Storming the Gates of Paradise (27 page)

Later that night, people would be pulled out of their cars at gunpoint or stopped on the street for no particular reason—not just the young but ministers, middle-aged NGO workers, anyone and everyone. And the next day, more than fifty activists were arrested in a peaceful vigil outside the jail, where many of the previously arrested languished. “They were surrounded by riot police and ordered to disperse,” reported organizers. “As they did, police opened fire and blocked the streets, preventing many from leaving. We are now receiving reports from people being released or calling from jail that there is excessive brutality, sexual assault and torture going on inside. People of color, queer and transgender prisoners are particularly being targeted.” Sunday, many of those arrested were released.

The visionary slogan of the antiglobalization movement is “Another world is possible.” This time around, some of the steelworkers had the slogan emblazoned across the backs of their royal-blue union t-shirts. What we don’t talk about so much is that many worlds are possible, and some of them are hell.

Seattle in 1999 has become a genesis story in which the revolution began as Eden. There were tens of thousands of us blockading the WTO, the story goes, and we were all as one: “turtles and teamsters” is the cliché. Actually, there were about fifty thousand in the big labor-organized parade, and ten thousand or less—few
union members among them—shut down the streets around the WTO meeting on November 30, 1999. The various groups coexisted nicely, but few articulated a profound common ground for us all (though the globalization issue has pushed activists from labor to the Sierra Club to develop a broader analysis and to reach for broader coalitions).

After the “black bloc” of young anarchist activists first made its presence known by smashing up the windows of Niketown, Starbucks, and a few other downtown Seattle corporate entities, some of those who supported the blockade sparked internal squabbles when they decried the property destruction. The Seattle police were brutal, attacking activists, passersby, nearby neighborhoods, and even an older woman on the way to her chemotherapy appointment. Seattle was no Eden but a miracle all the same, and a huge surprise for the world—both that direct action could be so effective and that globalization was not going to go forward unimpeded. Four years later, the tank of corporate capitalism that seemed to be inexorably advancing on the world is idling its engines or going in circles, and it could yet end up in a ditch.

Cancun was another miracle, notable for the fluid circulation of passion and politics between the developing nations that stood up to the United States and the European Union; the NGO activists, who were both inside at the ministerial meeting and outside in the streets; and the street activists, who included Yucatán and Korean farmers and a fair representation of the rest of the world, from Canada to Africa. As in Seattle, the activists stiffened the resolve of the poor nations, and the poor nations stood up for themselves against the agendas of the rich ones.

The street activists in Miami were overwhelmingly white Americans, and there was no such porousness: the Intercontinental Hotel was for all intents and purposes hermetically sealed. NGOs had no role in the FTAA talks or even access to the hotel. AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney went to visit the Convergence Center, the warehouse north of downtown where the direct action was organized and decried the police violence (which never targeted the union people). But the protests felt fragmentary: beforehand, the direct action contingent had had to negotiate long and hard to get the unions—who acted as if they owned the day—to consent to even letting the direct action supporters demonstrate on the same
day. Though we joined the labor march, they didn’t join us, and the teach-ins held at the Doubletree Hotel and other venues around town seemed to separate out more circumspect activists from the stuff in the street.

Uprisings, protest, civil disobedience—the stuff in the street—still matter, even though they don’t change the world every time. Sometimes it’s just an exercise of democracy and bravado, exercise in the sense of maintaining the strength and ability to intervene at a time when it will count. A month ago, Bolivians in the streets and roads of their own nation forced the resignation of their millionaire president, who was trying to export the impoverished nation’s resources. An insurgent spirit and direct action are radicalizing Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, and Venezuela. The surprise in Miami isn’t that so little was agreed to but, with the revolt against neoliberalism well underway in South America, that anything was.

About a month ago, I planned to commit civil disobedience in New York—there were some Republicans in town for their national convention, as you may remember—but circumstances beyond my control put me a few hundred miles farther north at the crucial moment, so I did the next best thing: stopped at Walden Pond on my way back to Manhattan.
Walden
—the book, not the pond—turns 150 this year, but the people at the pond that hot August day were paying more homage to cool water than to cultural history. Most of the swimmers seemed to be locals for whom the site was part of their familiar landscape, not outlanders like us paying homage to the pond and the guy who cultivated beans and contrary thoughts by its side from 1845 to 1847. It wasn’t what I expected: the trees shrouded everything up to the water’s edge; a secondary thoroughfare full of commuters ran very nearby, so that after paying to park in a large lot, you had to dodge speeding commuter vehicles. I didn’t mind that it had become a social or a suburban place, for Thoreau, in his legendary sojourn at the pond, never intended to be remote from society for long and reported on the train speeding by his retreat.

If it was a retreat. In one of the most resonant passages in his book, he enumerates among his many visitors “runaway slaves with plantation manners, who listened from time to time, like the fox in the fable, as if they heard the hounds a-baying on their track, and looked at me beseechingly, as much as to say,—‘Oh Christian, will you send me back?’ One real runaway slave, among the rest, whom I helped to forward toward the north star.” Politics came tramping through those
woods, which were never far from Concord, where his mother and sister housed runaway slaves, or from the conflicts of the era. During his time spent at Walden, Thoreau became an outspoken antiwar activist and tax resister, spent that famous night in jail, and on January 26, 1848, he delivered as a talk at the Concord Lyceum the great American landmark “Civil Disobedience.”

I did wonder a little about which Thoreau the sesquicentennial of Walden events and reprints was commemorating. The pond is now Walden Pond State Reservation, a 411-acre reserve, with lifeguards on duty that day; but Thoreau is still unreserved and unsafe in his writings, advocating that “when . . . a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize.” Homages to Thoreau sometimes seem to have domesticated him first, as have the avalanches of books of nature quotes taken from his longer writings. Those passages leave out the dangerous Thoreau, the one who went around suggesting that the abolition of the government might be a good thing and defending John Brown, who was already in jail for taking up arms against slavery.

Of course, Thoreau is no longer dangerous in the sense that he was in 1849, the year “Civil Disobedience” was first published. That transcript of the earlier talk, given soon after he was resident at Walden, inveighs against slavery and the 1846–1848 war with Mexico (whereby we acquired that nation’s northern half, now known as the American Southwest). Slavery is ended, and the long-ago war on Mexico is concluded. But he is still dangerous as a man who cared more about justice than law and saw that the two were not uncommonly in conflict. He was the man who argued that voting was not enough, that any cooperation with an unjust government was complicity in that injustice; the one who still shames me for paying taxes during wartime; the voice that declares, “I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.”

People in public and private argued about whether demonstrating in New York against Bush and the war was strategic for the election or whether it would feed into portrayals of progressives as dangerous fringe elements. Within the argument that we should have stayed home was a larger argument about whether
political demonstrations and civil disobedience are largely media stunts or whether they’re moral acts taken to change the world with less of an eye to press coverage.

We should always, especially when it is difficult, exercise our freedoms of speech and assembly, and I mean the word
exercise
. Rights are like muscles: they atrophy and aren’t there when you need them if you don’t use them. The First Amendment is in trouble not just because of U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and the USA Patriot Act, but because of a pall of self-censorship—some have spoken up with great courage, but many have been silenced not only by the acts of the authorities but by the prison of their own fear. Still, if people could stand up to Pinochet, if the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo could march in Buenos Aires during the time of the generals, if people could speak up in Prague in the 1980s, we can here, far more than we do. An atmosphere of repression exists specifically because people don’t speak up against it. When you speak up, you are not repressed—you might be suppressed or punished, but you have freed yourself. Too, a tyranny can rise more easily by shutting up a thousand people than a million, and that’s a reason to stand up and speak out.

Thoreau was more optimistic, writing, “I know this well, that if one thousand, if one hundred, if ten men whom I could name—if ten honest men only,—ay, if one honest man in this State of Massachusetts, ceasing to hold slaves, were actually to withdraw from this copartnership, and be locked up in the county jail therefore, it would be the abolition of slavery in America. For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be.”

The National Lawyers Guild, in its report titled “The Assault on Free Speech, Public Assembly, and Dissent,” has been more pessimistic of late. “The facts assembled in the following pages attest to the pathology of a government so frightened of its own citizens that it classifies them as probable enemies,” the report’s introduction begins. It’s a statement that might answer quite a different question about the war on terror: why have the soldiers in Iraq been so underequipped for their war, while the Miami police last November at the Free Trade Area of the Americas meeting and the New York police at the Republican convention were able to draw on endless new technologies and resources? “The
abuses have been so aggressive that rights of free assembly and free speech guaranteed by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution are simply no longer available to the citizens of this country,” states the preface of the Lawyers Guild report.

Those rights are indeed under assault, but they are not unavailable for those willing to take the risks or pay the costs. “No, you can’t have my rights, I’m still using them,” said a sign one woman carried in that long, passionate, stymied August 29 march against the war, George Bush, the Republican Party, and its 2004 convention at Madison Square Garden, up Seventh Avenue to Madison Square Garden and then to—wherever—not to Central Park, since the city’s Republican mayor claimed that democracy was bad for the grass.

Being afraid of how the media would represent us was just part of a larger landscape of fear I met with on the East Coast. “Don’t get arrested,” acquaintances told me over and over, as though getting arrested was some road of no return, as though going to a demonstration with half a million others was a terrible risk even for those of us who won’t ever want security clearances.

Certainly, the mayor, the New York police, and the attorney general had done everything they could to discourage people from coming. As had the media. One of the worst problems facing democracy in America is that a free press, while not entirely eradicated, has gone underground, on the Internet and in the small magazines. The mainstream media have generally taken up and run with the allegations the Bush administration uses to justify putting the First Amendment in mothballs and staging preemptive strikes against potential exercisers of free speech and assembly.

Exercising your rights, by these accounts, was pretty much tantamount to terrorism. ABC News reported that the New York Police Department was tracking “56 potentially dangerous people . . . the anarchist groups which disrupted the W.T.O. conference in Seattle in 1999.” The FBI “interviewed”—or, in the words of civil rights advocates, “intimidated”—activists across the country who “the government believed were plotting to firebomb media vehicles at the Democratic National Convention,” a rather improbable crime for people committed to public actions and nonviolent principles. After the Republican convention, the
New
York Times
reported that “five years ago in Seattle, for example, there was widespread arson” and then spoke admiringly of New York City’s reign of repression, stating that “Starbucks survived, the streets were not ablaze, and the police did not wipe acid from their faces.”

I saw the widespread arson in Seattle. It consisted of one mostly empty dumpster with feeble flames contesting with the northwestern drizzle. Nor was there ever evidence that anyone planned to set the streets ablaze or assault fellow human beings in such a vicious manner, as the
Times
insinuated (with the implication that if those crimes did not happen, credit must go to law enforcement). Still beat your wife? No? Thank the police. Seattle was constantly referenced as a moment of criminal violence. In fact, it was one of the great moments of civil disobedience in American history. Ten thousand or so people, in concert with protests from India to Iceland, took an oppositional step beyond the big march that was vocally opposed to the World Trade Organization’s summit downtown. They sat down in intersections all around the WTO meeting and shut it down as it was supposed to begin. The Seattle police had not anticipated this and went berserk afterward with clubs, tear gas, and enough violence against activists and scads of passersby to keep a lot of class action suits afloat for a long time.