Prescott community mourns passing of William Rodgers : AZ IMC

Statement from the Friends of the Catalyst

We mourn the passing of our dear friend and community member, Bill Rodgers, who worked tirelessly for the causes of social justice and environmental sustainability. We ask that he be remembered as the gentle, kind, and compassionate person we all knew and loved here in Prescott. We remain committed to continuing the work of community building and ecological awareness, through the Catalyst Infoshop, as part of the legacy Bill helped to create. We wish our friend the peace and serenity that he strived so hard to create in this world. This is a great loss for our community. We love you, Bill.

http://www.catalystinfoshop.org
http://www.supportbill.org

We love you, brother Bill...

We never say goodbye to such loving, caring and gentle hearts.
My prayers are with you all.

As the story of Bill's tragic passing travels across cyberspace and the Indymedia network - where literally thousands have learned about you loss and many share your grief, it's not suprising that the rightwing trolls detest the IMC and the vision of a better world that Bill embraced would respond with this kind of vitriol. They feel increasingly threatened and knowing full well they're losing the battle for public opinion , hate is the only response they can offer. Responding to them is a time and waste of spirit.

Life and death. First one step, then another. We will always remember.

may his spirit survive in those he loved and cared for. condolences to those who have lost a friend, comrade and a spirit who seems to have sought some dignity for all regardless of species...

la luchue sigue....

For Bill.

" I can see the dawn of the better day for humanity. The people are awakening. In due time they will and must come to their own.

When the mariner, sailing over tropic seas, looks for relief from his weary watch, he turns his eyes toward the southern cross, burning luridly above the tempest-vexed ocean. As the midnight approaches, the southern cross begins to bend, the whirling worlds change their places, and with starry finger-points the Almighty marks the passage of time upon the dial of the universe, and though no bell may beat the glad tidings, the lookout knows that the midnight is passing and that relief and rest are close at hand. Let the people everywhere take heart of hope, for the cross is bending, the midnight is passing, and joy cometh with the morning."

-- Closing remarks by Eugene Debs to the Federal Court of Cleveland, Ohio on September 18, 1918 after being convicted of violating the Sedition Act.

Tribute To Avalon
by posting for ghostdancer Saturday, Dec. 24, 2005 at 4:35 PM

For those who aren't aware, Bill Rodgers was known to many in the activist community by his forest name, Avalon. This is a tribute to this gentle spirit from one who knew and loved him.

Avalon, gentle elf
caring spirit caught in the tumult
of these interesting times
hearing wild earth's cries
your eyes sparked
with the magic of her songs...
Your tales of spelunking,
wriggling through her tight
womb-caves and
dark stone-cool depths
of meandering tunnels,
inspiring and awesome
was your thirst for adventure...
Teacher, at EF! RRR's
of how to move
and see in the night...
you knew well how to evade
their traps of darkness.
Caught, they thought they could
entrap you, silence your spirit,
but they knew you not -
elfin Houdini shape-shifter,
weaver of optimisms magics
always waits the chances of freedom... .
Their flimsy pretense of a case
cobbled of lies, deceit, treachery
ignorance, brutality, and founded
in insatiable corporate greed
- perhaps they knew
they would never hold you?
knew they were unlikely
to convict you with their
pick-up-sticks piles of lies...
They dare say that you
"committed suicide"
but any who knew you
saw your shining elf spirit
know you would never
do their death-work for them.
And where, in a one room jail cell,
might a plastic bag
large enough to cover one's head
come from anyway?
Like the exposed suffocation tortures
conducted by the US military
on prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan, and...
- did they intend to kill you
when they forced the bag
over your captured head?
Or was this "just a ploy"
an attempt to scare you,
borrowed from their deadly Iraq games?
Is this part of their plans
for activists of integrity
who will not capitulate
to police state brutality?
Are they seeking to
spill fear throughout
the "movement"
reeking with the stench of
blood, vomit, and horrors...
Let them seek, then
for they will not find
that they cannot understand...
death comes for all eventually.
Like an Oroborus
- fabled serpent which eats its own tail,
emblem of bu$h skull & bones -
they will eat the tail
of their own fears,
consumed by their own shadows
- haunted, in dreams where they will
know no peace... your killers,
for ending the life of such a magical
gentle soul, as you,
will face karmic tortures of their own creation...
And you, though untimely and unexpected
and not without great sadness
to the hearts of your many kindred friends,
are free from this world of too many contradictions...
free to dance again
with the wild spirits of elves, the disappearing wildones
and the ancient ones who yet remember
what life is really of...
free, in spirit, to help midwife the birth
of wild nature's re-emergence
as the insane vapid and brutal powers
around us, over-reach, topple
and vanish into the shifting sands
of their karmic fate...
Avalon, gentle elf,
we see you still
smiling in the swirling night's starry skies
in the spark of fire
in wild nature's eyes
as she comes up, again,
ever batting last...

I will mourn Bill's passing as I mourn every day for starving polar bears, or as I mourn for wolves hunted down for sport by helicopter, as I mourn the beached whales that are so contiminated with pcbs,dioxin and mercury that it's flesh is considered toxic waste, as i mourn every day for all things wild and free that are being pushed out of existence right before our very eyes!
I know you mourned the same things

Somehow this mourning helps me continue the fight against the ongoing biological holocaust

avalon may your spirit stay wild,pure and free.

Mr. Bill Rodgers suicide is certainly a tragedy, and I mean that from the heart. But the unhappy truth, one even his strongest supporters must face, is this.... when facing 20 years in the slammer, Mr. Rodgers chose to enter the spiritual world by his own hand rather than use the bully pulpit of the witness stand to reassert his allegiance to his radical cause — the cause that he had (evidently erroneously) once thought was his raison d'être.

His supporters can proclaim him a hero and a martyr if they wish, but the sad fact is that he failed them and their cause when the going got tough — the simple truth is that he changed his mind about the worthiness of his cause.

It is true that Mr. Rodgers died before he was tried, and therefore deserves the presumption of innocence. It is equally true that if he were to be convicted, he'd face heavy jail time, perhaps remaining in stir until he was 60.

I suppose we'll just have to wait to see what sort of evidence there was against him, but I'm betting it was pretty strong and I'll go on record as saying he
simply succumbed to what he viewed as a hopeless future in the big house.

I hope all the budding zealots out there who are contemplating an act of eco- or AR-violence take a
long hard look at the pressures Mr. Rodgers must have been under, and think very carefully about whether they want to risk their future by acting out as he allegedly did.

My advice to you and others is... overcome your arrogance, and don't assume that you're too smart and too careful to get caught.

The feds are really starting to take eco- and AR-terror seriously, and it's going to become increasingly difficult for perpetrators to hide indefinitely.

It really doesn't take much courage to sneak about in the night and hit some "soft" target.

It takes a great deal more courage to deal with the consequences of what you've done when you're caught. And even if you're not caught, you've got to live with the constant fear of being apprehended.

These members of ELF evidently hoped to put their violent past behind them, each wanting to move on and live a fairly normal life, working, going to school, protesting legally (one presumes) when and where whim dictated, selling leftist books.....now, all that spoiled.... so many futures in dire jeopardy.