Democracy Looks Like People Walking on Blacktop instead of Concrete? Or, Who Gives a Shit Whose Streets They Are?

Over on the discussion board, we’ve got someone going on and on about how, if you go to the anti-war march in DC on Saturday, September 24, you’d better bring a gas mask and be ready to be hit by rubber bullets and get arrested and spend days in jail without food, buster…

…except that this is, of course, nonsense. Washington, DC is a city known for taking mass marches to a new level of regularity, with permits negotiated months in advance, arrangements between marshals and police regularized to the point of boredom, and marchers bringing their kids, their kids’ kids, their parents and their dogs out for events that are known for pageantry more than for romantic scenes of barricade-storming and tear-gassing. If a march doesn’t have permits, or if it’s not in DC, then it’s a different story altogether. But really now, mass marches in DC are the sort of thing to which one can take one’s wheelchair-bound grandmother with reasonable comfort and confidence.

This is frustrating to those in the activist set who are burning to log happenings about which they can tell the grandkiddies later on in life, events which depict in stark relief their personal, heroic virtue. I have in mind a fellow college student back in 1991 who, at the beginning of the “press conferences” she would hold on a regular basis with reporters from the college paper, would announce in a loud voice that if anyone in the room happened to be an FBI agent, they were not welcome! This in a room of five people, all of whom she’d known for years.

I have in mind a trio of young “anarchists” (see, they were wearing shirts that said “anarchist” on them) at a 5,000 person march (maximum) in the early fall of 2002 who couldn’t bear that a small section of the march took place on a wide sidewalk. The police waved and smiled at those filing by. Why, The People do not protest on sidewalks! The police are not to smile; don’t they understand that The People are Pissed? So, despite the fact that there was plenty of room on the sidewalks, the three stomped onto the street and started chanting, “Whose Streets? Our Streets!” One of them would shout “Tell Me What Democracy Looks Like!” and the other two would shout back “This is What Democracy Looks Like!” Then they looked expectantly around at the rest of the marchers, waiting to be joined in the chant and in the exodus to the street. Marchers rolled their eyes; the police chuckled; a marshall yelled over, “Get your sorry asses back on the sidewalk!” And, after twenty more seconds, they did just that, muttering the rest of the way about how lame it all was.

If you want to go the anti-war march in DC on 9/24 hoping that you’ll get to show your radical bonafides by sticking it to the authorities, if you look forward to advancing your case for sainthood through suffering, if in short you’re going for reasons that are all about you, you’re going to be as disappointed as those Workers World people with the megaphones on the sidewalk, hoping perenially that we’ll realize we have nothing to lose but our chains.

If, on the other hand, you’re of a mind that participation in a march isn’t so much about getting to strike a pose as it is an exercise in the power of massive, joint, cooperative dissent against wrongheaded policy, you’ll probably feel pretty damned good as you walk down the street, surrounded by thousands upon thousands of friendly people from all walks of life who are just as pissed about what’s happening in this country as you are. Then, when you’ve got your grandkids on your lap next week or fifty years from now, you’ll be able to say that you worked with countless others, each in a small way but together in a big way, to turn the tide.