Solidarity Day September 20, 1981
I have never been a whole hearted supported of the political
left, even though most of my friends were in the 1960s.
So why I went to Washington DC today, still escapes me.
Maybe it is because I missed the social interaction I got
from those old marches when we had a war to oppose – this time, lines of
students mingling with lines of workers after the long bus ride form our
college campus in New Jersey, buses waiting for our on the parking lot we
called the air strip disorganized organization with union hard hats from
communist led labor unions and ERA flags of our fellow students behind them,
row after row of people, most of whom had a completely different reason for
being there, most of us there because somebody somewhere most likely a
professor told us that the Administration stood against everything we believed
in, and we had to fight back.
Many of the most naïve kids who sat across from me in
classrooms day after day screamed obscenities at the police, or yelled about
social justice, most just shouted, “Down with Reagan.”
Since I was a decade older than most of them, I likely had
the only memory of what protests like this looked and sounded like, although
union leaders – who rented the subway to get us to steps of the Capitol Building
– knew what they were doing when they engaged college kids to puff up the number
of protestors so media could have a field day.
Someone with a megaphone tried to make himself heard over the
chanting mob, thousands of angry voices hired for the day, buying us by the bus
load, dumping us before the aisle of power to somehow show how ordinary people
had power, too, trying to disguise the fact most of us had some there to be
part of the crowd, the new hip set that was anti establishment after more than
a decade of being Beaubois.
We tried to sell ourselves on the idea that we were all some
kind of David facing the Goliath of the Reagan Administration, when in fact we
were simply pawns, manipulated by the power elite not in power seeking to get
back in power and looking for us to help them. We were supposed frighten Reagan
by our sheer numbers and the home made signs some of us carried, as we flowed
with the crowd towards the capitol steps, some joking about “Here we come
Reagan,” while I was wondering if anybody had put on any coffee.
“We are the people!” somebody near me shouted and stuck a
fist up in defiance.
“We the people,” was something special to me, something upon
which the whole of our lives had been constructed, and for some reason hearing
it here like this it sounded false. We seemed like an army of bubble-headed dolls
rather than an army of protest, filling the space between the Washington
Monument and the Dome of the Capitol Building, silly kids caught up in a power
struggle we didn’t understand or had learned only through the bias of our professors.
The whole way here on the bus, Professor Nack – the head of the
college’s teacher’s union – had stood with a microphones lecturing us on why we
were going, his round face puffed up and red with the effort. He seemed angry and
frustrated.
One kid on the bus told me she was going because of the ERA,
her face wrapped in the typical liberal mask, her voice already hoarse from
chanting slogans, such as “Don’t be vague, dump Haig.”
I went because I was sick of sitting at home watching these things
on TV, being brainwashed by some talking head when I needed to be on the scene
itself to see for myself.
Media was always telling us how poor the poor were and how
much worse they would have it if Reagan got his way, making the poor out as modern-day
slaves, and the GOP as the new slave masters.
This close up to the scene, embedded in the crowd, I felt
confused, with no way to make sense of it all. There was always a slogan, many
of them revamped from protests in the 1960s, aimed back then at a war that most
people didn’t really feel except remotely.
The protestors wanted to bring the war back to the streets
and to hang the damage around the neck of Reagan, to make the whole city reverberate
with his shame.
The slogans pumped up the rage in the crowd, never meant to
do anything else, no enlightenment, no back and forth of points of view. We had
come to crucify the man, needing none of the thirty pieces of silver the unions
paid for us to get there. Like Pilate, we had no interest in hearing his arguments
or determine his innocence or guilt. The mob had already ruled. All we needed
was a stake and bonfire to carry out sentence.
A lot of kids were there for personal reasons, angry over
the increase in tuitions and the interest rates rising on their student loans
rising from 3 percent to 9 percent, neglecting to point out that most of their
parents paid off their loans, regardless of the rate. The complained about
changes to college grants such as BEOG and TAG, when unless you were a person
of color under the old liberal rules, you didn’t quality anyway.
Most had come to be cool, to say they had gone, much like a
merit badge for the Boy Scouts, later to be bragged about the way my old
friends bragged about our time at Columbia, Chicago, Kent State. You can’t be
cool unless you’ve been on the streets – even if the only reason you’re there
is to be cool in the first place.
Some of those who came with us were protest junkies, wearing
buttons and badges from previous campaign, as heavy on their chests as war hero
medals and ribbons, but lacking the self-sacrifice.
It had been too long from my days at Chicago to remember why
I had gone, yet still felt a bit annoyed at these phony hipsters, though this too
passed by the time we reached the capitol steps where we were drowned in
solidarity, drunk on it, a mob of self-righteous indigent spoiled brats from a
second rate college in Wayne, brainwashed into thinking we could save the
world, when we were fighting to keep union labor in control of the national
manufacturing, and some overpaid air port workers from losing their jobs because
they wanted more than most of us would ever learn in a life time.
So as the chants resounded and the bullhorns told us what to
day, I felt more and more out of touch, wishing I had stayed home, wondering what
the score was on the Yankees game.
Comments
Post a Comment