Don't Let Our Minivan Fool You

We have 1200 miles to drive and a minivan to get us there: our fall '08 Drop Beats Not Bombs tour includes 15 stops in 6 states, launching in Minneapolis and ending in New York city. But the minivan is only the cover of this book and not to be judged: inside we are hip hop, we are action, art, community across borders, a laboratory of resistance and visions of another world that is possible, a world that is being formed, built and created as we speak.

We come from Detroit, Colombia, Minneapolis, Oakland and DC. We are: Invincible, a hip-hop emcee and community activist, Paula Galeano, a Colombian conscientious objector of the Red Juvenil, US counter-recruitment organizer Isaac Martin and FOR artists/activists. Armed with LCD projectors, stories, microphones, scrap paper, guitars and photos, our tour aims to train and empower youth to support each other in resisting militarism through creative action, and to build the international conscientious objector's movement.

This tour is innovative in its conception, because we are connecting art and struggle, we are making the links between the local and the global, and seeing the war at home and the war abroad as two faces of the same unjust system. But this tour is not only about what we are against. It is also about what we stand for. We are objecting to militarism, we are opposing war and we do not accept a world in which the only option for young people is to join the military or an illegal armed group in order to survive. Our consciences will not let us live in a world where talented, intelligent, energetic youth are killed every day in the wars of the elite and powerful, who only care to secure more profits. To resist these realities, we offer our voices and our bodies, our beats and lyrics, our stencil art and street theater. We offer this creative resistance to build our visions into existence.

And this is our travel blog – here we will post our reflections, pictures, interviews and videos of these 20 days we will spend on the road together. Our first stop will be at Hamline University on November 5th, a day after the Presidential elections. Either way that turns out, we know that our work will be far from done.

So look out your window…you might see a minivan. You never know who's inside.