Month: November 2016
The transformation of vulnerability into power and action
I stopped being afraid once I came out of the closet.
I didn’t stop being afraid the first time that I said, out loud, repeating the words of Audre Lorde: “I am a black woman warrior poet doing my work – come to ask you, are you doing yours?” No, the end of fear was a long process, not an instant.
And I didn’t stop having moments of fear or panic. Those come, sometimes with great force, and often early in the morning, in the darkness, in the silence.
What I mean, though, is that once I was willing to step out of the closet and be completely vulnerable – to expose myself knowing that I could very well become (even more) an object of hate and of violence from people who looked like me and from those who didn’t– once I allowed myself to be that raw, I became absolutely and devastatingly powerful.
For make no mistake about it, that kind of vulnerability announces, in no uncertain terms: no matter what you say or do to me, I will not back down. I will not cower. I will not be silent. I will not hate you –but hear me clearly: I mean to be free.
This is yet another terrible, frightening moment in our nation – in the world, really, where children are bombed and washed up on distant shores and shot in neighborhood parks and told that they will be chased out of their homes and across borders into countries that do not know them.
We live in dangerous times, where men and women in power feel no allegiance to their neighbors — men and women who peddle fear and hopelessness in nihilistic pursuit of profit. Men and women who are not in their right mind, really, because they would rather destroy everything — all of us — than share anything.
To their insanity we are – no question about it – completely vulnerable.
But it would be a terrible mistake to construe that vulnerability as helplessness and weakness instead of as our power and strength.
That rawness you feel? That’s your spirit calling you to stand tall and be free, because something in you knows already that to those who would oppress us, nothing is more frightening and dangerous than a woman (or a man) who has much to lose and yet steps out anyway in the midst of madness to insist on her rights, to claim her freedom, to protect her brothers and sisters, to love as a radical answer to hate, and thus to convey that, come what may, she shall not be moved. Not one inch.
Be dangerously vulnerable.
The kids are alright
As I was waiting for my lunch today at a San Francisco farmer’s market food truck, I was suddenly roused – by the sounds of a cheering, boisterous crowd – out of the post-Trump election stupor that I had been nursing all morning. When I turned to look in the direction of the noise, I noticed that about one hundred people were gathered in front of a theater close by. I assumed that some play actors had emerged from the theater to address their excited, waiting audience, so I quickly lost interest and returned to my November 9 fog.
Before I could settle into more dark thinking about Tuesday’s election, I was roused again by the noises of the crowd. This time, it was walking in my direction and cheering, “Love Trumps hate” and “Not our president!” It was a crowd of kids – high school students, I assume – who were holding signs and happily disrupting the flow of farmer’s market traffic. As they passed by, two gentlemen not far from where I stood shook their heads. “Hmph!” one said in disbelief. “It’s too late now!” An older woman, probably in her sixties, chimed in and, in an accusing tone, shouted, “you should’ve done something a long time ago!” Another woman, a bit younger, stood by silently watching the kids and fighting back tears.
Contrary to what the gentleman seemed to think, the kids – from what I could discern – were not lost in some fantasy that somehow they could turn back the election of Trump. Nor did they seem like kids who stood on the sideline and waited until it was too late to do anything (and given that they were obviously too young to vote, what was it that the older woman beside me thought that they should have done? What did she do or fail to do?).
In fact, the kids were clear: they would not claim as President of the United States a man who disavowed and demonized their brothers and sisters. It was that simple.
And in their giddiness, in the joy they so obviously felt in protesting this horrendous election, they also made clear that they were having none of our shitty cynicism or crippling despair. Mourn, yes! they seemed to be telling us. But tap into the power of your grief to resist and to organize. If you can’t, at least get out of our way.
If you can’t teach your children well — which, in truth, is to teach them radical hope — then at least be wise enough to let them teach you.
The people’s power and the right to peaceably assemble
“Militarized police responses,” writes Emmanuel Hiram Arnaud, “are now a staple of local government’s response to the body politic’s exercise” of its fundamental right – enshrined in the First Amendment – “to peaceably assemble.” Fortified with such “military-style equipment” as “riot and camouflage gear,” semi-automatic weapons, armored vehicles, and tear gas, the police – in places as disparate as Ferguson, Missouri and the outskirts of Bismarck, North Dakota – now routinely transform into war zones places where women and men have peaceably assembled. In the process, they transform the women and men who have gathered into enemies whose rights the state is not bound to respect.
While much has been said about the challenge militarized police pose to our freedom of speech, “there has been little public discussion,” as Arnaud notes, on how law enforcement’s “increasingly violent response to acts of protest may encroach on the protective intention of the right to peaceably assemble.”
As a consequence, we have generally failed to use these violent police encounters as an opportunity not only to defend our First Amendment right; but also to explicitly affirm public space as the people’s space – as a place where we freely exchange ideas, organize, invigorate our democracy, demonstrate that we can and must challenge power, prefigure alternatives to what is often blindly accepted as “just the way things are,” and openly check those who would make of democracy a thing that benefits only the few. It is where we do democracy, in fact, where we teach one another what it means to be a free people. And it is where we demonstrate what the Founders so clearly understood: that the ability to peaceably assemble – in public and in private – is freedom itself.
The ways that we collectively transform public space when we peaceably assemble, the ways we make it a source of democratic power, is precisely what is so threatening to government and, indeed, to corporate interests. In other words, what we do as a matter of right “out there” in the open, while the whole world watches, is the reason the right to peaceably assemble is, as Maria Nassali writes, “one of the most restricted rights” worldwide (increasingly, national governments – including our own – have been “clamping down on independent civil society spaces,” often “under the guise of,” for example, “combating terrorism”).
When the police show up at our protests, then, with all the violence of their military hardware, they both usurp our right to peaceably assemble and banish us to the private sphere where we are to consider our grievances to be merely private, individual concerns. Police killings and fossil fuel pipelines? Those are only personal worries that require individual solutions. Thus, smile and say “hello” to a police officer. Pray for the Sioux. Don’t drive; walk!
When these militarized police show up, they also seize and, in the process, attempt to redefine public space as the domain solely of state and corporate power. In fact, they become the means by which our local, state, and national governments subtly and not-so-subtly mark mass mobilizations (like what we are seeing at the North Dakota pipeline site) as criminal trespasses, or more nefariously, as outright enemy invasions of government and business territory.
But assemble we must, for “when people hold assembly, they shift the power to the people,” declares Article 20 Network, a New York-based organization that I encourage you to support because it does the immensely important work of defending and advancing “the human right of Freedom of Assembly worldwide” (I am proud to say that I serve as Article 20 Network’s volunteer Nonviolence Advisor).
Given that shift, we need to be talking a lot more about the power of our assembly, and to covet the right to peaceably assemble just as passionately as we covet that other First Amendment right – you know, the one we are so willing to discuss ad nauseam (freedom of speech) and that is itself under siege every time the local army of police invade our peaceably assembled actions and events. After all, when the police chase us away with their machine guns and tear gas and armored vehicles and pepper spray, all that remains is silence.
Want to learn more about the Freedom of Assembly and Article 20 Network? Go to http://a20n.org/. You can sign up for alerts, explore Freedom of Assembly organizing and activist resources, and support A20N with your donation.
Coming in from the Cold 