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The DASW media workgroup outdoes itself. It issues press releases, holds a well-attended press conference, and succeeds in getting our website and the action meeting spot printed on the front page of the newspaper and announced on every major television and radio station. All public statements are crafted to appeal to the widest possible audience. Instead of “activists” or “protestors,” DASW uses terms like “residents” and “people from all walks of life”—language that underscores the broad-based nature of opposition to the war. As strategist and organizer (and fellow member of Code Orange) Patrick Reinsbor-ough writes in a later essay, “Without sacrificing the opportunity to put out a systemic analysis, [DASW’s] organizing appealed to mainstream values—democracy, security, justice, belief in international law, patriotism—and used them to leverage opposition.… [This] helped normalize resistance and expanded the appeal of the action.”
On March 14 we hold a preemptive action at the Pacific Stock Exchange, billed by DASW media as a preview of the Day After. More than seventy people are arrested for nonviolent civil disobedience, including the former president of the Pacific Stock Exchange. Euphoric with success, we move to an intersection on Market Street, which a couple of hundred of us proceed to occupy. Someone hands me the bullhorn and I am prancing around in the middle of the street, comfortable with it now, comfortable enough to holler at people to dance, shake it, move. And then all around the intersection, jubilant protesters are dancing and singing. In the face of missiles amassing and artillery un-shelved, we are defiant with life. For the sake of the living and their children and their children, we are snarling up traffic, we are causing CEOs and stockbrokers to falter in their tracks, and a single block of Market Street is, for a couple of hours, transformed.
Five days later.
“My fellow citizens, at this hour American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq.” I despise that voice. I am trying not to, but I can’t help it, I despise it. I despise the twang, the arrogance, the complacency with which nameless thousands are condemned. I despise it with such a cold silvery knife-edge loathing that I am shaky and nauseous. I turn up the volume. “On my orders, coalition forces have begun striking selected targets of military importance to undermine Saddam Hussein’s ability to wage war. These are the opening stages of what will be a broad and concerted campaign.”
I am driving from Berkeley to San Francisco, and I have to concentrate very hard to stay in my lane. I have to pay very careful attention, minute attention to the lights in front of me, to the stripes on the asphalt, to accelerator, brake, accelerator. I am straining past my tears, I am doing everything I can not to slam on my brakes halfway across the Bay Bridge and bash my head over and over into the steering wheel.
Fourteen and a half years ago my family scraped together its resources and its nerve and pole-vaulted across the Atlantic to the United States of America. We came here from apartheid South Africa because this country, to us, represented everything South Africa was not: freedom, justice, democracy. Democracy. A novel and thrilling concept to me, and I fell recklessly in love with everything it boldly spelled out. Now I am left wondering: Can my country still be called a democracy when a miscounted vote in a single state makes for a president? Is it still a democracy when the government lies to its people? Which democratic ideals are we embodying in embarking on an illegal war in violation of the will of the global community? In Nepal, democracy may be a child. But in my country, democracy, by all indications, is growing senile.
“And I assure you, this will not be a campaign of half measures and we will accept no outcome but victory.”
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What does victory mean to you, Mr. Bush? Oil fields? Puppet leaders? What does victory amount to when the mightiest military in the world charges into a unilateral war? But Bush batters on, heedless of my ranting and that of millions of others, several solid tiers of Secret Service buffering him from meddling journalists and their troublesome queries.
“We will pass through this time of peril and carry on the work of peace. We will defend our freedom. We will bring freedom to others.”
The freedom to work more hours than any other nation on the planet, grossly overconsume, and still feel we never have enough? Or the freedom for corporations to exploit workers and poison the earth?
“And we will prevail. May God bless our country and all who defend her.”
What of the people of Iraq? Does their God listen when they pray?
I blow my nose and pick up my cell phone.
“David?”
“Hi Marisa. You okay?”
“You heard?”
“Of course. Final spokes is at St. Boniface at seven. I’m heading over now.”
When I arrive, the large hall of the church is overflowing with people. Person after person goes up to the microphone to introduce themselves as a representative of their affinity group. There must be hundreds of them. I find David and Dorrit. I sit with them and try to comprehend what is going on, which intersection is being held by whom, but I cannot take it in. I am numb, staggered at the thought of all that is to come, of the jets climbing toward Baghdad, their bellies heavy with the neatly stowed apparatus of carnage.
Thursday, March 20 dawns brilliant and lucid as a child’s stare.
I clamber onto my bike at a quarter to six and start pedaling toward downtown. Even this early, to the knowing eye, Market Street is speckled with intimations of what is to come: small bands of the colorfully dressed gather on odd corners, ogling intersections and chattering animatedly, staking out the day’s work. Minutes later I arrive at Justin Herman Plaza, a broad swath of red brick in San Francisco’s northeastern corner. City-side, the plaza is surrounded by glittering blades of skyscraper. On the other side are the sturdy lines of the Ferry Building, leaning into the Bay, and then the swells of tide, hoary and ragged. I lock my bike to a parking meter and head in, scanning the scene. The DASW orientation team is at full throttle, checking their walkie-talkies and reviewing last-minute adjustments. Already people are beginning to arrive. They will be herded into groups, given an orientation, and dispatched to support actions throughout downtown.
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First stop: the Mourning Mothers. This affinity group dresses up as the mothers of Iraq. They wear huge painted masks of grieving and carry cloth effigies of dead children in their arms. I have been asked to sing with them. I spy a giant cardboard face at the other end of the plaza and head over. Susie, one of the Mothers, welcomes me with a hug, and we chat as she puts the finishing touches on her black costume. “It’s a hard day,” she mutters through the pins in her mouth. “But resistance, at least, will be ours.” Susie is one of those people who you don’t expect to be a radical. She’s middle-aged, incurably polite and placid, and works as upper-level management in a corporate job.
The plaza is rapidly filling up. Small knots of people arrive, locate their place, meld with the growing mass of bodies. I hum a few test notes into the microphone as the Mothers ready themselves. Then I close my eyes, imagine Baghdad, and begin to sing. The Mothers wait in a semicircle as a crowd gathers. One by one each proceeds solemnly to the front, holds up her child, and lays it down on a white sheet. I have not sung with the Mothers before, and I am amazed at the power of their performance, at how keenly it elicits the intimate horrors of war. Among the anger and confusion and fear, here is a space for grieving. At the close, a number of faces are wet, and some come up to place notes and flowers on the bloodied rag dolls.
My next stop will be Market and Sansome, where both City Corpse and the British Consulate are located. I thank and hug the Mothers, but reaching my bike proves no simple task: at this point, Justin Herman Plaza is sardine-stuffed with thousands of provoked patriots. I burrow my way through and am busy unlocking my bike before I think to look up at Market Street.
San Francisco’s financial district is not a place I relish. Everyone is rushing: rushing to meetings, rushing to shop, rushing to lunch dates. Rushing because rushing is what you do when you’re in the financial district. People are far too preoccupied to see each other. They are distracted by cell phones, by business papers or propositions or partners, by bodily urges that gallingly demand filling or emptying. It is a numbing place, a place both overstimulating and isolating, simultaneously busy and bleak. But today the financial district is on strike. Today the financial district is gone trekking on a vision quest, is lifting the veil to kiss its bride, thrusting out its first child. Today its streets are filled with human beings doing the kinds of things that render them human: conversing, dancing, shouting, laughing, sharing. Feeling. Today there is a clan of knitters occupying the sidewalk, churning out scarves and mittens as they chat. There are sweatpants-clad yogis doing downward dog in the Montgomery crosswalk. There are anarchists with bandannas over the lower halves of their faces reclining on plastic lounge chairs smack in the middle of Kearny. Police in riot gear stand watching. Helicopters drone overhead. The staccato lights that reliably regulate the rushing and the distraction are flashing yellow, red, green, yellow, red, green, but regulating nothing, a mute tribute to the orderly half-life of the world that yesterday was. I ride or walk my bike down Market Street, awed and giddy, whooping at the knitters and the yogis and the countless costumed and painted creative retorts to this war.
Market and Sansome: packed, jostling, panting, hectic. Alive.
“Dorrit!” She is talking strategy with someone from another affinity group, listening intently and then yelling into a walkie-talkie. She sees me, hugs me, pushes me toward the ad hoc stage. “Go sing!”
Our cluster decided to transform this intersection into a space for art and celebration, an enclave of music and poetry and performance grafted onto the concrete and steel. I am hefted up onto a crude platform and I sing the song I wrote days earlier.
I will fight against this war because I’m loyal.
I am loyal to the rivers,
loyal to the sky,
loyal to this earth and the stars swinging by,
loyal to what we share,
to the love that brings us here…
At first, it seems no one is listening. The sound system isn’t loud enough to rise above the clamor of this howling body. But after an early stumble, I sing as if my life depends on it, because singing is something I can give right now. I cannot stop the war, but I can offer this—my anthem to my country, which is without borders. My paean to my people, who are without tribe. My voice grows strong and sure. It takes me over, wrings me out, leaves me emptied in its wake as it curls and dives and soars. At some point the rest of me falls away altogether, and I am pared down to voice, naked and true. I shut my eyes, move in closer, and when I finish, to my surprise, to my delight, there is a scattering of applause. Some were listening.
I open my eyes.
I have a bird’s-eye view of the action, and there are people as far as I can see, up and down Market, up and down Sansome, people chanting and romping and snapping photos, people fierce with joy and anger, drunk with the elixir of our own power. Direct action is a salve on the lesion of our alienation. In times like this I am reminded of my own agency, and again I feel connected, enduringly fused with those beside me in the streets. Our society seems hell-bent on fragmenting us into ever-smaller isolated units, and confronting its institutions on terms entirely our own tastes to me like bread must to the starving. For a few hours, for a day, it is indisputable that change is possible, that we can make it so, that indeed we already are.
At 6 p.m. spontaneous waves of protest are still engorging Market Street. Thousands march somberly or stridently, moving with the implacable momentum of a force of nature. There are teenagers, businessmen, bus drivers, soccer moms, grandparents; the affinity group– spokescouncil structure allows for a widely diverse range of participants. At one point during the day my sister Gabi calls me on my cell phone to ask where I am. Market and First, I tell her. We have moved, as cops encircled the last intersection and ordered us to disperse. What’s left of Code Orange—David was recognized by the police and immediately arrested, a few others are supporting different actions— is now roaming the streets fortified with a bullhorn and a devoted constellation of cohorts. “We’re coming down,” says Gabi, who has never before expressed interest in joining me at an action. She arrives with a couple of other attorneys from her corporate law firm, points me out to them with something like pride as I ramble hoarsely from behind the bullhorn, suddenly self-conscious.
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A couple of months later I am in Columbus, Ohio, on another speaking tour for Tikkun. My host is an energetic young professor who teaches at the local college. We are driving through the city when the topic of the war comes up, and of the protests, and I mention the Day After.
“Were you there?” he asks. Yes, I tell him. Indeed I was. He chews on this for a minute. “You know, I’d like to thank you. You and everyone else who was a part of that. It’s not easy living here with my politics. Every single one of my neighbors supported the war. I was close to despair when Bush gave that speech. But when I saw the footage of the shutdown in San Francisco—of all those people putting themselves on the line—it lifted me. It gave me back some hope.”
On March 20, 2003, protests spontaneously erupt around the world: Greece, Costa Rica, Germany, the U.K., France, Syria, Jordan, Morocco, Egypt, Turkey. Thirteen U.S. embassies and consulates are closed due to security concerns. Meanwhile, in the belly of the beast, dozens of cities give way to resistance. In Chicago, thousands of demonstrators clog major arteries. In Philadelphia, over a hundred are arrested for blocking the federal courthouse. In New York, protesters stop traffic on Broadway for two hours. And in one legendary city on the western shore of the world’s superpower, twenty thousand people step out of their jobs, homes, and lives. Twenty thousand nonviolently occupy the streets in protest of an unjust war. Over fifteen hundred of them are arrested.
Half a world away, bombs are dropping on Baghdad. But our vote is unmistakable.