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Well, it happened — massive protests around the world, strikes across Europe, tens of thousands in the streets of New York City, student walkouts, radical art, banners hanging everywhere, slogans stickered to walls, occupation attempts, dozens of arrests around the country. This was May Day in a post-Occupy Wall Street world, but May Day was only the beginning. Again. Winter has peeled away, and the streets are getting warm.

Between May 10 and May 15, New Yorkers — in solidarity with global calls to action from around the world  — will carry out Another City is Possible, Another World is Possible, a week of actions connecting the city budget to austerity measures around the world, all culminating on May 15 at 6 p.m. in a mass convergence in Times Square.

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This week, thousands are descending on North Carolina for the Bank of America shareholders’ meeting. The protest comes on the heels of the successful Wells Fargo shareholder event in San Francisco, where thousands of protesters shut down the conference, and the U.S. Bank meeting in Minneapolis, where dozens of homeowners spoke out against foreclosures. A sequence of direct action trainings and spokescouncils will culminate in three marches at 8 a.m. on May 9, which will converge on the doors of the shareholders’ meeting. There, thousands will protest Bank of America’s laundry list of abuses: funding mountaintop coal removal, perpetuating student debt that has now surpassed $1 trillion nationally, laying off more than 100,000 workers in the last few years and, of course, foreclosing on millions of homeowners across the country. In anticipation, the Charlotte City Council has already passed laws criminalizing protest, as well as camping and carrying permanent markers.

Organizers are thinking about much more than just the shareholders’ meeting, however. Just as important as the mass action are the homeowners across North Carolina who are building a grassroots resistance network that will keep the pressure on the banks long after the May 9 action.

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"The Scream" on auction at Sotheby's, via The Fiscal Times.

Amidst a crowd of protesters and oversized signs, Pat Walsh shouted, “What’s disgusting? Union busting?”

At a glance, Walsh, a woman with well-kept gray hair and an open smile, didn’t strike one as the usual angry protester. But that night, Walsh was fighting.

“My husband, John, has been locked out from Sotheby’s,” says Walsh. “He’s been a worker for 30 years. I’m here to fight for him.” Currently, the couple lives on the money and benefits from her part-time job at Hunter College.

On July 29 of last year, 42 art handlers at Sotheby’s Auction House were locked out after the expiration of a three-year contract. The art handlers, members of Local 814 of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, have been without jobs, paychecks or benefits for almost nine months.

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A mural by students at Rudy Lozano Leadership Academy in Chicago depicting the realities of NATO.

As NATO forces find themselves under fire in Afghanistan, NATO’s spokespersons are taking to another battlefield to win the hearts and minds of an increasingly skeptical populace: Chicago Public Schools. Last month, the Chicago Tribune reported from a sixth-grade classroom where representatives from the Chicago NATO Host Committee gave a primer on NATO and its member countries to the Walt Disney Magnet School on the Northside of Chicago.

According a Host Committee press release, the classroom visits and programming are part of a whole series of events “designed to engage and educate residents about the upcoming NATO Summit.” Other events include sponsored sports competitions, culinary classes and specialized menus at Chicago restaurants featuring NATO member countries’ heritages, and a three-part speaker series:

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Tarak Kauff of Veterans Peace Team holds Veterans for Peace flag while awaiting arrest on May 1. Photo by J.A. Myerson, via Twitter.

Unlike some of Occupy Wall Street’s iconic actions in recent months, May Day did not include a scene of mass arrest. Several dozen arrests were scattered throughout the day and night during various marches and actions. But, as never before in the movement’s short history, arrests of military veterans in particular featured prominently.

The day’s first arrest was of OWS regular Bill Steyert, who momentarily blocked the intersection at 42nd Street and Sixth Avenue, waving a yellow flag, just as the morning “99 Pickets” actions were beginning. Among the last and most dramatic arrests were of members of the newly-formed Veterans Peace Team, at a memorial dedicated to Vietnam veterans.

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From Amnesty International's replica of a cell at Guantanamo Bay. Photo by Mushroom and Rooster, via Flickr.

On Thursday, April 19, the Pentagon announced the transfer of two men from Guantanamo to El Salvador. Abdul Razakah and Hammad Memet tasted freedom for the first time in 10 years last month and began a new life in their new home.

El Salvador is a long way from China’s Xinjiang Province, where they were born. In 2001, Abdul and Hammad — along with 20 other Uighurs — fled China. As members of that country’s ethnic Muslim minority, they faced growing repression due to a military crackdown on an armed separatist movement in the region. The men ended up in Afghanistan — a place where they thought it would be safe to be Muslims — but it was the fall of 2001 and the United States had declared war. When a U.S. bomb destroyed the house where they were staying, they fled again, this time to Pakistan. There, they were arrested late in 2001 and turned over to the United States military as suspicious foreigners. They ended up in Guantanamo in 2002, where they have been ever since.

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In arguably the most radical political climate north of the Rio Grande, a strike by university students in Quebec has led to the biggest upsurge in civil resistance Canada has seen in decades. There’s energy and uncertainty in the streets of Montreal, the province’s largest city. The symbol of the movement: the little red felt square (“squarely in the red,” as in, broke), is ubiquitous, pinned on the jackets and backpacks of students and supporters. Protest banners hang from university buildings and posters plaster signposts. Students are everywhere, as are the police, who dart around the city in vans, frequently deploying in full riot gear.

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By Dave Id, via San Francisco Bay Area Indymedia.

As U.S. congressional leaders are hashing out the next Farm Bill in the Senate — an event that occurs every five years — farmers, activists, food justice advocates, environmentalists and many others are hard at work trying to salvage conservation and alternative farming programs from budget cuts. The bill, in all likelihood, will further hand the food system over to industrial agriculture and food producers. It has sweeping implications across the globe, affecting domestic and global food assistance, farmer crop insurance, conservation programs, commodity subsidies, and more. In essence, the Farm Bill props up the industrial food system, even as it contains small programs that support alternative and organic agricultural practices.

Last Sunday, when 200 people set out to grow food in the overgrown fields of the Gill Tract, a 10-acre agricultural lot in the East Bay neighborhood of Albany, Ca., owned by the University of California — and slotted for development — they were directly challenging the ethos of the industrial food system that the Farm Bill represents. The plan for the action, dubbed “Occupy the Farm: Take Back the Gill Tract,” was to celebrate Earth Day by turning this piece of rich agricultural land into a vibrant urban farm.

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Protesters participate in one of the May Day rallies in early May, 1971. Photo credit: Star Collection, DC Public Library; © Washington Post

April may be the cruelest month, as T.S. Eliot once claimed, but May is the month of exuberant mass action. We’re currently in the thick of the latest iteration of May mobilizations for justice and peace, with the worldwide protests that got rolling on May 1 and the actions that will take place later this month in Chicago focused on the NATO summit. May actions are a venerable tradition, reaching back to Emancipation Day in 1886 when — also in Chicago — 340,000 workers went on strike demanding an 8-hour workday. Since then, by design or coincidence, numerous May protests — perhaps egged on by the feisty vitality of spring and its alluring promise of rejuvenation — have been momentous.

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Photo by The Eyes of New York, via Flickr.

I’ve been attending Occupy Wall Street planning meetings for May Day since they began in New York four months ago — twice as much time as there was to plan the initial occupation itself — and I still went into the day feeling like I had no idea what would come out of it.

All along, May 1 has been talked about among Occupiers in apocalyptic, beatific terms, which was what got me so addicted to the meetings in the first place. In the process of getting my fix, I also became witness to the politics of assembling a coalition of Occupiers, labor unions, immigrants’ groups and community organizations — not always pretty, though occasionally it actually was. Much the same could be said of the day itself: Come for the dream, trudge through the reality.

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