Friday, September 27, 2002
I just returned to the place I am staying in Maryland. What a day it's been!
The morning activities commenced at Dupont Circle in NW Washington DC at 7 am. People began to gather, bringing yarn, chalk, fliers, bumper stickers, wings, mud, bird puppets, oak cuttings and flower stalks for garlands, and a variety of signs with political slogans like NO BLOOD FOR OIL, NO WAR WITH IRAQ, and more. Once we had arrived, there were 45 - 50 people from all over the country and some internationals, ranging in age from mid teens to 70's. The air was charged with the feeling of early morning purpose and anticipation. We distributed the various headcloths, yarn, facepaint and other accoutrements and people began to adorn themselves. The energies we had planned on invoking, elementals and nature creatures, began to take form as people covered themselves in mud, colored ribbons, leaves, wings with words painted on them, and face paint. We grounded and then cast a circle, calling in the elements and She Who Opens Roads and Pathways. As a group we read aloud the prophecy we've been working with, prophesied by Starhawk.
All of you who would be free,
Heed the voice of prophecy!
In the fortress, thieves conspire,
On the throne there sits a liar
Rich and bloated, they grow fat
On the burdened peoples' sweat
The false king wants even more
To drink the blood that's spilled in war
Drunk with power, he forgot
What is real and what is not.
No gold, no jewels, can compare
With earth and water, fire and air.
When beings of earth and air awake
Foundations of the fortress quake
Seeds take root in rubble, grow
Living springs of water flow
Winds of change scour the skies
Dispersing the dank haze of lies
Now the flames of truth ignite
The will to change, the vision bright
A new world will come to birth,
Hear the voice of mother earth!
"Feed the hungry, teach the youth,
Heal the sick, and speak the truth.
Take the power, hear the call,
Weave a web to link us all
Faced with truth, no lie can stand,
Weave the vision, strand by strand.
We began to weave a web around us, between us, with balls of multicolored yarn. We danced and chanted, weaving a spell of protection, purpose, and love. The web of yarn began to include park benches around Dupont Circle. The web grew to become a circle held up by people, singing magic into this beautiful weaving.
There were police in the park with us. A G/L Liaison officer was there, and was very friendly and sympathetic. Dupont Circle is a neighborhood with a significant Lesbian and Gay population. At one point a large group of radical bicyclists rode around the circle followed by police in riot gear.
We began to move into the street at the north of the circle, with the web held by a number of people, and the rest of the people dancing into the street, singing, continuing to weave with yarn on street signs and other fixtures. Some bumper stickers saying "IMPEACH BUSH" were put on signs and passed to drivers who slowly negotiated through the protesters.
The police were watching, and growing in numbers as we went around Dupont Circle, headed for Connecticut Avenue. They were somewhat tolerant. When we started to disrupt the traffic in the northbound lane of CT. AVE. the police began to become louder and more insistent with their demands that we get on the sidewalk. We did go to the sidewalk for a couple of blocks, putting bumper stickers on signs and some windows as we went. People also wrote with chalk on the sidewalk. BUSH SUCKS, FAIR TRADE NOT FREE TRADE (in front of a Starbucks), and more.
We had reached an intersection 4 or 5 blocks south of Dupont Circle when we began to cross the street back and forth continuously, stopping traffic. We continued to weave with yarn, to drum and sing, and to talk with people on the street and drivers. We had 2 different fliers we were distributing, 1000 of each. The police made a loud demand that we get back to the sidewalk, and we did. They then surrounded us. There was a complete circle of police around the group, in places two deep. They were in full riot gear.
When the police started to form their human barrier, I began to walk backwards. I slipped through the police line, which hadn't fully coalesced, and saw that all but one member of my affinity group had also slipped out. The police closed in and closed their circle around the protesters. I have heard that a teenaged female protester was grabbed forcefully by a police officer when she attempted to leave the circle the police were forming, before the circle was closed. I saw a small young woman in her twenties being handled roughly by two large male police officers. She did manage to escape the police circle along with another woman, both of them in their early to mid twenties. There was a young man with a plastic bucket and a drumstick, along with his friend, another young man.
We all gathered and watched what was happening. We handed out fliers to passersby, and bumper stickers, and talked with as many people on the street as we could. The police gradually loaded our friends, 42 people in all, onto a Metro bus, and drove them away. We watched, sang, spoke with members of the press, and shared with each other how we were feeling. The process of the arrest and bus loading took an hour or so.
We circled, those of us remaining, and did some grounding. We talked about what we might do next. We decided to go to Freedom Park. We continued to be approached by members of the press so some of us spent time with a variety of journalists. After the dust had settled in the street we started to walk south towards Freedom Park. We spoke with people on the street, handed out fliers until we had none left, and kept walking. It rained lightly on and off, mostly off. The air was warm and humid. We walked past the White House and were joined by a personable young Secret Service officer on his bicycle. He was very up front about the fact that he was escorting us past the White House as part of his job. We discussed the protest with him and his professional neutrality when it came to personal politics at work.
We walked down to Freedom Park, and came to a part of the park that was mostly paved. On the other side there was a gathering of the Rhythm Workers Union, drummers. Police who were warning them with bullhorns that they were about to be arrested surrounded them. We watched as the scene unfolded slowly. Some of our affinity group needed to go to the bathroom so we walked to the US Customs Service a block away. While we were there the police arrested the drummers and took them away in buses. A block away there was another gathering of protesters that the police were in the process of arresting.
The police were mostly in riot gear. There were also Park Police on horses and cops on bicycles. I saw one armored personal vehicle drive up 14th Street.
We went back to the paved part of the park and talked about what was going on. People had been arrested all over the city that morning. There were few protesters left on the street. We interacted with protesters and members of the press. We met with a woman from the legal collective and she gave us a wonderful impromptu lesson in being interviewed which came to good use immediately as we were interviewed by 8 to 10 different roving camera crews from such diverse networks as Maryland Public TV, Abu Dhabi Television, a woman from the Free Leonard Pellitier organization, and others.
We spoke by cell phone with one of our friends who had been arrested. She told us how many they were and that they were singing, raising energy, and doing OK. She asked us to put a message out on the ListServ asking people in our national community to contact the Mayor of DC, the Police Chief, and their Congressional delegation. One of our affinity group called her partner at home, who took a dictated message from me and arranged for it to be posted to the ListServ.
The woman from the legal collective had told us that there was to be a press conference at Freedom Park at 1:00. We considered going to that, but decided that we needed to eat, pee, and regroup. Two of our group decided they wanted to go to the healing space the Pagan Cluster had set up in Malcolm X Park. They left to do that. That left three of us. We found a restaurant nearby and, dressed in our elemental garb, and had lunch with the downtown DC lunch crowd.
After we ate we decided to head home. We were exhausted. We walked back the way we'd come, up CT. Ave. to Dupont Circle. We saw the place where the police had arrested our friends on the sidewalk. We saw some pieces of yarn, and some of the bumper stickers. We saw the mud left on the ground at Dupont Circle, where people had mudded up. By now it was between 2 and 3 PM. We retrieved our vehicle from the parking lot we'd left it in, and drove north towards our digs in Maryland.
We were concerned about what was happening to our friends who had been arrested, so we called them. They told us they were being moved to Courthouse B at Judiciary square in the Capital District, and asked us to come and be there to support them when they arrived. We didn't know whether they were being transferred, jailed, released, or arraigned. We drove back into town to Judiciary Square and found Courthouse B. There were three buses on the street, and a few police men and women. We saw that our friends were on the middle bus and gestured to them. The police officers told us we couldn't stand there, that we had to keep moving. This was a public street, not crowded, in broad daylight. We were a 36-year-old woman, a 30-year-old woman, and a 42-year-old man. We had some face paint on, and leaves in our hair, and headbands. We looked somewhat exotic but not particularly threatening to armed police, but we were forbidden to stand and converse with our friends through gestures. So, we walked across the street, where the bus was between the police, and us and interacted with our friends. The windows on the bus were dark so we couldn't see anything but the shadows of heads, but they made gestures to us and we to them; signing love and support. The police "made" us and began to respond slowly. An officer was deployed to one end of the block with traffic cones he used to block the street off. Another officer blocked off the other end of the block with yellow Caution tape. The three of us walked up and down the street singing, grounding, and working with yarn to pantomime the cutting of the handcuffs our friends were wearing on the bus.
We talked with the people on the bus a number of times by cell phone. One of the people asked us to go to the homeless shelter where he and the other medics were housed to retrieve his passport so he could arrange for release from the bus before the night was over. The rest of the people on the bus chose to act in jail solidarity, not giving their names to the police. How long each person would choose to stay in jail was not clear. That's the kind of thing that evolves in an ongoing way.
The evening ended with us agreeing to bring ID to the courthouse the next morning for some people that decided to get out of jail after spending one night.
We'll see what tomorrow brings.