!G for gone (a remembrance) --- agk's diary 4 January 2022 @ 09:00 --- written on Pinebook Pro while Evy works and baby plays with parachute cord --- Most weekends I take a little bag of pig jacks to the child and adolescent units of the psych hospital where I work. Remember jacks, the child's game where you bounce a ball and pick up spiky chrome caltrops? Instead of caltrops my bag holds 8 tiny rubber pigs. I picked up pig jacks almost ten years ago when Mark 'Migs' Neiweem (1984--2021) was released to house arrest on parole. I hoped they'd give us something to do other than talk when I visited him. They might ease pressure, pass the time, and be funny---Migs *hates* the pigs. Migs named each jack after a screw in Pontiac Correctional Center. He bounced the ball. "Snatch- ing Ramirez," he said, and palmed that pig. I met him before the 2012 Chicago NATO summit. I think we first met when he came to a weekend-long street medic training I led. The training taught tactical first responder and community health worker skills to people planning to protest NATO. There were many reasons to protest the NATO summit. * NATO recently bombed and destabilized Libya, long the most prosperous and equitable African country, causing a failed state with open-air slave markets. * NATO forces still violently occupied Afghanistan, protecting massive money-laundering and poppy- growing. Veterans, Afghans, and victims of the opioid industry wanted NATO out. * NATO was destabilizing Syria, killing civilians with bombing. NATO nations were fostering the growth of Da'esh ("ISIS"), Jabhat al-Nusra, and other Salafi jihadi gangs who turned territory they held into hell. * NATO was (as always) pushing ballistic missile batteries ever closer to Russia in defiance of treaties, rendering member nations "not agree- ment-capable." In the process it destabilized Ukraine, fostering the re-emergence of overt fascism in Europe. When the Warsaw Pact collapsed in 1991, NATO should have dissolved. The NATO summit wasn't the only draw. Occupy Wall Street milennarianism was seeking to transform what it could of the indebted, foreclosing, evicted, underemployed, humiliating world it discovered was not each individual's private shame. The G8, makers of economic policy, falsely announced they'd meet in Chicago concurrently with the NATO summit. That spring, Chicago mayor Rahm Emmanuel used econ- omic shock therapy to extract public goods from org- anized constituencies. Despite historic teacher union mobilization, a terrifying number of schools were closed by surprise, without prior public notice. Swaths of Chicago sat vacant, foreclosed, bank-owned. Suddenly the school was gone too, the community center, neighborhood mental health center. More than once, Migs and I toted small first-aid kits in small crowds mourning, chanting, and bearing witness to the demolition of community institutions. *** At the medic training, one trainer-in-training told me she was concerned about Migs' presence. Chicago Antiracist Action circulated a communique calling him a snitch for allegedly informing on a white power gangster while locked up, maybe on heroin possession charges during a bad, embarrassing time in his life. I don't remember the details. He was at my training because he wanted to play a support role, help other people during whatever might unfold. He was clean from the heroin or pills, trying to find his way back into the Chicago anarchist scene. I let him stay. The communique followed him around like a bad fart. Nobody trusted him. He wanted to expose his kindness from under the crust of a hard life, but the rumor mill isolated him. Another long-time medic, a leftist attorney, and I agreed if the FBI was looking for anyone to entrap to justify their absurd budget for the event, it would be Migs. We tried to keep an eye on Migs, but they got him. Preying on his isolation and human need for connect- ion, getting him drunk and paying for a motel room, encouraging secrecy, being manipulative, the FBI followed their playbook for this kind of entrapment. An agent bought some kerosene and styrofoam, they stuffed some empties with flammable gel, the raid found the three (or whatever) Molotov firebombs. In jail, and eventually prison, Migs stayed clean. He refused to join the Aryan Brotherhood or limit communion with prisoners of color. He refused "protection" that divides prisoners by race. Migs' politics were visible, tattooed in his flesh: red and black anarchosyndicalist flag on his neck, circle-A for anarchy and circle-E for equality, a klansman getting shot, a lynched pig in a police uniform. Like many people with intense tattoos he was gentle and awkward. Anarchist Black Cross, a prisoner support network, sent him books to read. He wrote a lot. On the word of a prison snitch he was "trying to organize a collective," (which he denied) and the basis of his tattoos, books, and writing about radical freedom and responsibility, he spent the better part of a year in solitary confinement in a 6' by 9' cell. I wrote to him once or twice. Mostly my little friendship with Migs was in the months before his arrest and after his release to house arrest. He was from the western Chicago suburbs and helped me understand the importance of a left politics that addresses suburban youth. Everything we talked about was soon reinforced by the suburban uprising in Ferguson, Missouri after white cop Darren Wilson shot and killed black suburban youth Michael Brown and left his body in the street. In places like Niles and Brookfield, Illinois, where Migs grew up and to which he bitterly returned when times got hard in Illinois cities, of course there were punks in high school. There were garage bands, struggles to keep VFW posts and bowling alleys as venues for all-ages shows, pills and heroin, negl- ected infrastructure, debt and foreclosure, and there was vigorous racial politics. Migs was in a little crew of anti-racist punks, up against a bigger crew of nazi punks. They fought with fisticuffs and improvised weapons; a '90s West Side Story. The anti-racists got their politics from the bands they listened to, and to a degree from 'zines. They wanted to leave, get out and find city punk scenes where white pride assholes were the persecuted minority in the scene. "We didn't have anybody in our school or our towns to look up to," Migs told me. "We were fucking stupid, but our hearts were in the right place." They left soon as they could. "Somebody has to organize places like where I grew up," Migs said. "Young people know shit's wrong. They're pissed. They want an explanation of what's been destroying their future. The left doesn't know they exist and doesn't talk to them, so the fascists do. A bad, reactionary force is gonna come from suburban white kids if that doesn't change. The fascists use them. They don't give a fuck about them. We should." *** Fancy called yesterday. Migs' girlfriend called the leftist attorney two weeks ago. Migs is dead. He overdosed. Evy and I regularly see, in hospitals where we work, what happens after someone doesn't die immediately from opioid overdose. Migs got naloxone, but not enough, or not fast enough or who knows. The fentanyl in his mix was higher than he expected. An anoxic brain injury is brain tissue death from oxygen starvation. How it looks depends on which tissue, and how much. After the hospital extracted its tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for a suitable interval, Migs' family decided to withdraw life support. The pandemic draws people into our little pods of family. For those with strong family, with stable housing, with jobs that weren't disrupted, with health insurance, without addiction or with strong recovery, etc., it's been more or less okay. For many, family and friends died or disappeared, isolating them with very little over-stretched support. When crisis struck, neither government, nor civil society, nor family was there to care. This was the worst year maybe ever for overdoses and suicide in my country, and the worst in decades for murder. These are the curses of economic shock therapy. Migs is dead. When we hung out, he pushed me kindly, lovingly, and successfully to care about kids in the suburbs, especially the white boys. He profoundly influenced my politics with his life lived politic- ally against all forms of domination and his pro- found faith in people in tough circumstances. The weekend after his overdose I retrieved my pig jacks from the staff assigned to an increasingly bored, violent teen transboy who spent months locked in the psych hospital where I work because deficien- cies in the DCBS system are exacerbated by pandemic times. Foster homes and group homes lack beds for teens for the foreseeable future. The boy told me "I named them. Jackson, Jake, Jace, Jack, Jacqueline, Crispy Bacon, Jackie...."