Miami Dispatch: 11/12

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But let me back up a day:

Tuesday, 11/11

I fly down from Tallahassee, pop into the convergence center long enough to say hi to 12 dear friends that I don't have time to talk to. The arrests have shaken everyone up, and the women who picked me up at the airport have been dealing with the legal situation all day and can't leave to go to the event where I'm speaking. But another young woman named Cara whisks me away for a two-hour drive through rush-hour traffic, with "Dancing on the Ruins of Multinational Corporations" playing on the car stereo, to Lake Worth, where the Free Carnaval Area of the Americas has been building puppets for a month.

They are creating a pageant and a giant puppet contingent to march this weekend with Root Cause, a coalition of local groups of color who are joining the mobilization. Some of the Lake Worth organizers have asked me to be on a panel they've set up about anarchism, to dispel some of the myths around that word for the community and the press. I've been dispelling myths -- or creating them -- about one charged word or another for many decades; it's one of the things I can do, along with drumming a steady rhythm for hours on end without speeding up, and unclogging toilets. So, I've agreed.

We pull into the parking lot of the Quaker meeting house only to find it full of media trucks, complete with satellite dishes and tall antennae. I have the feeling I often get before a media onslaught: I imagine it's similar to the feeling one might have before leaping into a cold and foaming rapid wearing only an inadequate life jacket. Adrenaline begins pumping, and I wake up from my road travel sleepiness and go inside.

The panel is in disarray -- the sheer glare of the media gaze is upsetting, and the Quakers apparently didn't know until three days ago that they were about to become linked on national media with an anarchist coming-out party. But we talk briefly, get calm, and go upstairs to face a squadron of cameras and a house packed with a mixture of activist puppet makers, worthy local citizens, and Quakers looking a bit wary at the uses their meeting house is being put to.

Cara hosts the panel and introduces us before reading a definition of anarchism from the dictionary: "A utopian society in which people have complete freedom with no government." The first to speak is Sarah. She talks about the development of the anti-capitalist groups within the global justice movement, how CLAC (Convergence Lutte Anti-Capitalist and I am probably spelling it wrong, but it means Anti-Capitalist Convergence in French) formed in Montreal to help organize the protests against the FTAA in Quebec City in April, 2001. They supported a diversity of tactics rather than having strict nonviolence guidelines, not because they wanted to be violent, but because they wanted to support a wider framework of tactics and not marginalize anyone in the movement. Then she describes the work the AntiCapitalist Convergence in Washington D.C. has done to organize on local issues, like the closing of D.C.'s only public hospital, and to link them with global issues. She receives hearty applause.

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