Sacred Honor Ground .. Do NOT Move ..
rules for peace protest
I have suggested to the protesters in “Working Vacation” Crawford on their website (below) some parts of these tactics gleaned from a life of protest since when I first had the discussion in Northern Vermont with my first husband Michael about whether I (the appointed wielder of the ax) would have to chop off one big toe or three of the lesser toes. He was not going to go to a land in civil war, <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Vietnam, and kill people he did not know well enough to hate. Generically hating any Them was not in his nature.
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The key to this threat to Cindy Sheehan, a Gold Star mother protesting outside the Imperial Ranch is if the Crawford 50 protesters are threatened with arrest:
Do Not Move One Inch.
The last civil disobedience I had with being wrongly bullied by riot police a month ago (carrying my teach peace sign), I said, “Arrest me if you must. This 3-feet-square of ground where I stand is the last piece of real and free America left in this city tonight and I am not moving.”
The hundreds of riot police in their black riot exo-skeletons milled around me and had both furtive & frantic conferences, hissed in my face, and threatened me with arrest, but finally they did not arrest me. For three hours, my stupid knees were shaking as they had their noses in my face, but there is something about stillness that doesn't activate the attack in the predator or something.
Several episodes in months before this, they slyly would get me to “just move over here out of the way” or “just come talk to the Captain so we can see what we can work something out.” They’d been trained. I hadn’t – yet.
Now, my old gams hurt so much that I shook my legs around like some dervish after a few hours, I was so tired, I just wanted to go home, but I did not move out of my Sacred Honor square. One police officer tried to tempt me to move by being nice and saying, “You must be so tired. You can go sit over there if you want. I would.” The one other nice officer offered me a bottle of water, for which I would have normally killed by the end of the third hour. No. Bad cop, good cop. No. Just don't move out of your Sacred Honor square.
Several would stride so close to me that the stiff starched sleeves of their uniforms brushed my face. It was pretty much their whole bag of intimidation tricks. Most of them were hissers or shouters or bullhorners. “This has now been declared an illegal assembly,” from the bullhorn and the black(!) heliocopter deafeningly clattering ominously and endlessly overhead, “Disperse at once or you will be subject to arrest.”
The percussive noise of the heliocopeter is a very effective weapon. It instills fear at some level out of conscious control. “Disperse at once or you will be subject to arrest.”
No. Be smart about where you're willing to stand for 3 hours, and you have to be willing to be arrested, but the stillness works.
And steal this line— it made me feel braver and it flummoxed them: “Arrest me if you must. This 3-feet-square of ground where I stand is the last piece of real and free America left in this [city, town, road, &c] today and I am not moving from here.” I said it over and over, every time they tried a new gambit. Those darn long black riot sticks are scary. Do not move.
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The following is how it felt to begin to Damn It do something on-going and local and not just go to the safety-in-numbers big marches. If we had just two in every town doing this, think of it. This was a Guest Opinion piece published Jan 31 2003
Why I walk for peace
How does it feel to go out the front door and put your heartfelt convictions into public action?
Since late September 2002 I've been a lonely nutcase wandering preposterously up and down Main Street carrying my 16”x18” “Teach Peace” sign on a 4'7″ pole. At first you feel darn silly. But finally, after 46 solo peace walks, the acute self consciousness is wearing off because it is of course not at all about me, but about the future and about not smithereening young folk just as treasured as my 20-year old coworkers Silas and Gareth, or your happily careening young folk Pete and Jim, only with Iraqi names.
A droll and unexpected tidbit is that I think it's important to smile the whole time so that any given person seeing me doesn't think, “there goes that ole crank walking for peace.”
Well, I've always thought of myself as quite a jolly and smiling person. But now that I have to smile for peace and the benign future of humankind, I've discovered that we do not smile for two hours at a time. In the early going, my smile ached so bad in the grin muscle that I had to take aspirin to get through the day. Now, with all this “working out,” my smile is getting more buff and there's hardly a twinge anymore. But who would have guessed?
One of the chastening lessons of public action is the overturning and overturning of these stupid little stereotypes that lurk in the underbrush of your mind. “This kind of person is going to hate my sign,” you think. As you gird yourself to pass by them, they smile and whisper, “Great sign.” Some dude you're sure spends nights tossing back brews and blowing people up in video games says, “I want to thank you for being out here.”
I hand out wallet-sized cards with Gandhi's nine steps for decreasing violence. I found these in Colman McCarthy's book I'd Rather Teach Peace, which shocked me into realizing that we never teach peace in our schools, only war after war.
Yet in spite of the gloomsayers, in my own lifetime — a quick blink of the historical eye — we have made real steps to get past segregation and the trivializing of women, for instance. One day we will be beyond war too. We will teach peace. We will understand non-violence as a vivid force.
We'll stop spending more than a thousand million dollars every day on the military. We'll stop calling mutilated civilians “collateral damage.”
I'm telling you about my small, very local public action in hopes of giving you the courage to dare to take that dreaded first step out the door. Even if you are the only one out there for awhile, you give heart to people who see you. Only two folks have sworn vilely at me. If we want a more tolerant and sane world, I think we must accept feeling awkward, must act one step beyond our comfort zone in order to speak out, to show up.
— pogblog is a 31-year local resident, a former high school English teacher and window washer, and has worked on three San Francisco ballpark campaigns. She has been an anti-war advocate since Vietnam and has walked out downtown in her small some of every day with that teach peace sign for 1034 days in a row now. Just do a little every day. It adds up.
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If you know an agent, editor, publisher person who would handle this kind of rage for justice, rage for peace material, please let me know at .. pogblog@yahoo.com
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pogblog’s Glossary for many brave & nefarious words;
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Cindy Sheehan & the Crawford Protesters
[This meetwithcindy website has been down, but should return.]
info on dick cheney & collateral damage;
democrats.com, on-going & real
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Mr. Pogblog,
Thanks for sharing how it felt, looked, etc. to literally stand your ground. I wonder what the conversations, if any, about this are like on the presidential ranch.