by Alex Birnel

On February 25, 2024, Aaron Bushnell—a local unaffiliated comrade who was deeply involved in local mutual aid efforts, and a friend to many—self-immolated in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington D.C. in protest of the genocide in Gaza and the complicity of the US military. On March 1st, friends of Aaron organized a vigil, not only to commemorate Aaron, but to “pay homage to Palestinians taken from our world, the resistance fighters and ordinary people who continue to love humanity in the face of unspeakable brutality and genocide.”

Alex Birnel, a founding member of San Antonio DSA and a current leader in San Antonio for Justice in Palestine (SAJP), gave the following speech toward the end of the vigil. 

Good evening everybody. What a beautiful commemoration to a comrade. I have a lot of thoughts going through my mind right now about what needs to be said, versus what I want to say. So I’m just going to speak honestly, and hope that what comes out makes sense. I’m going to remember to not have snarkiness about a serious thing, which is such an important lesson - and what I’m told somebody like Aaron really embodied. He wanted people to learn, he wanted people to understand, he wanted people to connect, he wanted to help. 

I was lucky enough to go to Palestine last summer, in July 2023. And as I walked around the old city of Nablus, I noticed something that I took mental note of: everywhere I looked, people celebrated, cherished, and remembered their martyrs. I had a conversation with a friend that I met that night, named Ziad. As we were talking about politics – me organizing in Texas, him organizing in Palestine, comparing notes – we talked about differences. And the difference is, as far as I can tell, that tragically, unfairly, wrongly, politics in Palestine is a way of life. Because people are killed every day by Israel. Space is managed. It is an apartheid system. People’s movements are controlled. There is no such thing as a schedule in Palestine. You might have an important day, a wedding, or a birthday – but it all depends on the mood of a soldier or on the status of a checkpoint. Everybody has a family member that they've lost, and entire communities, entire cities, treat all of this as definitional to their existence. 

Then I talked about here, here in San Antonio, here in Texas, here in the United States; so-called San Antonio, so-called Texas, the so-called the United States. And the main thing that I felt was different is that politics here is a hobby: to the extent that you can say, I’m going to go to my protest, and you’re going to go to your concert, and then we’ll meet up afterward for a drink. Politics is just something you do recreationally rather than part of the fabric of what you do with your time on Earth. 

And from what I can tell, Aaron was the kind of person who used his time to not treat politics as a hobby, but to treat it as a life philosophy, as definitional to life. And I’m most heartbroken that this city has lost somebody who helps feed the homeless. Our unhoused neighbors. Because our government surely isn’t doing that. 

So I want to ask everybody in the audience: what can you do to make resisting the systems that harm us, in this city, around this country and around the world, less of something that you do with a little bit of your time, and more of who you are? It is unfair that Palestinian existence is so synonymous with politics. I wish it didn’t have to be true that people have to focus so much of their time on life and death, on resistance. People deserve to enjoy, deserve to laugh, deserve to appreciate the things we will never understand about being alive. 

A lot of us here get to do that with our existence. And I think that’s what makes politics more of a hobby than a way of life. And the responsibilities get inverted. Palestinians are of the oppressed people of the world. There are a lot of privileges that come with living in this society. Not to say that there aren’t oppressions here, there absolutely are, and Aaron was helping to bring some relief to oppressions that exist in this city. 

But I think most of all, the question on my mind is: what can you do every day, as a member of this community, with the people who are here, to improve this world? So that somebody else – who you will never meet, who you will never know – doesn’t have to spend all of their waking hours, cradle to grave, in a freedom struggle. I genuinely believe that that is our responsibility. To be different people, than we often find ourselves being. Indifferent, casually engaged, uninvolved. So ask yourself, how do you resist, how can you educate yourself, how can you get involved in an organization? Can you learn about what is happening in your community, what the problems in your community are, and how you can solve them? Can you make a friend, can you bring a friend to a meeting? I think those are the best ways that we can honor somebody who has issued us a challenge. Which is that these systems need a whole lot more people to be toppled, to be defeated, to be changed – and we aren’t going to get to another world without many more of us realizing that. 

Aaron has lit a fire in me, and we have lit a fire in commemoration of Aaron. I hope that we keep burning together, until the world is better. Please keep organizing. Please take care of one another. Please express love. Thank you. 

Ed Hinojosa was unjustly fired due to the Board’s incompetence. Last month they demanded that Ed Hinojosa carry out mass evictions across Opportunity Home San Antonio complexes, tenant organizers then pushed back. The Board is scapegoating Ed.

The Opportunity Home waitlist is over 110,000. What solutions has the board provided thus far? Ed’s tenure at Opportunity Home was a stark departure from the housing politics of Cisneros and Castro, which moved to demolish and privatize public housing nationwide.

Ed prevented the demolition of the Alazán-Apache Courts, advocated for the City’s largest housing bond and received the first ever general funding for public housing in San Antonio history. 

Ron Nirengberg is showing his true colors on his way out. He’s turning his back on the housing policies he previously championed now that he doesn’t have an election to win. City Council cannot turn a blind eye to this.

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The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is the largest socialist organization in the United States. San Antonio DSA (SADSA) is a local chapter of DSA that operates in San Antonio and the surrounding area. We build and support working-class movements for radical social change, while establishing an openly socialist and anti-capitalist presence in San Antonio through a variety of tactics, from labor organizing to mutual aid to electoralism.

For the past 2 years, our DSA chapter has attended Rock Hill Pride to show solidarity with our queer comrades and share with the broader queer community how queer liberation and socialism are intertwined. 

We recently learned that Rock Hill Pride has hired Shane Windmeyer, aka drag performer Buff Faye, to headline the Pride festival. Windmeyer is the former CEO of Campus Pride. QNotes has reported and Campus Pride officers confirmed that he embezzled over $100,000 in Campus Pride funds, spending money that should’ve gone to building queer friendly spaces to instead build his personal drag performing business.

As socialists, we recognize that bosses dominate our working lives, the resources of our communities, and through this, the public life of our society. The LGBTQ+ community is no different. Socialists organize with our community to reclaim this power and our lives, and it starts by organizing to hold particularly bad bosses in our community accountable. Following a deep discussion with our membership and The Charlotte Gaymers Network (CGN), our leadership voted to join CGN’s calls for vendors to pull support from Rock Hill Pride, so long as Buff Faye skirts public accountability and remains employed by the festival. We hope that Windmeyer can make amends with Campus Pride and the local queer community so that we can stay united at a time of growing hate against queer people.

We do not take it lightly when we call on our members, the community, and other vendors to boycott Rock Hill Pride this year. We recognize that, while Rock Hill Pride and most local Pride events are funded and controlled by corporations and the non-profits they fund, they are refuges for our queer comrades. Our members found solace, joy, and community there in past years and are disappointed they can’t in good conscience attend. But we build our own community. That is why we recommend y’all check out events from queer community groups like CGN and T4T, or other Pride in the area unaffiliated with Rock Hill Pride. Our chapter will be tabling at Salisbury Pride on June 22nd and will host a post-Pride new & prospective member meeting on June 26th and a Socialist Social June 27th! Check out our events calendar for more details!

Happy Pride,

Charlotte Metro DSA

It is with tremendous pride that we announce that Mexico has made history with the election of Claudia Sheinbaum as Mexico’s next president. Not only has Sheinbaum broken the glass ceiling to become the country’s first female president, she has done so with a wholehearted embrace of the progressive platform of social and economic justice championed by our comrades at MORENA.

Sheinbaum – a descendent of Bulgarian Jews who fled the Holocaust – has earned her way to history through a remarkable career as a student activist, physicist, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and finally, an effective politician. Her 30-point victory on May 2 is a resounding vote of confidence that comes from Mexicans of all regions and abroad. MORENA has a resounding mandate with victories in 24 of the 31 governorships and supermajorities in both houses of Congress. These victories amidst an unprecedented amount of political violence and an extreme drought demonstrate Mexicans’ unwavering support for the profound program of social and economic justice and development known as the Fourth Transformation (‘Cuarta Transformacion’ or ‘4T’).

MORENA also retained the Jefa de Gobernatura with the victory of Clara Brugada who. Brugada will succeed Sheinbaum as the chief executive for the entire Mexico City region. Sheinbaum previously succeeded current president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in that position. Brugada began her career as a militant member of the Zapatista Movement before serving as mayor of Iztapalapa from 2009-12. During which, she successfully oversaw an expansion of transit infrastructure, the opening of cultural centers called ‘utopias’, and reduced crime. 

DSA proudly participated as credentialed election observers for this historic moment and helped verify that the election was conducted freely and fairly as part of a large cadre of electoral observers from across the Americas and Europe. This is the fifth election in Latin America that DSA has participated as invited observers since 2021, demonstrating our organization’s growing integration with the Latin American Left. We look forward to continuing and expanding our delegation work for the benefit of our members and the region. 

The DSA delegation also held preliminary discussions with MORENA as well as with various sectors of Mexico’s organized labor for future collaborations that would mutually benefit members of both organizations and provide a political alternative to the current state of US-Mexican relations. 

¡Que viva la 4T!

¡Que viva la democracia, las mujeres, y el pobre!

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