At Amnesty International’s “Bringing Human Rights Home” Concert
Reaching Thousands with Bob Avakian’s New Year’s Message—A Call to Revolution
February 18, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
From readers:
Well over 14,000 people came to Amnesty International’s “Bringing Human Rights Home” Concert at Barclays Center in Brooklyn on February 5, in the wake of a major snowstorm. The concert was an effort by Amnesty International to reach out to a new generation of young people, reviving a series of concerts they held in the 1980s and '90s featuring world famous musicians performing and speaking out against governments around the world that were trampling on human rights including arresting, torturing, and murdering citizens.
This year’s concert featured an appearance by two recently freed members of the Russian feminist art collective Pussy Riot, Nadezhda Tolkonnikova and Maria Alyokhina, from prison in Russia—who were introduced by Madonna. There were performances by Lauryn Hill, Blondie, Imagine Dragons, Flaming Lips, Yoko Ono, and more.
The New York City BA Everywhere Committee wanted to reach the thousands at the concert, especially younger people, with Bob Avakian’s New Year’s Message. We undertook a simple experiment: a “mini-palm card” with a QR code on it so that people could point their phones at the card, click and start listening on the spot to the audio of Bob Avakian delivering this important "Call to Revolution"! Plans were also made for finding and engaging with potential larger donors and opinion-makers who would be at the concert.
Our presence outside included a crew with a display of posters featuring BA's “Call to Revolution” and calling out to those streaming into the stadium to get with the revolution and the leadership to solve with the horrors that have brought them here: from the massive rape of women around the world to the persecution of gay people in Russia AND the U.S., to the totally unnecessary and preventable deaths of 10 million children every year. We challenged people to drop donations to spread BA Everywhere into containers that each of us had. The Rolling Stone magazine website mentioned that the Revolutionary Communist Party was “recruiting” at the concert.
We felt the “freshness” of these mini-palm cards and the radical simplicity of what we undertook can be learned from and built on at other big cultural gatherings and on the campuses.
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