Revolution #266, April 22, 2012
BAsics Bus Tour Kicking Off From Atlanta in Early May
Be part of taking it higher
The BAsics Bus Tour is going to hit the road again. After its successful pilot launch in California, the BAsics bus is going to take it higher. And $20,000 is needed to make it happen.
Momentum is building in the mass campaign to raise big money to project the vision and works of Bob Avakian into every corner of society. In the coming months, new rounds of the BAsics Bus Tour are going to be spreading out to different areas. And now, beginning in Atlanta, then heading out from there, the BAsics bus will be rolling into the thick of the struggle in a particularly hot area in this country. The crew aboard will bring the message of revolution and introduce Bob Avakian to people who are beginning to fight the power. This will be changing the atmosphere, bringing the fresh wind of the possibility of a whole new world, attracting people’s deep hopes for humanity and outrage at the world as it is... stirring up controversy, deep engagement and critical thinking. It will bring the answers people so desperately need about the way out of all this and involve people in different ways in the mass campaign: BA Everywhere! Imagine the Difference It Will Make! This is needed now more than ever, and if this is accomplished, it will make a very big difference.
Whatever you can do and wherever you are, you can make your time, effort and energy count! Your creativity, participation and support is needed to make a truly big difference in the world right now.
- Join those who are coming together to fund this tour. Sponsor a volunteer—it’ll cost about $1,400 per volunteer for the full expenses of the tour. Contribute that in full and/or be part of raising those funds. Contribute air miles for volunteers to get to Atlanta, throw a house party, call your friends, be part of the major May 1 efforts to raise these funds, making a big splash around this revolutionary holiday while also joining in with the protests happening on May 1 itself (see page 4 for more details).
- Volunteer to be on the tour (see “YOU are needed...” below). For those on the tour, this will be an experience like no other.
- Follow the tour in this newspaper and online, and build support for and awareness of it. Volunteer to help spread the news of this online and in the media.
A crew from across the country—of different ages, experiences and nationalities—who think BA’s vision and works need to be known throughout society will go onto campuses and into inner cities, high schools and cultural centers and bring dramatic displays to downtown areas. They will be organizing screenings of clips from Avakian’s talk: Revolution: Why It’s Necessary, Why It’s Possible, What It’s All About, posting up quotes from BAsics, joining with those fighting the power and engaging in debate and discussion with people who agree, disagree or just want to find out more. They will be learning from people and giving them an opportunity to be part of the campaign to get out BA Everywhere. And all this together can reverberate back into the world at large.
A message to all those reading Revolution: Going all out around this—beginning now, making a big leap around the weekend before May 1, and when the tour itself kicks off—can bring all kinds of people together in many efforts, and on a mission—to break society open around the intolerability of the world as it is, the desirability of a whole different society, and a whole different way we could live... and the leadership Avakian is providing to bring that world into being.
“[The BAsics Bus Tour] cut through people’s daily existence of whatever sort of thing they were thinking about. It’s not like people didn’t have opinions on things. But... this was something they’d never seen before, an RV fully decorated with BAsics, the front and back covers in English and Spanish. You had music, you had these multicultural people stepping off these buses and very alive with revolution, alive with a vision of a new world... It was something unexpected, it was something very new, but it was also something very welcome.”
—a young tour participant
“Questions get raised every day about stuff like this but people don’t talk about it.”
—a city college student in Fresno
“A man from Mexico City who had bought Lo BAsico... commented on the sections that impressed him: about religion, seizing power, and learning about the experience of socialism. ‘These are big solutions to big problems.’ He said we needed to reach out more to youth, to the schools, that this book ‘has to be brought to people around the world.’”
—from a tour volunteers report
“When the bus rolls down the street, heads turn. One woman said, it ‘stopped me in my tracks!’”
—report from tour volunteers in Riverside, CA
YOU are needed now to help the
BAsics Bus Tour take it higher:
- Contribute generously towards the $20,000 needed and, as part of this, contribute airfare miles or credits. Checks or money orders can be made payable to The Bob Avakian Institute and mailed to 1016 W. Jackson Blvd., Chicago, IL 60607. Right now, contributions can only be solicited and accepted from residents of the following states: California, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Nevada, New York, Texas, Vermont, Washington, Wyoming. If you are interested but in a different state or want to contribute online, contributions can be made payable to RCP Publications at revcom.us or sent to PO Box 3486, Merchandise Mart, Chicago, IL 60654.
- Volunteer to join the tour. Contact your local Revolution Books. (See revcom.us/a/online/contac_e.htm.)
- Volunteer! All kinds of assistance are needed from wherever you’re at and with whatever time you can contribute: help with press work and Internet promotions (both urgently needed now), video editing (for short videos from the tour while it’s on the road), and more. Contact basicsevent@yahoo.com.
BAsics is a book of quotations and short essays by Bob Avakian. Avakian is the revolutionary leader who has brought forward a new synthesis of communism—building on the overwhelmingly positive but also negative experience of communist revolution so far, and drawing from a broad range of human experience. Because of his work, there really is a viable vision and strategy for a radically new, and much better, society and world—and there is the crucial leadership needed to carry forward the struggle toward that goal. But this is something that has to be made known throughout society, it is something people need to get the opportunity to engage, debate and be part of making real. |
BA Everywhere! Imagine the Difference It Could Make!
If you like this article, subscribe, donate to and sustain Revolution newspaper.
