One Can Make a Difference (19 page)

I might roll myself along, or turn somersaults or cartwheels. Once I got down on my hands and knees on London Bridge and started crawling along, wearing a sign that said “Could you love me?” I went about sixty miles that way. Some kids threw stones, some people called me an idiot and demanded that I stand up, and some people offered me cups of tea. What I do really brings out people's characters, and that's part of it.

I like to laugh and so I try to bring a lot of humor to my art. I'll put chips on my head, tie bricks to my legs, or roll a bean or a nut along the pavement with my nose (I pushed a monkey nut to the front door of Number Ten Downing Street, the prime minister's residence, which made the press report that “There's now at least one nut at Number Ten”).

There is always a serious element to my art, like making people think about why janitors are so poorly paid when they do such important work, or why we shouldn't waste water, but humor is a great leveler. I mean, imagine Osama bin Laden in a pink tutu! Being “silly” allows me to deliver something important to ordinary people in a way that makes them stop and talk about it all.

People become inhibited as they grow up; they lose their sense of wonder and that spontaneity they had as children. A child riding on the top of a double-decker bus will be looking at the sky, the bridge, his eyes bright, his mind going a mile a minute. I want to help restore those feelings, and I do. Instead of being stiff, people look over at me and laugh.Then they talk about what I'm doing.

Today I teach a fine arts course at Camberwell, the school I dreamt of attending when I was young. My class is composed of a special group of students aged from eighteen to seventy. I draw on my experiences now to enjoy each day, and I meet unique people every day that I'm performing, whole families, individuals. And all of them influence me. I don't want to ever be jaded. I keep in mind the story of a theatrical agent who has been in the business twenty-five years. An entertainer goes to his office and the agent says “What do you do?” so the entertainer runs across the room, swan dives out of the window, does the loop de loop in the air, comes back in, does a rolling handstand and then the splits. The agent looks up at him and says, “So, what else can you do?”

My answer is: I make art accessible to everyone.

KEITH McHENRY

You May Say I'm a Dreamer

Keith McHenry is an artist, activist, author, and public speaker. He is a
cofounder of Food Not Bombs, which shares free vegetarian food in communities
all over the world. He is currently listed by the U.S. State Department as
one of America's 100 most dangerous people, and Food Not Bombs is listed on
the FBI's Terrorist Watch List.

It is true that Keith has been arrested over 100 times. But it has been for
“making a political statement” by sharing free food in San Francisco. He has
spent over 500 nights in jail for his peaceful protests against militarism. He
has also campaigned tirelessly to end police violence, cofounding October 22 as
No Police Brutality Day.

Keith has been the keynote speaker at countless colleges including Oberlin
and MIT and has spoken on topics such as fair trade and poverty in cities
all across America, Mexico, Africa, Europe, Canada, and the Middle East. If
this is a terrorist and a dangerous person, something is deeply wrong with our
government's ability to tell a suicide bomber from a dumpster diver. I wanted
Keith to tell his own story of how he became the man he is today.

M
y father worked for the Park Service, and I grew up in some of our most beautiful national parks. When I was in fourth grade, our family moved to Shenandoah,Virginia. Life became hard there, as I didn't fit in and the local kids would beat me up. It became frightening to go to school. I started to draw and paint around this time, and my father gave me a copy of
Walden
and
On Civil Disobedience
by Henry David Thoreau. The cruelty of my classmates changed me. I believe this is why I became a defender of the poor and oppressed. Reading
On Civil Disobedience
and learning about the war in Vietnam inspired me to choose nonviolent direct action for peace and social justice. While living in Shenandoah, we had mandatory Christian education at the public schools, and my parents went to the Parent Teacher Association meeting to ask that this violation of separation of church and state stop. The child of our town's only Jewish family had to sit by himself in the hallway during the Christian classes because the teachers were saying the Jews killed Jesus and it was upsetting to the young boy. The night my parents spoke out against forcing Christian education in public school a group of angry parents marched outside our house holding flaming torches, throwing rocks and yelling curses at my parents. My mother had us all go to a back room and pray for our safety. Not long after this horrific event Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in Memphis, Tennessee.

Later in life, while I was studying painting at Boston University, I heard Helen Caldecott speaking in Boston Common. She was standing on a milk crate telling a small group of people about the threat of nuclear war. Her talk inspired me to start doing public art addressing this issue. During the next few years, I met other antinuclear activists, and we thought we should use performance art to reach the public about the dangers of nuclear weapons and nuclear power. I designed a stencil of a nuclear mushroom cloud and the word “Today?” and my friends and I would spraypaint the image all over the Boston area. We also spraypainted the white outlines of dead bodies and messages of peace. Eight of us would organize public street events using puppets, music, movies, literature, and food as a kind of Living Protest Theater. The first time we dressed as military generals and tried to sell baked goods to buy a B-1 bomber. We found a poster that said, “Wouldn't it be a beautiful day if the Pentagon had to hold a bake sale to buy a B-1 bomber?”We also organized a soup kitchen outside the stockholders' meeting of the First Bank of Boston to protest their investment in the nuclear industry. We called this Food Not Bombs.

By 1980, it seemed like most peace and social justice groups were limited to speaking to one another and that each group had a narrow focus. In fact, we not only didn't talk with the public, our message was often boring and uninteresting. If we were going to change society, we needed to build a popular movement that mainstream America would be excited to join. To us the issues were all linked—be it El Salvador, homelessness, or nuclear power—and we felt if we helped make the connections between the way we live and the larger social issues, we might be able to build a larger movement. So, the founders of Food Not Bombs set out to make working for peace and social justice fun and easy for the public to join. We came up with a simple descriptive name that explained our principles. We designed a colorful, easy-to-recognize logo and we had a clear message and task that everyone could relate to. We collected food and fed the hungry, illustrating our belief that it's possible to solve social problems like hunger. Our office was a food and literature table on the streets at a busy intersection like Harvard Square. Thousands of regular people walked past us every day. We gave away free food, which was unique and enjoyable. People tended to visit our table longer when they stopped to get a bite to eat, and the food provided a way to teach people about the reasons we should eat organic vegetarian meals and work for peace, social justice, and animal rights. It was clear that our concept was working. People who had never heard of the peace movement before now knew they could stop by our table and learn about the organizations who never left their offices and about ideas and events that they would otherwise not know about. We built strong relationships with the people who lived in public housing or slept at the local battered women's shelters. Local city governments directed people to our project, and the mayor of Cambridge could be heard directing people our way when they needed assistance. Local grocery stores and bakeries also supported our work, and soon we were well connected with a community of people who had never had any relationship with the peace movement. Each day we picked up donated food from bakeries and grocery stores and delivered it to people at public housing developments, daycare centers, and battered women's shelters, and in the afternoons we would staff a table with food, literature, and T-shirts.

Over the years, we faced a lot of hard times, but perhaps the most difficult challenge was the ten-year struggle to share food in San Francisco. On August 15, 1988, nine of us were arrested for sharing food without a permit. We'd written the city requesting a permit, but after a number of failed attempts to get an answer, we started sharing food at the entrance to Golden Gate Park. Over forty riot police came out of the woods and surrounded our table, arresting those of us they saw giving away the food. The San Francisco Police made nearly 100 arrests that month but stopped when Mayor Art Agnos issued us a permit.The next summer the police started arresting the homeless in an effort to drive them from the city. Believing we were providing encouragement to the homeless, the mayor had the Health Department suspend our permit and the Recreation and Parks Department deleted the permit to share food in city parks. The mayor's office also took us to court, and we were ordered to stop sharing food and literature until we had a permit. We were arrested another 100 times until October 5, 1989, at 5:00 p.m., when the Loma Prieta earthquake rocked the Bay Area. That evening, instead of the police arresting us, they joined us for dinner.

All was well until after the election when the former chief of police, Frank Jordan, became mayor. He had run an anti-homeless campaign, and after he entered office, he started Operation Matrix and started arresting the homeless again. Food Not Bombs worked with the American Civil Liberties Union to document the abuse of the homeless, and we videotaped the police sweeps, capturing the confiscation of blankets, shoes, and other personal belongings, and the arrest of people for living outside. After one of our videos was aired on an Oakland TV station, the mayor ordered our arrest. This time we were charged with felony conspiracy to violate a court order to stop feeding the hungry. During the next three years, we were arrested over 700 times. The police often beat us, and on several occasions they tortured our volunteers. We organized a program where community groups, unions, and churches were invited to risk arrest one day a month. This helped us extend our campaign. In 1994, I was arrested under the new California Three Strikes law and faced twenty-five years to life. In all, I spent over 500 nights in jail. I was beaten thirteen times and tortured three times where my ligaments and tendons were ripped and I was placed in a small four-by-four-foot wire cage for three or four days. After the police smashed a club into my face, I had to have two surgeries to rebuild my tear ducts and sinuses. During this time, we would be arrested even when we weren't sharing food, adding to the stress. Our vehicles were towed and our equipment destroyed. The police also organized smear campaigns trying to discredit us, claiming we were rich and that our food was dirty and spoiled. The police infiltrated our group and tried to pit one member against another. One volunteer was so upset by the pressure he killed himself. The San Francisco Police wiretapped our home phones and followed our every move. Amnesty International declared our convicted volunteers “prisoners of conscience” and the United Nations Human Rights commission started an investigation into the human rights abuse against our volunteers. Finally, the city agreed to stop the prosecutions and the arrests. This had to be one of the most stressful times ever for my family and me. Even though the city spent millions of dollars trying to stop us, we not only continue to feed people in San Francisco to this day but people all over the world were inspired to start their own Food Not Bombs group in their community. So, while it was difficult, it was worth it. After the city stopped the arrests, many people expressed their gratitude. For some people the fact that we never gave up gave them great hope.

The most effective way to encourage people to support the ideas of Food Not Bombs is to set up a table and start sharing meals. The impact on people is powerful. When I was staffing a literature table in Tucson, Arizona, a woman with several children came up and told us that when she was homeless in Sacramento, California, she ate with Food Not Bombs. She regained her self-respect because of the way the volunteers at Food Not Bombs had treated her and her children. She said if it wasn't for Food Not Bombs, she might not have ever gotten off the streets, and she gave us $20.

There have been a number of times when someone visited our table and argued that a war is just or that homeless people should just get a job, and we spoke respectfully with them, sharing our ideas along with our food, and several years later they returned to say that something had happened to them and now they understand what we were talking about. A number of soldiers have been very angry with us, but when they return from war they tell us that they support our work and that war is wrong.

In 1989 I was arrested outside a developer's party at the University of California–San Francisco for “singing Christmas carols without a permit.” The officer talked with me as he drove me to jail to spend the night locked up, and he asked me several questions about why we were singing outside this party. That summer the officer came to our table in Civic Center Plaza looking for me. He told me that our trip to jail made a big impression and he retired from the force that morning. He gave us a $20 bill, thanked us for our work, and waved goodbye.

JOHN McLAUGHLIN

Musically Speaking

John McLaughlin is, unquestionably, one of the greatest musicians alive and
a pioneer of what has come to be called “world music.” His compositions are
mind-bogglingly expansive and nonconformist, going beyond the boundaries of
jazz, rock, and other established genres. To me, he has always seemed to express
something deeper than music itself. Students and admirers of his work, who
number in the many millions worldwide, often report feeling the same way.