Denise, December 2002
A few years ago I went to visit one of the Quaker Meetings on York Road and was discussing with them the difference between their meeting and the one down at Homewood. “Oh Homewood,” they said, “They’ll march for anything.”
I might not march for “anything,” but within a certain political spectrum, if you are demonstrating or marching or picketing, you can count me in. There is something about a group of people gathered for a purpose that lifts my spirits and makes me smile, much like a parade does. And if the purpose is to build people up and to empower them, I like it even better.
My mother was a devoted follower of the late Joe McCarthy and my father was a fervent union man, so political discussions in our house were frequent and loud, and I began writing letters to the editor when I was in seventh grade. We believed in citizenship, in participation. As they are so fond of saying on my favorite TV show, The West Wing, “Decisions are made by those who show up.” We believed in showing up.
I hadn’t so much worked out my own beliefs as adopted my mother’s. My mother was adamant in her belief in the righteousness of the right, and I took her word for it. My Catholic upbringing was full of warnings about Commies lurking on the left, which also influenced my political thinking, such as it was.
In my college years, I worked on the Barry Goldwater campaign and also volunteered for William Buckley when he ran for Mayor of New York City. We leafleted on street corners and rode through the streets in motorcades, sitting up on the back of convertibles with loudspeakers. We went door to door handing out information. In the lower class ethnic neighborhoods of the South Bronx, the apartment doors were often open and we were invited in for a beer. In the better neighborhoods of the North Bronx, unknown persons peeked at us though peepholes in the door and growled at us to go away. This was a learning experience that made me begin to question my commitment to the Republican Party. I also noted that my compatriots in the George F. Patton Conservative Party Office spoke rudely and unkindly of poor people. This bothered me, as I knew my family would qualify as poor in their minds and I didn’t think we were lazy or useless or good for nothing. I was beginning to doubt.
My mother had strong opinions and wrote rabid letters to the newspapers supporting McCarthy and Father Coughlin, but being a woman born in the 1890’s, she had never had the opportunity to participate in politics. Women had only gotten the vote in 1920. Realizing that made me cherish my own right to play a part in the process. So, I offered to take her with me on a petition drive during the Buckley election. She was then in her seventies and in failing health and so we went in our own neighborhood in the afternoon, she wearing her hat and gloves and Sunday dress and tottering a bit on her rarely worn high heeled pumps. It was early in the day to knock on doors and she couldn’t climb apartment stairs, so we went along the avenue stopping in the commercial establishments, of which at least three on every block were bars. The sight of my tiny old mother standing at the door of the dark bar, backlit by the sunny afternoon, must have been either an inspiring or terrifying apparition because we got many signatures from midday drinkers and bartenders. Several of the signers had to be propped up by friends and reminded of their names, so I knew that the petitions were not valid and would have to be discarded, but she was getting so much joy out of this adventure that I didn’t have the heart to tell her. Until she died three years later, she remembered with great glee the day we went out “politicking.”
All of my candidates in those years in liberal New York lost, which became so habitual to me that four years later when the Nixon Republicans were winning, and I was living in a more conservative part of Maryland, I somehow felt obligated to switch to the perennial local losers of the Democratic Party.
Actually, it wasn’t so much the love of losing that changed my mind as the experience of having moved out of my familiar home area in New York to Colorado, and then to Maryland, where I felt suddenly the pain of the outsider, and was away from my mother’s influence. In those years of change in both my life and our national life, I gained a different perspective.
The riots at the Chicago Convention and the influence of the campus life in Colorado nudged me further to the left. The assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy, were even more radicalizing. By the time we returned to Maryland in 1969, we were both firmly against the war. My husband, a journalism student, felt the need to remain objective. I never particularly admired objectivity and believed in entering into issues with passion and intensity. But because of his effort at neutrality, when we went to the anti-war demonstrations, we stayed on the periphery. One night after innocently attending a theater program, we accidentally walked in front of a long line of students running back onto the University of Maryland campus after “liberating Route 1.” They were followed closely by a long line of police with Billy clubs drawn, and we narrowly avoided, by running like mad, getting arrested or beaten.
We campaigned for McGovern in ‘72 and retreated in despair after Nixon won. I spent the Nixon years lying low and raising children, occasionally taking them in strollers to picket the school board in behalf of teachers’ salaries or for a crossing guard on the school route.
Every August, in small town Westminster, we organized the churches to march in commemoration of the Hiroshima bombing. We walked with candles through the summer night and sang. My favorite years where those when the liturgical dance troupe came and danced, barefoot and ethereal, in candlelight in the public park.
In 1985, we went to Washington, DC, with the Ribbon Project, a demonstration organized by a women’s group to create quilt segments illustrating what most precious thing would be lost in a nuclear war. It was the most well-mannered and creative such event I ever attended. I remember it as a long sunny afternoon encircled by lovely pieces of fabric art. Pete Seeger sang at the march and afterwards, because we knew some of the organizers, we had the opportunity to meet the legendary folksinger. I was a longtime admirer of his and it made my day.
In 1987, we went to a march for the homeless, organized and attended mostly by union members who were quite a bit less polite than the Ribbon ladies. It was a huge march and an angry one; although there were light moments. We walked behind Gregory Hines, who would break into dance steps every few yards. After walking down Constitution Avenue, feeling the momentum and the energy of the crowd, we gathered near the U.S. Capital for the rally. Against my better judgment, my four friends and I moved further into the center of the crowd than usual because one of them wanted to hear the music better. The crowd was dense and there was a sudden announcement that they needed to bring through some of the speakers and we would have to move back. There was at that point no place to move to. Several of the large, burly union guys began to form themselves into a v-shaped wedge and dove into the crowd, pushing us backwards. We were shoved back further and I realized that a photographer had set up a stepladder a few feet behind me and if I kept being pushed back I would hit it and fall and probably be trampled. I had a death grip on the arm of my nearest friend, determined not to be lost in the crowd, and it was beginning to feel really dangerous. The crowd that felt united a moment ago was beginning to feel threatened and tension was rising. The flying wedge pushed further into the crowd and people were beginning to panic. Finally they had their path and brought through several celebrities, the only one of which I remember being Christopher Reeves. We were shaken and moved back out of the mob at that point. In those moments of fear, I saw the dark side of mass movements. A group of concerned citizens can become a mob and can move suddenly from vocal protest to violent action, even almost accidentally. And a group that gives up its right to think independently for the temporary security of the crowd can be easily led in dangerous directions.
Later that day I saw another incident of crowd control. Again, they needed to bring celebrity speakers through the crowd. This time, two rows of trained marshals, wearing yellow caps to identify themselves, edged through the crowd, placing themselves in two straight lines facing each other. They then each simply took two steps back and formed a path. I thought to myself, there is a right and wrong way to do everything.
That was an alarming experience, but not the most frightening I can remember. One summer night, a group, including children, had walked to the office of our Congressional Representative, Beverly Byron, to protest American involvement in El Salvador. As we stood outside, a line of pickup trucks, each showing a gun rack in the back window, pulled up across the street. I felt a chill of fear but could not abandon my friends and so stayed, although I remember little of what was said by the speakers. At the end of the rally, after an aide had come to the door to tell us that Mrs. Byron was not there, Ruth, the wife of a Church of the Brethren minister crossed the street and went up to one of the men standing by their trucks and asked if they wanted to talk with us. They all got out of their trucks and came across the street and stood around us, and Ruth engaged them in a calm discussion. I don’t remember any of this dialogue as I was both still overcome by a sense of panic and at the same time stunned by Ruth’s courage and amazed at the power of non-violent confrontation.
In 1991, again in Washington, we marched against the Gulf War, an enormous crowd flowing down the avenue singing, with banners waving above. There is undoubtedly a feeling of power that comes to you from this kind of activity. And I wonder, is that hypocritical to be seeking power at the same time you are protesting the use of power? I think that for the powerless, the sudden feeling of power is a good thing. Powerlessness leads to despair or ultimately to violence. So it is necessary for the common good for the powerless to be able to acquire some power. It is just not healthy for any one person or group to have too much power. It is much like a seesaw: when one is on the lower end, one wants to rise but if one rises too fast, one will be catapulted off the top of the seesaw. The machinery of seesaw works best when equal weight is deposited on both ends and neither has overwhelming force. It is good for the powerless to rise up and wield some influence and it is bad for any group to have uncontrolled and ever-growing power. Power needs to be constantly shifted from those who do value it for its own sake, and to those whose intentions are compassionate. As theologian Paul Tillich says, “Power without love is brutality. Love without power is sentimentality.” And mass movements serve as networks, or conduits, for power to be conveyed from one group to another. A movement of groups of people for this purpose can create a power surge.
And I had learned what it is to be powerless. I knew what it was to be poor and to live in a shelter with small children. And I knew what it was to see the smirk on the face of the powerful: the landlord, the banker, the personnel officer, and to know what that face thinks of a person like me. And I knew what it was to be invisible, to be in the minority, and without the stature and resources that enable you to be heard. And I knew that you don’t feel powerless if you stand up and witness to what you believe to be just and fair. And you don’t feel powerless if you join with others who feel the same as you and who show by force of numbers and will to be heard, that their experience and opinions count.
A Sunday school teacher told me once that while many children have deep fears about war and crime, the few children who do not suffer from such fears are those who have been taught that they can make a difference. Those who feel they have a voice, they can adopt a tree or clean a road, or collect blankets for the homeless, they can picket the school board, have a sense of power and thus do not feel at the mercy of unknown forces.
This to me is the essence of America. Power and wealth have a tendency to concentrate in the hands of a few. In a democracy there is always the possibility that by the will of the majority, that process can be halted, and power and wealth dispersed. The marginalized can be integrated so that they do not become the revolutionary, and the voraciously power hungry can be tamed. When we have lost our ability to speak up, to protest, to loudly and persistently call for change; when we can no longer hold valid elections, or have a free and independent press to inform those elections, we will have lost all.
“I don’t want to talk about politics,” people have said to me. “But everything is politics,” I tell them. The people you work for decide the hour at which you are required to get up in the morning. What kind of coffee you drink is dependent on government decision; whether there is a pothole in front of your car as you set out is dependent on city politics. Who you associate with and who will associate with you is politics. Who makes the rules and who obeys them is always politics. To quote outspoken Texas columnist, Molly Ivins, writing for the online Working for Change, “What stuns me most about contemporary politics is not even that the system has been so badly corrupted by money. It is that so few people get the connection between their lives and what the bozos do in Washington and our state capitals. . . . Is the person who prescribes your eyeglasses qualified to do so? How deep will you be buried when you die? What textbooks are your children learning from at school? What will happen if you become seriously ill? Is the meat you’re eating tainted? . . . It’s all politics, Bubba. You don’t get to opt out for lack of interest.”
Last month on the anniversary of 9/11, I heard about a proposed demonstration, the “Peace Path,” to be held on Charles Street. It was to be a line of people standing for peace from the Inner Harbor to the Beltway. It was late in organizing and rather impromptu and I wondered about the wisdom of it. Would people throw rotten vegetables or rocks or try to run the demonstrators off the sidewalk? I decided to go anyway, and set out to look for the Towson University contingent on upper Charles Street. I guess I was early because there was no one there. I ended up down by my old friends at the Quaker meeting and stood with a group of women from N.O.W. and some Methodist church ladies. The woman next to me, who appeared to be well into her eighties, sat in a lawn chair and carried not a sign but a small tree branch, (not an olive branch exactly, but symbolic of one.) Most people had signs that said “Peace” although some had more original efforts, including the word peace spelled out in different languages, and red white and blue peace banners. There was a loud group of students from one of the local schools on the next corner and another group with a sign that said “Honk for peace.” To my amazement people driving by began honking. At first just a few and then more as the stream of workers going home in the evening rush hour passed by the corner of Northern Parkway. At least half honked and waved and flashed “V” peace signs out the window of their cars. Small commuter cars as well as SUVs and pickup trucks all waved and honked encouragement. I was happily stunned by this sudden feeling of being not alone in my fears and concerns; of being surrounded by people who though not usually saying so aloud, were in agreement with my ideas. And I knew that this is why I do these things, not just to see Pete Seeger or Gregory Hines, not just to get a warm feeling from singing together, or to feel the power of massed numbers, but because there is human need for a community of belief, for a sense of solidarity, for a knowing that one is not alone in one’s heart or mind.