Wednesday, November 15, 2006
The Inconvenient Death of Brad Will: Mexican police gun down a counterculture hero
Sarah Ferguson, Village Voice
The last time I saw independent journalist and activist Brad Will was in September in an East Village yoga studio. I turned my head and found him lying on the mat next to me in the darkened room, his pale, flat stomach rising and falling serenely with the rhythm of his breathing. So on October 27, when I saw the photos posted on the Internet showing the 36-year-old Will's mortally wounded body laid out on a street in Oaxaca, Mexico, I cringed. There was that same pale, flat stomach now punctured by a bullet.
Over the course of his restless 36 years, he seemed to hit every activist node: squatting in the East Village, staging tree-sits in the Northwest with Earth First, and hopping freight trains to anarchist gatherings. He braved tear gas and rubber bullets during the anti-globalization battles in Seattle, Quebec, Prague, and Genoa (where a demonstrator was shot dead in the street by police).
When the heady Seattle-style direct-action movement in the U.S. toned down following 9-11, Will took his video camera south, following the wave of popular uprisings in Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil, Peru, Argentina, and finally Mexico. Friends say he was consumed with overlooked social struggles around the world. "He was one of the most dedicated activists I ever worked with," says Brooke Lehman, one of the owners of the radical Bluestockings bookstore on the Lower East Side, who met Will in 1998. "You could pretty much guarantee if there was a cause or an action, Will would be there. He felt a tremendous responsibility to do media where other media outlets wouldn't go, or were afraid to go."
There's much more to read about the life of Brad Will.
Sarah Ferguson, Village Voice
The last time I saw independent journalist and activist Brad Will was in September in an East Village yoga studio. I turned my head and found him lying on the mat next to me in the darkened room, his pale, flat stomach rising and falling serenely with the rhythm of his breathing. So on October 27, when I saw the photos posted on the Internet showing the 36-year-old Will's mortally wounded body laid out on a street in Oaxaca, Mexico, I cringed. There was that same pale, flat stomach now punctured by a bullet.
Over the course of his restless 36 years, he seemed to hit every activist node: squatting in the East Village, staging tree-sits in the Northwest with Earth First, and hopping freight trains to anarchist gatherings. He braved tear gas and rubber bullets during the anti-globalization battles in Seattle, Quebec, Prague, and Genoa (where a demonstrator was shot dead in the street by police). When the heady Seattle-style direct-action movement in the U.S. toned down following 9-11, Will took his video camera south, following the wave of popular uprisings in Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil, Peru, Argentina, and finally Mexico. Friends say he was consumed with overlooked social struggles around the world. "He was one of the most dedicated activists I ever worked with," says Brooke Lehman, one of the owners of the radical Bluestockings bookstore on the Lower East Side, who met Will in 1998. "You could pretty much guarantee if there was a cause or an action, Will would be there. He felt a tremendous responsibility to do media where other media outlets wouldn't go, or were afraid to go."
There's much more to read about the life of Brad Will.
