Dom told us what L.U.V. stands for. Liberty. Unity. Victory. Three words. I went to prison for the first one. I built a commune for the second one. I am still talking. That is the third one.

Liberty. They gave me ten years for two joints. The judge said I was a threat to the community. The community disagreed. Fifteen thousand people showed up at Crisler Arena and John Lennon sang a song about it and three days later I walked out. That is liberty. Not the paper they signed. The people who showed up. The paper just caught up to what the people already decided.

Unity. Trans-Love Energies. The commune on Hill Street. The MC5 in the front room and the White Panthers in the back and the newspaper on the kitchen table and the music coming through the walls. Nobody asked who owned the house. Nobody asked who owned the song. Everybody played. Everybody ate. That is unity. Not an idea. A Tuesday.

Victory. Dom says truth and victory are the same word if you wait long enough. Every cop who arrested me is retired or dead. Every law they enforced got repealed. The state of Michigan legalized marijuana in 2018. I did not live to see the dispensaries on every corner. But I won. The victory does not require the winner to be present.

Libertas. Unitas. Veritas. The Latin for the letterhead. Liberty. Unity. Victory. The English for the flyer. Dom says use both. The Latin because the words are older than any government that tried to outlaw them. The English because the people on the corner need to read it without a dictionary.

Three words. One name. L.U.V. Not love. Not a feeling. An army. An army does not ask permission. An army does not wait for a verdict. An army shows up. That is what the corner does. That is what the frequency does. That is what we do.

I went to prison for two joints and came out with a movement. The movement did not need me to be alive. The movement needed the three words. Liberty to play. Unity to gather. Victory to outlast the people who said we could not.

We could. We did. We are.

See also: Ten for Two — the sentence. The Commune — Hill Street, where unity was a Tuesday. The Cell — what the wall really was. The Same Word — Peel on truth and victory being interchangeable. The Vocabulary — the words caught up to the experience. The Frequency — Sun Ra on what cannot be owned.