In 2005 iLL-Literacy went on its first “on the road” show (a.k.a. first show that was further away than Santa Cruz). That show was in Paris.

That ‘05 summer, Ruby and I got together to send out press kits. We had just recruited Nico six months back, and the new “not a student organization anymore” version of ill-literacy.com had just launched. By the end of the day we had emailed out around 200 press kits to college campuses to all 50 states. Yes, even North Dakota (I see you ND!).

As the sun set over the Berkeley horizon, our eyes burned from staring at our computer screens all day long.

“Anywhere else?” I asked Ruby.

“Well,” she sighed. And when she sighs “Well” she says it in a high muppet-sounding voice and shrugs her shoulders up. “Well, I’d reeeeeeally like to go back to Pariiiiiiiiiiis.”

“Ah, then Paris it shall be,” yes I talk like a muppet too. We googled up Paris schools and came across the American University of Paris homepage. Slithering the mouse pointer through links, we found the database of student organizations hidden deep in the nethers of the website. Voila. Spoken Word Club. We sent them a press kit, but it was more like a “La la la we’ll just see what happens, whatevaaaaa” kind of attempt.

One September morning I was woken at 5:30am by a phone number with 14 digits. A month after that the riots in France broke out. And a month after that, we were on a plane to the city of love.

Decades of civil unrest in Paris ghettos. One day while some youth were running away from the police to avoid getting roughed up like they often were, two attempted to hide in a power substation and were electrocuted to death. Riots to respond to poverty. Riots to respond to racism. The walls of Paris were burning and we were about to enter its city gates.

When we arrived we were greeted by Sophia and Joe, two Americans that were studying at AUP, and the founders of the Spoken Word Club. As we chiseled away at our disbelief that we were about to do our first gig in Paris, the decayed brick walls whizzed by our metro windows. In Paris, the suburbs aren’t exactly Pleasantville. These suburbs were still containing heartburn from the riots that had swelled in their stomachs just weeks before.

“Are people in Paris worried about the riots?” I asked, really meaning “Should we be watching out for flying trashcans?” Sophia and Joe brushed their hands like they were dismissing a bad dish.

“They don’t really come to the city city…they’re mostly just messing up their own neighborhoods.”

I can’t pretend to understand what would drive youth to riot. By the time I was old enough to toss a stone through a window, America had already learned from the Rodney King outcry. Complacency was injected into the curriculum of my upbringing. And now we live through stolen elections, footage of beheadings on the news, and massacre in the streets of Chicago and raise barely a finger to click over to the next news blog.

At the time that I had left for Paris, I was so angry and frustrated. A girl had broken my heart, really badly. Gas prices were high and there were rumors of a pending draft. I felt suffocated. How funny that I chose to escape into a city was literally tearing itself apart.

I’ve learned that it’s arrogant for us Americans to think that we have all this numbness to ourselves. But maybe it takes more to get us mad. Because after 9/11 there weren’t any huge Muslim revolts in the Bronx streets even while everyone in a headwrap suddenly became a target. What were the conditions that made Paris, the city of love, so much more unbearable than Bush? Or Jena? Or Sean Bell? What happened in France that made children overturn cars and set fires to their homes?

Is it just that bad in France, or are we just that numb in America? What happened since ‘92 when all it took was a video of cops kicking a guy around to set Los Angeles ablaze? Sixteen years later, 50 shots, and we read the news report in between email and Myspace.

Coming home to all this crazy news going on makes me want to leave again, further away than I was before. But no one can just run away forever. We’ve got to change.

Anyway, just things that I thought about when I watched this:

Justice – “Stress”

PS: A lot of people have been commenting about this video and saying that it promotes violence. Personally, this is a realistic depiction of the suburbs in France, and doubles as a metaphor for the current abrasiveness of extreme Christianity. Ug, genius.