By Rebecca
...
This is my account of the vigil weekend in Washington, DC to
close the School of the Americas, May 1-3. It's important to me to give you
a sense of the whole weekend, but I focus mostly where the greatest learning
was for me: choosing whether to risk arrest at the Pentagon action, and
visiting the offices of my Congresspeople for the first time.
We started off on Thursday with an Arts Night/ Sendoff celebration at our church, which Miriam organized in coordination with NJ Peace Action, Peace Works, and Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. The "Arts" part included an awesome reading by Miriam's poet cousin Brett Axel, and music from jazz artist Ray Johnston. We also sang some, talked some, showed the School of Assassins video, presented the church's resolution calling for the closing of the school, and held a commissioning ceremony where those going to DC from our local area (me, Miriam, Lee, Brett, Ed Lewinson, and the Ceraso family) were given soil from the church garden to bring for the Pentagon action (more below on this) and named as representatives of the church and of those gathered who could not travel to DC. We took lots of pictures and sent press releases - we'll let you know whether that actually resulted in local news coverage. Turnout at the event itself was pretty small (about 20 people) but I think it was positive and energizing.
Miriam and Brett traveled to DC on Friday, and Ed and the Cerasos went early Saturday morning. Because we each had previous commitments on Saturday, Lee and I drove down to Washington, DC on Saturday night and didn't get in until almost 2am. This means that he and I missed the day of speakers and rallying outside the White House on Saturday, and two events on Saturday night - the benefit concert with Pete Seeger, Odetta, and others; and the poetry reading announcing the release of _Will Work for Peace_, the anthology of political poetry edited by Brett. This book was inspired when Brett came with us to Ft. Benning and crossed the line last November, and it contains work by over 100 poets including some very well-known folks - Marge Piercy, Sherman Alexie, Martin Espada, Leslea Newman, and many others. (If you're interested, you can look for the book in bookstores - or make them order it for you - starting in July, I think.) Lots of the poets in the book were there for the reading, and I hear from Miriam that the event was a great success. And Miriam got to read some of her own stuff too, and it was very well received!!! Very exciting.
So we joined Miriam and Brett late Saturday night, and then Sunday morning we said goodbye to Brett, who had to drive home, and brought Miriam to the airport so she could fly to Detroit for a national conference on sustainable development for work. Then we found our way to American University, where the trainings were taking place for the Pentagon action on Monday morning. There we met up with my mom, who had flown up from Florida, and Matt, who came down from Boston. We spent the afternoon in trainings and then spent the evening thinking about what was happening and making our choices about where we fit into the action.
This is the action that was planned, which we did successfully carry out on
Monday morning:
We gathered at the South Entrance of the Pentagon, to begin the action at
7am. We formed a procession that walked most of the way around the Pentagon.
At the front were people who had special roles in the ceremony to come,
including the bearers of the "SOA Death Machine" (a huge, 6 or 8 foot
diameter skull wearing a graduate's black mortarboard), banner carriers,
bearers of the soil, big full-body street theater puppets, drummers, and the
spokesteam of four people who would try to speak with Secretary of Defense
Cohen. Behind these were the majority of people in the procession, who were
carrying the white crosses with the names of SOA victims and wearing white
masks. Throughout the procession the names of victims were called out and
the crowd responded, "Presente." We circled the Pentagon in this way. Our
destination was the parade ground outside the formal River Entrance, which
Secretary Cohen can see from his window. In order to get there we had to
pass a security checkpoint, and we were allowed to do so - it had not been
certain that this would work.
On the parade ground we assembled facing the Pentagon. We performed a ceremony in which evidence for the SOA's condemnation was brought (large black banners with pictures and words to evoke SOA- related human rights violations in the numerous Latin American countries the school "serves"), and with each piece of evidence a piece of the "death machine" was torn off. We dismantled the death machine. Then we took the soil that we had all brought from around the country and from Latin America, and we used it to cover and "bury" the pieces of the dismantled death machine, neutralizing the evil and reclaiming it for the earth. Finally the whole thing was covered with a huge black cloth with a batiked red carnation on it, symbolizing both the blood that was shed and the miracle of survival and healing after such violence. At this point we were to take off our white masks, symbolizing a movement from death to life. Then the spokesteam attempted to enter the Pentagon, to bring our evidence to Secretary Cohen. They didn't expect this to work, and it didn't. So a message was given to the demonstrators: "Our request for entry has been denied, so we will have to leave our evidence here." This was a signal to begin the last phase of the action for those who had chosen to risk arrest. The final form of evidence that we left at the Pentagon were hundreds of body-outlines in (water-soluble) red paint on the pavement. Some people lay down on the ground as "bodies," while others got out concealed bottles of paint and painted around the bodies.
So the choice that we had to make on Sunday night was, where did each of us fit into this action? My mom had chosen to be a peacekeeper for the weekend, so her job was to know what was going on, carry a walkie-talkie and help the demonstrators know what they needed to be doing, when and how - so she wasn't in a position to take any other role. Matt is good with the theatrical and chose to be a puppet. Lee knew that he was not comfortable risking arrest, and he wanted to be at the action as one of the many carrying crosses, to offer his presence and to witness what happened. The Cerasos had gone home. Ed had already chosen to risk arrest, because he is retired and has little to lose. What was I going to do?
I had learned at the information session that the only people likely to be arrested were the bodies (high risk) and the painters (very high risk). The consequences of arrest for first-time offenders might be a fine, probation, or 30 days in jail. The maximum sentence was 6 months, and this was possible although it had not been done in recent years and was considered highly unlikely by those who kept track of civil disobedience at the Pentagon. I could handle those consequences. The most I would lose in my career would be that I would take a bit longer to finish my MDiv and a bit longer to pay off my educational loans. Miriam and I had talked about it quite a bit, and though even a month apart would be hard on us, we agreed that this was important enough to be worth it, one month or six. I told her several times she was allowed to tell me not to do it, but she said she couldn't, it was too important. So my choice wasn't about whether I could take the consequences. I needed to decide whether it would be a meaningful thing to do, whether my doing it would have enough value to be *worth* the potential consequences.
An important part of that judgment had to be the somewhat troubling feeling I got at the trainings on Sunday. I was worried about the movement, because the organizers were not quite living up to the standard of reliability that had so earned my trust in the past year, and I was afraid that things might go badly at the action and lose people's trust, which would deal a hard blow to the momentum of the movement. At the trainings, there were not enough trainers and we heard people asking around for anyone at all who had done nonviolent civil disobedience to lead a group, regardless of their knowledge of the plans for this particular action. In our small groups we were supposed to form "affinity groups" of people who would watch out for one another, but only a few group leaders actually had their groups do this. My mother heard in her peacekeeper training, but I did not hear in my training for people considering arrest, that Penatgon police might hose down the painted sidewalk and the "bodies" not just with water, but with bleach! I was particularly troubled that the organizers knew of this risk but would allow us to make our choices without that information. I did not want the movement to lose momentum because people like me backed out of the action because of our concerns... but if the whole thing turned out to be chaos, what good would it do for me to get arrested? I had to make two commitments to myself: first, that I would communicate my concerns to the organizers after the action and help, if I can, to prevent similar problems in the future; and second, that I would not risk arrest if it became clear on Monday morning that the problems were getting in the way of our action conveying a clear message.
The action would be successful if it built momentum for people to pressure Congress to close the school, if it showed Congress, the Pentagon, and the public that building momentum. It could only accomplish those things if the act of doing it was a deep and powerful collective prayer for healing. If my participation in civil disobedience would help the action to be successful in those terms, it would be worth it. If not, it wouldn't.
When I went to bed on Sunday, I had resolved that I would make my final choice only at the moment, but that if it felt like a faithful witness at that time, I would risk arrest. I chose to be a "body" rather than a painter because I had been immediately drawn to this role when the action plan was described - I am a dancer and this kind of embodied witness felt more powerful to me than the painting. Those of you who knew me when I studied Contact Improvisation at Oberlin may remember when our class danced with the AIDS quilt, and some of us lay down on the ground between the panels of the quilt while others gave caring attention to us as if to the dying, or as if embalming the dead. This was an extremely powerful experience for me, and the resonance between lying down with the dead in that context and in Monday's action was a strong reason that I chose the role I did.
The action was successful. Everything ended up being very well done, and there were LOTS of people there: I don't have an official count but the estimates I was hearing were around 2000 people in the procession. And it did feel like a faithful witness when the time came for me to make my choice, and I did lie down as a body during the painting. The goal was to make as many outlines as possible before we were arrested or the paint ran out, so I got up and moved a number of times to be painted around again. The police were slow and relaxed about the arrests and those arrested were cooperative. The painters were being arrested first, so I spent some time lying on the ground, hearing the drums and feeling what I was doing - I was lying on this earth at the center of warmaking on the planet, praying for its healing, bringing the presence of those who have been killed by its evils to witness there, with a group of many others doing the same. I cried some with the power of it. Always I was attentive to what was happening with the others around me, to make sure that I was doing what I needed to do. At some point I moved from lying down to kneeling, still in my place. Eventually it became clear that only the painters, not the bodies, were being arrested. The police took a painter who was in the act of painting around a body very close to me, and left the body behind. The body got up, picked up a paint bottle, and started painting, and he was arrested. The choice was presented to me: there were bottles of paint nearby. Was my purpose to get arrested, or was my purpose to do what I had chosen to do, and accept whatever the consequences were for that choice? I decided that it would not feel right to start painting. I stayed kneeling where I was, with my eyes on the group of bodies a little way away from me, surrounded by police. If they were arrested, I would stay where I was until they came and arrested me too. Other police came out with hoses (water only, thank God!) and started to spray the pavement around some of the bodies, turning the red outlines into an even more bloody-looking ocean. In my memory is the very powerful image of one body not far from me, lying still as he got soaked, then left there alone again in what looked for all the world like a pool of blood. I was lucky enough to remain dry. Finally, the police left the bodies without arresting them, and when the others were getting up, I got up too. Lee was there watching out for me, and together we joined the procession and left the parade ground with everyone else who had not been arrested. I felt like I had done the right thing.
Of course we all felt like it was dinnertime already because we'd been awake so early and using so much of our energy, but it was only 9:30 in the morning and we still had a full day ahead of us! We met up with Ed - he hadn't been arrested either, because he couldn't choose to be a painter because he is blind. (He was, however, happily walking around the Capitol in wet clothes stained with huge amounts of red paint, having been thoroughly hosed. And it was cold out!) With Lee and Ed and Grace, a friend of Ed's from California, we set about finding and visiting the offices of our Senators and Representatives. This was the first time I had done this, and next time I will be more organized and prepared about it, but it was an important thing for me to learn that I can in fact do this, and speak articulately, and it makes a difference. I am very glad that Ed and Grace felt it was important that we do this and encouraged us, since Lee and I might not have done it on our own. We had a very good conversation with a foreign affairs policy aide in Senator Lautenberg's office, and Lautenberg is considering co-sponsoring the new Senate bill. Senator Torricelli's aide was more noncommittal but also very willing to talk and listen. We also stopped by Representative Payne's office to say thank you for his co-sponsorship of the House bill, and went with Grace as she visited two California Representatives. What an empowering and exhausting day! Lee, Ed, and I got in the car, made it home around 9pm, and collapsed.
So now I'm home, and rested, and looking forward towards what needs to happen next. In addition to sending follow-up letters to my Congresspeople after visiting their offices, I'm thinking of trying to arrange meetings with my two Senators themselves in their New Jersey offices. Maybe organizing a group to do that, with people representing my church and other churches or organizations. I will make good on my commitment to myself to be in touch with SOAWatch about the problems I saw this time, and that might lead to my taking a more active role in organizing for the demonstration in Fort Benning in November, if Congress has not closed the school by then. And I'm just gonna keep on telling my stories to everybody I know, because the media is being studiously not interested in us and if the word is going to spread it's going to be one person at a time, by word of mouth. Do you think you or anyone you know might be interested in hearing more about the movement, or might be willing to write a letter? Please let me know if you can help me spread the word.
I hope I can be more in touch with you all soon. I'm heading into the home stretch of this semester, and then I'll have to start figuring out my summer plans... (yes, I know it's a little late for that.) So I'll be very busy for a week or two and then much freer. But for now I just really wanted you to hear about this amazing weekend I just had, because this movement is becoming more and more a part of me and teaching me a huge amount about myself and what I can do.
Many blessings to you all...
Love,
Rebecca