Miami Dispatch: 11/23-25

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We make plans for fundraising, jail support, ongoing political pressure. The meeting breaks up. I go back up to the fence, to see it covered with crosses, ribbons, utterly transformed. And then it is time to leave, to fly back home at last.

11/24

SAN FRANCISCO -- Monday noon we hold a small vigil at the Federal building in San Francisco. A few more survivors meet, tell our tales. We hold signs, hand out flyers. Across the street, a union group from the SEIU is picketing the State building, protesting the privatization of their security services. We join them, exchanging flyers, joining in their chants and drumming. It seems symbolic of the real victory of Miami -- that glimpse we had of the movement we can build when we do unite, across the divisions of class and race and issue, when we hold each others' backs: the unions and the direct action folks and the local community organizers and the NGOs and the ordinary people on the street. Under the barrage of rubber bullets and media lies, we can still meet on the common ground of truth. The strength of the assault against us reveals how imperative it is that we find that ground and hold it.

And now I go down to the beach with Willow to find rocks to bring to aboriginal elders I will meet Australia, where I'm going tonight. It seems far too soon to be going so far away, but that's how it is. A red-tailed hawk circles three times above my head. The bushes are full of song sparrows who do not flee from our approach. A humming bird hovers and looks me in the eye. Back in Miami, our friends are out of jail. I can breathe again, let the ocean air and the spray from the waves wash me clean. The steelworkers are calling for a congressional investigation. We will join them. The inherent violence of the FTAA has been revealed, but whether this will work for or against greater liberation still remains to be seen. We will need your help to raise an uproar, to unite more voices in saying, 'No!" This is not what democracy looks like. This looks like everything we say we are against -- bullying, arbitrary abuses of power, repression of dissent, blatant racism, oppressive power.

And democracy looks like what we experienced together, in the convergence center, on the streets, in the garden we planted, the meetings we held, the really, really free market, the dances, the joy, the thumbs-up signs, the linked arms and solid, grounded lines holding back the onslaughts of violence, If nothing else, Miami posed a clear choice. Another world is possible. Which world do we want?

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