revolution! we are in the midst of a great turning and it is an auspicious time to be alive

From Ascent Magazine 
by john malkin

adam avruskin

The revolutionary movement for sustaining life is unfolding and blossoming here and now. In fact, it is inevitable and exactly what we are made for. This is the message from Joanna Macy, long-time activist, Buddhist scholar and philosopher of general systems theory and deep ecology. Through empathy and compassion — connecting with ourselves and others — we are consciously turning a critical, troubled time in the history of humankind into a life-enriching and life-sustaining interrelationship with the world. As Joanna puts it, it is now a time when it really matters what we think and how we act because our survival depends on it.
I first heard about Joanna during my travels in Australia in the late 1980s. I was staying at a small communal farm nestled in the tropical rainforest, planting and harvesting organic food and hand-building mud-brick houses. One day we engaged in A Council of All Beings, an illuminating ritual designed by Joanna and Australian rainforest activist John Seed to enhance connection with the earth and all of life. It is deep ecology through direct experience. We explored letting go of our human-centred awareness and experimented with empathically opening to the interconnectedness of all beings.
Following a guide familiar with the process, we acted out the evolutionary journey of this planet and opened to the joy and pain of the beings with whom we share this earth. The exercises had us identify with a sentient being of our choice — butterfly or dolphin, for example — and we explored the world from that perspective. The day culminated with each of us wearing a handmade mask that we’d crafted with natural materials to represent our chosen creature — a heartfelt rendering of the suffering experienced by myriad species that face a world polluted with so many toxins.
Despair and fear are among the emotional toxins that Joanna helps others transform through compassion, connection and action. She leads workshops worldwide that use Buddhist teachings and the wisdom of living systems theory to inspire people to connect with their feelings and needs, explore impermanence, experience interdependence and develop creative collaborations to sustain life.
Through her books and workshops, Joanna reminds us that we change as we change the world, that the world is in us and we are in it. The old paradigm way of thinking that says we must choose between addressing our own suffering or addressing the suffering of the world is now torn open and seen as the illusion that it always was.
Joanna Macy’s book World As Lover, World As Self has recently been re-released with new material by Parallax Press (2007). Her other books include Coming Back To Life: Practices to Reconnect our Lives, Our World; Rilke’s Book of Hours, which she translated with Anita Barrows; and her memoir, Widening Circles. I spoke with Joanna at her home in Berkeley, California.

interview

John Malkin Joanna Macy, I am very pleased to be here with you in person.
Joanna Macy It is a delight. Welcome to my home.
John You have said that we are living in a time of a Great Turning. You call it the third turning of the wheel of dharma, a time when we are experiencing a revolutionary shift from a society based on industrial growth to one based on life sustainability. What evidence makes you feel that this shift is occurring and how is this view different from simply having hope?
Joanna I am so glad that you are starting with that because the concept of Great Turning has been of enormous help to me and my colleagues around the world, particularly at a moment when, on the surface of things, there is so much bad news and many setbacks. Environmental controls are being eroded, military contracts are being awarded and preemptive war is the order of the day.
Many great thinkers of our era have been teachers to me. They see that we are in the midst of a revolution that is as significant in its magnitude as two other recent revolutions. One is the agricultural revolution, which took centuries; and much later came the industrial revolution, which was quicker. Now, right on the heels of those revolutions, comes this revolution.
John Why is the current revolution inevitable?
Joanna It is inevitable because the industrial growth society is not sustainable. We are already on overshoot, as we say in systems thinking. Or, it is a “runaway system,” where we have already exceeded the renewable limits of the resources and have already exceeded the capacity to absorb the wastes that we have dumped into air, soil, water and earth. So we have just a little time left. We cannot continue at this rate.
Then we can look around and see that this revolution is happening particularly in certain dimensions. It has been useful to think of them in three dimensions. The first is in the holding actions to slow the damage, what many people think of as activism. The second is in the new institutions, such as organic farming and alternative health care. And finally, the third dimension is the perceptual shift in consciousness.
This revolution is happening and we don’t know if it will succeed or not. And that is a very useful thing to confront and recognize right on. There are no guarantees in life. And we don’t know if the systems that sustain life will unravel, thanks to our assaults upon them, before the life-sustaining society structures really are set in place. But that is always the case. When you put seeds in the ground, you don’t know if you are going to have a bumper crop. Or if you go into labour, you don’t know if you are going to have a healthy baby. So we have this enormous privilege in our time of being alive in a historical moment when what we do — how we relate, how we think, how we move ourselves about — has enormous effects. That is a great gift. A sense of meaning for our lives is right there and is something quite grand.
I just want to tell you this quote I heard the other day: “The essence of an adventure is not to know the outcome. The essence of a joyous adventure is not to need to know the outcome.” This is the great adventure of our time and it can transform every part of our life. And in the meanwhile, our hearts break all over the place, as we see the huge losses that are being incurred. We can’t stop those losses. We can’t stop all of them, so our hearts are breaking, our minds are opening, and our hearts are opening. We are weaving connections for the future.
John Many people seem to have become depressed and afraid, particularly since the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the subsequent wars on Afghanistan and Iraq. Many people agree that there has been a lot of destruction and dysfunction in our world, in our social, economic and ecological structures. We don’t know if we are going to manage through this. That in itself creates a lot of fear and distress in people and there can be the idea that it is too late to reverse the destruction of the earth. What do we do with that feeling?
Joanna We can realize that our very sorrow for the world, our dread for what might happen for the future beings and for our children and their children, our outrage at what is happening — all of these, which I summarize as “our pain for the world,” are actually evidence of our interconnectedness. Otherwise we wouldn’t care so much.
Now the mainstream thinking would have us privatize this grief and think that we are personally maladjusted or something. But this grief actually springs from deep caring. It is a shift that happens when you realize your sadness, the depth of sorrow — my God, what we’re doing to each other! Look how we are deregulating clean air acts and pumping poisons into the atmosphere, creating so many hundred thousand more cases of bronchitis.
To even feel a little grief is actually good news for you because it shows that you are not sealed off. You are not morally autistic. It matters to you. You are capable of suffering with your world. In every spiritual tradition the capacity to “suffer with” — the literal meaning of compassion — is honoured.
John But how do we know when to reach deeper into one’s own pain and into the pain of the world around us or when to let go of that and move on? I think that in our culture, we are particularly conditioned to want to push away the painful experiences and try to have as many pleasurable experiences as possible.
Joanna The only thing to watch out for here is if you’re afraid of the pain. That is where you get into trouble. It is not that you should be actively seeking to feel lousy about our prospects and to sink into the bottomless pit of sorrow. But you have to keep on going. You acknowledge that it is there without being afraid of it. I would say using the breath, the breathing through, helps a great deal. I always teach that in my books and in my workshops.
This is a time to stay present to what’s happening in our world, and it is really hard to do alone. We are social animals and now more then ever, we need each other. We need that companionship on the way, to help us know that we’re not crazy.
John There seems almost to be a crisis in knowing what truth is now. This is accompanied by the idea that, “Well, I don’t know if this effort I am making will see success anyway.” You touched on that earlier, with a lot of the work that we do to end suffering, we don’t know how it will turn out. Also, I think of Gandhi. He entitled his autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth. He viewed life as an experiment without knowing what will happen.
Joanna You don’t need to know. Don’t you find it really boring to hang out with people who think they have the answer? I mean, what is duller than that? Curiosity enlivens us and we cannot be genuinely curious if we think we know it all.
I have a friend who says, “Things seem to be getting worse and worse and better and better, faster and faster.” Well, as things get worse and worse, there is a temptation to get absolutely furious at the people in power who are making decisions that bring so much suffering. Or who are buying the politicians. There is a tendency to demonize them and I want to acknowledge how grateful I am to the Buddhadharma for offering me ways of being able to look at the perpetrators of great suffering and not demonize them.
The roots of suffering are not this person, this politician, this CEO or this terrorist or whatever! The roots of suffering are mistakes the mind makes. They are delusion, ignorance, craving and hatred. That has been such a huge teaching in its resonance, in my life and the lives of so many colleagues. Especially when you see how, in our time, there are institutionalized forms of greed, hatred and delusion. And they are powerful. But they’re not flesh and blood.
John There is still a dominant tendency in activism or in political change to attempt to remove those in power with the intention of gaining power to use that power better.
Joanna You bet! That is called “turning over the dung heap”! (Laughter)
John (Laughter)
Joanna Everything will be great, just put me in there, too! But it is the structures that need change. You get into the way it is structured, the rules of the game. Now, in the rules of the industrial growth society, if the CEO of a corporation tries to make decisions based on the sustainability of his raw materials, he can be ousted by the shareholders.
As we see in the Great Turning, this is one of the most ingeniously inventive times of our whole human story. There are so many new structures and perspectives that are springing up. And at the same time, there is such a radical extension of self-interest. People in every line of work — from radiologists and anti-nuclear activists, to permaculturists, farmers and the economists with their alternative currencies — are taking part in this great adventure of the revolution of our time.
John You are speaking about a very different sort of revolution than people were talking about fifty years ago. The idea of revolution is changing. Along with that, ideas about power are changing. You wrote, and I really appreciate this, “Power adheres not in any entity, but in the relationship between entities.”
Joanna Oh, you got it! The revolution in our time is a cognitive one as well as a spiritual one. That is why I got so excited about general systems theory. It reveals that, in terms of our intellectual understanding of how reality is structured, we are shifting from a “stuff” based view of reality to a process view. It is like shifting from noun to verb. The same thing happened at the time of the Buddha. That is why he didn’t want to get stuck on whether you have an atman or not, whether you have a permanent self or not. He said, “We are process. Karma. We are something happening.” Karma means action. We are action. Power occurs as we act and it occurs when we relate. It is very liberating!
John There can be the view that one must choose between “being” and “doing” or between being active in social change or involved in spiritual growth, or addressing our own suffering versus addressing the suffering of the world. I think that there is a similar dichotomy present between beliefs in science versus religion or mind over matter. Do you think there is a possibility of a third, combined, non-dualistic way of viewing and living in the world?
Joanna Well, that is one of the exciting things about being alive right now. That old dichotomy has been breached. It is so boring, anyway! (Laughter) There were years and years where there was debate whether it was more important to get enlightened first or get psychoanalyzed first or get your head straight first before you took action, before you climbed in the barricades. Or vice versa: “I must stand on the barricades first in order to earn the right to focus on myself. I have to take care of these terrible injustices. I can’t have any rest while there are still the homeless on the streets, and then I can sit on the zafu.”
I think these ideas are tragic and that this kind of polarization has turned a lot of people from doing either well. The Great Turning helps me to see that the truth is that you have to do both. And in a way, you have to do both at the same time. At least not see them as sequential, that you do one first.
This revolution we are in takes all of these norms and shakes them up and intermingles them so that you don’t know when you take an action whether you are going to be finding yourself in the midst of great mysterious awakening when you are just going out to collect signatures for a petition. The change is so deep and it will affect every part of our lives. It won’t be easy, but it won’t be all that hard because a different kind of strength comes through us.
John Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. both embraced social change and spiritual practice. King spoke of an “inescapable network of mutuality.” In Buddhism this is referred to as mutual causality or interdependence. Can you explain a little bit of what that view is?
Joanna It is really so radically new for us. It actually is the view that indigenous peoples and all humans have had — in our pre-industrial, pre-imperial, and actually perhaps, pre-patriarchal times — in seeing the natural world and ourselves as parts of each other. We are intricately, actively and organically interrelated as one body. It is like seeing that this world, which seems to be made up of all these separate entities, is actually connected through invisible relationships. These relationships are invisible to the physical eye. Just as an ecosystem is invisible to the physical eye, so is a society. The aspects that make it a society are invisible to the eye.
Interdependence, that view of the Buddha and of the systems thinkers, invites us to see the web of life in which we cohere and to honour it, to live according to its laws, because there are laws. “As we do unto others, so it is done unto us.” And this isn’t just some nice old wives’ axiom or moral. That is actually the way it works. It is the way an ecosystem works; what you do to others happens to you. We are not aloof from what we do. In my workshops, we get into the question of “What is a living system?” It is a process, a dance. Like a whirlpool or a flame, it is in constant transformation. An image that we use a great deal is that we are like a nerve cell in a neural net. So then, as living systems, we are in constant change, thanks to our relationships. There is a constant flow-through of matter, energy and information. It is a physical flow-through and a mental flow-through. And we discover that we are conditioning each other all of the time. This is true of life; it is reciprocal.
Once we understand it, this has immediate psychological effects on our notion of self-interest. My self-interest can’t possibly end with my skin. When we exterminate or contaminate places like the Amazonian rain basin or San Francisco Bay, we are doing that to ourselves. This is the heart of the spiritual, intellectual adventure of our time. We are waking up to the vastness of our mutual belonging, and the vastness of the mind that is available to us in that opening.
John Why is it still worthwhile to cultivate a relationship with the “world as lover,” to “fall in love with the world,” as you put it? How do we do that?
Joanna Well, I think that we’re made for it, for one thing. I think that we are built to take delight in our world with our senses of sight, smell and touch. We have tremendous capacity to connect with each other and the world around us. And we’re miserable when we don’t. It is hard to connect when you are scared. This is the great tragedy of fear.
We must not fall prey to wanting to exempt ourselves from pain or think that we should be feeling great or on top of the world all of the time. Not that I want us to wallow in suffering, but just to see that our very grief is an evidence of our love. It is the other side of the coin. Our pain and love for the world, and our reverence for life and our grief over it is present.
How can we toss in the sponge? Who are we to say it is too late? Who are we, with our finitude and discouragement and our grumpy moods and our bleeding hearts? Just look at today’s news, oh my God! But there is something huge happening for life and if we free ourselves from being dependent on the visible results of our own actions, and just take part in the dance to offer what we can, with curiosity and gladness for the opportunity — then, well, that’s enough for me.
Learn more about the systems of thought that influence Joanna Macy's work: Deep Ecology and Human Systems Theory

deep ecology

At the root of Deep Ecology is the Buddhist-inspired notion of the “ecological self,” an expanded identity beyond skin and ego. The basic idea is that the human identity can widen to encapsulate the people, city and world around us. Deep Ecology is a term that was coined by Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess in the 1970s. It marked a departure from traditional environmentalism in that Deep Ecology aimed to identify root causes of the environmental crisis, rather than the symptoms. Other leading thinkers in the Deep Ecology movement include Bill Devall and George Sessions. The Deep Ecology approach encourages humans to look deeply at their sense of human superiority, or “anthropocentrism.” As a philosophical movement, Deep Ecology has been condensed into eight main principles, which call on humanity to not jeopardize the richness and diversity of other life-forms except to satisfy vital human needs. Joanna Macy and rainforest activist John Seed have applied Deep Ecology on an experiential level, to help people uncover and feel their wider identity with the living world, and in so doing find their power to act on the world’s — or the eco-self’s — behalf.

living systems theory

(also known as general systems theory, systems theory or cybernetics)
Systems Theory developed out of biology, through observation of the biosphere and ecological relationships as wholes, interrelated patterns and flows of energy, rather than disconnected parts that act upon each other. The founder of System’s Theory, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, called it “a way of seeing.” Systems Theory is now used prevalently in the social sciences as well as the sciences to describe psychological, social and other systems. In essence, Systems Theory outlines four characteristics of living systems:

1. living systems are wholes that are not reducible to their components (the qualities of water are different than those of oxygen and hydrogen)
2. they are self-balancing and self-regulating
3. they evolve in complexity
4. each system is a holon: a whole within
   a larger whole

One of the most famous applications of Systems Theory was James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis, which in the 1970s demonstrated how the earth’s atmosphere is a living system which self-regulates as an intelligent organism. As Joanna Macy puts it, “The Earth is alive, mind is pervasive, all beings are our relations. This realization changes everything. It changes our perceptions of who we are and what we need, and how we can trustfully act together for a decent, noble future.”
1 Joanna Macy, Coming Back to Life, p. 40
— Rebekah Hart

 

The Silence of the Stars

When Laurens van der Post one night
In the Kalihari Desert told the Bushmen
He couldn't hear the stars
Singing, they didn't believe him.  They looked at him,
Half-smiling.  They examined his face
To see whether he was joking
Or deceiving them.  Then two of those small men
Who plant nothing, who have almost
Nothing to hunt, who live
On almost nothing, and with no one
But themselves, led him away
From the crackling thorn-scrub fire
And stood with him under the night sky
And listened.  One of them whispered,
Do you not hear them now?
And van der Post listened, not wanting
To disbelieve, but had to answer,
No.  They walked him slowly
Like a sick man to the small dim
Circle of firelight and told him
They were terribly sorry,
And he felt even sorrier
For himself and blamed his ancestors
For their strange loss of hearing,
Which was his loss now.  On some clear nights
When nearby houses have turned off their visions,
When the traffic dwindles, when through streets
Are between sirens and the jets overhead
Are between crossings, when the wind
Is hanging fire in the fir trees,
And the long-eared owl in the neighboring grove
Between calls is regarding his own darkness,
I look at the stars again as I first did
To school myself in the names of constellations
And remember my first sense of their terrible distance,
I can still hear what I thought
At the edge of silence where the inside jokes
Of my heartbeat, my arterial traffic,
The C above high C of my inner ear, myself
Tunelessly humming, but now I know what they are:
My fair share of the music of the spheres
And clusters of ripening stars,
Of the songs from the throats of the old gods
Still tending even tone-deaf creatures
Through their exiles in the desert.

~ David Wagone

Do you hear them?  Sometimes, out there in the back country, I think I might.

Love,
Riyana

The Police Are Rioting by David Rovics

(from Songwriters's Notebook, David's personal blog) 
 
If any elements of the corporate media have been paying any attention to what's been happening on the streets of Pittsburgh over the past few days I haven't noticed, so I thought I'd write my own account.

There is a popular assumption asserted ad nauseum by our leaders in government, by our school text books and by our “mainstream” media that although many other countries don't have freedom of speech and freedom of assembly – such as Iran or China – we do, and it's what makes us so great. Anybody who has spent much time trying to exercise their First Amendment rights in the US now or at any other time since 1776 knows first-hand that the First Amendment looks good on paper but has little to do with reality.

Dissent has never really been tolerated in the USA. As we've seen in recent election cycles even just voting for a Democratic presidential candidate and having your vote count can be quite a challenge – as anyone who has not had their head in sand knows, Bush lost both elections and yet kept his office fraudulently twice. But for those who want to exercise their rights beyond the government-approved methods – that is, their right to vote for one of two parties, their right to bribe politicians (“lobby”) if they have enough money, or their right to write a letter to the editor in the local Murdoch-owned rag, if it hasn't closed shop yet – the situation is far worse.

Let's go back in history for a minute. After the victory of the colonies over Britain in the Revolutionary War, the much-heralded US Constitution included no rights for citizens other than the rights of the landed gentry to run the show. This changed as a direct result of a years-long rebellion of the citizens of western Massachusetts that came to be known as Shays' Rebellion. Shays' Rebellion scared the pants off the powers-that-be and they did what the powers-that-be do and have always done all over the world – passed some reforms in order to avert a situation where the rich would lose more than just western Massachusetts. They passed the Bill of Rights.

Fast forward more than a century. Ostensibly this great democracy had had the Bill of Rights enshrined in law for quite a long time now. Yet in 1914 a supporter of labor unionism could not make a soapbox speech on a sidewalk in this country without being beaten and arrested by police for the crime of disturbing the peace, blocking the sidewalk or whatever other nonsense the cops made up at the time.

If you read the mainstream media of the day you would be likely to imagine that these labor agitators trying to give speeches on the sidewalks of Seattle or Los Angeles were madmen bent on the destruction of civilization. Yet it is as a direct result of these brave fighters that we have things like Social Security, a minimum wage, workplace safety laws, and other reforms that led, at least until the “Reagan Revolution,” to this country having a thriving middle class (the lofty term we use when we're referring to working class people who can afford to go to college and buy a house).

Reforms are won due to these struggles – proof over and over that democracy is, more than anything, in the streets. Yet the fundamental aspect of these social movements that have shaped our society – these social movements that have at least sometimes and to some degree ultimately been praised by the ruling clique and their institutions, such as the Civil Rights movement – freedom of speech and assembly, remain a criminal offense.

Fast forward another century to Pittsburgh, 2009. For those who may have thought that the criminalization of dissent was to be a hallmark of the Bush years, think again. Dissent was a criminal offense before Bush, and it quite evidently still is today.

I was born in 1967, so I can't comment first-hand on things that happened far from the suburbs where I grew up as a kid, but I can tell you unequivocally from direct experience that I have witnessed police riots before, during, and since the Bush years. Most recently, last Friday in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (If you want to read about previous police riots I have witnessed go to http://www.songwritersnotebook.blogspot.com.)

In a nutshell, here's how it went down. I drove to Pittsburgh from a gig in Allentown the night before, all the while listening to BBC, NPR, CNN, etc. on my satellite radio. Naturally, the coming G20 talks in Pittsburgh were in the news. The most powerful people in the world, the leaders of the world's richest nations, were meeting in Pittsburgh to decide the fate of the planet, to decide how to deal with the economic crisis, the climate crisis, and other crises caused by industrial capitalism gone mad, crises which affect each and every one of us intimately, crises about which many of us naturally want to do something – crises about which we would at least like to voice our concerns.

Notably absent from the news coverage is anything about the lawsuits that the ACLU had to file in order to force the local authorities to allow any demonstrations or marches to happen at all. Permits applied for months ago by state senators, peace groups, women's groups and others were only granted in the past couple weeks. Many other permits were never granted. It doesn't say anything about applying for a permit in the First Amendment, and in many other more democratic countries than ours no permit is required for citizens to assemble. In many European countries where I have spent a lot of time, if citizens choose to have an assembly in the streets the role of the police is to escort the march in order to divert traffic and keep things safe, and no permit is required. But not in the US – not in Philadelphia or Los Angeles in 2000, not in Miami in 2003, not in Denver or St. Paul in 2008 and not in Pittsburgh last week.

While various progressive organizations were trying hard to work with the intransigent authorities, other groups took the sensible (but – in the US – dangerous) position that this is supposed to be a democracy and we should not need to apply for a permit so that the authorities could tell us where and when we could and could not protest.

The first nonpermitted march that I heard about was Thursday afternoon. I should mention that I heard about it, but only with a certain amount of difficulty, because I and many other people I talked to in Pittsburgh were having strange problems with our cell phones, problems which started in whatever states we came from and continued in Pittsburgh right up until yesterday. People I talked to – friends and fellow engaged members of society such as Cindy Sheehan, Joshua White, Sarah Wellington and others – reported the same phenomenae. Every time one of us would receive a call we couldn't hear the callers, though we could hear our own voices echoing back to us. When we'd call back it usually would work then. Coincidence? Sure, maybe.

Reports I heard over the phone on Thursday from people I talked to were in between bouts of catching breath and running from the police. Reports on the local media (the only “mainstream” media doing any serious coverage of the protests, as usual, mainly because they were intimately connected to the traffic reports) said the police were “restrained” (what else are they supposed to be?) until the march reached a certain point, at which time it was declared to be an unlawful assembly and the crowd was “dispersed.” How? There was no mention.

Usually – and outrageously enough – whether in North America, Europe or other places I've been, if there's a meeting of the global elite happening you are not allowed in unless you're part of the gang or you're a lobbyist or a (officially-sanctioned) journalist. Usually a perimeter is formed by the police, Secret Service, FBI, and whichever other “intelligence” agencies are there, that you can't cross. This was also the case in Pittsburgh, but like Miami in 2003, St. Paul in 2008, and other occasions in recent years, the authorities were not just being “on the defensive” and maintaining a perimeter around the meetings. They were on the offensive.

If this happened in Iran or China it would be called martial law – but here in America we never have martial law, apparently, even when the military and the police are jointly patrolling the streets with armored vehicles and weapons of all descriptions and attacking people for the crime of being on the streets. Any gathering other than the permitted march (which was a great, festive march involving many thousands of participants from all walks of life, albeit with a ridiculously large, armored and menacing police “escort”) was declared an unlawful assembly and then attacked. I saw it myself on Thursday night and then again, much worse, on Friday night.

And what kind of unlawful assembly are we talking about? Hundreds of students and other folks, a few of whom may have broken a window or two at some point during the evening in the course of being pursued by violence-prone riot police, who were ultimately gathering on the grass on the campus of the university in the Oakland district of Pittsburgh. They had no weapons, they were unarmed, mostly youth, mostly college students from various parts of the country, along with perhaps an equal group of local college students, most of whom were just curious and didn't even have anything to do with the protests – many of whom in fact were just wondering what there is to protest about! They soon found out one thing to protest about – police brutality and active suppression of our Constitutional rights.

I have no doubt that the Pittsburgh police (and cops present from, of all places, Miami as well as other cities) will in the end have radicalized many local students who had previously been apolitical, and for this I applaud them.

On Friday night I went to a free concert a local community radio station was hosting on the campus. It ended around 8 pm. Over the course of the next two hours there were more and more riot cops arriving. Why? Because they knew what I knew – that a few hundred young folks were planning on gathering on the green at 10 pm, many of whom came by bicycle, after having engaged in a criminal, nonpermitted mass bike ride around the city. Around 9:30 I had to leave to go to a different neighborhood, and I returned in my rental car around 11 pm along with Cindy, Joshua and Sarah.

If the police had made announcements for everyone to disperse (as I'm sure they had at some point) we were too late for that. What we arrived in the midst of was a police riot. We parked on the street in front of the campus and walked on the sidewalk on the campus. Within seconds we saw a young man on a bicycle, a student at that very university, being violently tackled by two riot cops, thrown down to the ground with the police on top of him. All of the police all of the time were dressed in black armor head to toe, many of them driving armored vehicles. Earlier in the evening Cindy and Joshua and I were hanging around one of the armored vehicles while Cindy harassed the cops and soldiers strutting around there, telling them her son died in Iraq because he didn't have an armored vehicle like this one. (They studiously ignored her, of course.)

The young man with the two cops on top of him and his bicycle cried for help, perhaps not realizing that there wasn't much anyone could do other than take his name, which he was too freaked out to pronounce in a way that anybody could understand. Within seconds we found ourselves running from a group of cops, along with a bunch of young folks who had their hands in the air, hoping vainly that this might deter the police from attacking them. It didn't. Off the campus, a block away, police were running in groups in different directions, penning people in, throwing them to the ground, hitting them with clubs, handcuffing them and arresting them.

The four of us (an affinity group I suppose) got separated. Sarah and I were running and were about to be boxed in by police coming in different directions. After I was myself clubbed in the back by a cop with his truncheon, we ducked into the front of the lobby of the Holiday Inn and started talking with guests, other protesters, and various students who had also gone there because they were quite naturally afraid to be on the streets. Fifty feet away in either direction the police were assaulting and arresting people, individually and in small groups, picking them off the sidewalks.

Cindy and Joshua had ended up running in a different direction, through clouds of tear gas. They ducked around a corner just in time to watch dozens of young people, running away, being shot methodically with rubber-coated steel bullets in the back. One friend of mine there from Minneapolis said he saw someone who had ten welts on his back from being shot ten times. On both Thursday and Friday nights the authorities used their fancy new LRAD weapons, a sound-based weapon that causes people to flee because it hurts their eardrums so badly. (At future demos, look out for the noise-cancelling headphones accompanying the goggles...)

At every turn you could hear the sound of shocked students who had never seen or heard about this sort of thing happening, who were struggling to come to terms with what they were experiencing. They're just attacking anybody on or near the campus, they're not differentiating between us and the protesters! Some of them seemed to think that it might be OK to club protesters as long as you don't club the students, others had concluded that attacking people for hanging out on the grass was over the top regardless. (This is not an easy thing for a sorority girl from a wealthy suburb to come to terms with, so I was duly impressed at hearing these heretofore clueless youth having such epiphanies.) What was particularly entertaining was the first-hand realization that the local students could not themselves differentiate between “their” fellow students and the other ones who had come from out of town. How could they? It is, in fact, completely impossible to tell the difference between a college student from Pittsburgh and one from Toledo, even if they do have very different politics...

Eventually, by 1 am or so, Cindy and Joshua were able to move without being fired on, and they joined Sarah and I in the comfort of the patio at the Holiday Inn. The people who worked at the Inn, at least some of them, were trying to keep protesters out. The thing was, though, that if you could afford to buy a drink you were no longer a protester, but a guest of the bar, which is what we were. A little while before Cindy and Joshua arrived a convoy of limousines and other fancy cars pulled up in front of the hotel, and then security locked the doors. You could still go in or out, though, just not without security opening the doors for you.

We continued going in and out of the bar, passing by none other than Kevin Rudd, the Prime Minister of Australia, and his entourage, who were all staying that night in the Holiday Inn (of all relatively downscale places to stay!) and watching some big Australian rugby match on TV. In our confusion at having just escaped the riot police only to find ourselves ten feet away from the Australian Prime Minister, Cindy, Joshua, Sarah and I were all at a complete loss as far as what we should say to the guy. We all talked a lot about what we could say, but by the time we were getting close to coming up with a plan he had gone to bed.

The next day, Saturday, I joined a couple dozen friends and acquaintances outside the county jail where people had spent the night, waiting to get out on bond. Most folks got out on bond, others were (and perhaps still are) being held on a higher bond, waiting for friends and relatives and comrades to come up with the money. Talking to people just out of jail I heard more horror stories. One man, Gabriel, told of being kept outside between 2 and 6 am in the rain, and then being held in a cell where he was handcuffed to a chair along with another man, not able to stand or lay down, for 13 hours.

I left Pittsburgh in the late afternoon from the jail, heading towards New England to continue this northeastern concert tour. In Connecticut this morning I got a call from Cindy Sheehan, who had just gone to the Emergency Room because she was having trouble breathing. People around her the night before had been vomiting profusely as a result of the tear gas. Having suffered injury in the past from getting gassed in Quebec City, I knew exactly why she was in the ER.

There will be lawsuits, and the lawsuits will be won. People like Cindy and Gabriel might make a bit of money from their suffering at the hands of the authorities. Not to worry, though – the authorities have a multi-million dollar slush fund to deal with these lawsuits. They expect them, and they don't care. This is democracy in the USA. It's always been like this, under Democrats or Republicans. If you doubt me, it's quite simply because you don't know your history.

Protest, however, matters. The end of slavery, the banning of child labor, the fact that most working class people live to be past 30 these days, is all a direct result of protest – of democracy happening in the streets. Marches, strikes, rebellions, and all manner of other extra-parliamentary activities. The authorities are well aware that democracy in the streets, no matter what they say – that's why dissent is criminalized. Because as soon as we are allowed to have a taste of our own power, everything can change. It has, and it will again, but the powers-that-be will continue to do what they do best – try hard to make sure we don't know how powerful we are. They require the consent of the governed, the consent of those students in Pittsburgh, and they have now lost it, at least for many of those who were in Oakland last Friday night. They would have lost it a lot more if they had done mass arrests or used live ammunition, which is why they didn't do that.

We don't have freedom of speech or assembly and we never have, but it is through all kinds of “unlawful assemblies,” from Shays' Rebellion to the Civil Rights movement, that change happens. So here's to the next Pittsburgh, wherever it may be. I hope to see you there, on the streets, where our fate truly lies.

Going out with a bang... last day at the G20.

This whole week I’ve been wondering, on and off again, about why I’m here.  Today I finally found out the reason.

We left around 11AM for a unpermitted feeder march hosted by the CMU kids about climate change.  We’d been hoping to do our theater piece downtown earlier that morning, as a sort of distraction action for a banner drop, but as many things are here, things did not go as planned.  Flexibility.  That’s one trait that you either have, or cultivate, as an activist.  No banner drop, no theater piece, but no worries.  We decided to pack all of our props into our backpacks and bring them with, just in case.

The Climate Change march was perfect — there was a host of kids with marching drums there, keeping the beat and enlivening the energy, and for the nine zillionth time I found myself wishing desperately that I had brought a lighter drum.  Jason and I did bring a drum, but we kept it in the tent, because its deceptively heavy for its small size.  In fact, after all of the running around in the streets from the police yesterday, we’d lightened our packs considerably for today.  We didn’t expect too much trouble, even with the less-than-legal marches that we were doing here and there, but even so it seemed like a good idea.

So, the kids kept beat with the drums while other students dressed up in hazmat suits with signs that read things like “Climate Change, FAIL” and “There is no Planet B” on their chests and backs.  I brought the canary in his cage out again, and many of us dressed up in our finest banner-capes that read things like “community,” “change,” “power,” and “grow” set against brightly colored backdrops.  Infused with this kind of creative, bright, quirky energy, we set off from the campus towards downtown, where the larger permitted march was to begin.

Although the Climate Change march held a much different energy than the Black Bloc march the day before, it soon showed that it, too, had claws — like the claws of some sort of brightly colored rainforest-living bird of prey, stretching its wings as it clambered through the neighborhoods of Pittsburgh.  We started on the sidewalk, took one lane of traffic, then a second, and eventually the whole street.  This, of course, brought the cops.  They spent some time zooming up and down the farthest left lane of traffic to clear it in their cars and vans, sirens going off, but other than that seemed content to let us go where we were going.  And so, we did.  We swelled through the poor neighborhood, where our chants were met with enthusiasm and warnings (or blessings, depending on how you look at it), “Don’t let them stomp you!”  We swelled up into downtown past the University of Pittsburgh, where the cops had used tear-gas on the students the night before in order to clear out the dark courtyards, and called for them to join us.  “It’s our future, it’s your future, come out, come out.”  “Off the sidewalks and into the streets!  Off the sidewalks and into the streets!”  Most of them stared at us with confused, or even excited, looks on their faces, but did not step off the curb. 

No matter.  We kept going, grooving to the drum beats, holding our ground with our three lanes (which, even though one lane was open, pretty effectively stopped traffic.  Most of the drivers seemed good-natured enough about it, although more than one expressed their angry frustration with loud voices and lewd hand gestures).  It felt so freeing, to be marching without lines of riot cops everywhere, to take the streets with our voices and feet, to truly manifest the ideal of freedom of expression in a menagerie of creative ways.  And that creativity, that abundance of diverse voices, grew exponentially once we reached the rest of the march.  It was astounding.  There were all kinds of people there: labor union people wearing hard-hats and t-shirts; Code Pink ladies with their cute fuchsia dresses and gray hair; a whole host of Tibetans with flags and traditional garb; hula hoopers for peace; a motley group with a huge white dove puppet; you name it, it was there.  I saw quite a few signs about universal health care, specifically single-payer health care, as well as ones about climate change, jobs, and economic class issues.  Seeds of Peace came, too, renewed and ready to serve the thousands — literally thousands — of protestors who had come.  It’s hard to say how many people were there, but most of the estimates that I heard were about 8,000.

Once we stepped off, we filled the streets for blocks and blocks.  At the front of the march was a group (I never found out who they were) carrying flags for hundreds of countries, all fluttering in the breeze that occasionally graced us with relief from the hot humid day.  Behind us was the Black Bloc, huge and intense and powerful in a way that I’ve never seen them before — all consolidated like that, I felt like I finally understood them in a way I never have before.  Their energy is proud and strong and direct, like a lion shaking its main, uncowed.  Sometimes they would shout things like “Basta aqui capitalista,” a short chant that gathered power very quickly; other times, the traditional “Who’s streets?  Our streets!”; or, amusingly whenever the cops were around, “You’re sexy, you’re cute, take off your riot suit!” 

As we made our way further into the downtown district, the police presence doubled, tripled, quadrupled.  I thought I’d seen lots of police before, but I have never seen anything like this.  Obama recently ended the summit with a speech that commended how “tranquil” this meeting was, but with 6,000 armed police officers, one can only imagine that would be the case.  One fellow on the news said that the last time Pittsburgh had as many on-the-ground troops present was when the President sent in the national guard to suppress the Homestead Revolt in the late 1800’s.  They were four and five rows thick down every block, armored heavily with rubber bullets, pepper spray, tear gas, rifles, dogs, sound cannons, batons, the works.  Every bank had a line of national guard out in front of it, and as we approached a new intersection we would encounter SWAT humvees, tanks, the black LRAT vehicles with their sound cannons, platoons of bike cops and mounted cops.  Even saying this cannot convey to you what it was like — how can I possibly convey what 6,000 fully armed, armored police officers is like?  It feels like marching through a tunnel of hot, bubbling, bristling imminent danger.  Nah, too abstract.  It feels like your insides are being pressed in from the energy of it, as if the walls were closing in on you.  Nah.  I guess its not something you can really get from reading about it.  Maybe some of these pictures will help.  At any rate, it was way more police than one would have imagined for a permitted march, or really for anything short of an invasion of extra-terrestrial beings. 

At one point a couple of us decided it was time for a yummy espresso break, and went off from the mid-point rally in seek of it.  The only thing open downtown — quite literally, the only thing open in the most bustling part of the city, in spite of whatever economic woes the g20 was there to address — was a Dunken Donuts.  This, in and of itself, is a sad sad thing.  Nonetheless, that’s the way it was, so I was forced to put my inner coffee-snob aside and just do it.  On the way there, we saw a group of cops motivating towards one part of the street, and decided to go take a look.  Coming towards us, solid and proud but in a totally different way than our masked companions, marched a band of protestors from Africa.  There were about 20 of them, coming very intentionally and illegally up the street, another feeder march for the big permitted march.  Like the student feeder march, the police were leaving them alone — but in a much more potentially volatile area, nearer to the convention center, and near all the centers of finance that the powers that be were so determined to protect.  I watched them with quiet awe as they chanted and walked up towards us, some wrapped in traditional garb, others holding flags.  They chanted first in a language I didn’t understand, then in English, demanding attention for human rights abuses.  All the while, the police simply watched, even though I knew they very much didn’t want them to go up the street they were on — I overheard one say to another, “If these people meet up with those other guys, the shit is going to hit the fan.”  Even so, they didn’t do anything.  The Africans had a purpose and strength that was palpable.  In that moment, I saw what Civil Disobedience is at its best, at its heart.  I saw the kind of power that I hope that I can cultivate in myself, that I dream of for the Pagan Cluster and the movement as a whole.  It’s the kind of power that cannot be touched by violence, and so does not have to resort to it.  It is as intense as the weapons the police carry and the conditioned hardness of their hearts and humanity.

We rejoined the big march (as did the Africans) and marched across the river, coming as close to the Convention Center on the bridge as we would be at any time before or after the G20 meetings.  Looking out over the railing at the glass-walled building, I realized that although we were still quite far I was actually in eyeshot of some of the most influential, powerful people in the world, and that they were right over there, making decisions that would effect billions of people and animals and other beings.  Somehow, with all of the protests and planning and processing, I had forgotten that was happening — not that it ever truly went away, but it stopped meaning anything emotionally to me.  Standing on that bridge, looking out across the water and to that fortress, I felt it for the first and only time.  Those people have the power to change things so that we either sink or swim, I thought.  There they are, using that power, totally sequestered and removed from all of us.  Even though my day had been wonderful and very meaningful, and that I knew good work was happening, I couldn’t say that what we’d been doing had been very meaningful to those people in that building, those people who can enact legislation and policies that will keep our world from tipping into ecological collapse or that can make healthcare available to everyone.  I was struck in that moment, stung into stillness, curiosity, frustration, awe.  I wanted to tap into my deep magic, to do something that would make a difference energetically and carry to them.  I said a prayer, but couldn’t think of anything beyond that.  And then the march moved on, and the moment was over.

I’ve been thinking a lot about power today, seeing it manifest strongly in many different ways: the creativity and quirkiness of the student march, the uncowed rebellion of the black bloc kids, the violence and ugliness of the police, the collected, unwavering purpose of the Africans, the communal of the permitted march, and the piercing intensity of those at the G20.  I’m not sure what it all means just yet, but I can feel how its impacted me and helped me to question my own innate connection to power and the tribal power of those I’m running with right now.  There’s still a lot to be done with all of this, to be unpacked and understood.  But some of that will have to wait for tomorrow.  Tonight, I’m interested in experiencing the power of connection and love — it’s the last night we’ll be here, because tomorrow we’re heading back home.

This is what a police state looks like...

Tears and Tear Gas

Twitter texts transcripts from our Comms people:

12:16 am - Units are responding to hotmetal bridge for reports of protestors gathering.

12:06 am – Student dorms blocked by police with weapons. 

Lots of police need Fuel, can’t find Fuel.  Trying to get Tanker Truck to fuel humvees.

11:51 am – Forbes and S. Craig, protestors breaking out windows.

Police not responding to other calls.  “All units are in Oakland.”

11:30 pm – RIOT POLICE MARCH DOWN FORBES, SENDING STUDENTS SPRINTING TOWARDS TOWERS.  TEAR GAS SHOT AT CROWD.

Giving dispersal order – probably 200 people at least there.  Almost entire perimeter is surrounded by riot cops. 

Near cathedral of learning & heinz chapel:  POLICE JUST PILED OUT OF BUDGET TRUCKS.  SOUND CANNONS BEING FIRED AT CROWD.  COPS HAVE GAS MASKS ON.

11:00 pm – Radical marching band playing on the steps of cathedral, and riot cops continue to launch smoke bombs at them. 

Gray 2000 Chrysler town and country w PA registration — get the fuck out of there!  The police are looking for you!


And so on...

* * * * *

I didn’t really want to go out dancing when it first came up tonight.  It was a really long day today — the first day we’ve seen chemical weapons (and no, just to end the tension right here and now, the cops did not stick to or even attempt to begin the “escalation of tactics” they mentioned to the press.  They went straight for the gas and this weird sound thing they have that makes you feel unbalanced and confused, followed by rubber bullets).  We set out in the afternoon with a student march from Carnegie Melon University and joined up with a bunch of Black Bloc kids on what Delylah, our medic and spokescouncil rep, was affectionately referring to as “the death march” -- an unpermitted march that involved going down a street with a river on one side and a cliffside down the other.  We had subdivided the cluster into two or three loose groups — the green group, those who desire to stay as safe as possible; the yellow group, in-between; and the red group, those who wanted to wade into the fray and see what’s going on, and yet, because we’re pagans and peaceful, also get out before things got all crazy.

Jason and I decided that we were more yellow than green, and, that decided, tramped off with the college students through an economically disadvantaged area to meet up with the Black Bloc cohort.  I was still feeling ambivalent about that, because it seemed to me that there wasn’t a strong message or intention to what we were doing, and that some property destruction and police violence would ensue.  But, that said, I wasn’t about to sit back with the Greenies while Jason was out there marching around with them, because doing so would be more painful to my psyche than rubber bullets by far. 

It was wonderful to march through the neighborhood: so many people there clearly supported us, and called out to us and honked there horns in support of our message, which although confused, still resonated with them.  Soon, however, the tone changed.  We wove through the streets, corralled here by the cops and then there, and finally being blocked in on two sides and given the order to disperse.  This announcement was followed by a weird, creepy beeping, kind of like a siren but somehow different.  Suddenly, I began to feel very afraid and ungrounded, even more so once I saw the plumes of tear gas up ahead at the front of the march.  Although it felt important to be with the cluster, I realized very quickly that I was almost as afraid of the Black Bloc people as I was the cops — not because I thought they’d attack me, obviously, but because I had heard rumors of many of them wearing football pads and helmets and being ready to physically attempt to take on the police, and I wanted to be nowhere near anything of the sort.  That’s not what I’m about, and breaking windows is not what I’m about.  And I’m certainly not about getting gassed and arrested for them. 

So once the heat got strong (on both sides, for with a crash, the first window — a Boston Market, of all things — was broken), I felt a very strong desire to take off.  In fact,  I was terrified.  The weird siren was going off in my ears and the gas was blowing up ahead, and there were riot cops with batons on both ends of the street.  After a brief debate with Jason, we took off down a side street, leaving the crowds and the cluster behind.  As soon as we emerged onto the next block, however, we saw the march running towards us, followed by another line of riot cops.  Jason swore under his breath and we took off again, attempting to run perpendicular to the march that seemed to follow us wherever we went. 

Meanwhile, people were coming out of there houses to see what was going on — old men, women with children, teenagers with gaps in their teeth.  “Get inside, get inside, there’s cops with tear gas,” we’d say, and they’d stare at us confused, and say, “What’s going on?”  But we couldn’t stop long enough to tell them.  We wove our way through the streets, getting further and further away from where we wanted to go and closer and closer to downtown Pittsburgh, which is where the g20 is actually meeting and is therefore the most heavily guarded area in the city right now.  Jason wanted to cross back towards where we’d come from, but my heart was still pounding from being up there, and I couldn’t stand the idea of going back there.  Eventually, though, it became obvious that we couldn’t go forward anymore, and we had to go back.

It was a trek back, and along the way, Jason and I started to squabble.  He hadn’t been afraid, apparently, and had only left because he’d seen how tripped out I was getting about the whole deal.  At first I was irritated with him, because he’d told me otherwise at the time — but then, as we continued to talk about it, I realized that I’d been much more triggered than I had first thought as soon as the police began to get violent.  I’d thought I was being reasonable, intelligently deciding to get out of there when things looked hot; but I wasn’t acting reasonable, or grounded, or like myself at all.  Every time we’d go over what happened, my story was different.  I needed to slow down, to think things over, but there was no time for that.  We had to keep going, to get back to our friends and regroup.   He kept asking me if I wanted to join the green group so that he could run off with the yellow group and not worry about me, but I didn’t want that.  I didn’t want to be afraid, especially to be overwhelmingly, out-of-my-body afraid.

And so, as we walked, I started to ground out the energy through my feet, noticing each step connecting me to the earth.  I touched the part of my body where I have the feeling of groundedness and the memory of the redwoods at camp anchored into my body, and said the magic word I say to ground.  I walked, and grounded.  We would run into cops, and my breath would quicken until we were safely away again, and then I’d go back to grounding. 

Eventually, we did get back to our friends and made our way (appropriately) to Friendship park, where half of the march had gathered to chill and decide what to do next.  There, I had an opportunity to check in with Lisa, who’s been doing this stuff for a long time.  She knew I was getting tripped out, and promised to look after me and reminded that we were all committed to being safe and unarrested this day, no matter what “color” we were running at the time.  Somehow, between grounding out the energy and her support, I found a measure of my courage again.  It was only later that I learned that the strange sirens I’d been hearing were sound cannons — devices that play a subsonic noise that disrupts the equilibrium of your inner ear and causes you to become confused, disoriented, unable to think straight or move easily.  Although some of the fear and feeling of overwhelm was my own, and brought about by the reality of the violence of the situation, I had also fallen pray to this weird device, which in me disrupted my very though patterns and certainly my energy body. 

Suddenly, the other half of the march — who we had believed to have been cornered by the cops — miraculously reappeared and came sauntering into the park amidst cheers and cries: “Who’s Streets?  OUR STREETS!”  It was amazing.  The last we’d seen of them, they’d been goners.  And yet here they were, reborn.  I felt inspired.  Somehow, these kids had made it through the cops in spite of their many tricks.  We could do this.  I could do this.  And I wanted to do it, to find my voice and not let them cow me.

And then we were doing it.  We swarmed out of the relative safety of the park and headed back down the streets, following the Black Bloc kids as they flowed here and there, sticking with them but not totally immersing ourselves in their doings, which had indeed turned to breaking a couple of windows and such (Elizabeth told me that she thought that at least some of this started with provocateurs).  Flow in, flow out.  Move down this street, move over a block, go back a block because a line of riot cops are blocking the way.  Chant, sing, drum.  Yes, this is what a police state looks like — but its also what those who would live a different way look like, in all that is positive and negative about that. 

Eventually, it was really time to go home.  The march disbanded, we regrouped, and found ourselves a lovely Thai restaurant to nurture ourselves within.  Once there, we got a text from Bash Back, inviting everyone out to a dance party later in the evening. A dance party!  Lovely.  Let’s go.

Unfortunately, the “dance party” had very little dancing in it.  We parked the car on 5th and started heading over, pausing to stop at Caribou Coffee for a pit stop.  As I came out and pushed the doors open, I saw my little crew waiting outside for me looking up the street, where a march had started.  “Oh lovely,” I thought.  “They’re coming to us.”

Then my face fell, and my heart.  The kids were pushing six dumpsters down the street, yelling obscenities instead of chants.  Jason, Delylah, Stan and I quickly moved back along the street, only to be joined by a crowd of college kids who live in the area — the street we were on, apparently, goes right through a major campus.  They led the dumpsters down into the intersection, right in front of a cop van, and proceeded to turn them over to block the street.  And then the smashing began.  A moment later, further down the street, I saw smoke — not tear gas, but the smoke of a fire, of something burning. 

I looked up at Jason.  What I was thinking was mirrored perfectly on his face: The Cops Are Going to Be Pissed. 

Best to get the hell out.

And yet, we did not immediately take off.  There were hoards of college kids everywhere, angry about the windows of their community being broken, and curious about what was happening.  Within moments, the streets were full of cops in riot gear, curious college kids, shop owners, and the smell of burning trash.  We circled around the small plaza where the cops had corralled a large group of protestors — not the ones who had done the window smashing or dumpster turning, but a different group that had earlier in the evening been talking to G20 delegates.   Eventually we stopped at a little wall and hopped on top, along with all of the aforementioned college students and shop owners and restaurant employees and whatnot.  The cops had seemed to control the situation, but somehow, it didn’t seem over.

Probably because it wasn’t.  They brought in the sound cannons, again, and started lobbing tear gas into the courtyards of the university, sending whole packs of college kids screaming and running from the scene.  Then they surrounded the entire campus with riot cops in gas masks, lobbing the tear gas canisters further and further into the courtyards of the university.  Although it was far too late for any classes to be in session, there were still many people around, drunk and partying or studying late or drawn by all the commotion from their frat houses and dorms. 

The only way out was right past the cops, and so we put on our best “these are not the people you’re looking for” auras and, breathing slowly and carefully and grounding down, I followed Lisa and Scarecrow and the rest out through the perimeter of police and back out onto the street.  There was broken glass everywhere, and cars backed up, and “peace” officers of every description moving through the area in lines and packs and tribes, with horses or dogs (I’m definitely noticing that the cops in Pittsburgh love their police dogs) or neither, or bikes.   As we moved away from the scene, I would glance back towards the protestors who’d been trapped in the plaza, and feel a horrifying sinking in my stomach.  I knew, even without being there, that the police were going to be very ungentle with those they’d caught — all 200 some of them, many of them young.  I found myself imaging violent scenes of the whole thing, and tears (natural ones) sprung into my eyes.  I hate the idea of the police beating on, tazering, gassing, attacking all of these kids for breaking windows.  I mean, clearly I don’t resonate or condone the breaking of windows, or of anything, really.  But the truth of the matter is that breaking a window doesn’t warrant a chemical or electric assault on your person.  And often, those they catch aren’t he ones who broke the window anyway.

* * * * *
So now I’m back at Anne’s and we’ve just finished talking about our plans for tomorrow, and I find myself again wondering why I’m here.  It’s rather glamorous, I suppose, to be a traveling climate change activist.  It’s neat to see a new place, and sometimes there’s even a sense of adrenaline and excitement about it.  But tonight, like Tuesday night, I wonder if it really does any good and if there isn’t some more direct route to saving the world, one that doesn’t involve so many cops and so much violence.  That part just ain’t me.  It ain’t me you’re looking for, babe.

I’m so tired that my eyes are closing as I write this, but I don’t want to sleep just yet, because every time I close my eyes, a flash of vision — a line of riot cops — appears behind my lids, almost as if written there.  It isn’t every the same line of cops, and I don’t think about it before it happens too much.  They just appear, trapped in my head somehow.  It’s been happening all day and part of the day yesterday, as well — I close my eyes and there they are, unbidden, demanding something of me.  I’m not sure what — I’m simply sure that’s I’d rather NOT pay the devils too much attention or give up too much of my energy to them, and still here they are with every blink or longer, They live behind my eyelids now, constantly a force in my life.

Think I may need a auric brush down where I get home. 

Alright, I’m done now.  Good night, blessings, lotsa love.
Riyana

Theater of the Possible

Ah, turkey bacon.  It's a lovely way to start your day.  Especially when it's accompanied by eggs, pancakes, grits, fresh fruit, and orange juice. 

Lest you believe we out here in Pittsburgh are shivering in the cold, hungry and calling with shrill voices to uncaring ears, let me tell you a bit about my day.

We overslept our 8 AM breakfast call, and those of us sleeping at the house on Monroe ended up tumbling out of our tents sometime after that and into the cars, arriving at the other house (we Cluster folks are divided into two houses here in Pitts, which has not been easy.  So much better when you're all clumped together in one place, but alas, that is not to be).  Once we got there, late as we were, it was a beautiful sight.  A whole spread, put together by four early-rising pagan folks, was laid out before us.  An embarrassment of riches, a wealth of food.  It was nice to stuff my little belly and have a slow, chatty morning. 

Our first order of business was in-house work: to process our group communication agreements and power dynamics.  Oy, vey.  We must.  We simply must, but its hard -- hard to look at those shadow parts of ourselves, and hard to look at those of the people that we love.  About half way through the meeting, the person who was facilitating asked to step back and allow someone else to step up, and after an awkward pause, two fellas in the cluster slowly came forth to volunteer.  Each of them had already taken a turn facilitating a meting this week, and some of those present asked that we have a woman facilitate instead.  I knew I should step forward, but my own shadow was beginning to act up, telling me that there were many experienced facilitators in the room who were better equipped to tackle it. 

A couple more awkward moments passed, with some Cluster folks begging off, saying they were too emotionally close to the subject at hand.  Finally, the woman who had been turned to me and, under her breath, said, "Riyana... Please."  It was enough to get me past my shadow's sulky whispers and step up.  And, actually, facilitating had a really positive effect for me -- it allowed me to be present and contribute in a way that was much more satisfying then simply listening and witnessing.  So I was happy to have been pushed that way.  In fact, later, when we were going around each taking a turn saying what our needs from the group was, I realized that one of my biggest needs from a group is to be pushed past my comfort zone into my growing edge, which being with the Pagan Cluster in the streets does in ways that being in those places that I usually contribute energy (at home, or in the bay area ritual planning cell, or at witchcamp) simply does not.  It's powerful, every day, even simply being in meetings.

But luckily, it wasn't all just meetings, anyway -- although I did have a conference call about a completely unrelated topic with completely unrelated people later in the afternoon, in the pouring rain at the CMU campus, which was probably the most difficult thing I did all day, including those times we were surrounded by riot cops.  It wasn't a difficult call, but one of the amazing things that has at these actions is that (like witchcamp) the world outside seems to recede, or, more accurately, my senses, physical and intuitive, sharpen so much that the diffuse world of little tasks and conference calls and e-mail is harder to find or maintain interest in for very long. 

That afternoon we headed back out into the streets again.  Apparently someone had publicized a rally at Steel Park -- a place steeped in the rich labor movement history of Pittsburgh -- but hadn't planned anything to do there.  Fabulous!  We of the Pagan Cluster were happy to bring it on, then.  As yesterday there had been a strong police presence at Steel Park, we made our plans flexible... After all, most of us are invested in not getting arrested, and furthermore, it was raining and we didn't know if we'd get the Pagan Cluster + 4 or 100 people. 

It turned out to be somewhere in between: perhaps 40 or 50 people, a couple carrying banners of their own and many more picking up the extras we'd brought, with images of earth wind sea and fire and words like "change," "power," and "sustainability" on them.  We gathered at the park and Deborah, a wonderful woman from North Carolina, began hawking at the motley crowd gathered, preparing them for the greatest show on earth -- not, as you might expect, the G20 (wink) but the Pagan Cluster's awesome climate change skit.  For my part, I was excited about the hat I'd created from an idea that Esse gave me before we left California -- a birdcage with a dead canary inside.  It was awesome (pics when we get home, I promise), and was attracting a lot of media attention.  Last year, in St. Paul, Jason's bright pink shirt stole the show, so it was nice to be able to catch up this year (and without the pain and trauma, too... Which if you don't know about, I'm not going into now... You'll just have to reread Starhawk's posts from last year on her webpage). 

Deborah, in a spiffy purple hat of her own, began a beautiful monologue about opening up the discussion about climate change beyond the false solutions of green jobs and cap-and-trade carbon credits.  "We can't just change the lightbulbs; we need to change our lives."  From there, a song bubbled up and out, "We are rising up, like a phoenix from the fire, brothers and sisters, spread your wings and fly higher."  Indeed, it was true.  After all of the stalled, frazzled energy of the last couple of days, it felt good to be doing our thing unencumbered and free.  We marched down the Boulevard of the Allies and down to the headquarters of PNC Bank, a major investor in "Clean Coal" here in Pennsylvania, and then to Point State Park where Al Gore's big concert was. 

It was so amazing.  The media that we had attracted at Steel Park followed us down (okay, some cops did too, but they were relatively chill) and much more gathered as we began our full skit.  Deborah shone, as did my hat, talking about learning to be in right relation with coal and the other resources of the earth (that is, Deborah did.  My hat is mostly non-verbal).  After a while, some other pagan cluster folks came "on-stage" dressed up all corporate and suit-y, espousing the benefits of clean coal and safe nuclear power and corporate solutions to climate change, and were quickly "sequestered" by other members of the cluster and "composted" by throwing a tarp over them.  They were reborn as all of the good solutions we dream of for the world: alternative energies, community gardens, bike lanes, etc.  We finished up by creating a coal altar, complete with canary hat, and the crowd called out the visions they have for the world and we sang the coal song all together: "Take me down to the coal, take me down, where the earth is whole.  Take me down in your embrace, where I can see your ancient face."

It felt good to priestess the altar, to talk about having a different relationship with coal, who could be a great teacher to us all -- almost all of the coal on this planet was created during another period of mass extinction in our history, and it was in fact the sequestering of all of that carbon underground that made it possible for life on earth to continue.  It has seen the entire evolution of the human species.  It is literally the bones of our ancestors.  When we are in wrong relation to it, terrible atrocities occur that end up causing long term damage to our own bodies and the earth mother.  But in right relationship we could learn so much -- perhaps, if we listened, we would hear the answers we so desperately need right now.  So, the altar was about that listening, and about changing our relationship to time and the earth and abundance.  Preceded by a funny skit and followed by a snazzy skit, and with no cop interference at all.  Fabulous!

As I write this back at Anne's house, happy that the last two members (Aaron and Mary) of the Pagan Cluster have finally arrived, Delylah has just come home from the Spokescouncil meeting.  She is apparently not too impressed with the G20 Resistance organizers, who many of us have had some ambivalence about organizing with for quite some time.  They're the ones planning the big direct action events Thursday and Friday, and have for some reason decided that the "diversity of tactics" model of the RNC Welcoming Committee is a good way to go.  The messaging for these actions, likewise, has leans more towards images of war and destroying than the life-affirming visions that we are drawn to. 

A "Diversity of Tactics," in its essence, is a way of saying that you can break things as long as you don't do it close enough to those of us who aren't breaking things to endanger our non-violent, non-property-destruction, actions.  Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to really work that way.  The police don't actually watch a bunch of people break windows and rush off after those folks with tear gas and pepper spray, leaving the rest of us quietly sitting with our candles and prayers in peace in the street.  They simply attack, not distinguishing between those who chose to avail themselves of stones and bricks and those who sit in silent vigil, and who may not only be uninterested in any sort of violence (giving or receiving) may also be unprepared physically to run from or be in confrontation with the police. 

Earlier today the Pittsburgh police clearly outlined their methods of dealing with protestors: an "escalation of methods," they have stated through the media, beginning with pushing with batons, then whacking with batons, then pepper spray, then tazers.  So, good news, no tear gas.  Bad news, tazers.  I hate tazers, hate their very existence and especially their use on unarmed, peaceful people.  And I don't trust that the cops are going to methodically go through various "gentler" methods of controlling crowds before getting jiggy with the electricity and chemical warfare.  Our group is committed to staying "green," meaning, getting out of any area that seems to be getting hot long before any of these kinds of tactics are used.  But, then again, Jason and I were simply standing in a cross-walk last year when all the madness went down, so you simply never know.  As Rain said, "What about going for an escalation of intelligence, instead?"

As for myself, I'm not interested in putting on a helmet and football pads and throwing myself at a bunch of cops.  In fact, one of the thing that bugs me about all these protests is how much focus there is on cops.  I don't care about cops.  I don't need to educate them, to help them see the errors of their ways, to push against them as agents of the machine, or anything like that.  I'm interested in the people -- in the parking garage attendant I spoke with today, the nice manager at McDonalds that let us use her "customers only" bathroom even though we refused to buy anything there, the driver of the French ambassadors who told me about taking his clients to the local strip clubs and being paid per customer by the club itself for doing so, and the local labor union organizer who told me a story about doing an anti-war action in the sixties that started like this: "So, there were four or five of us all dressed up like the Viet Cong, with masks over our faces, and we went into a local government office and were running all over the place with these toy assault rifles... Well, obviously the cops eventually caught us, so they threw us in the back of this van and took us down to jail..."

Toy assault rifles.  In a government building.  Running all over the place.  Can you imagine what would happen if we tried something like that today?  We can't even find a place to park a bus. 

Anyway, it was a good day that ended with chocolate torte out on the balcony, people chatting idly about gender and power dynamics yet again and recounting tales of protests long past and what they'd heard on the news about the security zones tomorrow and the Greenpeace Banner Drop that ended in 14 arrests.  Now Aaron (from Teen Earth Magic fame) is here, talking about how different progressive groups are treated by the public and government -- the street protesters, the student co-eds flash-mobs, the Al Gore concert-goers, the Labor Unions.  All of us a motley crew, but in a hierarchy of respectability and marginalization... Seems like an interesting topic to pursue before cuddling up on the thermarest with Scarecrow, who's already turned away from all of the blah-blah-blah and turned in.  On second thought, maybe I'll skip the marginalization of protestors chat.  After all, there's always tomorrow, and getting my cuddle on seems a little more appealing at the moment.

Until then!

PS - I reread yesterday's post and was horrified at the amount of typos in it.  Please forgive my sleepy, stressed out little brain and its inability to conform to proper English standards at times like these.  I'm usually quite put together and capable in that regard.