Stepping off the plane in Dallas last Friday amidst cowboy hats and wide-open spaces, I was immediately thrown into the pulsating mixture of my relatives?great aunts from California, second cousins from Oklahoma, parents from Missouri?all in Dallas to celebrate my great-grandmother’s 90th birthday.
I was excited to see all of my relatives, but I knew it was coming. I am a college student, and my family is going to want to know what I have been “up to lately,” and somehow I could just imagine that my lifestyle of activism might run counter to many of the opinions floating around in that sticky Texas atmosphere.
Finally, my father popped the question. Leaning forward in his chair, and with an inquisitive expression on his face, he asked me, “So did you get your anarchists out of jail?”
After weeks preparing for a weekend of demonstrations for a number of different issues, the question I received referred to the four hours I spent Saturday afternoon waiting for eight of my friends to be released by the Metropolitan Police Department. At first I was taken aback; I felt the question should have asked about the hours my friends spent organizing educational teach-ins on Georgetown’s campus concerning the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, or the amazing debate our group orchestrated that pitted two individuals working for non-profits against three World Bank and IMF economists and representatives. Or perhaps I would have preferred the question to allow me to explain why I feel that the IMF and World Bank have some serious flaws in their policies that have ramifications for billions of people worldwide. Actually I really wanted to share with them the amazing experience of marching in solidarity with thousands of other individuals Sunday afternoon?drowning in the creativity of puppets, radical drum corps, songs, dancing, posters and guerrilla activist theater?all to demonstrate that we will not support Bush’s desire to attack Iraq. The pinnacle of the entire afternoon came as we marched up Massachusetts Avenue en route to Vice President Dick Cheney’s mansion; in passing embassy after embassy from all over the world, the international community greeted us cheering and waving peace signs in agreement.
Yet the questions I received merely reflected the mass media’s evening news?the fact that 649 people had been arrested?ignoring all of the peaceful actions and messages of thousands of others who protested during the weekend. My frustration with the mass media extends beyond my personal question-and-answer session with my family?all the way back to a Monday morning last week as I sat eating breakfast and listening to NPR before heading off to class.
While listening to an interview with MPD Chief Charles Ramsey, I had to cough exasperatedly so as not to choke on my Cheerios. I could not believe my ears; in summing up the weekend’s events, and after having illegally arrested hundreds of individuals who had been in a park for which they had a permit to demonstrate, Ramsey boasted that “these children have learned they cannot shut this city down.”
Children. It certainly has been a long time since someone referred to me as a child; in fact I graduated from my family’s Children’s Table to the revered and honorable world of adult tables, larger silverware and intelligent conversation many, many Thanksgivings ago. This remark (which had been broadcast over airwaves nationwide) completely misrepresented the efforts of myself and my fellow activists. According to Ramsey, he and his officers crashed the party of a bunch of rowdy, immature and ill-intentioned children.
Well, please allow me to explain exactly what we “children” have been doing lately to “shut this city down.” Several of my friends spend their Saturday afternoons preparing and distributing food for D.C.’s homeless population. Other friends of mine spend hours each week teaching English as a second language to just a few of the thousands of immigrants now making up a major portion of D.C.’s population. I personally have tutored incarcerated individuals in prisons (in the city that has the highest incarceration rate in the nation) so that they can receive their GEDs. Yet another friend of mine has created a group of volunteers that provides free childcare for those who cannot afford it. And perhaps my favorite action is when H.O.P.E. (Hoya Outreach Programs and Education) goes once a month to Urban Oasis, a small organic farm in Anacostia that grows food for a population that has been marginalized and neglected by a capitalistic system that has completely failed to provide an entire population with a means by which they can feed themselves (residents of Anacostia have no grocery store).
We are a rowdy group of activists who believe in building (not destroying) a better world, and we know that it begins with us?the individuals. The D.C. police briefly succeeded in stopping 649 individuals from participating in democracy, but they will never be able to stop this group of “children” from doing what we feel Ramsey and D.C.’s government should be doing: making D.C. a place where individuals can actually live free from institutionalizd oppression and violence.
As I stepped off the plane in D.C. I realized my most important lesson from talking with my relatives in Dallas: No one else (our mass media, our government?no one) is going to effectively communicate our ever-so-important messages. That is something we must do ourselves.
Mary Nagle is a sophomore in the College. You can find her every Sunday, at 12 a.m. playing a revolutionary game of soccer on Copley Lawn with her other comrades … Feel free to join them.
