to kill them and their kids. We would follow the young people who demand that we fight globalization and capitalism, the students in Quebec who went on strike this past year to fight the increased privatization of prisons, health care and education and corresponding cuts to public funding of education and other essential services, the First Nations who blockade highways and logging roads to draw attention to the rape of the land, Canada’s pledge to Aboriginal women and women’s groups who for 20 years refused to accept ‘never’ as an answer as they demanded and ensured that 500 missing and murdered Aboriginal women in Canada did not continue to be abandoned by the criminal injustice system and the penal industrial machine.

We should also honour the lawyers, who were sued, in addition to being implicitly censured by their so-called professional colleagues, and nearly lost their livelihood when they labeled the racism of the police after they strip searched three 12 year old girls in a school. The bully boy tactics were also employed to attack Corinne Sparks, the Afro Nova Scotian judge who took judicial notice of the racism of police. And, the many youth, men, and especially the women prisoners who refuse to succumb, who will not stand-down or over, but instead walk with, their sisters inside…like the ones who courageously authorized the release to the media of what has now come to be known as the April 1994 incident, when eight women, five of whom are Aboriginal, one who lies unconscious now, were illegally stripped, shackled, transferred to a men’s prison, then were held for 9 months in isolation until the videotape of the degrading, humiliating and illegal treatment they suffered was broadcast around the world!