LISTEN TO XAN SAM JOI:
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
“People like to say, ‘They’re not listening.’ I like to say, ‘We’re not talking loud enough,'” said Xan Sam Joi, as she stood beside her vegetable oil-fueled truck, which she drove from California to D.C. to take part in the occupation of the nation’s capital.
“We have to be activists. We have to rise up. We have to get out in the street. And we have to do it today,” said Joi, who has slept at Freedom Plaza since the occupation began there on Oct. 6.
“Every single moment we wait will make it harder for us to change things, harder for us to end war,” she said.
Joi takes ending war personally, as the colorful messages painted on her truck make clear. She transformed her truck into an anti-war-mobile shortly after Sept. 11, 2001.
“When 9/11 happened, I knew, I knew Bush was going to take us to war,” she said. “So I painted on the back of my truck, ‘Thou shall not kill’ and I took a trip around the country. I stopped in gas stations. I went to supermarkets. I just stopped and tried to talk with women.”
Joi, who’s a member of Code Pink Women for Peace, targets her outreach because “women have to stand up, take over, and lead us out of this horrific way we are living,” she said. “Do you want us to go to war? Do you think that’s a good response?” she asked women all over the country.
Joi and her truck evoke a wide-range of emotions. She’s been greeted in parking lots with hugs and tears from women who felt all alone in opposing the war. And she’s also been nearly run off the road.
But what bothers Joi most is “when they don’t respond at all, or if they say, ‘[War is] terrible, but I’m busy. I have to work. I have to go to school. I have to do this [or that].’ All of us have to do those things, but if everybody is busy doing those things, who’s going to be busy ending war?”
Related Links:
Related Stories:
- Grandmother Walks From West Virginia to D.C. for Oct. 6 Protest, 9/28/11
- “Occupy the USA,” Says/Sings Emma’s Revolution, 10/8/11