A Reminiscence

When I attended the showing of local activists' video coverage of the DNC and RNC, a week ago, where they also talked about their experiences on the streets in Denver and St. Paul/Minneapolis, it took me back to the demonstrations I attended in the late 60s.

A group of local IndyMedia people and activists went to the Democratic and Republican Conventions. There was a great deal of violence directed toward protesters, especially at the RNC in St.Paul/Minneapolis. When our representatives arrived safely home, they had video from these events, and some very disturbing stories of violence against activists engaged in legal activities, media people on the streets, and in their homes and against anyone they chose to attack any time, any place they chose to attack them. The images of violence were a vivid reminder of my first experiences in demonstrations while I was in college.

Their stories brought me back to November 1969 in DC. I attended a huge demonstration in Washington DC that fall. I had never been to such an event before, but I wanted to join the movement, and a friend gave me a ride down an back. Unfortunately, he was staying with his family, and didn't want his family to think he had a girlfriend, so I found myself on the street alone, wandering through the crowds. I was naive, and had no idea what to expect. When I was sprayed with teargas by the police, I was too shocked to be angry or afraid, and after a time, I ended up in the basement of a church where a fellow protester got some water and a cloth, and tried to help me get the coating of chemicals off my face and out of my eyes. The minister offered to put me us up for the night at his home along with some other young men who were alone and had no where to go.

The minister and his wife were very kind. They let me crash alone in ther daughter's room, a private space, while the others camped out together in the living room. The next day, as I was walking down the street to meet my ride, I tripped over a curb and dislocated my knee. For the next couple of years I would have to walk down stairs one at a time while holding the railing because the knee would buckle under my weight. Still, I was elated in a way at this first venture in activism.I spent an hour just now looking for photos of the November 1969 Demo and the one the following spring. It was slim pickings. We didn't have digital cameras and an internet to post to in those days. Also, I couldn't find anything at all about the spring demo described below. I thought it was April because it was sunny and warm in DC, but barely spring in New Jersey.

I went back in the spring with a group from school. There was violence and a couple of members of our group were sprayed with tear gas. I, however, had a great time dancing in the fountain shouting "Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh! " However, I got the worst sunstroke I have ever had that day. It was warm and sunny in DC, but I had worn a loose fitting long sleeved shirt, jeans and canvas sneakers so I was mostly covered. Even so, I had blisters on the backs of my hands and tops of my feet. I could not sleep that night because I was freezing and shaking so violently. People were sleeping all around me on the floor, and I was trying not to wake them as I huddled wrapped in my blanket with my teeth rattling until, finally, after sunrise the temperature rose quickly on the warm spring day in DC.

A few weeks later, student demonstrators at Kent State University were gunned down by members of the national guard. Several people died. This brought national attention to the ongoing demonstrations and to the government's overreaction to student activities. People were energized for change at that time, with the Civil Rights Movement in full force and the Women's Movement blossoming. Shortly after that, I embarked on more personal forms of engagement, and drifted away from, or should I say, into, the social movements of the day. I gave up demonstrating and began my inner transformation. Speaking of reminiscence, the other day I saw "I'm Not There" the biographical film about Bob Dylan. I deeply relate to his periodic swings between some sort of social or religious fervor and a total tantric immersion in life where he completely rejected social and moral intrusions on his experience.

A week after 9/11, 2001, I came down with Shingles and was sick for a month. I think it was the shock wave fear and hatred that flooded the psychic sphere of people around me. It was an unthinkable nightmare, but only a tragic prelude to the disastrous trajectory that has eroded or freedoms, and also our compassion, and brought us, as a country, to the bring of ruin. I went to see an elderly friend one day, and as I was driving down the road, I heard the news that the US was bombing Afghanistan, and I started to cry. When I arrived at Lili's apartment to find her sitting in front of the television, also crying. A German refugee who had married an American serviceman after the war, she was saying, "It's Hitler. My God! It's Hitler".

In early Spring of 2002, there was a Peace March in Washington DC opposing the war on Afghanistan. I attended with a friend who lives in Baltimore. It was a lovely day, warm and summery, unlike the April weather in Rochester where i live. There was a large, peaceful, mostly middle class crowd sitting around the mall like picnicers or tablers at an art show. I took photos of people with signs, Unions against the war, Jews against the war, Women in Black, Socialists. There were pagan college students in bright clothes with drums dancing at the base of the Washington Monument, which was surrounded by police in Riot Gear who never moved or reacted. My friend and I carried Tibetan Prayer Flags, with large, colorful hand painted images of the Wind Horse and Chenrezig, Young people were sitting on walls and sculptures where along the route of the march. A group of people in "tree" costumes were walking together like a mobile forest, and actors were dressed as caricatures of Bush and Cheney. The Raging Grannies were there.

Across from the White House, another demonstration was in progress. It must have been around the time of Ariel Sharon's devastating raid on the Palestinian town of Jenin, and Palestinians had come out to protest the treatment of their compatriots, and to draw attention to their plight. They brought their children, dressed in sunday (or should I say Friday) finery, little girls in lacy frocks and young boys, like the men, dressed in suits. Many of the women were wearing long dark dresses commonly worn in some parts of the middle east, and a dark colored hijab. They were very friendly. People came up and asked what the (Tibetan) symbols on our prayer flags meant. They thanked us for coming and offered us newspapers. A man sold me a traditional Arabic scarf for $1. Their march joined ours at some point. I was surprised to note that a Palestinian woman, perhaps in her 40s, wearing the traditional dark dress and hijab, was leading call and response chants in her neighborhood of the march, the responders were mostly men.

Members of Congress and Movie Stars spoke at the rally. I remember that Joan Baez was supposed to sing, but we arrived to late to hear her. There were hot dog vendors, first aid stations and port-a-potties around one end of the mall. The roads were cleared and police barriers blocked people from moving away from the assigned route. After the march, my friend and I retired to a Chinese restaurant a few Metro stops away. The Chinese host who seated us was very impressed that we had just been in the demonstration and was effusive in his enthusiasm. But from the time we left DC, it was as if the event had never happened. There was minimal coverage on the Baltimore news, and none the national news, or the big papers like the Washington Post and the New York Times.

I had taken many great photos (which, unfortunately, I can't find at the moment) so I wrote a little blurb about the significance of the event and sent it, along with some photos to The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, the Baltimore Sun, the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. I sent it to managing editors, story desks and op-ed page editors. No one replied. Not one recipient so much as acknowledged my effort. I was wondering about the old question my father used to love to mull. "If a tree falls in the forest, and there is no one there to hear, does it make a sound?" Perhaps it would have been more accurate to ask "If you scream after being beaten in a padded, soundproof cell, did you make a sound?"

Fast forward 6 years to the return of the local members of Independent Media and Anarchists who went to the 2008 presidential conventions. They returned with stories and pictures of people who were tear-gassed and tasered and beaten by the St. Paul/Minneapolis police before during and after being incarcerated for the crime of being present, the crime of holding a camera, the crime of sitting in their own homes making posters and plans to carry into the streets the following day. No more padded cells. There is still a level of soundproofing on our cages, but it is getting thin. At last, the battle has been engaged. When I hear people talk about their experiences, I was shaken. My own memories from those demonstrations in Washington flooded back. It's funny too, because before they left, I hear that they were bringing in the National Guard for these events, and I kept thinking about Kent State. But at least no one has been killed, yet.

Times have changed a great deal since the late 60s. Then, the turmoil was in the creation of a breakthrough. People were rejecting stereotypes and dogmas that had held us hostage for years. Women were exploring economic independence and sexual self awareness, and investing in 'Assertiveness Training'. The economy was booming and everyone was being supported by the wave of prosperity that came out of World War II an grew through the politically repressed and dreary 50s. Middle and Working Class people were living better than ever before, a small number of blacks were moving into the middle class, even poor people were supported better than ever before or since by Lyndon Johnson's Great Society Program which had initiated the Welfare and Medicaid programs that would later be structured and pared down significantly. Laws were put in place to support and protect the rights of the handicapped. Spring was 'busting out all over' in our society.

Now, we have another story. Fall is crashing in with brisk winds and dark clouds. People are, once again, in the streets. But now they are fighting to keep the very underpinnings of the changes that occurred in the 60's. As before, we have police brutality, illegal interventions, and the beginnings of a preemptive war on the people, supporting a preemptive war on the world. In the 50s, children were regularly taken to air raid shelters in preparation for a possible nuclear strike. Now we are handing over our toothpaste and cologne at the airport check-in. Silly then, because spending a day or two in a basement would be unlikely to do any good in the event of a nuclear attack. Silly now, because the ignorant young men who made the plan to carry explosives on a plane in water bottles didn't know enough science to know it was impossible, and weren't close enough to their goal to have figured it out.

Meanwhile, we have people in the White House, in congress and the Senate, and people running for these positions in the near future, who don't see a problem with using nuclear weapons in a 'limited sphere' and who cheerfully instigate hostile scenarios with the only other country in the world in possession of as many nukes as we have. Global warming is growing exponentially. People are starving, dying of thirst and fighting with weapons we gave them in areas 100s of miles wide, where the Sahara desert has grown over their homelands, and their neighbors, also on the brink, don't want to feed them. Meanwhile, we are arguing the fairness of asking corporations to stop aggravating the situation. Who should pay?

Yes, Winter is arriving, and we can only hope that it won't be a nuclear winter. The movement seems to be fragmenting. The last time that occurred, other people, I think, were doing what I was doing, what Bob Dylan did, we were taking the revolution into our lives to the extent that we could accommodate it. Now, I see a similar thing. People are moving out, into their own experience. Some elements of the 'movement' are being institutionalized, some radicalized, while others are being absorbed into individual lives. Viewing the cycle, which seems to fit itself to my lifetime, not that this is the only level at which we are cycling as a society, much less as the human race, it appears to me that the last turning point was at the peak of the cycle, we have recently passed below the horizon, and are approaching the nadir. As difficult as this is, I remind myself that Winter Solstice is the basis of most world religions. It has been celebrated by humans from our earliest times because it is the time when the light begins it's return from the darkest hour of the night.