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Authors: Sunil Yapa
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and purpose.
It was there in the burnt-out warehouse that they built their giant puppets. Caricatures of heads of state. Devils and villains and sharp-horned tricksters. It was there among those concrete walls in the dust-laden light from the high windows that they handcuffed each other and laughed, learned the meaning of civil disobedience, learned how to nonviolently accept arrest. There where they discovered the true nature of struggle. How to do it together. How to coordinate a direct action. There where they learned that courage is not the ability to face your fear, heroically, once, but is the strength to do it day after day. Night after night. Faith without end. Love without border.
It was here, too, where they first spoke the names that would carry them through the fire. Where they first felt the stories issuing forth from their lips. Where they gathered to build the family that would survive.
When he had first looked at the maps, some six months ago, he almost didn’t believe it—the geography of the city was an ally they had never expected. Any other city and it would probably have been just a protest. But here in downtown Seattle, thirteen intersections formed a triangle around the convention center. The center where the World Trade Organization planned to hold their auction of the Third World. The World Trade Organization whose opening ceremonies began, John Henry checked his watch, in three hours.
Shut down those intersections and you would own the city.
A chokehold that would trap the delegates and the diplomats and the experts in their fancy hotels eating smoked salmon and Brie or whatever it is they do when they are not busy buying and selling things they have no right on earth to claim as their own.
These veterans of the anti-nuclear demonstrations of the 1980s. Tree-sits in the high Sierra and on the Redwood Coast. Who had arrest sheets that read like a timeline of American protests: Seabrook, Rocky Flats, the Nevada Test Site, who trained for months on a farm in Arlington rented by none other than himself. My people. He was lit up. They had been fighting corporate Goliaths for so long their tactics had become streamlined and beautiful and efficient.
The first wave, they lock themselves together—a lockdown at the center of each of those thirteen intersections. They would be the immovable core of the block. Surrounding them and protecting them was the second wave—standing groups to clog the streets, a buffer of faces and voices and flesh to stand between the locked-down bodies and the cops.
Surround that with a street party—the flags and the trumpets and the beating drums—and let the cops just try to figure out what was going on, let alone clear the streets.
Lockdown. Each person sat cross-legged on the pavement with both arms locked into PVC pipe, each arm locked from the inside with a chain to the person on either side. Only the person locked down could release the chain.
The pipe itself, to break the locked circle, had to be cut with a diamond-tipped saw, very carefully or you were likely to slice off an arm. The cops hated the lock-boxes. They hated having to cut so carefully. They hated that they could not force you to release.
John Henry loved the lock-box because it said everything. One PVC pipe was not enough. It was only working in concert that the lock-box became something special. Eight people in a circle; eight people with each of their arms in one of the prepared pipes. Eight people willing to lock themselves together in an unbroken circle, to sit on cold pavement, totally immobile and vulnerable, waiting for the loggers to come to reclaim their tree, for the cops to come to reclaim their city.
John Henry himself wanted to be in lockdown because it was neither their tree nor their city. But they had agreed to come as medics. That was the plan at least. Less risk for King with the Vail thing hanging over her head, although he thought that a needless worry on her part. Still,
It was there in the burnt-out warehouse that they built their giant puppets. Caricatures of heads of state. Devils and villains and sharp-horned tricksters. It was there among those concrete walls in the dust-laden light from the high windows that they handcuffed each other and laughed, learned the meaning of civil disobedience, learned how to nonviolently accept arrest. There where they discovered the true nature of struggle. How to do it together. How to coordinate a direct action. There where they learned that courage is not the ability to face your fear, heroically, once, but is the strength to do it day after day. Night after night. Faith without end. Love without border.
It was here, too, where they first spoke the names that would carry them through the fire. Where they first felt the stories issuing forth from their lips. Where they gathered to build the family that would survive.
When he had first looked at the maps, some six months ago, he almost didn’t believe it—the geography of the city was an ally they had never expected. Any other city and it would probably have been just a protest. But here in downtown Seattle, thirteen intersections formed a triangle around the convention center. The center where the World Trade Organization planned to hold their auction of the Third World. The World Trade Organization whose opening ceremonies began, John Henry checked his watch, in three hours.
Shut down those intersections and you would own the city.
A chokehold that would trap the delegates and the diplomats and the experts in their fancy hotels eating smoked salmon and Brie or whatever it is they do when they are not busy buying and selling things they have no right on earth to claim as their own.
These veterans of the anti-nuclear demonstrations of the 1980s. Tree-sits in the high Sierra and on the Redwood Coast. Who had arrest sheets that read like a timeline of American protests: Seabrook, Rocky Flats, the Nevada Test Site, who trained for months on a farm in Arlington rented by none other than himself. My people. He was lit up. They had been fighting corporate Goliaths for so long their tactics had become streamlined and beautiful and efficient.
The first wave, they lock themselves together—a lockdown at the center of each of those thirteen intersections. They would be the immovable core of the block. Surrounding them and protecting them was the second wave—standing groups to clog the streets, a buffer of faces and voices and flesh to stand between the locked-down bodies and the cops.
Surround that with a street party—the flags and the trumpets and the beating drums—and let the cops just try to figure out what was going on, let alone clear the streets.
Lockdown. Each person sat cross-legged on the pavement with both arms locked into PVC pipe, each arm locked from the inside with a chain to the person on either side. Only the person locked down could release the chain.
The pipe itself, to break the locked circle, had to be cut with a diamond-tipped saw, very carefully or you were likely to slice off an arm. The cops hated the lock-boxes. They hated having to cut so carefully. They hated that they could not force you to release.
John Henry loved the lock-box because it said everything. One PVC pipe was not enough. It was only working in concert that the lock-box became something special. Eight people in a circle; eight people with each of their arms in one of the prepared pipes. Eight people willing to lock themselves together in an unbroken circle, to sit on cold pavement, totally immobile and vulnerable, waiting for the loggers to come to reclaim their tree, for the cops to come to reclaim their city.
John Henry himself wanted to be in lockdown because it was neither their tree nor their city. But they had agreed to come as medics. That was the plan at least. Less risk for King with the Vail thing hanging over her head, although he thought that a needless worry on her part. Still,
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