Return to Top of Page

​

The Price of an Orange (from RQ #97 - Spring 2005)

For Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall

by Starhawk

I am writing this as we approach the anniversary of two murders. And I find myself thinking about an orange, a ghost orange, growing on a branch on a ghost tree that no longer stands in the courtyard of a home crushed to bloodstained rubble.

In Rafah, the border town that lies on the dusty frontier where Gaza meets Egypt. A place of cement tenements pockmarked with bullet holes, streets choking in dust and smashed concrete, barbed wire and fences and sniper towers, where Rachel and Tom died, like so many of the Palestinians they had come to stand with in solidarity.

In March of 2003 Rachel Corrie was killed as she was trying to stop an Israeli soldier from demolishing a home. The bulldozer driver saw her, and deliberately ran over her. She was twenty-three years old.

Just a few weeks later, an Israeli soldier firing from a sniper tower shot Tom as he was trying to save some children who were under fire. After nine long months in what the doctors call a "vegetative state", his body breathing but his mind and brain destroyed, Tom died in January 2004, just a day after his mother whispered in his ear that his murderer had finally been arrested. He was just twenty-two.

Tom and Rachel were not unique in dying in Rafah. Palestinians are killed every day. At the time of Rachels’s death, the toll was more than 250 dead in Rafah alone since the beginning of the intifada, more than 50 of them children. Now the count must be much higher. The same day Rachel died, Akhmed, a 50-year-old street sweeper who lived with his mother, went outside to smoke a cigarette. The soldiers gunned him down, for no particular reason, and his death made no international headlines, caused no controversy, evoked no words of condemnation from a shocked world.

The children Tom was trying to save were playing on a mound of dirt on the border, a zone of rubble and razor wire, half demolished homes and dirt piles and walls riddled with shell holes. A barren zone of scraped earth where tanks prowl at night and death comes whizzing out of the air from an unseen source. And yet, because of the danger and the emptiness and the destruction, the area right along the border has a sense of wilderness, of spaciousness, of being at the edge of something, like the sea.

The children of Rafah cannot play by the sea, which lies just a few miles away. In fact, there is nothing much to play with in Rafah, no playgrounds, no swimming pools, no swings or slides or climbing bars.

So the children in Rafah are bored and infected with the restless unease of children whose lives and homes and families are constantly being shot away all around them. They run in packs. They follow strangers and mob you if you stand still. They all seem to know only one English phrase, "What’s your name?" and they call it after you, over and over again. If you ignore them they will gain your attention by lobbing a few stones at you. If you make the mistake of stopping, you are soon surrounded, groped and patted and poked by small hands as voices cry, "What’s your name? What’s your name?" until you think you will go mad.

In the few days Tom spent in Rafah he must have been plagued many times by these children. Nonetheless, when he saw a group of them crying in terror as bullets ricocheted around them, he acted instinctively to save them, running in under the fire from the sniper tower to rescue a small boy, going back after two little girls trapped on the wrong side of the mound. The sniper lowered his sites, and put a bullet in Tom’s brain. Under interrogation, the soldier first lied, claiming Tom was armed and firing at him. Later he admitted that he knew Tom was an unarmed civilian. He says he did it deliberately, as a ëdeterrent’.

I went down to Rafah after Rachel was killed to support the team who was with her, most of whom were so young that they had never experienced a death of someone close to them. I went back again after Tom was shot, to support the team that was with him, many of whom had also been with Rachel. We agonized about just which picture to put on Rachel’s martyr poster, held a press conference after Tom’s death, tried to regroup and figure out how to go on. At night we continued to sleep in homes that were at risk of being bulldozed, hoping our presence would be some slight deterrence to the soldiers, or that we could intercede with them if they came, or if nothing else, bear witness.

I stayed mostly at Abu Akhmed’s home. He was a farmer, who grew olives. His groves were destroyed by the soldiers, and he had only a few trees left. Each night he sat in the small, cement-enclosed courtyard in front of his home, making a small fire in a tin can, brewing tea for us and the visitors who would stop by to smoke and gossip, as men have talked around the fire since the days of Abraham, father of both the Arabs and the Jews.

Around that fire, the concrete and the bullets, the tanks and the shellfire, the warren of refugee tenements and the rubble filled streets seemed just a thin overlay on an older pattern of life. Look through the shell holes at just the right angle, and you might catch a glimpse of an ancient Rafah, a paradise of sun and orange groves, small farms and donkey carts laden with fruit and oil and flowers, where life went on much as it had since the beginning of time, and guest were always welcome at the evening fire.

The house was strangely bare because all of the family’s important possessions had long been removed to safer places. Abu Akhmed’s sons stayed elsewhere — the border is too dangerous a place for young men who may be perceived to be fighters and so are at risk of being shot. But they would sneak back some evenings to join us around the fire.

Abu Akhmed was old, but no older than my husband, I had to remind myself. He would tease me, saying, "Star, she Jewish — she kill you and me!" and then laugh and say, "No, Star, she good!" and discuss the possibility of finding me a husband locally, so that I might stay on in Rafah. The U.S. was bombing Iraq, troops were moving in toward Baghdad, and in the middle of the night he would often get up, turn the TV on full blast, and yell back at the news.

It was harder to sleep through than the gunshots and the periodic firing at the house, which I was used to. The room I slept in had had a big shell hole where the window was, that was now repaired. I suppose that was evidence that it was not safe, that another shell might come through in any of the nightly tank assaults. But I was grateful for the space, and the privacy, and the mat on the cement floor, and slept well whenever there was quiet to sleep in.

​

Some nights, I stayed at Abu Akhmed’s sister’s house. Abu Akhmed’s sister’s name is Sorari, and she is the grandmother. The house was a big, rambling farmhouse, with many rooms and a large kitchen and a long balcony across the front. Behind it was land that had been an olive grove before the soldiers bulldozed the trees. There were still a few trees left: a swath of olives and oranges and a pen for the chickens.

Not all of the rooms were usable: one had bullet holes through the front window and bullets lodged in the molding of the doors and Nahed was afraid to let the children sleep there. One had a huge shell hole through the wall and much of the floor: the children liked to play there because they could jump through the hole in the floor to the outside and they thought that was funny.

I remember clearly the first night I stayed there. They gave me the best bed, in a bedroom all to myself where normally Abu Ahkmed’s sister’s son Foad and his wife Nahed would sleep with the youngest children. Now Foad came to the house only for dinner, leaving before the night grew too dangerous. The mattress was covered in plastic, which crackled whenever I turned over in my sleep.

Nahed was beautiful as a Madonna, holding her children on her lap as they did their homework or cuddled up to watch TV as tanks shot at the house. The kids were so used to gunshots that they didn’t even notice. Joe, one of the team that had been with Rachel, was playing his guitar and singing, the kids were looking at my video camera and wanting me to take their pictures and play it back, all to a soundtrack of rifle fire that no one paid any attention to. Until the shots got loud and close, hitting the walls of the house. When the kids dove to the floor, I started to worry.

"This is bad," Joe said. "It’s dangerous. Maybe we should do something."

"What did you have in mind that we could do?" I asked.

​

"We could go out with a light and a bullhorn and tell them that there are Internationals here," Joe suggested. "Are you comfortable with that?"

"Comfortable" isn’t the word I would have chosen. It was just over a week since Rachel Corrie was killed. We were hoping they wouldn’t kill us, too. I should have been afraid but I was actually not feeling much of anything at all, just a kind of deadly calm, in that dangerous, numb state when you can no longer discern whether a given act is brave or stupid. Joe picked up the light, a long flourescent lamp that runs on rechargeable batteries, and the bullhorn. We put on our high-visibility vests. Nahed, nervous, holds the door for us. We stepped out into the courtyard, still protected by the concrete wall. I was holding the video camera. Cautiously, Joe pushed open the narrow, metal door, and steps out with the light on. I followed

"We are internationals!" he called out. "There are internationals in this house. And children. You are shooting at a house full of children."

We waited for a moment. No one shot us. The tank rolled away, and we went back inside.

Nahed had a few orange and olive trees left in the back yard and the front courtyard, and chickens. Most of her land had been confiscated, the trees bulldozed. In the mornings, she served us eggs, telling us with pride that they were from her own birds. I would have loved to help her with her garden, or to learn from Sorari how to bake bread on the domed, clay oven in the yard, its design the same as models found in Neolithic burials. The kids played in the yard, when the tanks weren’t around, jumping in and out of the shellhole in the back room, making a game of it.

I stayed with them one more time, after Tom’s death. I had to leave early in the morning, to go back to Beit Sahour near Bethlehem for the meeting in which we would try to make sense of these murders and decide how to go on as an organization. I didn’t want to wake anyone, or take time for breakfast, but Sorari wouldn’t let me leave her house unfed. She got up, made me coffee, gave me some pita bread to eat. As we walked out, she paused in the courtyard to pick ripe oranges from her tree, and filled my pockets.

​

It was the simplest gesture, one every gardener knows, the slightly smug generosity that draws on nature’s bounty, the sense of wealth and pride at having so much that you can give without feeling any lack. Just so, if she had come to visit me, I might have handed her an apple or a plum, or sent her away with a small jar of my own apricot jam. A very ordinary gesture. Yet everything we were fighting for was in that gesture, in the simple dignity of a woman who stands on her own ground, who has something to offer, gifts to bestow, fruit from her own tree.

I left, and never returned. When I tried to go back, the borders were closed. One by one, the internationals who were there in Rafah were forced out or eventually had to leave. Laura stayed on, for ten months, but now even she is gone.

​

And the tanks and the bulldozers marched on. The house Rachel died trying to save is gone. Abu Akhmed’s house, Sorari’s house, the courtyards and the olive trees and the orange tree, all bulldozed into oblivion.

I carried those oranges for a long time, finally ate them on a long night’s bus ride back from the hospital in Haifa where I’d gone to visit Brian, the ISM volunteer who was shot in the face by soldiers in Jenin. They tasted sweet, so sweet they surprised me, as if all the sweetness of ordinary life were concentrated in that juice. All the stories Rachel will never write, all the pictures Tom will never take, all the moments of tenderness neither will ever know, all the undone homework of the children and the unbaked bread of the women reduced now to beggary and homelessness, all the unsung songs and unlived dreams of all the thousands of bloody martyrs in whose company Tom and Rachel now rest, who paid their lives as the price of an orange. A ghost orange, that has yet to be plucked from branches daily ripped from a tree that has maybe already been uprooted, or maybe has not yet been planted, cannot be planted until a flood of the world’s outrage cleanses this bloodstained, bitter ground.

​

Starhawk is an activist, organizer, and author of ten books, including her latest, "The Earth Path" (see page 8). She teaches Earth Activist Trainings that combine permaculture design and activist skills, and works with the RANT trainer’s collective. For teaching/travel schedule and other writings by Starhawk, visit www.starhawk.org

​

Return to Top of Page

​

*****

​

Miami: a Dangerous Victory (from RQ #93 - Spring 2004)

Free Trade Area of the Americas protest draws massive police response

by Starhawk

​

For those of us who participated in the protests against the FTAA, the Free Trade Area of the Americas, in Miami the third week in November, it’s a bit hard to feel victorious. We are bruised, battered, worried about compañeros still in jail, and grieving for Jordan Feder, a young medic who died of meningitis after the action. We’ve been harassed, arrested, tear-gassed, pepper-sprayed, hit, beaten, assaulted, lied about, and in some cases literally tortured and sexually assaulted in jail, and we’ve stared directly into the naked red gaze of the New American Fascism.

​

Nevertheless we have had a significant victory that we need to understand and recognize, not least because it throws us into a new and very dangerous phase of activism.

​

Our victory was not tactical. None of our own attempts to physically enter or disrupt the conference were very effective. I’ve heard rumors that one group did actually take down a section of fence, but most of us just managed to march up to it and maintain a presence for short periods of time before being driven back by police riots. And while I could list numerous missed opportunities and tactical errors we made, I can’t honestly think of anything much we could have done, given the overwhelming police presence and the physical layout of Miami, that would have made for a significantly different tactical outcome.

​

We were Iraqued — that is, we were attacked not for anything we’d done but for someone’s inflated fears of what we might do; shot, gassed, beaten and arrested for weapons of destruction we did not have; targeted for who we are and what we stand for, not for acts we had committed. The $8.5 million that was allocated for the policing of this event came out of the $87 billion appropriations bill for Iraq. Miami was the Bush policy of pre-emptive bullying brought home.

​

There is a certain visceral sense of satisfaction in breaching a barricade and directly blocking a meeting, but those are not actually the measures we should use to judge our success. The direct action strategy in contesting the summits is not really about physically disrupting them. It’s about undermining their legitimacy, unmasking them, making visible their inherent violence and the repression necessary to support them, and undercutting public belief in their beneficence or right to exist. And there we are winning, not because of any tactical brilliance on our part, but because in truth all we had to do was show up, to be there as a visible body of opposition and withstand the onslaught.

​

Our most effective direct actions may have been those we did in the days and weeks before the meetings: the outreach, the community gardening, the door-to-door flyering downtown, conducted under the constant threat of arrest by a police force acting like Nazi bullies, arresting protestors for walking on the street, standing on the sidewalk, talking to people or witnessing other arrests. In spite of the major fear campaign and the negative propaganda being put forth by the police and the media, just about every interaction we had with ordinary Miami folks was positive. Locals were told by police that dangerous anarchists would burn their shops, would shoot them with squirt guns full of urine and feces, would smash their windows, and destroy Miami if they were not contained.

​

Local people were scared, but still interested in what we had to say. The poor and immigrant populations of downtown Miami understand the underlying issues of economic injustice. They could quickly grasp what the FTAA might mean for their jobs. They told us stories of water privatization in their home countries, of 16-hour-a-day workshifts on cruise ships that unions couldn’t organize because the ships are registered in other countries, of their daily struggle to survive on the streets, of the ongoing police brutality faced by the homeless and the poor.

​

When we were driven back into Overtown, Miami’s black ghetto, people smiled and waved, came forward to help us, offered places for hunted activists to hide, sheltered our puppets in their backyards. Other local people came forward to offer housing and shelter, to donate food, plants, and time to the mobilization, to hold vigils at the jail and to provide support after most of the action had left town. It was as if the bulk of the population pressed the “mute” button on the soundtrack spewed by the media and the police, noticed what their own eyes were telling them, and knew who their true allies were.

​

That gap — between the reality that the power structure was attempting to construct and the actual reality of ordinary people — is the fertile political space we need to nurture and explore in order to move forward. It leaves the bullies building a more and more elaborate fortress of control that is unsupported by any foundation of credibility or legitimacy. Where there should be the concrete of credence and the rebar of faith, there is only air. Such a structure is bound to fall. In its fall, it may well take a lot of us with it, and therein lies both the danger and the opportunity of this political moment.

​

Miami was a clear example of the New American Fascism brought home. I don’t use the word “fascism” lightly. I use it to mean that combination of brutal state power applied ruthlessly against its critics, backed by surveillance, media distortions, hate propaganda, and lies, allied politically and economically with those who profit from the industries of weaponry, prisons, and war.

​

In The Lord of the Rings, the evil Sauron is represented by a red, glaring, all-seeing eye. To be in Miami in November was to suffer that searing, hostile gaze. The red eye of fascism is a double-barreled gaze: the eye that watches, that records, that holds you under surveillance and videos your comings and goings and compiles the records; and the media/propaganda eye that frames the story, that defines and distorts you and tells everyone what the justification is for your repression.

​

For true totalitarian control, misrepresenting facts, telling a false story is not enough. Total control requires control over the frame of the story, the meaning of the language you use, the boundaries of what it is possible to think about. So “violence” becomes a word whose meaning changes radically when it is applied to protestors as opposed to agents of the state. “Violence” is simply not applied to police by the media or the political powers that be. The use of sound bombs, pepper spray, rubber, wooden and plastic bullets, wooden batons, bean bag pellets, and tear gas, illegal arrests, beatings, deprivation of basic human rights, medical care, food and water, overt torture and sexual assault are properly characterized by the word, “restraint,” as in “the police acted with restraint.”

​

Friends of mine who were watching the news on the days of action all reported a similar experience. They saw police move in on a crowd of peaceful protestors, swinging billy clubs and firing tear gas and rubber bullets. What they heard was commentary suggesting that protestors were “violent”, and that therefore the police were justified in whatever measures they chose.

​

Applied to activists, “violence” means, “any act of opposition to total military and police control, any act of resistance from walking in the wrong place to talking to the wrong people to allying with other suspects.” Above all, any attempts to remove oneself from the all-seeing gaze, to mask oneself, to carve out any space free of that hostile red arc light, are evidence of violence.

​

Totalitarian control is deeply racist, sexist, and homophobic, for it depends on division and separation. Police attempted to divide the unions from the direct action folk by pushing the action into the area where the permitted labor march was scheduled to go, attacking the crowd there, attacking union members, and punishing them for associating with “potentially dangerous” others.

​

Activists of color were singled out for special abuse by the police and prison guards, subjected to brutal beatings and outright torture in jail, in spite of solidarity efforts by other activists. Sexual assaults were carried out on women and transgendered prisoners. Queer prisoners were harassed and mistreated.

The greatest victory we achieved in Miami is that these strategies of division did not work. Instead of dividing labor and direct action, repressive police tactics angered the unions who are now calling for a congressional investigation. Our solidarity with labor remains strong, as does our commitment to stand together and support each other through the aftermath of the brutal attacks against our fellow activists, and to name and unmask the racism, sexism and homophobia we encountered.

​

The overwhelming military force and brutality of the police was a measure of the utter bankruptcy of the policies they were defending. Neoliberal economics, the “Washington consensus” behind the various free trade agreements and institutions, is not hard to delegitimize because it doesn’t work. It promises increased prosperity for all if we allow corporations free reign over the globe, privatize all public resources, and end government support for any arenas of human activity that actually increase health or well-being or quality of life. Somehow the poor are supposed to benefit from this. But this promise has proved overwhelmingly false. Countries like Argentina that implement these policies have lost economic ground or gone belly-up. The gap between rich and poor has grown into a vast chasm. NAFTA has been devastating to the U.S. economy, costing us over 785,000 good manufacturing jobs, and allowing corporations to sue governments for loss of their projected profits if governments pass inconvenient environmental or labor regulations. The developing countries have not been able to use the WTO or any of these trade agreements as platforms to reduce tariffs for their products or to persuade the U.S. and E.U. to reduce the agricultural subsidies that have devastated small farmers around the world — hence the walkout in Cancún of countries from the global South.

​

No one was defending the FTAA with any passion. In fact, brute force seemed to be the major argument in its favor. And the FTAA summit ended in a glossed-over failure. To prevent its utter collapse, the conveners referred all controversial issues back to committee, ended a day early, and pulled back from the original vision of an overarching agreement to a truncated “FTAA-Lite” — which even in its watered-down form has little chance of being adopted.

​

Their failure was a result of the years of organizing, education, truth telling, and direct action we’ve done in the North to create and foster that gap of belief. Perhaps even more, it is a result of the absolute social disruption that the policies of neoliberalism have spawned in the global South, where governments have already fallen and ministers know their populations will not tolerate more of the same.

​

We in the north are left confronting an alliance between economic powers desperate to retain their advantage in a sinking economy, the most powerful military/police force ever amassed on the planet, and a subservient media willing to tell whatever story the rulers command. But the more ruthless and brutal the system becomes, the wider and deeper that gap of legitimacy may become.

​

Our political success and personal survival may depend on our ability to understand and deepen that disconnect between eyes and ears, between direct experience and propaganda. At what point does it set in? When do people start to believe their own eyes, to question the authority of the commentators? How do we prevent the power structure from consolidating a new foundation of belief? How far does that gap extend? How do we widen and deepen the gap, and how do we mobilize and empower those who have ceased to believe? And as the fortress of control begins to crumble over our heads, where do we find shelter from the falling debris, and what new structures will we build in its place?

​

If we can build on the successes of Miami — the solidarity, the deepened alliances, the trust — if we can turn those alliances into real political power, we will have a strong victory. If the combined forces of the progressive movements and the unions and the NGOs can succeed in making the political and police powers of Miami pay a political and social cost, we can stem the tide of repression.

​

There were actions we took in Miami that undoubtedly contributed to the support we received: we waged a proactive media campaign, we planted a community garden in Overtown and gave away dozens of trees. Above all, we went out and talked to people on the street. In the worst moments of police assault, there were always those who moved forward to put their bodies on the front line and slow the assault of the storm troopers. People helped and supported and strengthened each other, and the shock of the violence we experienced was tempered by the sweetness of support and the inspiration of acts of courage.

​

We can go further in making our actions and organizing more welcoming and friendly. We can perhaps devote more of our efforts to outreach and connection instead of obsessing on our tactics, confront our own vestigial racism, sexism, homophobia and the other prejudices that can divide us.

​

And we can frame our actions and organizing with a clear strategic goal: to broaden and deepen that gap of belief, to make strong alliances with the disaffected and to mobilize the political power of dissent, to unmask the violence, repression, and sheer ugliness of the structures of control, to counter them with the beauty and joy of our visions brought to life.

​

Then we can stare back into that red, totalitarian eye and pierce it with a white-hot gaze of truth, a spear in the eye of the Cyclops. And we will have the support and strength we need to withstand the monster’s crash, and to begin the process of building the world that we want.

​

Starhawk is an activist, organizer, and author who teaches Earth Activist Trainings that combine permaculture design and activist skills. She works with the RANT trainer’s collective, which offers training and support for mobilizations around global justice and peace issues. Visit www.starhawk.org for articles, actions alerts, schedule, and more.

*****

Return to Top of Page

Siempre Victoria! (from RQ#92 - Winter 2004)

​

By Starhawk

The last day of negotiations at the 2003 WTO. Things are not going well, and the ministers have until 11:00 p.m. to come up with agreements. Some of us in the streets want to make one final push into the conference center area, make one last show of opposition.

​

Sunday, September 14

​

The group of exhausted people who met the night before could only come up with a time and a meeting place: a beach just south of the security zone. While I’m on my way there with a carload of us, we get a call that the military have blocked off the beach. We try to spread the word that the location has changed to a beach farther south.

​

When we get to our fallback beach, the military have blocked that off too. But I get a call from Brush that they are up at the first beach, have gone through the military blockade, and that there’s lots of press there. We get there quickly, park, and walk past a line of soldiers standing by orange, metal barricades that open and let us walk through.

​

A group of 20 or 30 of our friends are standing in the sand, and more are in the water. We quickly strip down to our bathing suits and run into the waves. For most of us, it’s the first time in this action that we’ve made it to the beach. I see lots of pale activist flesh around me, a contrast to the deep tans of the tourists. The water is clear and cool and the waves roll in gently and everyone is tumbling around like a pack of baby seals. I don’t actually care whether we do an action or just play in the water together, to demonstrate that self-care and pleasure are as vital a part of a sustainable movement as self-sacrifice.

​

The action is organized as fluidly as children organize games. The media are there, and we can’t resist playing with them. We get out of the water, and one laughing group bares their butts to the press while Valerie writes on them with lipstick to say “¡Ya ganamos! We are winning!” The media crowd in to snap photos. The message will prove prophetic.

​

The soldiers up at the road are blocking people from getting in.

​

“Let’s open the barricade,” Lisa suggests. We run up to the top—well, they run, I slog more slowly through the sand behind. We take the orange metal fences and carry them down to the beach. The soldiers stand there, a bit stunned, as we run off with their barricade.

​

We are arranging the sections of it on the sand to spell “No WTO!” when they rouse themselves to come down and get it back. They are clearly under orders not to attack us or get violent, and in fact several of them are laughing as they pull on the barricades one way and we pull another. Finally we get the idea of lying on top of them. Valerie fends off the soldiers while we arrange a metal/human living message, “No WTO!” Finally we take pity on them and let them take the barricades back, but the beach stays open.

We reorganize, and a few stay behind with our stuff while the rest of us embark on what I am soon calling the Cancun Death March. The sun is blazing hot and is searing new parts of our flesh that have previously been decently covered under cargo pants and bandanas soaked in lime to give that special Mexican flavor to tear gas protection. We don’t have enough water and the sand is deep and hard to move through. All the youth are nonetheless striding ahead at a great pace, while I am falling farther and farther behind, wondering why I keep doing this, keep trying to keep up with twenty-three year olds, why I can’t just admit my age and settle into some more sedate form of activism. Finally I yell at them to stop for a moment, and suggest we drum and chant as we pass tourists at the big hotels that front the beach. They put me up front, and we process up the sand, chanting, “No OMC!” or “On the beaches, in the streets, we’ll shut them down, anywhere they meet!”

One of the hotels has a bar fronting on the beach and we stop there for a moment in the shade. They offer us water, and we line up and fill our bottles from their garrafons. As we are relaxing, Lisa gets a call on her cell phone from Antonia, who is inside the meetings. The Kenyan delegation has just walked out, and the WTO ministerial has collapsed. We’ve won!

The march becomes a jubilant procession. We continue on, drumming and chanting and cheering, announcing the news to surprised tourists courting skin cancer in lounge chairs. My fatigue has fled, and even the sand seems firmer underfoot. We meet a small police barricade and sweep through it, simply taking their barricades away and running on down the beach. Then we get another call. Some of our friends are trapped up near the Conference Center where they were marching in the streets, and are asking for us to come support them. We are still several kilometers away but a few of the young men are eager to charge ahead. We have a moving meeting, trying to decide whether to keep to the beach and try and go around the point or to head up into the street where we will probably be corralled ourselves.

​

A line of rocks juts out into the water up ahead, and we see that the military have made a stand there, with a line of men and the metal barricades planted on the rocks. It looks like a difficult situation to try to push through, so we head up, climbing a rock outcropping, scaling a low wall, and pushing through the line of the hotel’s security guards in more or less nonviolent fashion. They aren’t too serious about hurting us and we don’t want to hurt them. We just want to get to the street. But we end up on a green lawn that leads nowhere, trapped between walls and a high fence with barbed wire. Now masses of security guards and hotel workers have come down to see what’s happening. We try to negotiate a safe passage to the street, but before we can one of the government officials shows up and offers us a free bus ride back to Cancun or wherever we want to go, if we will only go voluntarily and quietly.

​

We sit down and have a consensus meeting about what to do. A few want to try to stay and make some kind of stand. “Why?” I ask. “We don’t need to block anything or disrupt anything anymore. It’s over — we’ve won!”

There seems to be general enthusiasm for that point of view, although one voice cautions us that just because we’ve won is no reason to abandon the struggle. Clearly there’s still some momentum to do something more, but we also have a debrief meeting planned, and we’re hungry. While we’re talking, the hotel workers bring out a whole case of water for us. Finally we agree to go, file onto an extremely comfortable air-conditioned bus, and head back. Students pop the skylights and ride on the top.

Because of the threat we posed marching on the beach, and because of our friends who got deeper into the security area, the authorities have apparently shut down the entire area, and no traffic is moving. The roads are lined with workers, waiting for their rides home. Their travel time has been extended, they’ve been waiting in the sun instead of relaxing on their off time, and yet they cheer and wave and flash peace signs and raised fists as we pass, sharing in the victory.

​

Back at the Parque de Palapas, it seems that everyone from the action has gathered. We are all greeting and hugging each other in a moment of pure, radiant joy. I am looking at each of them and thinking how each one contributed to this victory. I’m thinking about all the organizing and strategizing they’ve done and their grueling bus ride here and back. I’m hugging Tristan who has stalwartly organized security for the Convergence Center, and Luke who pushed so hard for our action inside the zone, and Rodrigo who came down from Mexico City to help build the eco-village, and Eileen who took on so much of the media work, and Gloria who cleaned the kitchen and fed us breakfast every day, and so many more, the whole self-organized volunteer army who have come to fight with puppets and drums and our bodies and ideas as our weapons. The choices each one of us has made, the tasks we’ve taken on, the work we’ve done, have all been part of this moment. Finally Lisa and I throw our arms around each other. We’ve been working on this together for so long. I can’t even begin to count the tasks she’s done and the things she’s pulled together and grueling work we’ve both been doing for this and the times we’ve sworn we’d never do it again. But we smile at each other, knowing damn well that we will, that there is nothing we’d rather do than help twine together the strands of the rope that we can grip to move the world.

​

We go on to a debrief meeting in the Convergence Center. The mood is high as we recount the highlights of the actions. So many things have come out of this mobilization—solidarity between campesinos and anarchists, students from the south and students from the north, street activists and NGOs, new connections and new networks that will strengthen our form of globalization: the globalization of resistance and vision.

Opposition Inside and Out

At the end, Antonia gives a report on what happened inside. The Kenyans were part of a “Green Room”—one of the small “informal” meetings where the real decisions of the ministerial are laid out, where the big, powerful countries represent themselves and the developing countries might have one representative for dozens. Kenya was representing not just themselves but the whole group of African, Caribbean, and Pacific nations and the African Union. The developing countries wanted agricultural agreements to limit the subsidies for US and European crops that keep prices artificially low and allow the dumping of grain in their countries that destroys the livelihood of their farmers. The US and EU wanted to put investments on the table, to craft a new version of the old Multilateral Agreement on Investments that civil society defeated back in the ’90s. When it became clear to the Kenyans that the US and EU were saying they would have to accept the investment agreement if they wanted to talk about agriculture, they walked out. When they announced their decision, they were joined by South Korea and India. At least two of the delegates were now referring to the WTO in the past tense.

“And the delegates from Brazil and Swaziland both said that if it weren’t for the actions inside and outside, they wouldn’t have been able to stand strong,” Antonia finishes. An electric shock of joy pulses through the room, and we burst into cheers. That was our strategy — the hope we held throughout all the work and planning, that if there was clear, strong public opposition to the WTO in the streets and in the forums and in the conferences themselves, the disaffected delegates of the developing world would be empowered and supported to rebel. And they did.

​

“I don’t know when I’ve ever felt so purely happy,” Brush says to me after.

​

“Seattle,” I say to him.

​

Monday: The Last Update

​

A day of cleaning up and carrying out the debris of a mobilization: the cardboard, the used paints, the leftover flyers, of scraping paint off floors. And of goodbyes.

We’re sad, saying goodbye to so many people we’ve grown to know and respect and love. We’re happy, with a deep, sweet sense of satisfaction at having derailed the most ambitious institution of corporate greed. We’re eager to bring more people in and empower them more fully and communicate more clearly. In spite of the work, the exhaustion, the frustration, we’re ready for the next joyful exercise in dismantling the institutions of injustice, and building a better world.

And now the sun is setting, and the streets are full of wandering activists with backpacks, moving out of the Parque de Palapas, out of the streets of Cancun, out of Ground Zero. The delegates have gone home, the roads are open, the barricades are down. A cool breeze is beginning to blow, and Chac hints of a blessing of rain. The self-organizing wandering army releases its troops for some well-deserved R & R, and this organism that has sprung into being dissolves. The kaleidoscope turns, the pattern changes. No formal structures hold us together, no hierarchy, no contracts or pledges. But we know that we will come together again, and again, drawn by that sweet, insistent call, and by the threads of love that twine together stronger with each fight, each sacrifice, each space reclaimed, each life given, each vision made real.

Starhawk is the author of many books on Goddess religion. She is a feminist, activist, teacher, Witch, gardener, drummer, and one of Reclaiming’s founders. Visit www.starhawk.org. 

*****

​

Return to Top of Page

The Living River (from RQ#91 - Fall 2003)

Toward an Activist Spirituality

By Starhawk

​

No sane person with a life really wants to be a political activist. When activism is exciting, it tends to involve the risk of bodily harm or incarceration, and when it’s safe, it is often tedious, dry, and boring. Activism tends to put one into contact with extremely unpleasant people, whether they are media interviewers, riot cops, or at times, your fellow activists. Not only that, it generates enormous feelings of frustration and rage, makes your throat sore from shouting, and hurts your feet.

​

Nonetheless, at this moment in history, we are called to act as if we truly believe that the Earth is a living, conscious being that we’re part of, that human beings are interconnected and precious, and that liberty and justice for all is a desirable thing.

​

When we founded Reclaiming two decades ago, our intention was to bring together the spiritual and the political. Or more accurately, some of us for whom the spiritual and the political were inseparable wanted to create a practice and community that reflected this integration.

​

Now, with the Bush forces pushing into an aggressive war, with horrific environmental and social problems left unaddressed, the need for activism is stronger than ever. The stakes have never been higher, and the sense of urgency is palpable.

​

Reclaiming folks have been out there — taking part in marches and demonstrations and protests from Seattle to Washington DC, bringing magic and ritual and spiral dances into what sometimes seems like the zone of battle. And doing the proactive work beyond the protest — helping to organize our communities, provide healing, food, nurturing for children, music, art, and ritual — all the things that embody the world we want to live in.

​

The integration of magic and activism sometimes means bringing magic into an action — doing a spiral dance in the midst of the tear gas of Quebec City, or in Grand Central station surrounded by riot cops. It might mean starting our strategic planning with a trance or a Tarot reading, or invoking Water as we work against the privatization of water resources.

​

But that integration also means that our rituals are informed by our activism, and by the real life issues that we address. It means a different conception of spirituality — that spirituality and ritual are not something removed from the world, but are deeply embedded in it.

​

Reclaiming is founded on Earth-based spirituality, which rejects the split between spirit and matter, and claims nature and the physical, material world as equally sacred with the spirit.

​

We don’t ideologically believe in the separation of spirit and matter, but in practice, we still tend to think that things that are too material, too real-life, are somehow not as spiritual. So a trance to Faery is perceived as “spiritual,” whereas a trance to a Brazilian favela slum is not. We can argue about the reality of Faery, but the favela is undeniably real. If we truly believe that our spirituality is about deep interconnectedness, maybe it’s more important for us to grapple internally with the reality of the favela than to dance with the faeries.

​

Of course, visualizing the faeries generally makes us feel good, whereas thinking about slums and wars and international trade agreements often makes us uncomfortable. Even angry or sad or hopeless or guilty?

Much of our magic and our community work is about creating spaces of refuge from a harsh and often hostile world, safe places where people can heal and regenerate, renew our energies and learn new skills. In that work, we try to release guilt, rage, and frustration, and generally turn them into positive emotions.

Safety and refuge and healing are important aspects of spiritual community. But they are not the whole of spirituality. Feeling good is not the measure by which we should judge our spiritual work. Ritual is more than self-soothing activity.

​

Spirituality is also about challenge and disturbance, about pushing our edges and giving us the support we need to take great risks. The Goddess is not just a light, happy maiden or a nurturing mother. She is death as well as birth, dark as well as light, rage as well as compassion — and if we shy away from her fiercer embrace we undercut both her own power and our own growth.

​

There are times when it is inappropriate to feel wholly good. Now is one of them. As the saying goes, “If you aren’t angry, you aren’t paying attention.”

This doesn’t mean that we need to be in a constant state of rage or irritability or guilt. It means we need to use our magical tools to face the stark and overwhelming realities that confront us, acknowledge our feelings, and transmute them into the energy we need for change.

Last Fall, before the Spiral Dance, we received a letter strongly objecting to an invocation from the year before, when we had staged a mock march to invoke Water, complete with a river of cloth and chants that began, “No FTAA, NO WTO, No Privatizing, Let the river flow!” The writer objected to the ritual being turned into a “pep rally.”

I never had time to reply to her letter, but I was grateful to the writer because it stimulated a lot of thinking for me. Everyone has the right to their own opinion about a ritual, and to their own aesthetics. There’s generally at least one invocation in every ritual that I could personally do without. But what interested me about the letter was her unspoken assumption that an issue such as the privatization of water was somehow an extraneous element that didn’t really belong in ritual, and turned it into something else.

For those of us who created the invocation, the privatization of water is a deeply spiritual issue. Because the water we hold sacred is not some abstract image or fantasy of Water, but the real stuff that we need to drink and bathe and grow our gardens, that provides the crucial habitat for fish and plants and thousands of other creatures, that is the Earth’s literal life blood.

If two thirds of the people on the Earth don’t have access to the water they need — as is predicted within another decade or two — and I am integrally connected to those people, that’s a spiritual crisis as well as a physical and political crisis. And if I’ve been engaged with that issue, politically and magically (as we have been in many of the actions around global trade agreements that further the corporate takeover of the planet’s water), I need my rituals to reflect that struggle and energize my work.

​

Another common, unspoken assumption is that spirituality is about calm and peace, and conflict is unspiritual. Which of course makes it hard to integrate the spiritual with the political, which is all about conflict.

​

In New Age circles, a common slogan is that “What you resist, persists.” Truly spiritual people are never supposed to be confrontational or adversarial — that would be perpetuating an unevolved, “us-them” dualism.

I don’t know from what spiritual tradition the “what you resist, persists” slogan originated, but I often want to ask those who blithely repeat it, “What’s your evidence?” When it is so patently obvious that what you don’t resist persists like hell and spreads all over the place. In fact, good, strong, solid resistance may be the only thing that stands between us and hell. Hitler didn’t persist because of the Resistance — he succeeded in taking over Germany and murdering millions because not enough people resisted.

On some deep cosmic level, we are all one, and within us we each contain the potential for good and for destruction, for compassion and hate, for generosity and greed. But even if I acknowledge the full range of impulses within myself, that doesn’t erase the differences between a person acting from compassion and love, and another choosing to act from hate and greed. Moreover, it doesn’t erase my responsibility to challenge a system which furthers hate and greed. If I don’t resist such a system, I am complicit in what it does. I join the perpetrators in oppressing the victims.

I am often astonished at well-meaning, spiritual people who advocate beaming light toward world leaders, who scold activists for expressing anger toward authorities or police, who define compassion as loving the enemy — but somehow lose sight of the need to love our friends, our allies, and those who suffer at the hands of the perpetrators. I really don’t feel much call to beam love and light at Bush or Cheney or the directors of the International Monetary Fund. Whether or not they suffer from lack of love is beyond me. From my perspective, they suffer from an excess of power, and I feel called to take it away from them. Because I do love the child in Iraq, the woman in the favela, the eighteen-year-old recruit to the Marines who never dreamed he was signing up to bomb civilians. I can’t love them, or myself and my community, effectively if I can’t articulate the real differences in interests and agendas between “us” and “them” — between those who have too little social power and those who have too much.

To equalize that power means changing an enormous system. And systems don’t change easily. Systems try to maintain themselves, and seek equilibrium. To change a system, you need to shake it up, disrupt the equilibrium. That often requires conflict.

To me, conflict is a deeply spiritual place. It’s the high-energy place where power meets power, where change and transformation can occur.

Part of my own spirituality is the conscious practice of placing myself in places of conflict. As someone in the Pagan cluster said after the February 15 antiwar rally in New York, which was seriously harrassed by the police, “When everyone else was running away from trouble, we were running toward it.” I run toward it because I generally believe I can be useful there — sometimes de-escalating potential violence, sometimes just holding a clear intention in the midst of chaos, sometimes just as a witness.

​

Our magical tools and insights, our awareness of energies and allies on many planes, can deepen and inform our activism. And our activism can deepen our magic, by encouraging us to create ritual that speaks to the real challenges we face in the world, offers the healing and renewal we need to continue working, and a community that understands that spirit and action are one.

​

Starhawk’s travel schedule can be found at www.starhawk.org.  Starhawk is the author of many books on Goddess religion, from “The Spiral Dance” to “Webs of Power.” She is a feminist, activist, teacher, Witch, gardener, drummer, and one of Reclaiming’s founders.

​

Return to Top of Page

​

Read more of Starhawk's writing at ReclaimingQuarterly.org/web/starhawk/

*****