Miami Dispatch: 11/17

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Although the police have done their usual campaign of intimidation and fear mongering, people are mostly very glad to talk to us, to take our flyers and hear what we have to say. No one is hostile. Many are curious. I explain the FTAA carefully to a woman who speaks with a Caribbean lilt, and she listens carefully although she looks tired. "This is bad for me," she says finally. "The FTAA. It means no jobs here." She gets it.

On the corner, the cops have three of our friends and appear to be arresting them. We stand and watch for a while, and call our legal support, but move on when it becomes clear there's nothing else we can do. Ryan and Sara have already been arrested once for walking on the sidewalk, and they'd like to stay out of jail at least until the action begins.

We talk with three unemployed workers off cruise ships -- or rather, they talk to us, about working long hours, 16 hours a day, for $150 a month, and how the unions were no help to them because the ships were always registered in other countries. And now they are unemployed and have no work at all. One is from Honduras, one from Haiti, one from somewhere in the Caribbean. "And what about that, how do you call it, that making private of water?" one says. "Privatization," Andy says, and mentions Bolivia and everyone shakes their heads sadly. "How can that be, that people have to pay to drink water?" our friend asks. We encourage them to come out to the march on the 20th, and they say they'll be there.

We catch up with the others, who are talking to a woman with a sculpted, dark face and haunted eyes who flinches when we approach. "It's okay, they're friends," Ruby says.

"I'm nervous," the woman says. "I got woke up this morning by the cops kickin' me in the face. They've been on me all day. I was just trying to get some food for me and my boys. We ain't had nothin' to eat for three days. But the soup kitchen was closed, they say because of the demonstrations." We give her some money, and she goes on with her sad tale of police harassment and brutality. She's terrified of all the cops in the area, who are swooping through the streets in packs on their bicycles, like schools of circling sharks. I offer to walk her to somewhere safer -- an instinctive response that comes from all that time I spent in the Occupied Territories, walking people past soldiers and checkpoints and tanks. It just seems that if someone is terrified of some armed authority, I ought to walk them somewhere. The woman is asking for eight dollars. If she had eight dollars, she could take her and her boys to their grandmother in Fort Lauderdale. Her grandmother has said she could come back. She wants to get her boys out of this environment. I am pretty sure this is a scam but it makes me so sad that I would have given her eight dollars in a minute if I'd brought more change with me. The typical homeless scam is maybe just the dream that keeps you going when you have nothing, nothing at all but a patch of sidewalk and boot in the face for a wakeup call -- that somewhere there is a safe place, a place where you would be welcome, and that just a little bit of help would get you there. Or maybe that's what we want to believe for them -- that just eight dollars and a ticket to Fort Lauderdale would remove this misery and we wouldn't have to think about it any more, wouldn't have to let our well-being be haunted by this woman's ghosts seeping in through the cracks of our imagination.

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