Offering my take on The Wind Cries Freedom, I should acknowledge that I was one of the book’s eighteen interviewees and, from RPS’s start, an avid member. My addressing the book may seem awkward, but that’s par for me. Consider it narcissistic if you like, or perhaps merely forthright.
Miguel Guevara wanted to hear my views, and I happily consented. But I wasn’t particularly excited by my contribution and doubted Miguel would use it. However, a year later, I received the finished book and a note of thanks. I had lived through the times and knew many of the other Interviewees and the experiences they recounted. Feeling no need to read their words, I set the book aside.
A few months passed and I got the flu. I hate watching video during the day and by chance read The Wind Cries Freedom for diversion. I saw after a couple of chapters that the book would be very useful for someone just getting going on activism and even better for anyone who doubted prospects for winning or was unsure what winning could mean.
Over lunch I read on, and it turned out the book was also useful for an unrelentingly committed veteran like myself, not for reliving glory days or enjoying a subtle selfie, but because thirty six eyes and eighteen voices give eighteen angles, slants, and takes, and eighteen is more than one.
Even for someone involved, it turned out RPS/2044 didn’t get redundant. We interviewees told how we got involved and became and retained confidence, how we got radical and used language to communicate and not alienate, how we simultaneously sought reforms and revolution, and how we navigated the ills of violence. We overwhelmingly agreed on all that, though we took different paths to our similar ends, and recounted different nuances.
Considering our organization, RPS’s roots, we evaluated the motives at work in the 2016 and 2024 elections and their Resist Trump aftermaths. We offered related, compatible, mutually enhancing insights on RPS’s later start-up, discussed its early rallies and events, described conventions, explained chapter building, recalled the logic of demands, explored the source and character of thoughts, and revealed visions. We recounted successful but also compromised electoral work undertaken to alter old or to model new, as well as to win and use elected offices.
We reported the means and results of our consciousness raising work, described how we contested for race, gender, class, and environmental demands, and examined how we constructed shadow and alternative institutions to plant seeds of future habits, deeds, and projects.
Throughout Guevara’s oral history, my fellow interviewees and I described our journeys into and through RPS, including how we became revolutionaries, our misgivings, and why we persisted. We shared with Miguel Guevara criticism and praise. We recounted warnings and celebrations.
As I read our interviews. I felt proud that our in-person descriptions of events transformed otherwise dry claims into heartfelt evidentiary testimony. Yet The Wind Cries Freedom is not a call to do as we did. Each respondent recognized the contextual dependency of each event and project in our timeline, whether sanctuaries, boycotts, marches, strikes, occupations, or elections.
We workers, athlete, doctor, nurse, actor, priest, judge, from different cultures, genders, and classes among the book’s principle persona all described our struggles as we experienced them, south, north, west, east, center and coast, and about it all we emphasized the contextual dependency of our efforts.
I believed and I still believe RPS’s values are suitable and even inevitable for modern human liberation. I believed and still believe no one can end run equity, downplay justice, bypass self management, sacrifice solidarity, or underestimate diversity, sustainability, or peace, and win a worthy world.
Less obviously, and more instructively, I also concluded that my fellow interviewees’ words showed the centrality of RPS’s institutional vision for RPS’s timeline. But even beyond that, what I got from hearing RPS history from so many voices and especially from hearing about parts of the journey that were pivotal to other participants yet peripheral or even unknown to me, was that the path from the past to a revolutionized future isn’t, in fact, one path. At every turn, different steps were not just possible, they were likely.
Rerun the tape starting in 2026 100 times, and the shape of the ensuing path would be different each time. A modest change at the outset, would often snowball into major differences not far down the road.
Maybe a few reruns would attain success even faster than we did in our own history. Perhaps a comparable number of rerun histories would not succeed at all, falling to internal flaws or suffering massive war, climate collapse, plague, or other dystopian calamities of the sort that so many people at least to my mind so oddly have liked to write or read. But beyond those possibilities, I would guess that most reruns would lead to liberty like ours did, but take longer than we took due to making different choices, encountering different frictions, or provoking different responses.
Given all that, my main thought on the oral history, and my main hope for it, is that it makes the ringing of revolution plausible, tangible, and able to generate and inform successful activism.
I tried to read The Wind Cries Freedom not as the participant I have been, but as the curious and worried teenager I was decades ago, and, in that persona, I found it highly provocative. It didn’t strike me as a how-to-do-it book. It seemed instead a how-to-conceive-it, how-to-refine-it, and how-to-work-on-it-for-yourself-along-with-others-book.
In that sense, The Wind Cries Freedom seemed relevant not only as an oral history, looking back, but as a facilitator of creative rebellion and revolution, looking forward. A work in progress. A work whose real worth and meaning will be determined by what its readers do with it.