I watched this terrific video by John Oliver thinking of my friend Shannon Williams, a school teacher and sex worker in Oakland California, who died of a brain tumor in 2015 at the age of 48. Shannon was an anarchist and activist, an organizer with Love & Rage and every radical antiwar and social justice project. We re-met after a couple of decades when I was broke (as usual) and selling my poems that afternoon on the docks in Oakland. This beautiful person handed me $20 for a poem, and only then we stared at each other, she said “Mitchel?” and brought me home for dinner to meet her kids, find again our mutual friend Pablo, and reconnect. I didn’t know this story about her life until later. https://www.nswp.org/…/sex-workers-remember-shannon…. John Oliver hammers the issues fairly and relentlessly, just as Shannon would have. Thanks John. In memory of Shannon Williams. We shall rise again.