On the morning of the action we got up at 6:30 AM in the church even though there was no breakfast served, and the opening rally was at 11. I guess we had to get our stuff out of there. It was raining. Some of us wore trash bags that we found, mine eventually turned into a toga. I shoved my stuff in Ed's car but he left with half of the Connecticut crew and I wound up going to a bakery with that musician couple that rocked with me the night before, those two young girls that whispered strategy with me, and Russel. We were warned to try not to have to go to the bathroom during the action, because who knew how long the cops would keep us on the sidewalk in front of the White House, so I didn't drink any water or eat anything, even though the big, puffy pastries at the bakery were super cheap compared to New York.
As we walked to the subway, Russel was barefoot on the wet ground. We passed some cool looking Solar Panel-art figurations. The first subway trip was okay, during rush hour, but when we tried to transfer it was really impossible herd stuff so we walked instead. We used a bathroom at a Starbucks but later they would actually blockade the bathroom with garbage cans and cones and stuff. Actually, while I was waiting for it originally, I talked to this guy from Appalachia who said he really dug the Reverend Billy but in Coal Country, a preacher could never talk about Coal.
I got some really great footage of the rally getting together, just a lot of people hanging out with signs. It wasn't raining. A girl with a megaphone, a green Kentuckians for the Commonwealth t-shirt and a red bandana around her neck walked all over a giant Beehive Collective poster explaining some of the story on it. People were dancing and people were playing music about Mountaintop Removal. There were a lot of songs like this that went on in different kinds of Appalachian country music, blue grass sorts of styles, and a Native America guy played a tune.
Soon the place was packed with what looked like 1500 people, but later I felt I could say there might have been more than 2000 people there. Anyway, I didn't listen to all the speeches but James Hansen gave one and Jonas Larry, the man who wouldn't give up his mountain, really a pretty old man, shouted, "The science is in! Coal Kills! Coal Kills!" Then we marched.
It was really beautiful and I was trying to find the banner I was supposed to be behind, wasn't sure if it was the Safe Jobs in Appalachia one, but let it go. At the EPA there were speeches and I climbed up the steps to film. We chanted, "Do Your Jobs! Do Your Jobs!" At this point it rained on us as we chanted this and I cried and could hardly cheer. I don't think I had ever cried at a demonstration before this and later in retrospect I figured I should take this into serious consideration, because I don't think of myself as an emotional person, but really- I don't plan on being an emotional activist. I don't think Gandhi and King cried too much. Just know that the thing that made me cry was that we were protesting the EPA for hardly taking care of the things our generation cared about or properly standing up for what was right.
We protested PNC bank for funding MTR. Inside the bank, Rev Billy, his choir and a bunch of young people were doing some awesome sermon, and at least Billy got arrested. We chanted, "PNC, We're Killing Our Communities!" I saw Al and told him to hold onto my camera. At last I didn't have to worry about getting arrested with my camera.
After some speeches in Lafayette Park, a path was cleared for people risking arrest. I went behind the Safe Jobs in Appalachia! banner with ten other people. We were third after Safe Water Now! or whatever and Protect Our Homeland with the people from Appalachia in the front. For kids walking onto the path, people shouted, "Get off this path unless you're going to get arrested."
We were in front of the White House. The police had a big "Clean Air Natural Gas" green-washing bus and 1 or 2 little vans for prisoners, and a few cop cars. They taped off the whole section of the street making a square and the protesters stayed behind the tape chanting with us, "The People, United, Will Never Be Defeated!" There were just over a hundred of us on the sidewalk, standing. The cops read us the law and told us to go away. Someone from Appalachia gave us the key to disobey and the people behind banners at the front, in front of two of three other rows of people, sat down. Actually, everyone sat down except for a line of Appalachian elders in the back, something like that. We would have decorated the fence but it was also barred off behind us. So as they read us more stuff we sang songs and passed the banners behind us to the back. We locked arms, mostly for a symbolic visual. We sang a millions songs and chants,like one I even led, and without deliberation, it just happened, "When I Say Mountain, You Say Justice!" and there was this back and forth between the sidewalk people and the people at the perimeter. So all the back and forth chants were like that and sometimes my side of the sidewalk people started them, sometimes the other, and sometimes the people at the perimeter started the chants. One was, "One! We Are the People, Two! You Can't Ignore us, Three! We Will Not Let You, Blow, Up, Mountains, One!..." We even sang old songs from the 60s like Joan Baez: We Shall Over Come... We Are Not Afraid... Oh deep in my heart, I do believe, that We Shall Overcome, some day...
There was a reason why one of the cops counted us at the beginning, I found, because although most of the front line to my left had been arrested, the cop skipped the two people remaining to my left and gestured me to get up. I stood up and people applauded as he tied my hands behind my back. A few young people, when they were arrested had started new chants, like "Save Our Mountains," but when the time came I swallowed and didn't say anything, but just thought about Gandhi and dignity and boldness. And this nice dude with a straw hat said to me, "What do you want us to chant for ya?" So I chanted, "Eco Justice Now!" and soon all two thousand or whatever people were chanting, for the first time that day, "ECO JUSTICE NOW! ECO JUSTICE NOW!" At the "Clean air natural gas bus" the cop said to the other, "This is number 35," I thought, "well there you go, that was the amount of people that were in the 350 CCNY shot."
James Hansen smiled at me, the man already cuffed, sitting on the bus, as I was escorted two seats past him and talked to a nice older woman from West Virginia who said she loved Obama, I said I think there's still hope, and this guy Charlie across the walkway who had black earrings and told me all about the people that police the borders and how either Earth First! or one of his Radical groups protested some Republican speech at I think Chapel Hill in North Carolina by literally holding a banner in front of the speaker, and how there's actually a student society there that is conservative, I said, holy shit, at City College in Harlem, well, we don't have a single conservative club, just a Left. And I brought up how the White House, looking at it right there handcuffed, looked equally oppressive with it's rich and conservative qualities and beautiful at the same time, neutralizing it. He said, "We should paint a big red fist on it," and I said, "Yea, and a rainbow prism!" The guy next to him, I started listening to him speak, said, "My family in Appalachia, we are descendents of indentured servants." Then the cop said, "I'm sorry we have to wait so long but unfortunately some of your friends decided to not cooperate and they have to go through a more complicated process." Charlie said, "Don't listen to him! He's trying to pit us against each other!" And then the bus flew through DC with cop cars and blazing sirens in front of it, through all the red lights and stuff, while the cop gave us a tour guide speech of DC, making jokes about monuments and Charlie kept arguing with him about stuff like whether America is really a Democratic country. He said, "I've never seen a ballot that actually said abolish all prisons."
We sat on on concrete floor somewhere while some people used a porta potty then they called us in by groups of 6 and I wound up in a little cell with one little bench, a toilet, a sink, and 5 other guys who were all at least 10 years older than me, including one guy from DC. There was one old man from Upstate New York who was in such Solidarity with Appalachia that he chained himself to some machinery on a mountain. They took us out one by one every few minutes and I was left with the DC guy and he had been talking about March 2nd One Nation and I said how the March 4 Education Movement was part of it and all about what happened with how k-university schools were in Solidarity on that day last year and how it goes on et cetera.
Well, a guy took my thumbprint and gave me a ticket that said my city of birth was Long Island, which isn't a city and then I was led out into the parking lot confused, and I walked halfway through the cars and saw some people sitting on a fence far away past a field of grass and so I walked that way and soon people were cheering and applauding as I walked up onto the grass. There were 25 people there, behind the fence and we did it for everyone who came out of jail. Seeds for Peace had pasta and bananas for everyone! and someone explained that no one knew anything but it seemed we had to come back to the same place the next day or within 15 days to pay 100 dollars and they couldn't reimburse us right away and Jonas Larry said he was refusing to pay his fine and so did this long haired guy from Coal Country and most people just wanted to pay the next day and get out of there like me. Also, I ended up changing my ride to a guy John who had a big car and was going right through New York City and I invited Kitty. The sun set and then I realized that in the opposite direction, over the odd empty road, you could see over DC, it was twinkling in the twilight.
This girl Erica in squeezed in a truck with me, going to a place where App Rising could put us up this extra night, said she came because she didn't go to Power Shift 09 and regretted it so much after hearing from her friends that she had to go to this, and we met this bearded Vermont guy with a guitar too. And we were brought to this room, just us at first and on the other side of a sliding wall was an AA meeting that was ending so we tried to be a little quiet but when they left I played for them one of my eco-political songs on guitar. And then Erica and I went into the lobby, sat on pluffy couches and I showed her how to play some chords. She was from Seattle but going to school in Upstate New York. I remembered that I still had no one to cover my Climate Justice talk the next day at 6:30PM and it was 10PM! so I called a bunch of people and found that it was actually noon the next day! but at last I got this wonderful woman from the Sierra Club Mid Atlantic Chapter to do it and she agreed to do it just on Hydrofracking, I was so free! except I had to pay 100 bucks the next day.
In the morning I was supposed to meet John after taking the subway somewhere but Erica's phone was dead and she was afraid her ride didn't know where she was so she was trying to figure out what to do. I convinced her to come with me and we put a paper on the door saying she was with me somewhere but eventually we realized, after 30 minutes of losing our heads, that we had the same ride. But she was so not wanting to pay the fine that she didn't want to pay for the subway and we convinced John to come get us event though either way it would cost almost 30 minutes and she wouldn't let me buy her breakfast but I got chai. John came with his buddy Scott in the car. We also picked up a girl named Eileen who had a Rev. Billy album to listen to later. The two girls sat in the middle and I sat way in the back with a bunch of stuff next to me.
At the station there were like fifteen people and someone relayed to us that they were letting us go to different stations since there was only one agent that could process each person at a time and it took a long time. So we drove to another station but they said that they couldn't do the opposite of what our tickets said even though we saw some kids outside from our demo that they processed. So we went back and there were still a lot of people. We sat on the floor. It was a small room with no staff person to be seen. There were just some posters on the wall about America and drive safely and stuff. The guy from DC and his wife came in. Kitty was there, she said she thought I was gone but wanted to come with us and was all happy. The agent said he would called stations and see who would take us. In the meantime the DC guy and his wife said they were going to another protest, this one of the FBI who broke into some activist houses or other and making them look like terrorists or something and people wanted to go and the agent came back and sent us to different stations. But when we got to the other station they said they didn't process fines there so we came all the way back and I went out to the back with this bearded dude with an earring because we needed to pee and in the field over a little hill there were tall grasses, butterflies and moths everywhere. It was like a little Utopia or something and we peed facing different directions and when we got back his group was leaving so it was just my group. We played Adlibs and laughed. We made fun of and discussed the stupid posters on the wall. I made an adlibs about a protest and with the words filled in it turned out hysterical and awesome, we even read it like 3 times. And then Erica said she was starving and Eileen had this great idea so we ordered a pizza and ate it sitting on the middle of the floor. When the guy finally finished processing our fines he said, "Are you all coming back for the John Stuart rally?" We shrugged and said, "No." He said, "Ya'll are no activists."
Some of the way back I drove because John, Scott an Eileen had to go all the way to Massachusetts. At a gas station Erica and I ran across a major highway to use the bathroom at a diner. I bought a muffin and a coffee. I could only drive until it got dark because of my terrible vision. As the sun set we listened to the Rev Billy Choir CD. They sang, "This Town Aint No Super Ma-ll." and he was like, "Where's Ginsberg and Coltrane?" and I said to Scott, "You ever read Ginsberg?" and he said, "Been meaning to," I said, "Man, you've got to read Ginsberg, like the poem America."
And I was in the middle and John was in the back and Kitty was driving and Eileen said, "Kitty, why do you have a book about reaching love's deepest bliss?" and she said, "Some woman at the party-" (Erica and I didn't feel like going) "-gave it to me and said I had to read it." Eileen read some passages which were both spiritual and sexual and it made everybody laugh, we passed the book around and I said we had to stop because it was disturbing me and we debated whether sex could be spiritual or not or whatever and then we debated whether casual sex was Sustainable. Eileen said that there are herbs that women can take for birth control that are Natural and her ancestors were burnt as witches for using that stuff. And soon we were talking about Gandhi and... as we went into the blazing lights of New York City John was talking about this philosophy about what is really Natural and what do we consider Natural and everybody was talking about this and the different ways they saw it and whether they would rather live in the country or what and soon we were in Midtown and John said, "The buildings are just so imposing," and they dropped Erica and me off and she said something similar like, when you live in the country it's so bizarre to be in Manhattan and I said I'm there everyday and I walked her to her bus and soon I was all alone on 42nd Street.
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