As Ericka reminded me, today's date has a certain significance for us. I didn't yet realize what it meant to our family or even our nation, but personally it was part of a momentous week with my Code Pink sisters and brothers in DC last year, celebrating the end of the Bush Era, hoping for good things from the Obama Era, and reminding our new President of his campaign promises and our continued vigilance.
I had media, police and Facebook friends asking why I was going to Washington to protest the President I campaigned for. I wasn't, actually--I went to promote peace and justice, and reset the program:
Compared to my first time at the Code Pink house, this really was a joyous week of action--not to say I didn't have fun learning with my new friends back then, but there was less of a sense of hope and potential change.
We still used many of the same Methods, though perhaps in slightly modified ways:
- Group or mass petitions
- Slogans, caricatures, and symbol
- Banners, posters, and displayed communications
- Leaflets, pamphlets, and books
- Group lobbying
- Wearing of symbols
- Paint as protest
- Taunting officials
- Humorous skits and pranks
- Singing
- Political mourning
- Turning one's back
Note that we did not court arrest or engage in any more intense psychological or physical intervention. Starting anew with protest and persuasion, leaving room for escalation as the Obama Era wears on...
Photo from Women's Suffrage Parade, Washington, DC, March 3, 1913. Courtesy US Library of Congress.
Our various Pinking activities did not mark the first time women and men descended on our Capital with a specific agenda when there was an Inauguration on the schedule:
On Monday, March 3, 1913, clad in a white cape astride a white horse, lawyer Inez Milholland led the great woman suffrage parade down Pennsylvania Avenue in the nation's capital. Behind her stretched a long line with nine bands, four mounted brigades, three heralds, about twenty-four floats, and more than 5,000 marchers.
Women from countries that had enfranchised women held the place of honor in the first section of the procession. Then came the "Pioneers" who had been struggling for so many decades to secure women's right to vote. The next sections celebrated working women, who were grouped by occupation and wearing appropriate garb—nurses in uniform, women farmers, homemakers, women doctors and pharmacists, actresses, librarians, college women in academic gowns. Harriet Hifton of the Library of Congress Copyright Division led the librarians' contingent. The state delegations followed, and finally the separate section for male supporters of women's suffrage. All had come from around the country to "march in a spirit of protest against the present political organization of society, from which women are excluded."
...
At the railway station a few blocks away, president-elect Wilson and the presidential party arrived to little fanfare. One of the incoming president's staff asked, "‘Where are all the people?’;—‘Watching the suffrage parade,’ the police told him.
The procession began late, but all went well for the first few blocks. Soon, however, the crowds, mostly men in town for the following day's inauguration of Woodrow Wilson, surged into the street making it almost impossible for the marchers to pass. Occasionally only a single file could move forward. Women were jeered, tripped, grabbed, shoved, and many heard "indecent epithets" and "barnyard conversation." Instead of protecting the parade, the police "seemed to enjoy all the ribald jokes and laughter and part participated in them." One policeman explained that they should stay at home where they belonged. The men in the procession heard shouts of "Henpecko" and "Where are your skirts?" As one witness explained, "There was a sort of spirit of levity connected with the crowd. They did not regard the affair very seriously."
The suffrage movement was criticized for their tactics and timing, not just at the time of Wilson's party but when they engaged in hunger strikes, and all throughout their struggle. In the end, women won their right to vote after forcefully issuing their demands and escalating actions until they achieved their ends.
Almost a century after that march, there we were educating and singing and dancing, for which Code Pink is oft criticized: we're a joke, a bunch of clowns, etc.
Actually, the latter charge isn't entirely inaccurate. After all, six months after Obama was sworn in, a number of us were resisting American and Israeli policies while being shot at with tear gas, concussion grenades and rubber bullets by the IDF in the presence of Fungus the clown in the West Bank, and we were joined by none other than Patch Adams as we tried to deliver aid to Gazans who live in rubble courtesy of weapons Americans paid for. Despite the value of clowning in advocacy and the inherent danger of security forces with automatic weapons, I heard criticisms of our "antics" as being simply fooling around.
What if that were really the case, that we were just having fun while expressing dissent? Revolutionary Emma Goldman wrote in Living My Life:
[After getting women to join in the cloakmakers' strike] I became alive once more. At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha, a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause.
I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business. I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement would not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. "I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody's right to beautiful, radiant things." Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world — prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own closest comrades I would live my beautiful ideal.
It's the very joy of life that compels us to not only protest, but put ourselves on the line with other more intense forms of civil resistance despite unpopularity and danger to change mindsets, dynamics and policies. It's deliberate method to our dancing madness. It's what earns Code Pink MVP awards in some progressive circles.
So a year ago we danced to celebrate hope and worked to effect change. I remember being particularly stirred as I listened to Obama's speech in the bitter, windy cold:
[Y]our people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy.
As Jodie Evans notes, much of that hope is gone, but not the drive to push for change: we need to change our course on health care NOW; we need to change our course on equality at home NOW; we need to change our course in Afghanistan NOW. We continue trying to remind the President of his own admonition, that he needs to build and not destroy. And we remind ourselves that we must make him do it. Now.
ntodd
(Post at Pax Americana, Dohiyi Mir, Green Mountain Code Pink, Corrente and Daily Kos.)