Here's the full text of the forwarded message - enjoy!
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Begin forwarded message:
From: "Nina Reznick, Esq."
This is long but it's such a wonderfully written piece about activism that it's worth sending. This guy tells so brilliantly why some decide to put a little of our energy into affecting the bigger picture.
Subject: New York Critical Mass aug 27th
Date: Tue, 31 Aug 2004 09:33:06 -0700
Dear everyone, you know what is happening around the RNC convention in New York right now. The writer of this e-mail rode in the Critical Mass
bike ride "for non violent solutions..." Aug 27th, and I have had this missive forwarded to me yesterday. It is perhaps one of the most eloquent emails I have ever received and touched me deeply... so I wanted to share it with you. Bobby
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by johnny
"Two hours into this small miracle, the police were deployed to constrain the outbreak of humanity."
Notes on the Critical Mass Ride
I participated in the Critical Mass bike ride of August 27, and I have already been asked several times why I did it. After nearly three ;years of protest, the question sounds ridiculous to me. "Why?" I asked a News One camerawoman who interviewed me in Union Square before the ride commenced. "What, do you live in a cave? Take your pick." I resorted to my usual response, which I gave by rote, strengthened by the assurance that I was too rational to ever actually appear on the news. I ]explained that there were important public discussions that weren't ]happening, about the war, about globalization, about the environment, and that they needed to happen, and that until I was convinced that they were happening I was going to be making my statement in the streets.
As I rode on, I had the typical afterthoughts and, typically,spent most of the ride thinking of all the things I should have said. What nagged me the most about what I had said was that these discussions were happening. The Internet was stuffed to its infinte brim with discussion boards, news sites, blogs, comics, flash animations. Even the major outlets, the so-called corporate press, were having these discussions. Prominent magazines like Harper's, and columnists like Krugman in the New York Times, who reached hundreds of millions, all routinely agreed with me. Everyone I knew routinely agreed with me.
Countless people had taken to the streets with me to express their agreement, and countless more would later. What, then, was my ;complaint? Why was I doing this? It was, for me, another dark night of the soul. If you're like me, you have about three a day, more on weekends. I thought about the ride itself, and protest in general. The exhiliration that accompanies being part of a sudden, semi-spontaneous mass movement is unmatched by anything else. Leaderless yet united, we rode through the streets, a temporary embodiment of our democratic ideals, living evidence that that nameless thing inside of us had some validity after all. As someone who rides my bicycle to work every day - along some of the same roads - the difference between Critical Mass and my average day is the difference between being alive and being dead.
There is something terribly inhuman about the city. The weight of strangers is tremendous. Separate people living separate lives rush by you, avoiding eye contact, men leering or looking away meekly, women with their faces set in fierce, implacable stares lest the slightest smile attract an unwanted proposition. You can resist this tendency, suppress the sexual urges that are constantly stoked by the naked make-out ghouls on billboads, and try to open up to a stranger, but the inevitability of your never seeing him or her again quickly squeezes that impulse out of you. You settle into the typical interactions: polite words exchanged with a cashier, banter with employees, taking orders from the boss, checking out and being checked out by people will never care about you or be cared about by you, and avoiding eye contact.
You struggle to hold friendships together over scattered, heated discussions of abstractions that fill you with hope but wear you ;out with how little they change anything. There is the occasional moment of connection, and you think, This is it, I'm really living, but you have to let it go, over and over, to shift back into "real life."
And there is a love, maybe even true love, but then you have to go ;your seperate ways, tending the unweildy, parasitic life support systems of your separate careers, knowing that to try to open up like that again will undoubtedly kill you. Maybe you do it again anyway, get killed again, eventually give up. Love becomes less a spiritual imperative and more another need to fulfill, like finding an apartment. It gets easier and easier to just allow life to wash over you, to break, to accept that you are, as the poet says, "utterly and inexorably alone," and your life must be lived the solitary pursuit of achievement.
Then something happens.
It beings to seem to you, and to others like you, that this thing you suffer has a source, a name, and most of all a leader, and that there are people out there who are just as unhappy about the situation as you are, who would be willing to risk any amount of suffering and sacrfice to escape the system, as long as they could be sure that there would; be someone there suffering and sacrificing beside them. And then you arrive in the same place at the same time, with the simple goal of surrendering to one another's care, to exchange one sorrowful, stupid,repetitive day for a little bit of togetherness. And it works. For a while, it works. You ride the streets together, cheer together, and look out for each other. If I had it to do over again, I would have said to the News One Microphone, "I am here to show America that there are still people of courage and character, people who are willing to sacrifice in order to make the world a better place." Or maybe, more simply, "I'm here to fight for my childhood."
We rode in the streets. We blocked traffic. We cheered and chanted. The experience was of a swelling in power that had temporarily obstructed the workings of a large machine. And it is a machine. That is not a childish characterization. Countless people engaging in repetitive behavior in order to satisfy abstract, predictable goals are willingly participating in a machine, a machine that consumes every natural thing from forests to youth in order to reproduce itself.
For a brief moment, the oppressiveness of the city simply went away, the loneliness went away, that vague sexual longing which is consumerism went away. I saw the people around me as they truly are, not as potential mates, competitors, or participants in the delusion of myself, but as fellow children of God, as souls barely contained in bodies that were barely contained in roles. All because something wild, spontaneous, and human gathered in one place to gum up the works of that system whose purpose is to continuously convince us otherwise.
(The only thing that comes close to that is dancing, which is also illegal in this city.) I saw a man on the news complain about us. He used that same voice people use to complain to service staff when their food isn't perfect. I don't care what they say or what they think, I just want to be able to walk across the street when the sign says walk." It was a strange complaint - I want to be able to do what the sign tells me to do. There was such loneliness in his eyes, such outrage at having been disturbed from the slumber of his work-a-day life, such defeat. He reminded me of an autstic child I had worked with who would make that same face when you took his toy car away.
I saw myself in him, the amount of time I spend alone moving from food to work to sleep to escape, ignoring the miracle of my existence, ignoring the countless miracles who share the street with me, trying to stay comfortable. We have been colonized by comfort, by the desire for safety, for the routine satisfaction of our animal needs and desires, by the ability to safely aggrandize ourselves behind closed doors. More than anything we fear waking up, because if we wake up, then we must realize that we have only one life, that it ends in death, that it is a blessing, and that the way we live is a mockery of that blessing, and that the only thing that stands between us and paradise is our stupid, petty fear of opening up to each other.
The Critical Mass ride was stopped, of course. Two hours into this ;small miracle, the police were deployed to constrain the outbreak of humanity. This is a curious phenomenon, the universal recognition on the part of authority that protest cannot go unpunished. It can be tolerated; charges can be dropped later, but arrests must be made. Part of this, I think, is part of the lesson that authoritarians feel obligated to teach anarchists, that adults feel obligated to teach children - that authority is necessary, that police are necessary.
In Miami, during the FTAA protests, cops encouraged the homeless of Overtown to rob protesters. "See all those cameras," they told them. 'They won't fight back, either. They're pacifists." A deeper motive may be to simply put us through the experience of our own inefficacy - if the relatively restrained police force of a liberal democracy can rout you so easily, how would such your pathetic movement fare against the organized violence of our enemies? Then there is outright hatred, which manifests in cops being unnecessarily violent during arrests, dragging passive resistors back and forth through mud, pepper-spraying the restrained, tasering fleeing, unarmed children, running with shock shields into a group kneeling in prayer. Part of it is no doubt an organized, official intimidation - the visits from the FBI, the threats. In Chicago, the day the war started, I witnessed a federal official, possibly FBI, instruct an officer on the scene to arrest everyone. "No one here is going home. They all must be taught their lesson."
Underlying all this, I believe, is the primal fear as to where such an outbreak might lead. Being a part of any crowd, you realize that there is a group mind whose will begins to overwhelm yours. As I heard one activist describe it, "the streets were full of ghosts." The system also has its own collective mind, which has its own fears, best expressed in Ovid's Metamorphoses, when the cult of Bacchus sweeps across the Greek world, drawing people out of home and society and into a massive, self-indulgent circus of free sex and human sacrifice, the release of all of civilization's suppressed urges.
This is the conservative nightmare. Instinctively distrustful of human nature, they believe that without the rules that bind us, humanity will spiral out of control into an orgy of sex and violence. Those of us who have indulged those impulses, been burned by them, and come into an eventual harmony with them, know there is nothing to fear. But we have no way of sharing that knowledge with a frightened public that dispatches the police, like antibodies, to prevent the disease from spreading, so that vague uncomfortable feeling we give them will quickly go away.
We often talk, as activists, of the power of nonviolent action to shame oppressors and inspire sympathy with a cause.
There is much controversy lately as to whether this really works, which I do not know the answer to. But there is a deeper purpose. To be nonviolent and controlled in the face of aggression and in the grip of a mass movement is to demonstrate something very vital to ourselves, something that, until the moment of protest, was only hypothetical: that all the impulses civilization restrains are restrained unnecessarily. That a committed soul can live in freedom without hurting anyone. That if we can learn to deal humanely with our sex drives, our anger, our violence, our greed and ambition, if we can gather together in that most destructive of phenomenon - a crowd - and cause no destruction, then we become living proof that another world is possible, that we are prepared - emotionally, psychologically, spiritually - to be its citizens.
And our numbers are growing. All over the world, humanity is slowly waking up. What happens when we go into the street is that we say to each other,"I am with you. I am prepared, when the time comes, to abandon all this in favor of something better." When the police break us up, we return to our normal lives, but we take with us what we experienced. I walk down the street now feeling closer to my fellow man, more willing to help, more willing to open up, more convinced that a future is coming in which we can live without war, without exploitation, and without fear. And the path there looks a little clearer to me. All this human potential - all this discussion, all this hope, all this conviction, is waiting just under the surface to be deployed.
This is what we all want - the ability to work together in peace toward a better world. The distorted news coverage, the unnecessary arrests - all of this is indicative of how close to the surface this potential is. If the system were not afraid of it, then the machine would merely allow it to run its course, the television news would take the time to interview us and let us speak our minds, instead of dismissing us with the smug superiority of the damned. I am not sure what to take away from this, except maybe a faith in this upcoming generation, faith that disaster and disorder, things which we have feared in the past, could only serve to further release the potential I saw in the streets. That the tremendous pressure of financial insecurity, isolation, and need that keeps us apart could requires the constant exertion of force, wealth, and intimidation, whereas whatever I saw last night requires nothing but their momentary suspension.
That and a willingness to take a step, to act on this faith. My sister, who works as an art therapist in a homeless shelter, once said, "We're all going to have to decide to be homeless all at once." I, personally, am leaving my job and looking for a role in service. I am not going to wait on paying my debts or earning enough money to be sure of my future. I am going to write, and I am going to work for a better world. I hope others will follow.
DEFEND AMERICA: DEFEAT BUSH!
