What’s the Point of Protests? Goose! You’re IT!
I wasn’t born on a picket line, but I grew up there. My mom trucked me off to protests against Marble Hill Nuclear Power Plant and in favor of the Equal Rights Amendment.
Well, at forty-four, I’m living downwind from Three Mile Island and I never got the ERA. But the all-night bus rides, the songs, chants, buttons and solidarity I experienced as a child in the crowd are gifts that no corporation can negate. I learned about collective power, which I’m still practicing today as a fifteen-year member of Heathcote, my Intentional Community. But I also learned about my personal power—not my power to always make governments and corporations listen and act responsibly, but my power to co-create culture with every little decision I make.
I co-create when I choose my toothpaste based on where it was made, under what working and environmental conditions, and with what ingredients. And I co-created nearly twenty years ago when I stood in the office of Louisville Alderman Steve Magre and experienced him looking me in the eye, telling me, despite documented hate crimes, that there were no homosexuals in his district. I told him the obvious, that I was a homosexual in his district. I let my goat poop on the City Hall steps and I didn’t clean it up. Compost happens. It was not my place to negate her co-creation.
So for a month and a half now, we’ve been going about our lives, agreeing to perpetuate the status quo, going to the store, working our jobs or looking for them, going out to dinner. Co-creating that life can stay familiar and comfortable, that this week’s soccer game or new set of tires or office conflict matters. We keep our schedules. And a couple of times a day we check in on the oil spill.
Clearly we have been benefiting from technology without truly requiring that we be able to keep ourselves and the planet safe. The marketplace consumes every new product offering without asking if it was made by children or slaves or whether it will make us sick or our planet uninhabitable. We just say, “Ooh, shiny!” and plug it in.
What now? This feels like an environmental 9/11 moment. After the planes fell, we mused at how things could never be the same. We wondered what would come next, not appreciating that what comes next comes from us, the co-creators of culture. So our collective rubber band slowly sagged back into our individual-focused lives.
I as a co-creator never got around to insisting that my government stop making enemies around the world in my name, while benefiting corporations. Let that one slip away, I did.
There’s an inherent tension between our (Western?) individualism and basing our choices on the common good, choosing to actually only take our fair share of the pie. If we really do that, what do our houses, neighborhoods, cities and families look like? Intentional Communities have been kneading this dough for decades.
Now, with the Gulf of Mexico on its way to being a dead zone, I’m standing still with the question, what comes next? What culture do I participate in today and tomorrow? Do I get in my car?
Of course, my personal responsibility for the disaster as a car owner doesn’t lessen my ire at BP executives and management. I want them to all go to prison, and not the civil one with tennis courts. I want them in poor people’s prison! Or better yet, I have a fantasy of helicoptering them over the middle of the oil slick and dropping them into it. If they make it to shore, I’ll wipe them off, if I’m not on break.
Yeah, that feels good. So will going to BP corporate offices in Washington, DC and chanting my head off! Several people on Facebook and on my path have questioned the usefulness of protests. The oil’s already in the water, lobbying to ban offshore drilling is more useful. Nice head talk.
Protesting has a logical, “head” component. Organizers are using strategy. But for the people in the crowd, the protest is a heart or gut expression. Let’s make room for those expressions, too, or they will find their own, less helpful medium.
My friend C.T. Butler, co-author of On Conflict and Consensus and Food Not Bombs and solo author of Consensus for Cities, is writing his memoir of the early days of Food Not Bombs, the decentralized international organization he co-founded with five other activists he met thirty years ago, while protesting at Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant.
I asked him what he thinks the point of a protest is. “Lots of things, networking, people get education around an issue. Participants experience the event and meet like-minded people. For the organizers, they get their message out, fund-raise, create mailing lists…”
“Does it change things?” I ask.
“No,” He states groundedly.
“What does?”
“Money.”
So if you need to let your gut do the talking for a while, join me by attending the protest in your area. While you’re there, get on a mailing list. Don’t whine to me about being on lists. This is important. Donate to organizations for those great lobbying efforts. I know the economy’s bad and money’s tight. I’ll bet you a month’s pay that BP is sparing no expense on their lobbyists right now, even as the spill drains their coffers.
And in those frequent restless moments, ask yourself and your friends, “What now?”
—WT
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Goose
Don’t send a soccer mom to do a drummer’s job.
Ritual demands more.
Vibe to the score, don’t police it.
Tune to the slipstream, don’t minivan it.
I am my mother’s allegory/alimony/mystery.
The mysteries choose wisely.
When I pulled the sword from the stone,
I left with the stone.
And my mother, ripe/right to spare me
the life of the poet queen,
had words in rows for the stone’s return.
Duck, duck, duck, duck…
Drumbeats fall like medicine;
Medicine falls in phrases.
Don’t let your mother book your gigs.
Don’t let your mayor paint your Madonna.
And, God, whatever you do,
don’t let the accountant write the play–
“Lesbian Mudwrestling Playboy Bunnies on the
Harleys of Hawaiian Midgets” does
not need to be done to death to be old hat…
I am my mother’s protest march.
No bullshit goes unmagnified.
No magnifying glass can lie.
And the press is not left enough, thank you.
Duck, duck, duck, duck…
Live your life like Jesus
but don’t send his groupies to Congress.
Their Bulging Bibles have whole chapters
missing from mine…
…Are we on the canary draft now, or the gray?
I am my mother’s politician.
One womb, one vote. And the
Mysteries choose wisely. And the
drumbeats fall like food stamps
in the wind. And the medicine falls like
empty stomachs that can’t vote.
Goose, goose, goose, goose.
—WT
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Purple Movements
Purple Dawn on the hill
would open orchids
with mental jaws-of-life,
boldly blazing,
But a quiet moment
has Venus flytrapped her,
mirroring her brovada,
leaving her limp.
Wilted! Just add water
and she’ll daisy dance,
teaching Crayola-cheeked children
the sublime cartography
of tripping on joy,
of squashing trailers,
of walking on hot coals
with matches between your toes.
It’s a vision worth
open eyes
every time she climbs down
here.
—WT
Please join our Hippie Chick [...]
Candy Wrappers
Candy wrappers and unopened bank statements. Handwritten directions to properties for sale, other women’s numbers, receipts that mapped out the months that we traveled, fixed the car, rewired the house, ate out, bought books. He had cleaned out his car one day when he was about to leave on a trip. All the clutter from [...]
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You’re a cheap shoe,
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sloppy canvas that bleeds my socks.
Always complications!
I’ve been lucky enough
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and then the surprise of
an enjoyable fit.
A one season shoe,
no presumptuous spring
in your step,
bouncing back from
the perils of pavement.
You give in at the toe, heave ho.
And I out grow, and,
Dear [...]
