experience of connecting with others on social justice values and then of figuring out together a way to take collective action produced in me a feeling of efficacy—like I could help to make a change in the world.
Immersion
At the same time, I also felt exhausted. In Lancaster I was something like a “political orphan,” making it up as I went.9 Jeremy and Carmen were my only mentors, and they lived in New York. After the Walmart campaign in Lancaster, I decided to move to the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker in Washington DC—just for a little while, I thought, to learn and to rejuvenate. I was so happy to find a deep sense of community there and to be able to protest alongside people who already “got it”—folks who I didn’t have to organize to get them to come to the protest. We protested sweatshops in Haiti, oil drilling in Nigeria and Colombia, US sanctions and escalation against Iraq, human rights abuses around the world, the death penalty, the drug war, the military industrial complex, imperialism, racism, sexism, bigotry, and on and on. I spent two years at the Catholic Worker. Each protest and campaign led to the next. In no time I was fully plugged into the radical subculture. By the end of the 1990s—after just a few years—I had been involved in numerous campaigns and had been arrested 20 times for protest and civil disobedience.
I had acquired an empowering sense of agency through the experience of taking action and seeing directly how my actions made an impact. However, that impact seemed to be limited to the level of mobilization itself. In other words, I could get people to come to actions, and I was becoming adept at action logistics, but our actions seemed to consistently fall short of influencing political outcomes. In Lancaster I had stirred things up, but I hadn’t come even close to stopping Walmart or effecting any changes in the government policies and corporate practices I protested. My sense of agency in local mobilization and logistics was at odds with the deep resignation I felt in the face of a very bleak larger political reality. Carmen’s question of whether it was too late for us to make a difference weighed heavily on me.
I felt a deep sense of fulfillment in joining with others to put our bodies on the line and speak truth to power. Power, however, did not seem overly concerned with our truth. Power is concerned with power. And we didn’t seem to have very much of it. Over time I started to understand that a “slogan doesn’t threaten anyone”10; that those of us who wish to “speak truth to power” have to arm our truth with power too; that “truth” and social justice, in the world of politics, are only particular agendas in a sea of possible outcomes. The universe was not somehow bent toward their eventual automatic realization. We would have to fight.
That much was already obvious. We were fighting. The problem was that our fighting seemed hopeless; our resistance, futile. Our opponents seemed to hold all of the advantages. At most, we might be capable of being a nuisance. All the evidence pointed toward the harsh reality that idealistic social justice-oriented young people like me had indeed arrived “too late to the game.” We were up against the culture itself, it seemed, swimming feebly against a powerful tide.
This is what troubled Carmen so deeply: the idea that he could devote his whole life to an activity that, in the end, might make no difference at all—like Sisyphus, condemned to push a boulder up a hill only to see it roll back down, time and time again. Yet Carmen wouldn’t live his life any other way. He couldn’t look away from the suffering of the poor and oppressed. He couldn’t carve out a comfortable niche for himself within a system that caused so much suffering and injustice. And it’s not as if such a life was all doom and gloom. There was tremendous joy to be found in the struggle. There was a depth of community and meaning that seemed to be in short supply in contemporary American society. Sure, people like Carmen and Liz and Phil would sacrifice and risk a great deal for the sake of the struggle, but they would be the first to tell you that the life they chose was abundantly full of joy.
I felt the same way. One night, following an especially spirited protest, I wrote in my journal, “I have found my church. I have found my family.” Carmen, Jeremy and I went back and forth at that bar about the potential for long-term, large-scale political opportunities—grand recalibrations—but, for ourselves, we knew that we would keep on keeping on either way. This is how, despite a bleak assessment of the prospects of social justice movements, I stuck with it. I plodded on in the small and marginal social movement groups that I had stumbled upon in my neck of the United States in the 1990s. In a moment that felt hopeless, I was able to find others who held out hope—or who at least acted, even without hope. I realized, however, that we would have to figure out some as yet unknown game-changing intervention, if we were ever to shift the odds in our favor.
A taste of potency
Then one day it happened.
On the morning of November 30, 1999, heads of state, trade ministers, and official delegates from around the world gathered in Seattle, Washington for the ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization. More accurately, these delegates attempted to gather. They were greeted instead by ten thousand people—mostly young—who had successfully blockaded all the intersections leading to the convention center where the meetings were to be held. This was a major tactical coup that no one in power had expected. Groups I’d been involved with in the two years prior, like the Direct Action Network, The Ruckus Society, and Art & Revolution had been working in the months leading up to Seattle to train people in the use of lock boxes for “hard” blockades (where blockaders locked their arms into hardware, like chains and welded-together metal apparatuses, to make it very difficult for police to disperse them). These direct action–oriented organizations created a plan wherein specific affinity groups took over each of the intersections and entry points.
The affinity groups were trained not only to erect blockades, but also to respond to the contingencies that would follow. How do you de-escalate a charged situation with police or with hot-tempered vigilantes? How do you stay calm so that you can think clearly? What will you do if the police start pepper-spraying people or using pain-compliance holds? How do you alleviate the painful sting of pepper spray and teargas after the fact? What will you do—and who in the group has relevant expertise—if there is a medical emergency? Who in the group will talk to reporters if they approach? Who will explain the reasons for the protest to passersby? Who will keep track of folks who get arrested, and provide support from the outside? How will the group make the kind of quick decisions that are often necessary in street scenarios? The affinity groups were prepared. The police and city government of Seattle were not.
As the hours passed on that fateful morning, the police escalated. They used teargas, pepper spray, pain compliance, and other aggressive tactics. Donning gas masks and riot gear, they looked like Imperial stormtroopers. The governor declared martial law and deployed the National Guard. As news spread of what was going down, the affinity groups were joined by tens of thousands of unionists who had also turned out in larger-than-expected numbers for a permitted rally against the WTO. Thousands of Seattle residents also joined the fray spontaneously—outraged that their city had suddenly been turned into a police state.
The next day the delegates were able to convene. But no regular business could be conducted. What had happened the day before was on the front page of every major newspaper around the world. The images clearly depicted a strong mobilized opposition in the streets of a major US city. The images showed peaceful civilians engulfed in clouds of teargas and a melee of rubber bullets, concussion grenades, and unrestrained police batons. The world was both shocked at the sight of the “gloves coming off” in America, and inspired that people in the United States were visibly joining with movements in the Global South that had been protesting against neoliberal policies for decades. Inside the convention center, official delegates from Global South nations seized the platform that this dramatic intervention had provided them. They spoke against the brutal treatment of nonviolent protesters and against the WTO and neoliberal policies that benefited the few against the interests of the many. The ministerial meetings collapsed and were declared a total failure. The WTO, which most Americans had never heard of before November 30th, suddenly became a household name.
