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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Movable Borders
I have enough to eat.
The news sells cereal
with a pound of flesh–
a charred toddler–air raid veteran.
My home is still
as a funeral parlor.
TV sells soap, the stain of mass
evacuations, walking mass graves,
eluding the cleansing. Today.
It burns the muscles of my
belief. But I never
did exercise regimentally…
I can touch the war between the
states with my great, great grand-
mother’s white glove hand. Our
farm, before the tornado took the
old Place…Young Heathcote Mill–
grinding the Mason-Dixon Line.
It could have been a hiding
place. Under the gearworks, behind
the race…for me, for railroad passengers…
I have known no war.
So I turn down the volume,
go for a snack when I’ve had my
fill–The child’s parents among
Those shot. The distance of death,
Sudden or slow. What I could know…
She never hit me. Our crime was
similarity.
Daughter and mother in the same
old battle to change each other.
Geography the only poultice/politic.
From America, Serbs and Albanians
look and sound and shoot the same,
playing Mother May I at the border, at the
pit, at the polls, apart.
No bullet pocks or splatter patterns
mark my sister’s house. Today.
I have known no war, she repeats like
a rifle, rolling his drawers for receipts.
He sets his pattern and she pours
herself into that casing. Confined,
she swells like bread. The hardening, the
hairline stress, his bottle-
rocket burst–Not rage, not
rage, not rage, she rattles.
CNN doesn’t blink.
They are cleansed. He is quiet.
She is quiet. He makes another
promise, unkeepable. She believes it
again, and rests. And Serbs slip over
the border with the clothes on their backs. And
Chechnyans drive over Russia, un-
welcome garbage scows. And the
Canada geese move in a v
for victory…or Vietnam…
She will visit me at Easter.
I will crucify my opinion to cleanse her stay;
a sacrifice for a cease-fire.
Delicious distance.
—WT
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Peace with Every Purchase: ConsumersForPeace.org
Kudos to Heathcote Earthings‘ wholesaler Northern Sun for including a little card in my recent order:
I don’t have time to post about their site now; Off to change a flat tire on Earthings’ new van before setting up for Common Ground on the Hill music festival. But I will be looking into making these cards available at our Heathcote Earthings booth. You can request copies or download them on ConsumersForPeace.org. Spread the word!
Harold’s Challenge for a Better Answer to War; Wren’s Answer: Blue Jellyfish and The Line of Other
[Harold, an osteopath from Virginia, is pictured above teaching tantra--quite a peaceful practice itself!]
Now that I’ve had my tea, I’m thinking about the human history of war and peace. Within Heathcote, my Intentional Community, everyone who lives here commits to our conflict resolution policy. It’s developed by consensus, so members who see improvements to be made in our process can bring them up. It’s a living, evolving agreement. But it’s only practiced among those who stay. Someone, for example, with a strong need to be right can just say, “This is bullshit,” and leave. The members who stay with Heathcote’s culture of processing end up being of similar temperament, having tremendous patience and commitment not to their own plan but to the higher good. So within the bubble of Heathcote, the process works fairly well. Extending that bubble to the entire planet is another issue. I can’t even get Heathcote’s neighbors to return my calls to meet with me about our beaver issue. I don’t feel equipped to stop a war among those determined to have one.
Yet the yield of any war that humans have waged has only ever been some land grabbing (creating historical amnesia and generational resentment for millennia, as pointed out in my favorite t-shirt, to the right), some winners, some big losers and countless dead. Still, my own generation continues this tradition, this entitlement to tunnel vision. I wonder how evolved we really are. Am I wrong to believe that we have the capacity to come together as humans planetwide?
Last night I caught a nature program showing the blue jellyfish. Its body is a bubble shaped to act like a sail. But half the creatures have their body sails pointing them left and half point right. So half sail out to sea to live life and procreate and half wash up on the beaches of Australia (see picture below). The randomness of evolution dooms half their population to death.
So even as I feel within me a tremendous capacity for peace, why should I assume that’s a universal human experience? How do nature and nurture influence a person’s ability to justify war, or violence of any kind?
Maybe I should switch to herbal tea. But my answer to such questions has always been to make my own choices, such as living in community and buying in to our process, and being available as model/guinea pig for those who want to come and learn. Maybe, Harold, witnessing is my personal answer.
A huge influence on the actions of humans seems to be what I call the line of other.
Individuals and cultures have this invisible line they cast out around them. Some people and living things are on their side of the line–family, friends, community, pets, nation. Then there are living things and people that are outside of this line–plants and animals one eats, other nations, people who are different in some triggering way. The line defines how we treat others. If you’re inside someone’s line, The Golden Rule applies. If you’re outside someone’s line, it does not. They can torture animals in factory farms and slaughter houses because they’re not like “us,” they’re “other.” They can invade another country with no obligation to understand its people’s culture or objections because they’re “other.” The line of other creates an impunity that terrifies me.
I hope my life and my choices help to negotiate a collective moving out of that line of other to include all life on Earth and the planet itself. I try to model this in my Open Classroom teaching, promoting fair trade with Heathcote Earthings and inviting dialog on Hippie Chick Diaries.
I get frequent emails from partners in this work who are fearful of humanity’s direction and impatient to make major changes.
Looking at the systems of nature, as Permaculture teaches me to do, I see that lasting change happens in two ways–catastrophically and incrementally.
War and natural disasters are catastrophic changes. They happen without my help, and will continue to. I don’t wish for them, as some do. I try to make my peace with their rhythms and minimize my carbon footprint. Incremental change feels more peaceful to me and I am satisfied with my little victories of having information about sustainability or Intentional Community when someone comes asking, or witnessing for animal rights or human rights when I hear someone being intolerant. And I live as lightly as I can every day. I’m not a monk but I’m not a soccer mom, either.
Maybe, Harold, walking my talk for those who will notice is my answer. And like every creature that evolves, my answer is a work in progress.
I’m looking forward to everyone’s thoughts!
–Wren Tuatha
Hi. I really like your website. I noticed the photo of the sign outside your main building “War is not the answer”, but no suggested alternative. So I wondered if it would be more in line with your philosophy to offer what COULD be the answer? Maybe that should be a topic for discussion, leading to a second sign offering the new direction for those who would like to agree with the first one if they had any other ideas?
Harold, Hi! And thanks for visiting and commenting! Good idea to phrase things in the positive instead of the negative. I just woke up so all I have right now is, “Tea is the answer.” A good backrub would solve a few of my woes, too…
Funny that you make this comment now, because I’ve just spent a week intensely processing conflicts within the community and with some neighbors. And it’s clear that peace, or specifically conflict resolution, only works as an answer if all parties buy in. Still, you won’t catch me buying in to the war…