Carla Harryman: from a Journal [January 17, 2003]

Bus Ride and March in Washington

At 9:30 Friday night, I got on one of four Detroit departing buses, sponsored as far as I can tell by a coalition that included both the peace and anti-racist activist organization A.N.S.W.E.R. (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) and the International Socialist Party of Michigan (I wrote my $60 check to the ISP), and traveled overnight to the national demonstration against the on-going and forthcoming war in Iraq in Washington D.C. Most of the people on the bus were not affiliated with any specific organization, however. The man I sat next to was an ex-marine who used to work in the tourist industry and who hadn’t been to a demonstration since 1972, when he had been involved with veterans’ participation in the Viet Nam anti-war movement. [...]

He and I were of a small number of people traveling alone on our bus. Seated across from me was a woman with her three grown-up sons and a family friend. There were students from local high schools and the University of Michigan, and some people I took to be young Chomsky-style anarchists: one of them, or so I imagined, Corey, was a friend of Asa’s, but Asa now tells me “she doesn’t know what she is.” It was a happy coincidence that two of Asa’s friends were on the bus, as neither Asa, Barry, nor my friend Katie could make the trip. The other of Asa’s friends was Matt, who has become a committed member of the Socialist Party of Michigan. After the march on Saturday, Matt and I spent a good long time together looking for our missing bus in below-twenty degree weather.

On the bus were also a handful of “aging” street-style activists, including a new age-y radical wearing yellow ski pants and donning a head of thick bottle-enhanced deep yellow hair who claimed to be from Berkeley. I grew quite fond of this man and also to rely on his cheerful pants as a familiar fixture amongst the seas of travelers in the truck stops, all of who, like me, were bundled up against the bitter cold in similar dark clothes.

I was told there were 19 buses from Michigan altogether, with one from the resort town Traverse City. At the Pennsylvania truck stops jam packed with buses from all over the Midwest, I learned there were four busses from a village in Northern Wisconsin, eleven from Ohio State University, eleven from Milwaukee and many more than that from Minnesota. Loud speakers announced the departures of the busses: the bus from Missouri is leaving. Bus number such and such from Chicago is leaving. Another bus such and such from Chicago is leaving. A woman from Chicago in front of me on line for the women’s room had never been out of Chicago. She was looking into the gift shop window and asking, are we in Pennsylvania? I just bought all these D.C. postcards thinking I was in D.C.

I ate grits and cold eggs and soft biscuits at 5:30 a.m. with two women traveling on the Northern Wisconsin bus. They said that they knew 50% of the people on the four buses from their town. One of them was a high school math teacher. One of her students had decided to go at the last minute—she laughed and said, “That’s pretty good for my conservative school.” I asked her if she was able to introduce discussion of the war crisis into her teaching. Yes, a little bit, with probability problems. She started to mumble something about how to get away with it. We talked about fear of speaking out, but as we were speaking the fear was felt as past tense. I hope that with the nation-wide demonstrations achieving a larger, critical mass, the fear will be put behind us.

Ironically, when we woke up this morning, Asa’s car windows were painted with Fear in big red letters. Around the corner of our driveway is a flag Asa mounted on Christmas Eve. It says Hope.

Back to Pennsylvania--two older white women from West Detroit had met on a tour of Italy. One of them had bent arthritic hands. I wondered how she would do in the cold. They told me, over truck-stop coffee, that they had boarded a bus in Warren because they were afraid to leave their cars downtown. They had never been to a demonstration before, but they said they had to go—what Bush is doing is too scary they said. They also said that they expected we would all be ignored.

At first, I couldn’t believe that all of these buses, herds of them, were going to D.C. Weren’t any of them vacation tour buses? In the murky light of the eating halls, I kept trying to make myself see something else, something I could have imagined—even that didn’t make sense (who would be going on a vacation tour bus at 4 a.m. in the middle of winter in this part of the world?) other than what I did see. We were all war protestors, crowding into the slushy cafeterias somewhere on the mountain passes of Pennsylvania in the middle of night—this was not 1968, it was January 17, 2003 and we weren’t supposed to be here: we were supposed to be in snug, or not so snug, in isolated enclaves ignorant of each other dreaming our neo Orwellian dreams as the world’s boundaries stretched and warped unfathomably beyond us.

Every one of us was going to D.C. A few were affiliated with Christian organizations and schools. More were traveling under the sign of Wellstone---there were Wellstone buttons everywhere. In the march, I met people from Boston and Buffalo and Alabama and Colorado who had traveled by plane. Where are you from and how did you get here and how long did it take? We asked each other in the cafeteria and rest room lines, sharing tables for meals, and while marching. We were between the ages of eight and eighty.

I met Tom at the rally. We wandered around the three squares across from the capitol and caught up with each other, mostly talking about children, work, his experiences of Pakistan, writing, and friends. How is everybody? For the most part, the speeches weren’t news, although, I had earlier been impressed by a Korean American woman critiquing the deployment of the phrase “axis of evil.” I learned later that each square, when full, held 250,000 people—this according to one of the protest organizers. Later, I heard that we were 500,000 in all. Tom and I went for coffee at Starbucks, which was filled with demonstrators, including a man seated at a nearby stool who seemed to be suffering from a terrible headache. Later, after the march, lots of people had aches—a woman on my bus had frostbitten toes and the woman seated across from me seemed to be suffering from a little hypothermia as she was shivering uncontrollably.

In spite of the cold and the problem finding buses after the event was over, the march was wonderful, a joyful and determined experience. It took hours. In some places, I’m remembering particularly the Botanical Garden building, there were so many of us there already and so many others joining us that we couldn’t walk more than ten steps a minute. When we finally stretched out making a line you couldn’t see the end of, things would speed up and then slow way down, sometimes stop. As we got out of the government area and into the shopping area, we were greeted with NO WAR signs in the windows of shops and bistros. Dressed up young Asian women working at a nails salon, waved and danced on the balcony as we passed. The march had a nice beat: there was lots of hand drumming and singing and Bread and Puppet and other agit prop weaving its way through the crowd. A group of Philippino-American performers moved to the edge of a crowd, encircled themselves with a banner. Please move around us, we are going to congregate here, they said. I was moving past: it was hard sometimes to stop for performances. When I looked back, they had melted into the crowd. Another group weaving their way through the march were dressed all in black carrying a big black banner they held like a rope to keep them connected to each other. The grim, the parodic, the quiet were gathered in a massive harmonic. People chanted this is democracy. Masked Bushes and Cheneys and Rumsfelds skipped and strutted around us, trying to shake our hands: we mocked them, laughed, and they moved on.

When I talked to my 85 year-old 88 pound mother on the phone, she said, “I wish I could have been there.” “Next time, I’ll carry you,” I said in a mock-heroic tone. She also wanted reassurance that the crowd of protestors was diverse and was happy to hear of the placard that read, “Conservatives against the war in Iraq.”

Posted by Brian Stefans at March 31, 2003 06:07 PM