This piece was originally published in peacejournalism.com, until the site was gobbled up by AHN.
The important thing is that you still hold your convictions when it’s over. The estimates and politics, the drugs and paranoia, even the solidarity don’t mean a thing, really, unless you can discover the relevance of your actions in the multiplicity of phenomena.
Take my friend Miles, an old college roommate of mine, political advocate and occasional journalist. When I heard about the march on Washington, before I even decided to go myself, I asked him to come with me. We’d taken road trips before, including an ill-fated midnight drive from our college town in Tennessee to Pensacola where I played the role of a third wheel while Miles and his girlfriend decided they were no longer on the fast track to married bliss and abruptly switched sexual teams. But that’s another story.
When he set foot in the car with his ex-boyfriend of three months, Jacob, I had a feeling it was the beginning of the end.
“I’ve never been on a road trip before,” says Jake, all boyish grins and excitement. “Except to Six Flags.”
“What’s that, like three hours?” Miles turns to ask him in the back.
Before he can answer, I turn the key and hit the gas.
Dean meets us downtown, closing up the café. He strolls out, pants tight as a wet suit around his hips and flaring in faded greens and browns around his ankles. He throws his shit in the trunk of the Chevy and hops in the back.
“Hey, babies, let’s go get drugs.”
Miles and Jacob convince Dean to pick up an eight ball of coke in addition to the two bags of weed. Fifteen minutes into the trip and we’ve collectively blown over two hundred dollars, not counting gas and the sacs of oranges, bananas, and apples from the market I picked up before leaving home.
We drive back downtown to caravan with a Pontiac full of hippies, who take a cool twenty minutes to pull out of the parallel street parking. They’re good people, really. Just smelly and slow.
“You know where you’re going, right?” says Aimee, the driver. We were hitting the can and finishing vegan burritos before leaving.
“Vaguely,” I say between mouthfuls. “I printed out a map from the internet.”
“Oh, I never trust those things. Follow us, we’ve got a whole binder full of maps.”
I don’t start laughing to myself until we cross the state line and pull over for a rest stop/smoke break a mere hour and a half after leaving the city.
“We got hungry,” says Kris, all bloodshot eyes, strolling into the McDonald’s in bare feet. I had no idea hippies ate cow.
As soon we first met Kris, Dean took us all aside for a smoke and laid claim to him.
“We’re kind of a thing,” he giggled.
It was going to be a fantastic weekend with a truck full of fruits and drugs, and an army of cops and protesters waiting for us 600 miles away.
We pull away from the rest stop, and the boys break into the candy while I drive the eleven hours to the nation’s capital, playing a rousing game of cat and mouse with the other car through the night to keep me awake. No drugs for the driver. That’s my only rule.
The sun rises over the Mason-Dixon line, but apparently Aimee and I are the only ones who see it. Fiona had asked me at the last pit stop if I had picked out what cd to listen to when dawn broke, but I couldn’t come up with the answer. I realized once we were back on the road that it wasn’t my selection of music she was interested in. Abbey Road, of course, would have been the logical choice, preferably with “Here Comes the Sun” cued precisely to meet the ascending globe over the Eastern horizon.
Instead, New Order is spinning for the third consecutive time, as I have no access to alternatives and the boys are asleep. I secretly wonder what Fiona is listening to. She is possibly the only other person on the trip in whose sanity I had confidence.
As it is, however, I’m caffeinated out of my mind and still barely conscious, watching the sunrise. The sight is rather spectacular, with cigar-smoke mist huddling around the waistline of the hills while the sky splits in two with color. My bloodshot eyes wince at the brightness as we hit the beltway.
“Can we eat? I’m fucking starving and have to piss,” Miles groans from the back. We’re thirty minutes from our destination.
“Can it wait?”
But of course, it can’t. Miles eats McDonald’s for the third time while the rest of us stay by the cars. I peel an orange on the bed of the truck, watching my breath frost. It’s close to an hour before we make it out of the parking lot. No one says a word when we pull into the garage of a Whole Foods supermarket downtown where the rest of us eat breakfast.
Somehow my parents find out I’m back in town and I reluctantly agree to meet with them before we rally on the mall near the Capitol Steps. My mother has baked scones with raisins and we chat while my father throws my old Schwinn in the back, on top of the backpacks. I suppose he was more concerned with preventing a love-in than a break-in. At least they are kind enough to ignore my choice of attire, my aroma, and my cause. They’ve always been religious and right wing. We talk about my wife and job for a few minutes before we awkwardly hug and they leave.
Later, we convene on the mall, about halfway between the Capitol Dome and the Washington monument. Dean is quick to point out its phallic significance loudly as children in strollers with gaping eyes and mouths look on.
Jessie Jackson and Jane Fonda spit in our ears over loudspeakers while we hastily make colorful signs with clever slogans like “Bombing for Peace is like Fucking for Virginity”, and “Wage Peace.” I keep wishing I had dropped acid to make sense of it all. Meanwhile, Miles and Jacob stand over us and shake their heads while we get our knees dirty.
“You should wear one of these,” Fiona says, handing me a pink bandana.
“It’s not really my color.”
“We’re all wearing one, so they can’t identify us.”
Who exactly “they” are, Fiona never mentions, but apparently they warrant her attire: a Blues Brothers mask. It makes me a little nervous the extent some have gone to disguise their appearance. One of our troupe wears roller skates and a Mardi Gras mask made of red feathers. I’m already wearing a hat, and resolve to hold my sign in front of my face until Miles takes it from me and tapes it onto the back of one he picked up off the ground.
As the march winds its way around the Capitol Steps, I follow my sign until it is lost in the distance and I make my way back to the rest of the group who are chanting and marching alongside a small collection of protesters in orange prison garb—grotesque images of the incarcerated in Guantanamo Bay.
“You don’t seem that into this whole thing,” says Dean, laying a hand on my shoulder while the crowd shouts, “We want peace, not an increase.”
“I am,” I reassure him while snapping a picture of the helicopter that was circling above us. “I just don’t believe in mantras.”
“I thought this was a no-fly zone,” says Aimee.
We look back over our shoulders as we ascend Capitol Hill. I thought we were near the back of the crowd, but the line of people snakes out of sight behind us and we can see the throng streaming down the other side heading towards the finish. We are a force to be reckoned with. The papers that chose to cover the event said tens of thousands. The organizers said half a million.
When we come down on the other side of the hill, a few fellow peaceniks had begun to stage a sit-in. A few drummers roll out a beat with their hands on synthetic hides while the small gathering calls for the passers-by to sit down and surround the Capitol Building. As solidarity reaches its breaking point, the weariness of 36 sleepless hours begins to catch up with me and I gladly take a knee next to my brothers and sisters.
All told we number less than a hundred sitting on the street, but it is enough to block the path from sidewalk to sidewalk and attract at least a dozen photographers and as many more shooting video. My film has run out, and no longer encumbered by the camera straps I feel like making a statement, when my phone rings.
“Where are you?” asks Miles on the other end.
“At the bottom of the hill. We’re squatting.”
“Jacob and I are back on the mall, come meet us when you get here.”
“I gotta go,” I say as the chant rises to a fever pitch.
He calls three more times, and I finally stop answering when the police ride up in a row of motorcycles and horses and begin to edge forward. For a while their sirens are overpowered by our cries of protest and outrage. As the emotions intensify and the officers grow in numbers we begin to disperse. Our point has been made both peacefully and without arrest.
Dragging signs in our weary arms, we meet the two on the edge of the mall.
“Where were you assholes?” Miles demands.
“We were squatting. I told you.”
“No you didn’t. Did he tell us that?”
“I can’t believe how little trash there is,” says Fiona as we pass a trashcan filled to the brim with broken signposts and a pile of printed signs. The mall, however, is green as far as the eye can see. Not even a biodegradable water bottle mars the relative cleanliness.
We reach the car. Miles takes shotgun while Jacob slinks into the back. The rest climb into the Pontiac.
“How did you feel about the solidarity?” I throw the words into the air as a distraction as I half-drunkenly slalom down 11th street towards the beltway.
“Good,” is the best response Jacob can muster.
“Didn’t you see some of the signs? The slogans, they made no sense. ‘Enough is enough.’ What does that even mean? I felt so diversified. I wish there was a greater sense of a singular cause.”
“That’s the point, though,” says Miles. “We were thousands strong, gathering with different voices to express our outrage. E pluribus unim.”
“I guess,” I say, screeching to a halt at a red light. “I’m just afraid that that’s all the critics are going to see, you know? The ten percent of the marchers who have nothing thoughtful to say are going to represent the whole thing to the opponents. They’ll just think we were a bunch of brainless, smelly hippies and disregard the whole thing. Not that what we did was going to make a difference anyway, but I felt like we had an intelligent, important point to make and that it may have been undermined by the mindlessness of a small minority.”
“The point was made by the numbers. We were there in force. It doesn’t matter what was said or how we said it. Quantity, in this case, speaks a lot more than quality.”
“Hell, no. That’s what we were trying to do when we sat down in the street. Make a point we couldn’t with numbers.”
“That makes no sense. No sense at all,” Miles begins to shake his finger at me. “What the hell was that anyway? It’s totally against everything the rally was about.”
“We were peaceful, we dispersed without arrest. What ever happened to freedom of expression? We’ve got a right to speak out. They’re our fucking streets. Who the hell do you think paid for them.”
“What exactly did you prove, aside from the fact that a bunch of lazy pot-smoking tree-huggers can’t make it a mile without taking a break?”
“I don’t think you understand. I had an obligation to sit down, to let the impact of my actions speak louder than my voice could, and I’m fucking proud that I did it. You know that as soon as the last marcher passed us the cops were on top of us with their fucking motorcycles and sirens like a pack of roaring lions.”
“Lionesses,” Jacob chirps.
“Whatever. The point is we were serious. It wasn’t just about being a member of a march, it was about proving that we were pissed off and not settling for a fucking walk in the park.”
“The point was the march. We made our point by marching, not by taking a seat.”
“Maybe you did. But you can’t talk me out of thinking that what we did was important. I don’t know, what do you think about all of this, Jake?”
“I thought the girl with the roller-skates was more concerned with the attention that she was getting than with the protest.”
“Yeah, probably,” we all agree, and drive in silence to a bar for dinner and drinks.
Six hours of sleep and a massive hangover later, I awake in the apartment of an old friend who was kind enough to lend me a corner of her carpet and a pillow. A copy of the Post lays on the coffee table, a picture of the masses on the mall slapped on the front page under the headline “Thousands March.” Miles snakes it before we leave, proof that he was there on the 27th of January, 2007.
A bitter taste creeps down my throat. It makes me sick to my stomach when I read the coverage, or lack thereof. I had hoped we could raise awareness, change the heart of a senator, end the war. But all of this seems so dim in the glare of the daily news.
Why were we here? The war in Iraq started more than four years ago. Soldiers with automatic weapons and hand-shaking, cheek-kissing diplomats had failed to end the violence. What made us think we could?
And then it hits me, a moment of clarity as I fade in and out of consciousness in the passenger seat on the way back to Chicago. Despite our bullheaded disagreements, maybe Miles and I weren’t so different. Whether or not I concurred with his opinions and methodology, for a few hours on the steps of the Capitol, we were Democracy.
