Screaming at the Supreme Court: A Love Story (Part Three)

            After my righteously unhinged encounter with the MAGA couple, Amy and I crossed the street from the Capitol and joined the biggest of the three crowds, in front of the Supreme Court itself. As we joined the throng, they were chanting my very favorite:

“Shut! It! Down!”

            I let so much fury out into those chants that even Amy, who has known me at my very best and VERY worst, looked a little surprised/impressed. I fully embraced the shrill, hectoring harpy-ish ness of my voice, let it all out into the sky with thousands of other rape survivors and our brave allies. The pain and anger that I screamed with felt like it came from the very center of the earth, as if I was screaming as nature herself, which is of course what’s really at stake here.

            In the midst their sadism, their selfishness, their entitlement, Kavanaugh supporters also call themselves “pro-life” and I don’t think anything could be further from the truth. What I see (what I always HAVE seen) in every single one of the Republican policies—from forced pregnancy to caging children to deregulating the environment, is a ruthless, bloodthirsty hatred for life itself.

            And I just realized why: Life, like justice movements, can’t really be controlled. It seeds and prevails itself in millions and billions of chaotic, mysterious, and ravenously resilient ways. Just like this protest’s voice and Dr. Ford’s voice and Anita Hill’s voice and Mamie Till’s voice, life is unstoppable. It’s a vine that keeps seeding itself, keeps sprouting and spreading in insurmountable ways, ways that make white colonialist patriarchs NERVOUS. As long as there is life, as long as there is VOICE, there’ll be something they can’t control. I think that’s where white male supremacists of both/all political parties get their horrible, bloodthirsty nihilism. They have to be stopped.

            So the fury that was coming out of me that day felt both firmly grounded and out of control—at no point for the rest of that day did I stop scaring myself. I decided that I wanted to go up the Supreme Court steps to see the crowd and stake my claim, to plant my feet. When a policeman told me I couldn’t bring my sign up there with me, then told me again after I tried to put down my sign and go up, I got in his face:

“Because GOD FORBID I should want to express myself IN AMERICA.”

            Cliché but true. I felt frustrated with myself for not having a handle on my emotions, but jangled fury seems like the perfect emotion with which to stand on the Supreme Court steps, glaring at America and looking lovingly at the crowd as they chanted:

“We! Believed! Anita then! We! Believe! Christine now!”

            This is my country. Our country, and we are SICK OF YOUR FUCKING NONSENSE. But even/especially on this wild, explosive, feminist day, there was SO MUCH MORE nonsense to come.

My Wonderful, Magical Day of Yelling at Nazis, Part Five

Back to last Sunday in a minute, but this morning in church, we had a guest speaker, an organizer and woman of color who said we should push outside our liberal boundaries and realize that those who hate might do so because they don’t have enough love. She wanted white folks to use our identity as a way in, to go back to where we’ve left and try again.

Disarm, she said, and listen.

Unitarians are like that.

Though I generally prefer to spend my energy on targeted communities rather than their/our attackers, the speaker did give me a chance to reflect on the compassion I DO feel for white nationalists and others who don’t have the benefit of diverse lives. Amy always scoffs/admires when I talk about how sad I am for racists, but I am. Anyone can empathize with the feeling of being trapped inside what one already knows, with being afraid of those unlike us. I do feel sad for those 25-or-so men on the other side of the fence last week in Lafayette Park. It would be lonely and sad to rely on superiority for a sense of worth, to be so scared they turn to hate. But I’ll probably always be the one to yell, fight, and turn away while others with more people skills reach out to those in hate groups. I think both approaches are necessary and okay.

Back to the wonderful yelling. Craning our necks. Chanting “Shame! Shame! Shame!” Police on horses lined up facing us. The crowd startled and seemed to retreat about something and I smelled something bad. The nightmare sequence activated in my already-altered brain. The smell might have been a confederate flag burning, or just a funky cigar, but my brain read it as tear gas, which to my knowledge I have never smelled. I grabbed Amy amidst the (she said later it was very mild, if any) chaos and said “I have to get you out of here.” By the time we found a friendly tree a few feet away from the crowd, I’d started to return to normal. I breathed. I ate peanut butter and jelly and hoped no one nearby had a nut allergy—back to regular everyday protest thoughts.

“I’m DONE WITH THIS,” I said, but as the food entered my system and I could see that  everyone around me was doing okay, I knew I could stay a little longer.

Possibly it was thunder that had startled the crowd. The sky opened up and poured rain into the humidity, onto everyone’s signs. Watercolor colors dripped down onto my Disarm Hate shirt.

Amy wanted to see the other side of the fence and my curiosity took over from my fear, so we waded all the way into the crowd, trying not to poke or be poked with umbrellas or dripping signs. We sang:

“Na na na na, na na na na, hey hey hey, goodbye.”

We sang “We Shall Over Come.” We sang “This Little Light of Mine” Then more na na na nas. I decided that all this singing meant that it qualified as church.

The police horses were so beautiful. I stood there feeling outraged on their behalf. Why should they be wearing riot helmets? They never did a thing to anybody, why should they be dragged into our mess? I guess it’s too late in human history to be mad about the domestication of animals, but sheesh!

I didn’t stand there fuming about the horses for much longer. A police leader came out with a bullhorn and told us that Unite the Right had gone home, and now we needed to go home too. It was the first time I’d ever felt like we’d won a protest.  Dance parties broke out! Whoops of joy came up from the crowd. It was right around the time I’d told my check-in person that we would hit the road. I put my waterlogged sign into an overflowing recycling bin and felt free without it. We did it. We won.

On the way home, Amy drove and I scrolled though news story after news story. While most of them acknowledged that the counter-protest had far outmatched the hate rally, they didn’t show the images of the march the way I saw it. News videos showed the most armored Antifa members and they showed Jason Kessler draped in the American flag.

On our neighborhood thread, one guy told me that my personal experience of the day was “fake news” and a lady told me that I was wrong because my perspective didn’t match those of the mainstream news.

Part of the reason I’ve written this down in so much detail is that people are already trying to convince me that it didn’t happen. The way so many on our team tried to erase Hillary’s primary win. Tried to erase the fact that she won the popular vote and so would seem to be, on some level, likable. Like people try to erase pretty much all of the work that women do. Ever. Like I teach my tutoring students—we’ve got to give ourselves credit for every step of the way. It’s the only reliable way to get it.

Speaking of 2016, amidst this liberal love-fest, this celebration of (momentary but no less important) unity, it’s important to remember that we on the left have our OWN white supremacy problem. (I mean, in addition to Mass Incarceration. Please watch 13^th) There’s still a small but loud minority of people (mostly white men) on the left what say that “Identity Politics” don’t matter (please listen to Kamala Harris lambaste them for this on Call Your Girlfriend: https://www.callyourgirlfriend.com/sen-kamala-harris/) and who undermine the work and contributions of not just Hillary Clinton but of her supporters, which means women, especially women of color, LGBTQ folks, disabled people—there are those in our party who want to silence us/them. (Amy just explained to me that the silencers are known as the alt-left. I had no idea that was a real thing!)

THERE ARE PEOPLE ON THE LEFT WHO BOOED JOHN LEWIS! NOT IN THE SIXTIES! TWO SUMMERS AGO!

So I’m glad we teamed up against the nazis on the right and won this round. But we still have to keep pushing back against the sexism and racism of our own party if we want last Sunday (AND THE BLUE WAVE) to have the lasting effect that we want.

Thank you for listening and being on my team. Love you a bunch.

My Wonderful, Magical Day of Yelling at Nazis, Part Four

            Whenever I noticed one of the hardcore Antifa members, face covered, gas mask, sometimes in a spiky helmet and/or knee and elbow pads suitable for roller derby, I checked my instincts. What I found there was nothing but calm, an eerie-quiet feeling of we’re-all-in-this-together, even though this person would almost surely have called me a shill (or worse) if I’d met them online in 2016. What I felt was trust and compassion. I don’t always feel that way towards the younger, whiter factions of the left, but it was a relief to feel it that day. I felt like they were there to protect those of us who are less fighty, or less able to fight.

            When the contingent of young socialists behind us in the march, diverse and carrying a “Black Trans Lives Matter” banner, began chanting “No hatred, no fear, immigrants are welcome here!” I was moved. I was overcome by an almost supernatural joyful sadness, a deep ravaged gratitude that felt like it came from the center of the earth.

            I went ahead and sobbed. I let so much out on that hot, loud, humid street—the years and decades of pain and fear, the children in cages, my childhood trip to the Statue of Liberty during which I took the words of Emma Lazarus’s poem VERY SERIOUSLY, it all streamed out of my face and my throat as I marched down the street with my best friend and thousands of strangers.

            A nice man patted my shoulder and asked if I was okay, and I cry-said “Yes, I’m fine, I’m just so happy that people are SO AMAZING.” He looked a little nonplussed as I thanked him and kept on sob-walking.

            If I could push a button and cry like that for a few minutes every day, I would. As the tears subsided and the chants did not, I felt like I was floating, like I was awash in a sea of empathy and healing. I’m not religious, but I’d call this a religious experience. In those moments of crying I felt myself merging with the crowd, I felt myself filled up with the best name for god I know: love.

            At each intersection, I wondered if this was where it would happen—the confrontation, the violence, the attack, the clash. But from where I was standing, it never was. Though I don’t usually find a police presence comforting, I appreciated the hands-off (from what I saw; I’m sure it looked different for people of color and/or for trans participants) organization of the D.C. police force. Plus, there weren’t huge tanks stationed around like there were at the March for Our Lives—I guess because this wasn’t specifically about guns. From my no-doubt skewed white perspective it felt like we, the left, were the ones who were being protected from the bad guys, but I guess it might just have been comforting that so much effort was being put into facilitating free speech, even if it was the free speech of horrible white nationalist monsters. I’m weirdly patriotic sometimes, and only sort of ashamed to admit it.

            Finally, we made it to Lafayette Square, which was already packed with liberals of every stripe. My body felt tense and pained with the possible proximity to Unite the Right, with the anticipation of confrontation. Determined to confront my fears, I craned my neck over the crowd where the nazis were supposed to be, but I could see nothing but a vast partition and then police.

            The crowd chanted “Shame! Shame! Shame!”

            We could tell by the way the whole crowd tensed up that the other “rally” had arrived. (We later learned that the nazi demonstration was about 25 people, far outnumbered by the number of police) Mounted policemen took their places in front of our side. We all peered over the fence and braced ourselves, though I’m not sure for what.

Next Time: A panic, a rainstorm, a victory.

My Wonderful, Magical Day of Yelling at Nazis, Part Three

One of my favorite parts of the No Hate in DC rally was when people asked me “What’s the E.R.A?” (https://www.equalrightsamendment.org/) and I got to tell them that sadly all genders aren’t currently protected under the Constitution, but we only need one more state to ratify!! People from Virginia apologized for not having already ratified, but it was so cool because they could call their reps and do something about it directly! This feeling of organizing-within-organizing made me feel so optimistic, happy, and powerful, and I plan to carry the Equal Rights Amendment around more often.

As the group (estimates had the count at around two thousand) started to migrate over to the side of the park where the march would start, a couple of the communist and socialist groups began to form a march in the opposite direction. I caught a glimpse at the (white lady) Refuse Fascism speaker at whom I’d yelled “Stop suppressing votes!” when she’d launched into a “both parties are the same” tirade at Philly’s immensely successful demonstration against Family Separation during Mike Pence’s visit a couple months ago. (https://www.phillyvoice.com/pence-in-philly-hundreds-protest-march-rittenhouse/) Telling a crowd of mostly brown and black people not to vote is a good way to become my nemesis for life, but I wouldn’t let seeing this character disrupt my sense of unity.

(Not the nemesis lady)

Antsy to march, Amy and I joined the smaller march, but a guy in a yellow safety vest told us that it was a splinter group, and that the Charlottesville contingency, Black Lives Matter, and other groups would be leaving in a few minutes. After marching with the splinter march for about a half-block, the phrase “hired by Russia to make the main protest march seem smaller” popped up in my mind. It’s funny/sad that such a paranoid-sounding phrase can also be totally sensible. (For a good insight on how ground-level Russian interference works: https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/curious-case-russian-flash-mob-west-palm-beach-cheesecake-factory/)

We rested in the shade for a few minutes then went back to the main group. Black Lives Matter was out front, with other groups getting into formation behind them/us. Fox News came by and the crowd erupted into boos and chants of “Black Lives Matter!” I feel so incredibly lucky whenever I get to chant that.

(Awkward aside: Earlier in the day we’d come across a group of white ladies about my age chanting in celebration of Heather Heyer and happily moved over to join them, until I realized they were chanting “Say Her Name!” I sidled away, not knowing how to feel, but knowing that Say Her Name is for women of color and even the most wonderful, heroic, martyred gift of a white woman can’t have it. For a great resource about the #Sayhername movement, you can go here: http://www.aapf.org/sayhernamereport/)

Finally, the march got underway. I loved the way that “No Trump! No KKK! No fascist USA!” reverberated off of the fancy columned buildings, the way “Whose streets? Our streets!” felt true on so many levels.

Next time, sobbing in the march with joy and love.

My Wonderful, Magical Day of Yelling at Nazis, Part Two

               

We got to DC by 11 AM, just in time to visit the National Gallery of Art. I was excited to see the Dutch Masters’ paintings of ships, but frustration and horror about colonialism put a damper on my fascination with the beautiful, intricate model tall ships and dramatic, almost photorealistic maritime paintings. In the modern and contemporary wing, the Calders gave me such a sense of buoyancy as the light streamed in over the mobiles at all sorts of I.M. Pei-designed angles.

Voyager by Kerry James Marshall (https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.159651.html) gave me a sense that goodness and rightness were possible. So did (to a much less transcendent degree) the strong coffee in the museum café.

Detail: Voyager by Kerry James Marshall

Our Lyft driver was happy to hear that we were on our way to Freedom Plaza to yell at nazis. He was African American and a veteran, so the idea of anyone carrying a nazi flag offended him on a deep patriotic level I could probably never fathom.

“That’s not a nazi in the trunk,” he said, “Just a water bottle I keep forgetting to unload.”

“A nazi in the trunk would definitely be five stars” I said, and we promised to yell some extra for him as we jumped out into the humidity to join the crowd.

One of my goals for the day was to really pay attention to what it feels like to be around Antifa members. I knew lots of people were afraid of them, maybe more afraid of them than they are of white nationalists for some reason (racism), so I wanted to figure it out.

Though one of our local anti-fascist groups does seem a little bit like they might be funded by Russia for protest-trolling purposes (Refuse Fascism Philly is almost exclusively white, seems to have a very big poster budget, and has engaged in “both parties are the same” voter suppression rhetoric—could be suspicious, could just be young and rich…) I’ve also felt grateful to see covered-faced anti-fascists take the periphery of the Philly Trans March, seemingly to act as a protective front line in case anything violent might happen. That’s an act of risk and service that means something to

me.

Although the media portrayed it differently, the rally in Freedom Plaza was populated with all different kinds of people. BYP 100 and Black Lives Matter activists, young punk kids handing out “ally cookies” that I didn’t realize were a pun until later on, and at least two two middle-aged ladies carrying signs about the ERA:

           

Though I have a deep distrust of young white dudes (Okay, white dudes. Okay, dudes in general. Okay, almost everyone because I have anxiety and PTSD and it’s 2018.) I felt a deep wave of affection for a scrawny bespectacled twenty-something white guy standing atop a planter holding an Antifa flag aloft.

And, as at every protest I’ve been to, there were adorable kids being adorable. I put on my teacher voice and told them they were doing SUCH a good job.

My Wonderful, Magical Day of Yelling at Nazis, Part One

I spent a good chunk of last week working on my protest sign and panicking. I had terrible dreams. My best friend/ex-wife can’t walk very fast and I dreamed that we got separated in a crowd—I have recurring dreams of us getting separated and me screaming out “Amy! Amy!” because she’s lost, then getting in trouble for screaming. So you can see that as much as I tend to drag people for being afraid to protest, I was scared of this one.

For anyone who might have missed it, a group of white nationalists planned a rally for Unite the Right II on in Washington, DC on Sunday the 12^th, the anniversary of last year’s tiki-torch hatefest. On the anniversary of a white supremacist murdering Heather Heyer with his car. When I heard that facebook was taking down some of the counter-protesters’ event pages, I sought out a couple that hadn’t been taken down and RSVPed YES. My BFF agreed to go with me and I made her promise not to get lost or murdered. I asked a favorite neighbor to be my check-in person so someone could feed the cats and call my mom if anything happened to me—since the March for Out Lives, this has been my routine, and I’m grateful to have a neighbor who doesn’t mind!

Aside from my #sayhername series, (http://theserotoninfactory.blogspot.com/2018/06/say-her-name-street-art-abolish-police.html) this was probably the saddest protest art I ever painted. I had to put it in the closet for the second half of the week to stem the rolling panic attacks it inspired.

The other side was cheerier, and I was happy to devote some time to my favorite new (to me) cause:

(For more info and the other unratified states, check here: https://www.equalrightsamendment.org/states.htm)

I sproinged out of bed at 4:30 AM on the 12^th, but only so I could read my book for a while before getting ready to go. Amy and I packed water, snacks, and sunscreen. She packed more phone batteries than we could ever need, that’s a very comforting thing about Amy.

Next: Soothing Art and Pondering Antifa

The Stupidest Thing That Ever Happened to Me, Part Two

The tiny altar of my old desk: Dexter the Emotional Support Peacock, "Oprah Rules" on a light-up marquee, a baby eevee that a student drew, a paper snowflake another student made me, Garnet being made of love, My Little Ponies saying "Friendship is magic," the times I met Cecile Richards, John Lewis, Hillary Clinton. Dear Prudence is on the monitor, as he always was when I had a spare moment.

My coworker and I went outside for a while and decided we would just lock up the store until Amy got there, but when I went in to lock up, 7-10 members of the security staff and the maintenance staff had formed a concerned circle alongside the fire chief. A member of the public safety staff, a young woman I’d never met before, said “Miss, you can’t talk to the chief like that.”

So, it was fine for him to come in reprimanding a grown-up citizen and to have to be cajoled into doing his actual job, but I was a serious problem for cursing. And it was more important to soothe this dude’s dignity than to make sure that the other dudes’ mistake had been fixed. Confronting this many uniformed people at once about this cascade of lunacy was too much. My coworker and I left the store with the ego-soothers and went to breakfast, which we admittedly should have done in the first place.

My wonderful treasure of a coworker took this opportunity to direct me to a nearby old-timey diner she’d been wanting me to try. While we ate a big, bacony breakfast and waited for Amy to arrive, my friend gave me some insight about the workings of the campus. She explained that campus public safety often tried to limit and even suppress calls to emergency services outside of campus, including in cases of sexual assault. In other words, the college was completely willing to put their students at risk if that meant fewer official incidents to report. The students and their families were paying thousands of dollars for students to live on a campus that prized its reputation over their safety. Including, it seemed, being willing to sacrifice their own property.

It has taken me a long time to write this down, partly because institutional horrors like this are hard for me to process. Anxiety brain connects the dots, and somehow, the whole world is conspiring against bodily safety for the stupidest of reasons: money, men who are scared to admit they’re wrong, preserving ancient gender, race, and class oppressions and most of all, protecting the institution itself.

In times when I tangle with authority, I tend to self-gaslight, so at the diner, my friend reassured me again and again that I wasn’t crazy, that there hadn’t been a better course of action, that it wasn’t my fault. Amy agreed as she sat down with us and ordered, but the (Rush Limbaugh listener) campus liaison had been on the phone and things didn’t seem good. I knew that Amy wouldn’t want to fire me, but I knew I was probably in trouble. Isn’t it weird as an adult, feeling the same in-trouble feelings you might have felt when you were seven or sixteen? The emotions of a traumatized kid never really leave me, they just find different ways to fight.

            The three of us finished our breakfast and went back to the store, where public safety was guarding the door I hadn’t been able to lock. The smoke smell had dissipated so I guess there wasn’t a fire. But that didn’t make me feel safer on a campus where I now knew that calling for emergency services was restricted, and, as I was about to find out, punishable.

I made some detox tea and turned to Dear Prudence for a few minutes, happy that after that I could finally turn to the online orders and other first-thing-in-the morning tasks, but soon, the Rush Limbaugh listening campus liaison was on the phone again. “I want her off campus,” he said, “Now.”

Amy couldn’t do anything about it. Security would be on the way soon. I lingered for a while, in denial, finishing my tea, my coworker determined to cheer me up with surprisingly hilarious old Veggie Tales episodes. (Rhyming “manatee” with “humanity”!! I can’t even!)

I packed up my pen cup, took some of my favorite employee art and customer thank-you cards off the wall. I left the sticky notes with happy faces and spangle-heart emojis. I’d posted one for each time I snuck some art or writing into my work days. There were so many sticky notes, in rainbow colors. When the store was packed up a few months later for Amy-swears-unrelated reasons, the ladies just left all the sticky notes there.

I wrapped up my archetypical work coffee cup, (Charlie Brown saying “Good grief!”) and all of my brightly colored pens. I would miss (until my next store) checking off purchase orders and dispositions in neon pink and light blue, writing thank-you’s on the online orders so we could all feel (okay, so I could feel) less like cogs in a heartless corporate machine.

The head of security, whom I’d known only as kind and helpful, was there to escort me off campus. I was afraid to tell anyone the story because I was worried that it seemed implausible—it still kind of does. I didn’t want anyone to know (and also I wanted EVERYONE to know) how poorly I was getting along with others, how I hadn’t been able to stop myself from letting a stupid mean man take away yet another thing I liked.

What scared me most, and still does, was that in the moment I called the unwilling fire chief a sexist piece of shit, it didn’t feel like a conscious decision. It felt like a pulse from deeper inside, from all the way in the center of the earth, like it was bigger than me and also totally stupid and mundane. I want to give myself a little time before the next installment, to think about what this all really means.