“It is amazing to me that you can forget yourself like that.” Those are the words of my friend, Juan Torres, as we were driving home from a church event last summer. I was trying to talk him into attending the peace protests on Saturday afternoons in Logan Square when I started talking about the November Close The SOA protests at Fort Benning, Georgia. I had told him I planned to take a stand this year by joining the prisoners of conscience, who cross the property lines of the military base, knowing full well they will spend a night in jail, along with a probable prison sentence of 3-6 months.
Juan knew about the US training of assassins in his native country of México. He might have recalled distant rumors of the violent US-backed slaughter of the Zapatistas in Chiapas and Oaxaca in 1995. These (predominantly indiginous) community leaders tried to breathe life back into the spirit and philosophy of revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata, a final attempt to make Mexicans wake up to encounter the high-tech looters in suits taking control of the country via the passage of NAFTA. Juan wanted to show his heart-felt admiration for the sacrifice I was committing to, and I deeply appreciated that.
True, his response encouraged me, but I also felt it was premature. I made a decision not to tell anyone else of my plans unless it was absolutely nessessary because I didn’t want glory, especially if my conviction failed me at the last moment.
For 60 years or more, the United States’ military has been directly involved in training and arming the militaries and police in Latin America. One of the institutions that I know exists for this purpose is the School of the Americas (SOA) renamed Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHISC or WHINSEC).
The most dispicable part of this whole setup is this military aid often takes the place of humanitarian aid given to impoverished countries in the Western Hemisphere. US citizens have the potential to imagine and fund world-wide programs to help poor farmers obtain their own land to feed themselves and their families, to establish free quality medical services, and ensure the sustainable and respectful use of resources, nourishing healthy and safe living environments. Instead, the US government trains and arms thousands of foreigners to impede, threaten, maim, or kill those people who would get in the way of today’s huge corporations’ plans to increase profit. Put very simply, in the face of powerful public dissent, these corporations must employ terrorists to remove or “disappear” those people--- obstacles to their profit-motive function. The employment of the terrorists might be direct (as in Coca-Cola in Colombia) or indirect, the US government or other governments in the middle of the deal.
Uncovering, exposing, and shutting down these disgusting covert operations is one of the great challenges we, the world community of peace and freedom-loving people, have to face. The SOA Watch’s workers and volunteers, donors, and everyone who attends and organizes the protests and educational outreach events have been taking a lead for over 15 years in under-cutting the treachery of the SOA/WHISC. Year after year, the SOAW links the kidnappings, killings and assassinations of peasants and community leaders to graduates of the SOA and of the WHISC. They do this by looking at school rosters obtained through the Freedom of Information Act whenever a report comes in about human rights violators being identified. The US government and its military do not take any initiative to investigate these abuses themselves. Actually, since the school has been known to admit students or invite speakers who have already committed or are likely to have committed crimes against human rights, their incompetence (even perhaps indifference) really is damnable.
* * *The day of my direct action, everything was ready. I had attended a meeting the night before where I made arrangements for leaving my bond money and my bag (the bus I came in on was leaving the same afternoon). There was a media committee that wanted me to write down a few comments they could include in a press release to my local newspapers. Some people taking care of logistics at the meeting told us they had found a weak spot in the concertina-wire fence where we would be able to crawl under. If that should prove impassable we might also find some way to an unfenced section. They couldn’t disclose where they found the spot (maybe a government agent was among us at the meeting) but made arrangements to meet us and lead us there. Some friends from DePaul furnished me with a lot of granola and fruit, for what I imagined could be a hike through some remote wilderness to the fort’s border.
As the funeral procession for the victims of the SOA/WHISC completed its circuit up and down the street in front of the main entrance, those of us who were crossing got led up to the fence, just to the right of the main gates, along with a few hundred or more spectators. Each of us in the first group went in gopher-style as the fence was held up for us. The hardest part was pushing through the people with cameras to get to the opening. Whatever reservations I might have had were gone because it felt like my whole body was in an adrenaline rush--- it was like the easiest thing in the world to walk up there and crawl.
* * *As an Indígeno former neighbor of mine in California once told me, “there is the law of the Land, and after that there is the law of Man.” His people followed an unwritten code that says don’t mess with what is divine--- above all don’t mess with the right of following generations and everything else that belongs to this Earth to exist. “Land” in this sense is the living Earth. You can also replace it with “Love” or “God” or any other name you may have for the entity which always provides, encourages, trancends, and loves eternally without fail.
This is where I place my hope, and within it I remain sovereign. I do not respect the rule of law. Where these times find us, it seems that we are ruled by civil and societal rules that are often driven by something other than “the law of the Land.” Peace and freedom-loving people want to do whatever we can to stop suffering and bring justice. It is sometimes possible to make small changes without irking the powerful, but more often we have to look more broadly at our options, and be creative.
The Law of Man can look menacing. It’s nothing but an illusion, a trick. What was made by our socially conditioned consent is just as easily unmade. It disintegrates as soon as we stop acknowledging it. This is why civil disobedience has been so powerful, and the reprisal so swift, throughout the history of human civilization.
As I write this, there are personal risks involved in every disobedient act that go beyond everyday risks. I face the almost certain prospect of being subjected to workcamp slavery. Many people in the past have taken much greater risks for making a stand. When I went to Detroit a few months ago for Rosa Parks’ wake, many people there respected her because she did what she planned to do despite what could have happened to her. She knew she could have been lynched--- indeed, that is what had happened to others in the South with less prominence than Parks who had also refused to give up a bus seat for a white person.
Whether or not the effects are as immediately jolting to the ego, there are far greater risks with choosing not to take action. We must begin to see sacrifice as a vehicle to invigorate wonder into our fellow human beings. Many people--- and especially those driven by personal ambition--- are at-risk of losing the ability to question, their free-lance quest for determining what is true. It is especially sad when adolescents feel they must regress to this existence, their childhood creativity still fresh in memory, but turning frigid, no longer able to flow out into the universe.
Those of us who choose to act in civil disobedience and accept our fates emit an energy that is not wasted but rains down most intently on those who have abandoned or are about to abandon wonder for phantoms of commercialism. The prospect of self-sacrifice is so antithetical to this worldview that the two cannot be ground together. At that moment they are suddenly and completely re-immersed in wonder as they are left to analyze this piece of news.
This energy does not fade or fail with the passing of time, but still lingers on in the hearts of those it touched. Although specific information and our own identities may fall away, the simple rumor about an act of unconditional sacrifice soon takes a life of its own, floating on the wind, finding new and re-invigorated children to encourage, inspire, and provide for.
The question: “Was it worth it?” will always be irrelevant. This is just the beginning