Miami Dispatch: 11/23-25

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FORT BENNING, GEORGIA -- I'm in the state of post-action rage that I recognize and still don't quite know quite how to handle. Despite 52 years of experience transmuting rage and anger to creativity, in spite of my considerable ability to ground and stay calm and centered in crisis, I really want to just hit something.

I'm at the School of the Americas protest, which has been linked this year to the Miami actions, with people encouraged to come to both. The School of the Americas is the enforcement arm of global corporate capitalism, the U.S. military school that trains Latin Americans and others in 'counterinsurgency' techniques -- read torture and assassination. The death squads of Colombia, the torturers and kidnappers and political terror squads of Nicaragua and El Salvador, all originated here.

A long procession has formed, thousands of people carrying crosses, each with the name of a victim of graduates of the school. And the names are being sung, from the stage, in a beautiful, soaring litany. After each name, the crowd sings back, "Presente!" "Present." Dead, but not forgotten, not disappeared, not made into nothingness. Still here. Each one as precious to someone as my friend Abby is to me, Abby who was atttacked and beaten by cops. Or Kori, the chocolate brown, innocent-eyed young woman from Sonoma county who was in my training. I'd 'snatched' her, pretending to be an undercover cop arresting her, to demonstrate that people of color may be at greater risk. I think she was with Abby, and is out of jail and on her way home now -- but I hear rumors that someone named Kori was arrested and I am terrified to think of what could be happening to her. The litany of names is so intertwined with my own litany of the arrested and the disappeared. I know at least two friends who are immigrants are rumored to be in jail -- I can't name them until they are released. "Presente." The procession moves forward like a slow river of grief, poignant and inconsolable.

We are busying ourselves around the edges, collecting bail money, urging people to call the mayor of Miami and complain. At 1 o'clock, there's a meeting of those who have been in Miami behind the hospitality house, to connect and share stories and organize.

The procession continues behind us, hours and hours of victims, of names, sad and beautiful in its solemn power. After the Christian groups, delegations of nuns and priests and students from Jesuit colleges and Catholic schools, others will come -- Pagans and puppets and drums. My friends in the pagan cluster tell me they are forming up. I am torn: I recognize a certain internal state endemic to actions and stress and the aftermath of violence, a feeling of needing to be in two places at once, that wherever you are not is where you should have been. The month and a half I spent in Palestine was infused with that restlessness and I did spend much of it chasing up and down that most difficult-to-traverse country, and it's been a rare week that I've spent in one place ever since. It's as if exposure to violence fragments some energetic membrane that creates containment and coherence and continuity. Mine is already full of scar tissue and now it's been ruptured again.

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