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Title: Paul Swain’s Son Author: Sean Swain Date: September 13, 2020 Final Straw Radio podcast Language: en Topics: death, Sean Swain, anarchist prisoner, The Final Straw Radio, audio, transcription Source: Retrieved on September 29, 2020 from https://anarchistnews.org/content/paul-swain%E2%80%99s-son Notes: transcribed from the Sept. 13, 2020 podcast of The Final Straw Radio | You can write to Sean Swain at his latest address at: Sean Swain #2015638 Buckingham Correctional P.O. Box 430 Dillwyn, VA 23936 You can find his past writings, recordings of his audio segments and updates on his case at seanswain.org or now follow him on twitter at @swainrocks
One of my earliest memories, I couldn't have been older than 3 years
old... It was in the kitchen of my parents' home in Des Moines, Iowa. My
dad was holding me while my mom was on the phone and I was trying to
reach out to grab the ceramic Pillsbury Doughboy cookie jar... I lost my
dad on March 24th due to complications after heart surgery. He had been
waiting to get scheduled since before Thanksgiving, but he wasn't a
priority. He didn't matter to the people who make life and death
decisions.
He should have. He was a really extraordinary guy. I know I'm biased
because he was my dad, but even so, he was an exceptional human being.
He was kind and generous and gentle, and he really loved life. He and my
mom were together for something like 55 years. This has really
devastated her. My dad wanted to be cremated, so my mom has his ashes in
an ornate walnut box that he would have liked, because he loved to do
woodwork. He made canes after he retired.
I'm an only child so my mom's alone now and it's hard on her, because
she's really alone. She's in her seventies and can't risk getting
COVID-19. She's constantly injuring herself doing yard work and other
nonsense she has no business doing. She needs me home. I've been meaning
to share this for some time, to help maybe work through this loss, but
it's been hard to reduce to words. There's the pain of missing him, but
there's more.
I think of all that he went through and the sacrifices that he made for
my mom and me. He worked at Ford for thirty years. He hated it - factory
work. Another of my earliest memories: my mom and I were in the car
dropping my dad off
at the Ford plant. He had on a denim jacket and carried one of those old
black metal lunch boxes, the kind that was rounded at the top to hold
the thermos. He was in his twenties then, shaggy hair and beard.
Beyond this loss and grief, I feel this sense of injustice for him. The
day he died, the world kept spinning. There was no pause, no moment of
reflection. Traffic kept moving on the highways. Everyone kept shopping.
The stock market closed slightly up for the day. Apart from my mom and
me, and a handful of close friends and family, it was as if he had never
existed, as if he never happened.
Somewhere at the Ford plant at Romeo Plank Road in Michigan, an assembly
line worker stood right where my dad did for decades, and that worker
performed the same job my dad used to do. He or she has probably never
even heard of Paul Swain.
So, beyond the grief it was hard for me to wrestle with this sense that
the world moves on like that. In fact it doesn't even blink. Not just
for my dad, but for all of us. It makes it feel sometimes like all the
struggle and the sorrow and the misery and even the joy - that none of
it counts. It's there and gone like ashes in the strong breeze - and
then so are we.
I share this now because it feels like the world over we're in an era of
loss. With COVID-19 raging and the fascists on the march, with knees on
our necks and guns pressed in our backs, it feels like everything is for
nothing sometimes. It feels like doom and gloom. But maybe that is the
point. Maybe these cumulative losses, this intolerable meaninglessness,
this sense
of the hopeless, it all confronts us (and it confronts all of us) and it
awaits our collective response.
For me, personally, I never met George Floyd. I didn't know him, but I
knew Paul Swain. I remember when he was young in that denim jacket,
facing the daily small injustices, the humiliations and the reductions.
The thousands of spectacular and terrible atrocities we witness are also
accompanied by hundreds of millions of mundane ones that we all
experience.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that, as I navigate the loss of my
dad, it's important for me to think about how this collective struggle
against the current dystopia is to stop the brutality like we saw in the
street in Minneapolis for 9 minutes. But it's also to stop the
slow-roasted brutality of which we are all victims.
I don't just want to end police or prisons. I want to end factories and
sweat shops and wage slavery and nation-states and chemical warfare and
all the components of this emisserating shit-society in which we live.
And shop. And work. And die.
I want to struggle and win because all of our lives, and all of our
deaths should matter. Until we have that kind of a world, we owe it to
those we love and to those we've lost to fight for them and for
ourselves. This is Paul Swain's son. If you're listening, you are the
resistance.