why i am going to nyc
Mon Aug 23, 2004 at 04:59:07 PM PDT
there've been some discussions in the diaries recently about the benefits and risks of protesting at the rnc. for me the most compelling issue is the war in iraq... and i don't think a kerry win is going to be sufficient to get us out asap. so, while i desperately want bush to lose - i also want to provide kerry with the political pressure (and cover) to do the right thing and end our military occupation of iraq.
starhawk's post today from nyc could have been written for our discussion... so, i just have to share some of it with dkos folks....
...while my friends at home say, "Take care of yourself" with that worried tone in their voices, I'm actually having a great time in a very New York way, listening to smart and inspiring people talk, and having lots of interesting conversations. And in spite of the media smear campaign and the police' claim to be shadowing every dangerous anarchist in town, none of us actually seem to be being followed. Nor are the police harassing us. In Miami, activists were followed for weeks beforehand, arrested on the sidewalk while going to meetings or handing out flyers, and you could feel the surveillance like the Red Eye of Sauron, always watching. Here, the city seems quite normal, and the occasional cop we pass on the street is smiling and friendly.
Still, there's an aura of fear that people seem to have internalized. Martin, who is one of the Argentines hear to present on their social revolution, remarks on it. We're talking in Spanish so I'm sometimes missing the nuances, but he's saying how you can feel the fear, coming into the city, and how it's a kind of fascism, the level of control, the media campaigns. I suggest that its internalized fascism--not the cop snatching you off the sidewalk but the cop inside your head who says, "Don't protest, don't say anything, don't do anything to upset the situation." Some people are leaving town because they are afraid of terrorist attacks and some because they are so afraid that Bush will get re-elected that they fear any sort of street disturbance will be spun toward his good.
But obviously I don't think so. Or rather, I can acknowledge the fear and the real possibility that anything we do or don't do can be spun to his advantage, but it seems clear to me that fear and timidity are what maintain his--or anyone's-oppressive power. The Democrats have been timid for years, have avoided openly challenging him, have predicated their whole strategy on what their pollsters tell them somebody else thinks.
Somewhere, somehow, we have to stop adapting to what we think someone else might think about what might possibly happen, and just do what we think is right. It's not the government or the cops on the streets or the New York Post that shut us up, it's the cops and the Karl Roves inside our head who steal our will and our voices.
....A man came in and sat down who had what my Vietnam Veteran friend Lawrence calls the thousand-yard-stare, that faraway look as if your eyes were fixed on some horror no one else can see. He had bad teeth and his head and his words kept jerking away as if were hard to stay still, stay focused. He is a veteran, named David, just back from Iraq. In four days of fighting in Fallujah, his unit had a 67percent casualty rate. He was lucky, he tells me, he had a good wound, shot in the ass, his hip broken, his wife was sobbing and grateful after months of snatched, hideously expensive phone calls, "I'm alive." "I'm alive." "At this moment, I'm still alive."
He used to run a business, he tells me, he's a plumber, electrician, now he can't work, his mind won't function, but he's organizing other veterans in the South Bronx and he's very excited by permaculture. They've squatted a building because many of them have no homes. They don't get paid enough overseas to support their families, and they come home to no jobs or jobs they can't do because they have lost a limb or they're in a wheelchair or they simply can't focus through the thousand yard stare. And they've got the violence locked inside them and it comes out on their wives, they're shooting up and drinking to dull the pain, and they need food. They need jobs. They need to be able to walk in the door and say, "I'm home from work."
I knew it was bad, but not this bad. I can say honestly that I did everything within my power to prevent this war, and I lost. We all lost. But now David's teeth are rotting from the toxins in the Iraqi soil left over from our depleted uranium bombs in the first Gulf War and the ones we've dropped since and the awful food the army served them and they've closed the Veteran's Hospital and they've got to wait months and months to even see a social worker. And he, mind you, is one of the victors.
He didn't sign on to kill Iraqis, he joined the National Guard because he wanted to fight fires in California, and help people. Most of his guys are Green Card soldiers, they signed up to get a Green Card, maybe go to school, but now they're not going to school, they can't think, can't focus, can't see beyond the pain.
"And who are we now?" he asks. "I guess we're activists--what does that mean?"
There are things that are so wrong they go beyond normal anger or rage. "I'm angry," Naomi says in a soft voice that doesn't change expression. "I'm so angry." I'm angry, too. And anger is healing, and powerful. Anger is the life force responding to a threat. Anger cuts through fear. David and his guys are not afraid. They are dying, and know it, he tells me. They are already in a hell beyond what most of us can imagine. What do we owe them, and what do we owe those on the receiving end of their firepower, the living and the dead victims of the guns placed in their hands by those who will meet in that convention hall next weekend?
The very least we owe them is to not be afraid. To not let our voices and our anger be silenced. To speak the truth. To do what we think is right.
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