Miami Dispatch: 11/23-25

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Zot Lynn suggests I stay where I am, and I nod. I've already been up to the front, seen the groups laying down their crosses, seen the brave few climbing over the fence and the barbed wire to enter the base in an act of completely nonviolent civil disobedience that has been yielding prison sentences of three months to a year. It's a different kind of courage, a different witness, than we offered in Miami, but very, very powerful in its own way.

The Pagan cluster goes up without me, lays down candles and ties on ribbons we've charged in the ritual we did the night before. They do a silent spiral at the gate. The puppets process up with drums and noise and pageantry, a giant dragon, a huge bird, staging a pageant of liberation that brings back some joy and raucous power after the river of grief.

Meanwhile the Miami people circle, talk, meet, share stories of horror and joy. In truth the river of grief is too much for us right now -- we're still too raw and wide open, our friends are still currently in jail and we don't know what's happening to them, or missing and we don't know where they are, and we haven't emotionally left Miami although we're here in body to support this action. We need to do what people do to heal trauma: talk, tell our stories, talk to others who have been through the same thing and understand, make sense and meaning from what we've experienced. We talk about what people suffered in jail and on the street, we name how strong and courageous we were, how we didn't panic when the police attacked, how some always went to the front and faced them down and slowed their onslaught, how we held together in retreat and took care of each other. We tell stories of the support we got from local people when we were driven deep into the black ghetto, how people took us in, offered to shelter the puppets in their back yards, gave us smiles and thumbs-up signs, and how, too, a few people were accosted or robbed. A young man from Canada tells us he came down to support us because so many of us went up to Quebec City, and how important it is for the world to know that there is a resistance movement in the U.S., and how impressed he was with the courage he saw on the streets. And we remind each other that we have, indeed, had a victory, however grim. The FTAA that we were protesting in Quebec City two and half years ago is dead now, no longer even on the table. All they have done, in this summit, is to refer every substantive issue back to committee, and to reveal the extent of the repression which backs their regime.

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