The text on this side turns the phrase “here is your answer” toward the everyday commandments of the straight world: don’t hitchhike, don’t talk to strangers, get a job, stay in school, don’t make love, don’t take drugs, don’t stand around waiting for nothing, don’t shelter the young. Against that catalog of fear, caution, work, property, surveillance, and passive spectatorship, the Digger voice answers with the counter-principle that creation and being are free. The piece is especially striking in the way it opposes “watching” to living: watching movies, television, ball-games, go-go dancers, rock bands, even spontaneous demonstrations, becomes a symptom of a sick culture that has forgotten how to act, share, risk, and come together joyously. Its final inventory of free clothes, free food, free shelter, free cars, free farms, free medical advice, free lawyers, and free printing presses moves the sheet from denunciation into declaration: FREENOW was not a slogan only, but an already emerging infrastructure of liberation. |