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Anti-War Movement Makes a Big Splash |
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August West |
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 On
my way to the demonstration in San Francisco on September 29th, held
to counter the drive towards war, the rising assault on civil liberties
and increasing attacks on people who are or perceived to be Middle
Eastern or Muslim, I started feeling apprehensions. What if this turns
out to be yet another boring leftist demo? What if it features nothing
more than the usual pacifist pleading for the authorities to be nice?
What if the turnout is pathetically small, and flag-waving counter-demonstrators
outnumber us? I didn't see very many people who seemed headed to the
demo while on the BART mass transit train,which didn't make me feel
better. Even as I got off in the Mission District just blocks away
from Dolores Park, where the demo was to take place, little evidence
of it was visible.
Then, I got to the park, and it was full, and more and more people
were arriving. Oh yeah, the usual suspects were there: The Spartacists,
the LaRouchites, the RCP,...but people were ignoring them.Speakers
went on, with a general theme of placing the 9/11 attacks in the context
of a violent US foreign policy, while expressing explicit sympathy
for the victims. Nothing real exciting, but nothing offensive. Then
we went on a march through the Mission. And this is when things really
took off. The puppets constructed by Art and Revolution, a common
presence in anti-globalization demos, sort of led the way, though
no one really led. The crowd was very diverse, though tending toward
the young, very San Francisco, though this time many more of the Mission's
Latinos were in evidence than in past demos. And the energy was intense.
Many carried their own picket signs, rather than some mass handout,
many carried colorful banners. Lots of t-shirts silk-screened for
the occasion. And the mood was very fun, yet defiant, and often explicitely
revolutionary. It seemed that many of the people I encountered understood
quite clearly that the problem isn't just a specific policy, but the
capitalist system. The anti-globaliztion movement has indeed become
a force for more than just reform. One woman had on the back of her
t-shirt a stenciled message "The task of a revolutionay artist is
to make revolution irresistable". I ran into a friend of mine, a young-ish
punk woman with rainbow hair, walking with her "chick friends", and
had lots of fun seeing how the participants were very individual,yet
acted as a unit when necessary.
We did a loop, and came back to the park. People started a spontaneous
dance, initiated in particular by a group of young women from Mills
College in Oakland. Then, someone yelled out "This is what democracy
looks like", a la Seattle N30. The assembled picked that up, and the
dance went on and on, frantic energy from many bodies mixing with
fragrant illegal smells and dust in the hot California early fall
sun, the chants shifting but staying on the same theme. Then a song
got started "We've come too far, we're not gonna turn around. We'll
fill the streets with justice, we are freedom-bound". The dance turned
into a spiral dance, everyone standing around got drawn in. And then
we collapsed. But the event kept going.
Given this event was in the plans for less than two weeks, that fighting
hasn't started yet, and that the general public is still stunned and
angry about 9/11, this outcome was way better than I expected. The
one downer is that aside from a couple of anarchist tables (including
the IWW), people with politics similar to mine, anti-authoritarian,
anti-capitalist, but with an analysis seemed hard to find. I hope
this is not a sign that such people are too arrogant to participate.
You cannot change the world by staying in your room and just writing
theory, and hope that somehow people will find it. Now more than ever
it is important for people with an analysis to share it with a growing
milieu that is eager to learn.
(October 2, 2001)
Image:
Charles Slay
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