Bill McKibben, via Imogen Kandel Senior Publicist Black Inc. http://www.blackincbooks.com
We weren’t really planning to actually go to jail.
Our advance team had been on the ground in Washington for three weeks. It turns out that in a market society there are people equipped to fill every need, including organizing civil disobedience. The crew we’d found, and who would soon become close colleagues, was headed by Matt Leonard. With his shaved head and earring, he bore a striking resemblance to Mr. Clean. But he was more like Mr. Calm; in what became a rapidly mounting storm he never lost his cool. His posse included Rae Breaux, Linda Capato, Duncan Meisel, and Josh Kahn Russell, each the veteran of many such actions.
But because of that history, they were pretty sure only a small number of people would turn up—it had been at least thirty years since people had been hauled away in the thousands. (That had occurred during protests at the Rocky Flats nuclear test site in the Western desert.) Matt kept saying that we’d be fine with five or ten arrestees a day over our two- week protest; even as the number of people signing up kept mounting, he cautioned that many would melt away. The D.C. police must have felt the same way, because it was next to impossible to get their attention—our team was bounced from one sergeant to another, and none seemed to take the whole thing very seriously. I began to worry they’d just let us sit there, that we wouldn’t get arrested at all.
We’d told each daily wave of potential arrestees to gather the night before at a Washington church for training. So it wasn’t until five p.m. on Friday, August 19, 2011, when we convened the first of these sessions at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church in the Columbia Heights neighborhood, that we got to find out if anyone would really show. People started streaming in early; soon there were more than eighty people planning to risk arrest the next day, which was more than we’d anticipated—many more. We practiced for an hour, walking in columns down the center aisle and fanning out in front of the altar as if it were the White House lawn. A procession of lawyers from the National Lawyers Guild answered questions (“What if I have a green card?” “Will they take my medicine?”) and assured us that the routine for arrests was well established. We’d sit down on the sidewalk directly in front of the White House in a fifty-yard zone called the “postcard window” reserved for people taking snapshots. The police would handcuff us, load us in paddy wagons, drive us to the police station, process us, fine us a hundred dollars apiece, and release us that afternoon: we even handed out slips of paper with subway directions from the police station back to the airports and train stations, because most people were planning to travel home that evening.
But it turned out that the police were not as pleased by our turnout as we were. When we arrived the next morning at Lafayette Square, across the street from the White House, there were a scattering of police cars—but as the crowd swelled, more and more cops kept arriving, too. And though the rest of us didn’t know it at the time, an angry lieutenant was giving Matt the first indication that the arrests might be anything but routine.
I made a short speech through a bullhorn, and then, as we’d practiced the night before, we walked toward the White House, spreading out into a long line three deep, with our banner at the center. We sat on the sidewalk, the president’s front porch behind us, and then we waited. People tried a few chants, but they didn’t fit the mood, which seemed solemn, but also joyful. To me at least it felt like I was finally taking action on a scale that began to match the scale of the problem— that if the planet was at stake, handcuffs made more sense than lightbulbs. I was grinning, I think.
Three times a police officer read out an order to leave: “Attention. This is Lieutenant Phelps of the U.S. Park Police. Be- cause of violations of park laws and regulations applicable to this area, your permit to demonstrate on the White House sidewalk has been revoked by the ranking supervisory U.S. Park Police official in charge. Due to these violations the side- walk is closed. All persons remaining on the closed portion of the White House sidewalk will be arrested. This is your third warning.” With that, they closed metal barricades around us, shooed away the onlookers and camera crews, and began arresting us, one by one. It took a long time (which, as it turned out, would be the basic operating principle for the next few days). Beginning with the women, officers in full body armor hauled us one by one to our feet, cuffed our hands behind our backs, and then led us to a small tent, where they photographed us and gave us each a number. From there we were escorted to the back of a paddy wagon, which was stifling hot and claustrophobic once it filled with the requisite ten bodies. And from there we took a ten-minute drive to the U.S. Park Police station in Anacostia.
We sat on the ground outside the station for an hour or two, hands still cuffed behind our backs—after a while, it’s painful. And then, one by one, we were led inside, where an officer emptied our pockets and wrote out in laborious longhand a receipt for each of us. (The Park Police seem not to have been informed about the advent of the digital age—I did see a couple of IBM Selectrics on a desk, but they were unplugged. It was pure Bic and carbon paper for us.) That’s when my wedding ring went, along with my ID, my hundred dollars, my belt, my shoelaces, and my necktie. But I really only cared about the wedding ring—it’s amazing how much you suddenly miss something that normally you don’t even know you’re wearing.
“Why are you taking it?” I asked.
“Because where we’re sending you they’ll cut your finger off to get it,” one cop explained.
Extract from Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist by Bill McKibben published by Black Inc.
[ URL: http://www.blackincbooks.com/books/oil-and-honey ]
