Ain’t there yet: reflections on
New York
By Wendy Artemisia
Sept. 1 (AGR) — I’m sitting in the back seat of a
car going south, looking out over the New York skyline, the city where
I spent the last week joining the massive protests during the RNC. I
take my farewell glances, and sit quietly with a menagerie of conflicting
feelings. Spirits have been high over the past week, and the air has
crackled with vitality and resistance. I feel proud of us, I feel exalted,
and I feel like we have a long way to go. I feel exhausted and full
of energy. I feel hope and sadness, frustration and empowerment, but
above all a feeling that although “the movement” is strong
and growing, we shouldn’t pat ourselves on the back just yet. Here
are a few of my experiences over the past week.
‘What do we do?’
We pass by Union Square on our way from one action to another. There
are rows and rows of worn combat boots neatly covering the pavilion,
hemmed in by clusters of women’s and children’s shoes. Attached
to each pair of boots is a white card bearing the name and age of a
US soldier killed in Iraq — 978 in all. A woman’s amplified
voice reads name after name, both US and Iraqi, all dead, punctuated
by a solemn, clanging bell.
Afterword, a man approaches me as I am handing out flyers. He is obviously
local, and like so many New Yorkers, he is wearing an anti-Bush pin.
“You seem to be plugged in to all this protest stuff,” he
says. “You’ve obviously thought about what’s going on
in the world a lot. I’ve got a question for you... What do we do?”
I hesitate, unsure of what he means. “About everything?” I
finally ask, taken aback by the all-encompassing nature of his question.
He nods, looking at me intently, looking at me as though I might know
the answer.
I fumble through some shit about building community, about sustainable
living, about DIY, searching for positive solutions to problems I know
I barely grasp the severity of. I try not to sound preachy. He is black.
I am white. He asks how I think we should deal with people’s “opinions”
— i.e., prejudices — about “things, like being gay,”
that keep people divided. I talk about respecting everyone’s basic
humanity, about how we must all work on learning to do this if we are
to salvage any of our ruined world and begin making it beautiful again.
I think, simultaneously, about my own racism, sexism, and privilege;
about all the times I fall short of this respect. He says that even
when we have 500 things in common, people let one thing, one “opinion”
about something keep us from joining together; this keeps us from becoming
a unified front against those who we should really be fighting against.
I agree. And then I say, “I don’t know what to do. I just
don’t know.”
We look at each other in silence for a moment, each hoping the other
will come up with something else, something better than that. We cannot.
“Well, it was good talking with you,” he says.
“Yeah, it was good talking with you too,” I say. We wish each
other luck and he walks away.
This encounter led me to ponder many of the realities of our movement.
We are isolated in many ways from so many groups of people who, if galvanized,
could empower the struggle for justice exponentially. Much as we crow
about the diversity of our movement, the fact remains that a large percentage
of us are young white people who are poor by choice, not circumstance.
This is not to de-legitimize our anger, nor to do so for efforts at
bridge building and networking — much promising and effective work
has and continues to be done in this area. Neither is it to downplay
the fierce struggles and victories of people of color, women, gays,
and other “minorities” whose daily and worldwide fights for
freedom and justice have, in their own rights, been instrumental in
permanently altering our social and political landscape. But if this
admittedly growing movement is to evolve most effectively, we must first
recognize that the participants in it are not quite as “diverse”
as we would like to believe. Without shouldering the heavy and ineffective
burden of white guilt, we must remind ourselves that comfort levels
and the ability to “plug in” are different if you aren’t
white, 18-30, with perhaps some tattoos, pins, patches, or whatever.
Let’s keep this in mind as we talk to neighbors and people on the
street, and quit waxing rhapsodic about how diverse our movement is.
But the encounter also brightened my day a little. After hitchhiking
across the country a few months ago and having all too many political
conversations with “regular” people who are convinced that
poor people just aren’t working hard enough, especially if they
are black or brown, and that schools are ill-equipped and poorly run
because the teacher’s union is stealing all the educational funding
away from our children, and that George W. Bush really is doing what’s
right and protecting our freedom from terrorists, it was refreshing
to speak to someone who wasn’t involved in, or perhaps even previously
aware of, the social justice movement and who realized that things are
terribly wrong. Even if we don’t quite know what to do with the
vastness and complexity of what we face, just seeing the truth through
the lies we’re told is a big step, and perhaps it is the most impotant
one.
‘You’ve broken the machine’
I just spoke with one of my medic buddies who was just released from
jail after being arrested with over 1,500 people on Tues., Aug. 31,
the day of direct action. I had seen it all go down, the cops rushing
in with billy clubs drawn, barricading two city blocks full of people
and taking them all away in buses. She was still in New York, breathless
and alive with the taste of victory in her mouth. She told me of the
intensity of all being together in there, about treating the wounded
with smuggled medical supplies, about cheering and comforting and supporting
each other, about being joyful. She said a cop inside, pissed off at
the situation and at the system, told her we had won. “You may
be in jail right now, but you’ve broken the machine,” he told
her. “They can’t handle the volume. We’re going to have
a lot of lawsuits filed against us because of this. They’re going
to have to let you all go.” He was right.
Times like these make you feel like you’re getting ahead. And in
a sense, we are. At least half a million people came to New York to
protest, and although we didn’t come anywhere close to actually
stopping the RNC, it’s okay because that wasn’t the point.
The point was to disrupt the convention as much as possible, which we
did — delegates were constantly harassed and had trouble or were
prevented entirely from getting to their destinations — and also
to show the world that not all people in the US are completely brainwashed
by our crappy media, and that some of us actually have a world view
based in reality, not in a sea of hawkish propaganda, ignorance and
misplaced nationalism.
I myself am energized, alive, ready for the next fight. Though I certainly
have my share of criticisms, I believe on the whole that we are powerful
when we stand together, that we can change things, and that we are always
capable of doing a better job. After Miami, the movement as a whole
seemed chagrined; the future appeared dismal and grey. I hope others
feel as I do, that the A31 protests will change the collective feeling
from one of failure to one of hope that, with sustained effort, we might
actually effect some sort of lasting change. My fear now is that, if
by some chance Bush is defeated this election, many people who are active
now will consider their job done, while the next monster continues to
wreak havoc upon our world.
We cannot afford this possibility. No matter who “wins” this
election, we must continue to keep the pressure on. All too often, at
least for many of us in this country, we face the reality that we are
activists because we want to be, not because our lives depend on it.
We get caught up in our daily routines or personal dramas and somehow
fail to keep the two worlds intertwined — to connect our own lives
with what’s happening in the bigger picture. Because our bellies
are full and our homes are not being bombed, it is easy to treat our
activism as an extracurricular activity. I am just as guilty of this
as anyone else. But the train is picking up steam, and as rickety as
it is, I think it’s got a good engine. Let’s do all we can
to push it along.
Body count 1001: Where have all the soldiers
gone?
By Stan Goff
Sept. 8— These milestones come along, reminding us and
the wrath struggles to break free again. The anger is never really absent,
just dormant like a sleeping volcano.
Back when the pack of professional liars in Washington DC and their
slavish corporate press still had Americans brainwashed that Iraq was
a threat to the United States, General Tommy Franks — then the
chief military planner of the catastrophe in Iraq — said, “We
don’t do body counts.”
He didn’t want anyone to know what might be behind the numbers.
I could say the same thing now, as we arrive almost simultaneously
at 1,000 US military fatalities in Iraq and the third anniversary of
the attacks of September 11, 2001.
So I’m saying it. This is not a body count. This is not about
the number of dead GIs. This is not about almost 7,000 wounded. It’s
not about 14,000 dead Iraqis, or any of the considerable inventory of
macabre enumerations we might clinically extract from the orgy of cruelty
that is now Iraq.
We won’t do body counts. War is more than a number. This war is
an expanding ocean of unanswered pain, and it cannot be reduced to a
number.
One thousand times now, people have arrived home or looked out the
front door only to see a military sedan, with two troops in their dress
uniforms.
This was my nightmare while my own son was there. An army sedan.
When people see it, they know in that terrible instant that someone
they pushed out of their own body, someone they saw take a first step
and speak a first word, or with whom they made love, or the anchor in
the stormy world that is a parent, someone called brother or sister
or grandchild that sedan with the survival officer and the chaplain
signifies that this someone has been erased and is no longer in the
world with us, that something shocking has happened to the living body
we once held close and will never hold again.
One thousand times now, as George W. Bush and his entourage smirked
and plotted and slapped each other on the back, those left to live have
been flayed with grief then set adrift in the void of their own loss
to seek some trifling scrap of consolation. Why?
It’s so the oxygen thieves who run the US Empire can chase after
their grandiose delusions in drawing rooms, surrounded by an army of
servants attending to their every whim, and so the class they represent
can continue to accumulate money. That’s why a thousand ripped
up bodies have been shipped home—boxed and draped in bright new
flags to sanitize the obscenity.
These pampered fucking sociopaths have no conception of the anguish
of ordinary people, of how inconsolable is this loss.
When we reflect on the personal enormity and breathless depth of the
sorrow of ordinary people that we know, then maybe we can begin to understand
how that pain is mirrored in the ordinary Iraqi people who have been
occupied—where their children have been bombed, homes destroyed,
husbands and fathers and wives and mothers and best-friends and sons
and daughters and grandchildren and neighbors and schoolmates killed
and maimed, whole communities reduced to rubble, dignity daily kicked
face first into the mud, humiliation their daily bread and fear their
meat, the very soil transformed into a radioactive toxin that leaves
women giving birth to pitiable monsters and people rotting in their
own bodies from inexplicable malignancies.
This is what we can appreciate about others when we begin with the
loss of those we think of as our own. This is what we can comprehend
about who is the real enemy here; when we begin to really see the kind
of personal devastation that is the price of this war. And a price paid
for what?
The same Tommy Franks who didn’t do body counts once, in his soldierly
way, called Douglas Feith, one of the intellectual architects of this
enterprise of grief, “one of the dumbest motherfuckers on the planet.”
Yet Franks—ever the obedient servant—has now climbed up on
a political cross to sop up the guilt for the “Mission Accomplished”
fiasco organized by Karl Rove’s reptile myth-makers. Franks now
enthusiastically campaigns for the election of George W. Bush, a de
facto chief executive whose cognitive capacities make Feith look like
Robert Oppenheimer.
Franks is teaching us something right now far more significant than
how to count or not to count corpses. He is teaching us with his example
where our own culpability lies. Obedience.
It would seem that Pete Seeger’s lyrics from the last great American
antiwar movement still apply:
Where have all the soldiers gone, long time passing?
Where have all the soldiers gone, long time ago?
Where have all the soldiers gone?
Gone to graveyards, everyone.
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will WE ever learn?
Source: Counterpunch
