Sunday, September 25, 2005 TL:DNR/how my day was--in history, and in my mind
Today I shivered in DC, because I hadn't realized how cold out it was when Tracy's friends got here to take us to the march.
Strangely, there were no furtive e-mails from my mother in my inbox when I got home tonight. "I heard there was a protest???? I hope you will be safe and remember there are other ways to accomplish your goals." But, no. I think even my mom knows that I don't do shit anymore.
Showed her! Showed everyone! Walked around slowly, heard the same chants I've heard for a good while, went to a concert on the mall. MMM! Damn!
When I am around large crowds of the left these days, I feel guilty as hell that I stopped dabbling in activism. I had my reasons, and I know what they are, but I wonder and wonder whether even the ones I still think are valid are good enough, or whether I'm just lazy and selfish. I get bored silly at events where we just march around and chant the same old chants, but I am the first twenty-something middle-class girl in history to find out that jail is unpleasant, and I am 2 scared 4 civil disobedience. I could rationalize about how random self-sacrificing gambits to get mass-arrested eat up time and resources like nobody's business, but mainly, I'm scared. Jail just about wrecks me, every time, so that's bad enough, but more than anything, I get scared that I don't know my own mind or the difference between a good or a bad idea.
The second time I got arrested was at protest against the IMF and the World Bank in September 28, 2002, which was also my mother's sixtieth birthday. She found out where I was by watching the news, which ran a clip of me, in an outfit my sister later Mr. Blackwell'd, getting carried off and yelling something. I still haven't seen it, because I was detained when it ran.
The story of that day is full of punchlines. For example, what I was yelling was "The whole world is watching," and it was funny because I thought that was the exact opposite of the truth, and funny again because the portion of the world that was watching included my family and most of my professors.
It was an early-morning march that I'd skipped class for and that I didn't want to be at any damn way, and before I got arrested, I was already seething. The night before, I'd come down to the abandoned apartment in Takoma park where my fabled ex-boyfriend was staying, because nobody calls Marty McFly chicken, and although I had only been planning to go to the legal marches, I knew that was so lame and would ruin my cred, and somebody said as much. So: that guy and several associates and I stayed in the roach-trap apartment, where I was already afraid that the neighbors would call the cops and we'd get arrested for trespassing. In the middle of the night, an out-of-town contingent came in, and they were punchy from their cross-country drive. I just wanted everyone to stop talking and laughing and to lie silently in the dark, but no one else agreed, so I stormed out, quietly, so as to not get busted by the neighbors (who, PS, obviously did not care that people were squatting the hell out of that apartment, because our half-assed precautions were worthless and dumb), and went and huddled in the back seat of my car. A few hours later, I was stiff and angry and it was time to go march around.
Eventually, we got hemmed in by lines of police, and we stood and got squeezed for a while. The police would direct people to leave through certain openings, and then arrest people one by one, so people stopped leaving. Then the police began to grab people out of the crowd at random and take them to the waiting busses. They tried to grab the girl next to me, the giggly out-of-towner, and I pulled her back, so they grabbed me instead, and nobody pulled me back, and that is about when my mother and the rest of them saw what I'd been up to.
Then blah blah blah blah detained detained. They brought hundreds of disheveled young people to go and sit on excercise mats, flex-cuffed ankles to wrists in the gym of the Blue Plains police acadedmy, and then later on, they took us to Central Booking a few busloads at a time. I spent the night alone in a cell, and then got put in the series of holding cells that I already knew well from my thing a few months before that. I ran into a lady I knew, who had been arrested nude. She was wearing something that looked like a moonsuit made of thin cotton. I guess they have a closet full of them at Central Booking. She complained and complained that she was cold, until I was like, "FINE. God." and gave her the shirt I'd been wearing (The! Shirt! Off! My! Back! and here you see I am a good person), and after that I just wore my old bomber jacket. I was irritated, though. I'd been thinking that people behaved counter-productively at these things, and didn't think enough about the consequences, and here was an example! You see, I pictured myself wagging my finger at her, this one time you may wear my shirt, but next time you should remember how cold it is here, and you should think twice before ripping off your clothes and flinging yourself onto the hood of a cop car. That would be what makes the most sense.
I didn't get a chance, because she was hissing into my ear through the bars that separated us that the woman in the cell across the way from ours was really a police plant. "She's been here every single time I've been in here," she rasped. "Every single time. That can't be coincidence. Watch what you say."
Things happened. Things after things after things. We all had a meeting, me and the rest of the ladies, and a huge bunch of us decided to refuse to give our names, with the idea being that we'd snag up the system and eventually, when the time frame that they had to arraign us within passed, we would be free to go.
Time passed and passed, because they were arraigning the regular criminals first, and the men before the women. People lost their nerve about not giving their names, which was too bad for the ladies who had already been before the judge and refused to identify themselves and thereby ended up in honest-to-goodness DC jail for a week, and had known that would happen, but had thought they would have plenty of company. Whoops! Sorry. B-tr_A'd U. I was one of those people, but one of the punchlines is that when it was finally my turn to get arraigned they were like, "Hi, Cara," because, dddduh, they had my fingerprints on file from the other thing, so even if I'd tried to be noble, I would have been foiled by my own scoff-law attitude.
Anyway, I've been pretty sour on mass actions since then. I didn't feel great that people were in jail that really didn't have to be. I didn't stop feeling sick about it for a while. I was going to tell you more things about that day, like how, later, they shuffled us around in different cells enough so that I found out that my arrested-nude acquaintance had tried to warn others about the woman she thought was feeding information to the police, so she'd wet wad after wad of toilet paper and stuck them to the wall in the shape of the word SNITCH and a giant arrow pointing to the woman's cell. Except, in all the excitement of identifying a dangerous individual, she had skipped a letter and branded the other woman a SNITH.
I was going to talk about how all that stuff wrecked my head for a while, but here's the thing: I'm back in Baltimore now, writing from my living room, and everyone is just about to go to sleep, and I've had a hard time finishing typing this. My housemates were singing mid-90s hit "Hunger Strike" earlier, and I don't want to give away who was Eddie Vedder and who was Chris Cornell, but it was dead-on, and I'm still laughing, so eff a bunch of angsty jail stories. Goodnight. posted by Frenz | 9/25/2005 12:56:00 AM
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