Miami Dispatch: 11/12

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"Matters!" We chorus back.

"Water!"

"Matters!:"

"Home!"

"Matters!"

We open a discussion with the audience, and by the end many are discovering with surprise that they may be anarchists, too. I go out to eat with Naomi and Susan, who drive me back to Miami. I go to sleep on a futon in a house of activists and small terriers with a pool now turned into a giant fishpond, and awaken early to go down to the convergence center with Naomi and a stack of press releases.

I spend a short, happy hour designing our permaculture projects for the space and writing up a materials list. Just as I'm wishing for a pickup truck, Lynn and Suzie arrive in one and offer to go off to the salvage yard to look for tubs and to bring plants, manure, gravel, and other treasures as we need them. I send Abby shopping for plumbing fittings and go off to the noon press conference in downtown Miami, at the Torch of Friendship, a statue in Bayview park with an ever-burning flame and a plaque from Cuban refugees honoring the Bicentennial and expressing their undying gratitude to America.

The press conference is mostly for the NGOs, the "nongovernmental organizations," who are organizing forums and teach-ins to announce their events. Lisa thought it would be good to have someone represent a direct action perspective, and when the local organizer she first suggested didn't want to do it, I was drafted. All the speakers are good, short and clear and to the point, but the sun is blazing and by the end, I'm red and sunburned. Several of the reporters have seen me quoted or on TV from the night before, and I realize I have now become Anarchist Poster Girl for this mobilization. The police have apparently contacted the church where I'm speaking tonight and told them there will be a plainclothes officer in the crowd. Nice of them to be open and honest about it.

Back at the convergence center, we meet, make phone calls, refine our permaculture plans, get some good, cheap Cuban food at a deli down the road, and then go off to a five o'clock meeting with the Community Relations Board, which is an agency set up to mediate in the local community around issues of tension, and to intervene in moments of great public tension such as this promises to be. They have been our allies in trying to prevent police abuses, taking a neutral role, neither with the police nor against them. We have a friendly but slightly frustrating conversation, but get some information on that always fascinating topic of speculation, "What are the police thinking?" and "What are they going to do?"

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