Send a May Day Message of Solidarity

Please help us LITERALLY launch this solidarity message in New York City on May Day, 2020. 

International Workers Day is a holiday of worker solidarity, and traditionally a time to take to the streets for demonstrations and celebration.

#CAPITALISMISTHEPANDEMIC

On Friday, May 1, 2020 an airplane will haul this banner down the Hudson River in New York City, the center of the global coronavirus epidemic - and a center of the global capitalism pandemic.  This action is weather dependent and we have scheduled a rain day.

The airplane will loop around Battery Park in southern Manhattan.  The total flight time is approximately 3 hours.  The banner will be visible to people along the waterfront.

Because it is not safe to gather in public spaces, gatherings are not yet advised on this international holiday of labor solidarity.  We send this message in the sky, out in the open, to say:
 
- Take it in!  We will breathe the air as we better see our opponents

- Look up! We will return to sunshine with the strength of an unbroken people

- Sit up! We will love one another outside with the fury of the dispossessed

COVID-19 has exposed deep and ongoing structural inequality.

Let this sky action embolden you to take action.

We are currently assembling documentation and media outreach teams.   On the day of the event, we will circulate this message through traditional media and social media.  We are building a simple website and Twitter presence.  We need your help!

We believe this is a viable and an important action to shore up our ranks in a difficult moment.

$3000 pays for the aerial ad company, and with $500 we can provide some compensation to  our documentation team, a carbon offset for the flight, pay for website hosting, and print postcards later this summer to send to you, dear donors.    

Any money raised beyond the $3500 threshold will go to the  
Navajo & Hopi Families COVID-19 Relief Fund

https://www.gofundme.com/f/NHFC19Relief 

THANK YOU!!!

If this project inspires you to take similar actions on your own, we invite you to do so, in whatever form they may take.

Please keep in mind that there is a chance this event could not happen.  Any event such as this could be canceled due to weather or unimagined circumstances.  We have scheduled a rain date for May 4.  If both days are ruined by weather, we will evaluate; if the event doesn't happen, you pay nothing.  Seems fair!

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Citizens In the Present is an ad-hoc group of friends and collaborators brought together by Buffalo-based media artist Jason Livingston in rapid response to the accelerated precarity of all working people.  We believe that the current crisis lays bare the fundamental, foundational, and ongoing flaws of a capitalist system that puts the planet and its people at daily risk.  We hope our action inspires others to be creative and determined in their resistance.  We are truly citizens of the world.

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If this project excites you and you would like to help its creator, Jason Livingston, please see his personal gofundme.  He is trying to avoid going further into debt after one job ending, draining his retirement account, paying back taxes, losing a few freelance gigs due to the virus, and is now faced with moving expenses within the city of Buffalo to get out of a very bad rental situation.   Really, you should donate to the Navajo & Hope Families fund, but if after you've read all this text at the end of the message, and you find it within your means to help me survive and continue making media with a roof over my head, I would be enormously grateful.  Thank you.  

Solidarity.

gf.me/u/xxk558