Sitting on #ShutItDown and Solidarity with Ferguson
I’m sitting in my home in Oakland, California, meditating as police helicopters fly overhead. I am not at the protests demanding justice for Mike Brown, even though I live only a few minutes from where they are taking place.
I am sitting because I want badly to be at the protests. I observe the alternating feelings of a bursting heart, a leaden body and a skiddish mind. My legs are restless and my right calf twitches as I imagine jumping on my bike to catch up with a pulsing crowd. I attend to the feeling that I am failing by not dropping everything to respond to the call to #ShutItDown — just shut down this system that does so wrong by so many of us, so that we may finally rebuild it right.
I think of advice an organizer friend relayed getting recently: “Go to sleep. Racism will still be here tomorrow.” But then I rise from my sitting and see an email from Ferguson Action reading “National Tipping Point” and calling for a massive day of action this Saturday. My stomach drops and my feet both buzz and feel encased in concrete.
I don’t want to join the protests without knowing fully why I’m going. It may be because I am drawn to the feeling of suffering to feel alive. It may be because I want to feel superior to others who passively watch and stay home. Or it may be because this is truly a singular moment in which an unprecedented, strategic and tech-enabled movement is turning the wheel of history. And I want to serve.
I catch my breath, shallow and trapped in a tense belly. I have never been arrested or participated in a non-violent direct action where I actually risked arrest, even though I’ve been an organizer and campaigner of some stripe as long as I can remember.
I register the urge to check Twitter again to see whether the protest is moving towards my neighborhood. I plan my Facebook post asking for someone to come with me to an upcoming protest so I have a buddy, and tick off the mental protest packing list I should prepare: water, Maalox, goggles, handkerchief, gloves and a hat.
Katie Loncke
Thank you for sharing your process, Cristina. It’s a gift to be able to slow down enough to notice our motivations, while still being moved to act in some way. The actions we choose might surprise us. See you out there, and on the interwebs, and hopefully over tea and in a sit sometime.
xo
katie
Miriam Wolodarski
Thank you for these reflections, interwebs Sangha…
This afternoon I attended a demonstration in Oakland, and I want to make myself vulnerable here, and admit that I didn’t last.
I’ve since been trying to get real with myself about why I didn’t finish the march. There were lots of police, and yes, I fear the police, and sure, I did not wish to be arrested. More fundamentally, though, I think I left because I fear the feeling of outright confrontation: not only with police, but with society at large, with passerby and drivers-by. The physical sensation street protests generate within me is similar to that dreaded moment in a family argument when tense voices finally burst into screams— a feeling that signifies that we have moved past the point of conversation, negotiation, even argument. And I guess, in many ways, that is where we are at, politically. I was raised to believe in critical thinking, in logical debate, and in democracy. But do these paradigms hold sway any longer in a public discourse so dominated by corruption, propaganda and profiteering? A large percentage of the US electorate says it doesn’t vote because its vote doesn’t matter. With legislators increasingly bound to protect the views not of their constituencies, but of their campaign contributors, that depressing view is increasingly true.
So my question is, do I, an educated white person, still lean into my privilege to have my speech heard, somehow, or do I despair of discourse? If so, how can I learn to lay down to kick and scream? What organizations are there out there who are preparing people to protest mindfully?