The first meeting

It must have been late spring or early summer because it was almost before I started caring and soon after I had to ask someone what R-N-C stands for. SDS had a meeting that I almost did not go to but then did, and some folks there were from the Anti-war Committee, talking about a big march (turns out big meant absolutely fucking epic). And some other people from the RNC Welcoming Committee (which I gathered was a somewhat ironic name) said how they wanted to stop the delegates from getting into the city of St. Paul so that when the cameras go on inside the Xcel, no one would be there.

Pretty quick after that

I joined Students for a Democratic Society. Our job was to mobilize the student contingent, which means try to make my sanitized generation care about something. We dropped banners from the sky and spray painted the night. So as the summer hummed along and everything slipped away except RNC looming so large, it slowly dawned on me; this is more consuming than school or kissing or reading Harry Potter. Enormous elephants are coming to rape my state with their gore-loving choice-hating money-grubbing cocksure cocks, and I wanted to lie down in front of them all peaceful looking…then pull some vagina dentata shit on them.

Soon it was August

and the Anti-War Committee had us throwing paper that said March Against the War and that was for Day One of Epic Protest Week; flip it and you see where to catch the SDS bus to get there, and then there were the Day Four ones, proclaiming No Peace for the War-Makers, and then there were the wordy ones explaining why occupying Iraq is bad. So we were throwing this paper like crazy at all these new freshman, moving into their dorms, going to their welcoming ceremonies, buying their books: fresh new minds we attempted to catch. Show them that college can mean more than going to class, being poor, drinking yourself into a puddle of piss, etc.

Then,

somebody thinks of burning a McCain effigy. And it creeps me out. It’s too personal, too mean-spirited, and they say it’s a highly visible tactic but I say it doesn’t show anything about us being right, it just shows how much we hate, which feels like sinking to right-wing level. It’s the first time I disagree with a tactic (and according to the St. Paul Principles, the sort of rules of the protest, you aren’t supposed to publicly denounce someone’s tactics. But it’s OK because that effigy thing never ended up happening). Funny because I like the idea of stopping traffic and breaking windows–less personal, feels more like irreproachable revolution. Even Molotov cocktails, so long as you blow up inanimate symbols of corruption and not symbols of humans.

All of these journalists start calling,

wanting to know why? Why protest the RNC? The easy answer is because it is coming HERE, but why did I ever do anything else? Always wanted to DO SOMETHING about all the nasty shit between the lines in the newspapers, and now I am doing it. Meanwhile the anxiousness in my mother is growing, and SDSers are arriving from LA, from North Carolina, from D.C., and I can’t even convince some of my friends right here in the cities to come to a fundraising party. And here I am: went from being an all-talk sort of feminist pacifist to planning civil disobedience and spraying NO WAR NO RNC all over the place and I can’t understand how all these Minnesotans can keep still, keep doing what they’ve always been doing, when Iraqis are dying, when lives are in upheaval. I start getting nervous because the cops have all these Tasers and they are raiding houses and arresting folks for owning cleaning supplies and maps of St. Paul. But I know why, why I am doing this, and I am ready.

SEPT. 1

Get up early for breakfast with three co-conspirators, deep breath and next thing you know we are loading up five buses and charging to the Capitol and all over the lawn are all sorts of people with giant puppets, pictures of dead soldiers, Bush masks, cameras, posters, and one guy on stilts, and people are speaking, presenting anti-war arguments from every perspective you can imagine, and soon we are marching and my cousin is here from North Dakota holding a big sparkly peace sign and she screams “ain’t no power like the power of the people cause the power of the people won’t stop,” and it could not be much truer than right at this moment, and I feel like dancing but can’t because my job is to marshal, which means showing the cops we can take care of our own and don’t need them standing there in their Ninja Turtle gear (no badges showing or smiles or anything–any remnants of innocent trust in our police force is shattered by this robotic presence that is all too willing to use their new toys), but there were just shit-tons of them, so my best friend and I put ourselves between the riot police and the peace, and inched along that way toward the convention–

You know, I never even saw the building. I felt compelled to stay in front of the police, felt like the sort of barrier a breeze might knock over, but rooted, knowing that here I am doing something– a piece of movement, stretching out my arms for the mad old ladies scolding the cops, ‘you all should be ashamed,’ for the little red white and blue dog; for the shirtless boy who called out ‘you have nipples too, under your riot gear’ for the Iraqis, for the soldiers, for myself.