Another local newspaper column, written about a week after the 1999 Seattle WTO party.
On November 30th, estimates of people gathered in downtown Seattle to protest the WTO ministerial and its practices ranged from 30,000 to 50,000. The number of people engaging in acts of violence or vandalism at any given time during that day and night have been estimated at from two to four hundred. This works out to roughly one percent of the people who were there, and was more likely about half that.
Someone I was talking with about all this had an interesting idea. They said they think that that percentage is probably consistent with us as a people – that there are that many folks who represent a destructive potential in any situation. They also think that whenever people get together in sufficient quantities, that percentage can reach a ‘critical mass’ where destruction becomes not only possible, but likely.
Since the first days of my children’s alternative school tenures I’ve considered the problem of consensus. I have concluded that reaching consensus on any difficult question (excepting obvious or extreme cases) is hard for even a handful of people, and the difficulty rises exponentially as the group size rises. I’ve also seen that even in a small group there is often some one or ones who seem determined to thwart any agreement, and that as the size of a group increases this factor can grow to a point at which agreement becomes impossible.
Protest and dissent are not just important to us, they are essential to our lives, our way of life and the lives of everyone. So what’s the lesson in all this? One might be that it’s unreasonable to expect that many people to congregate over issues loaded with fear and injustice without some trouble. And yet ninety-nine percent of the people there (note, please – this is not a figure of speech) wanted nothing more than to peaceably but forcefully get their points across to the ministers of the WTO – a body that works shrouded in secrecy and the fogs of power and paranoia.
I participated only briefly in the chaos of that day and the following few days, but I came away with two things to think hard and long about: organization and scale.
I started with the easier of the two. Must protests be huge in scope to be effective? I think that used to be much truer than it is today. With information, images and ideas flying around the planet at near light speed, perhaps there are other factors than scale that can mobilize people, get them to sit up, learn more, and then perhaps take a stronger stand about things that affect us all. I work in Pioneer Square, and we have some serious deadlines right now. That week I split my time between the streets and my job, with the job getting the lion’s share. Yet I kept close track of what was going on from my desk, watching on my monitor live video of the chaos six blocks away, while I continued debugging my projects on that same monitor.
There were small groups of well organized, disciplined people who worked closely together on their chosen protest tactics. They were the ones who made the real difference. They energized the people around them, they refused to move when the casual observers fled the tear and pepper gasses – they were the ones who disrupted the ministerial by being at the center of the storm. Some did theater, some made music or chanted, and some locked themselves together in the middle of intersections.
I encountered a group of young people in the intersection of Fourth and University. They sat in a circle about thirty feet wide, arms encased in ‘lock boxes’ made of pipe and mountain climbing gear. Their arms could not be forcibly pulled apart unless they themselves let go inside the pipe. By the time I got there they had already been gassed at least once, but they had not moved. Most of them had kerchiefs over their faces. My instincts told me they were truly worth supporting, and I never even asked them who they were or what precisely they were protesting. They badly needed more supplies: vinegar and lemon juice to sprinkle on their kerchiefs to neutralize the gas, and toothpaste to smear athlete-style under their eyes for more protection, and cloth for the people who didn’t have kerchiefs.
I was absurdly, profoundly happy to be useful. I fought my way three blocks to a drugstore that was miraculously still open, past two long lines of riot police, clubs drawn and faces tense. I came back with a bag of vinegar, juice and dishtowels, and the cheer they gave me made me feel like crying. They were all about the age of my own kids. I loved them; I was proud of them. I wanted to hug them and say, “Are your jackets warm enough? Do you want me to go find some Vashon lawyers to do pro bono?” They were disciplined and committed, and I loved them for the way they carried themselves. I was proud to have helped them, even a little.
Those kids are the diametrical opposite of the people who believe that change and violence must always go together, and especially of those who practice violence for its own sake. We need to work on sharpening the outward distinctions between them, and we need to educate both the media and law enforcement so they can understand the distinction better, and act accordingly. Like the Bread and Puppets troupe and many others who were there, we need to learn how to maintain our sense of humor in hard times. And we need to consider ways to safely decentralize large-scale protests. I think this idea is nothing new, but if it’s occurring to people like me, it might just catch on. We need more street theater, more street music, and more street dialogue. We need to cultivate communities that operate on a smaller, more human scale, and that can inter-operate with other communities in a healthy and reasonable way. Can you imagine each intersection in the curfew zone with its own theater troupe, band, and sit-in group? And how about the roadies, the ones who run for more lemon juice and toothpaste?
That, of course, brings us to the next question: organizing all this. I’m still thinking about that. But as long as there are groups like the young people at Fourth and University, I will not lose faith.
Richard Jones 