Heather
Ajani
It was really interesting in terms of being a Chicana woman in the United States, and then going down there and not having the knowledge of your language, and having to deal with that and then go through personal identity crises, and then have these really huge experiences in terms of visiting different areas like the Tarahumaras and the Sierra Madres, which I didn’t actually go to, but went to the organization that helps them out, the Sierra Madre Alliance, that was pretty interesting, and then, going down to Cancun was something entirely different, because it is such a tourist trap, and having been to places like Acapulco during spring break, you know what those places are there for, they are developed strictly for tourism. Thirty years ago, Cancun didn’t even exist, it was jungle. It just blows my mind that all of those fancy hotels are on the island, and that people go there for conferences, and to go make out with boys, and have the ‘Real Cancun’ movies from MTV come out. It is a little bizarre. And then, we stayed in an area of town, we stayed in the city, and we had rented a house, the medics had rented a house in the neighborhood, and so living in the neighborhood for about two weeks, two and half weeks, was pretty different. It was different in terms of your daily, like, flushing toilets and not being able to flush toilet paper down, and having to go out and buy a toilet seat, because a toilet seat is kind of a luxury item, and showering without shower curtains, and everything is tile or concrete, and it is humid, and everything is so different. It was culture shock.
You definitely feel your privilege as an American. They know that you are down there spending money, so you can use that in your defense. ‘I am a tourist.’ That guy, the Federale, actually, he was in the brown jumpsuit, so he was conscripted. He wasn’t even really in the army, he wasn’t a Federale, he was a federally conscripted security guard for the WTO protest. And he was following us around, and freaking us out, and we can’t get to where we need to go to join an action that is going to be spontaneous anyway, and we need to be in all the hot spots, so there is already all this stress, and then we have got this guy following us around, thinking that we are going to be laying in the street like everyone else, and having to dodge him throughout different parts of the island. It was pretty freaky. But, telling him, while you ladies were in the [restaurant], actually going up confronting him, kind of doing a quasi-Copwatch situation, where you are watching him watching the others. I think that it freaked him out a bit, because I went up to him and I said, ‘Look, we are spending money here, we are tourists, we are students, we are here together, you need to stop harassing us.’ And using that American line of, ‘We are here to spend money, we are consumers,’ in a time when we are there to protest consumerism and globalization and cheap goods and services, and unfair trade, and things like that. To me, it felt really weird, but it felt like a survival tactic, though, it kind of added to the whole thing I was going through anyway… It was something that stuck in my head, how I had to use that.
When I got down there, I was really glad that we were staying [in the medic house], but I actually went down there planning just to sleep in the convergence center. I brought nothing with me of any importance. Everybody had had it figured out. It was one of the few times that I actually traveled and let other people figure it out for me, and not had any control over my situation. I was really excited and I was happy to sleep in a hammock somewhere, whatever, I didn’t really know what the situation would be like, But, going down there, and seeing what was going on in terms of strategies and tactics that we use against institutions like the WTO, it started to occur to me that we are activist tourists in a way and that we are pumping money into these local economies, whether we are spending a lot of money or not spending any money, because we are buying a quesadilla for a buck in the Palapas Park. We are paying five dollars a night for a hostel or ten dollars a night in a cheap hotel room. It is still money they wouldn’t have made in their off season. And they choose these resort destinations in their off seasons, because it is supposed to bring money to the local economy, and the protestors add to that, I think. I couldn’t help but think that a better tactic might be to boycott the cities that choose to host the WTO because the cities take on these conferences and these meetings to boost the economy in the off season, so if we counteract that strategy by the city and say, ‘Don’t go to Cancun, boycott Cancun, we are calling for this.’ It is a small boycott, it is a temporary boycott, and I think it is one that could be effective.
Well, unfortunately the media that covered us was the world media, and we didn’t get much coverage in the United States. So, it is like, there are a lot of these people that came from the United States, and the purpose is media coverage in the US, to make people aware, well, the media is playing into this whole game of, ‘Well, they just want that media coverage.’ We were only in the New York Times when Hyung Lee killed himself on the fence, and, I think, the last day of the meetings, when the Kenyan delegation walked out. But, as an alternative, I keep thinking about local. I keep thinking about that whole stupid bumper sticker, ‘Act locally, think globally,’ or whatever. And, I am thinking, ‘You know what, if we went to the institutions…’ I would rather travel to DC than Cancun, and be, like, ‘I don’t want my government in the WTO, because it is elitist, right, and we are drawing borders.’ Or go and do a border action… The border is something that is affected by the WTO. Find things in our own locales that are affected by the WTO, and make a public face there, and say, ‘They’re meeting in Cancun, this is how it affects our lives here, and we are going to do something here, rather than wasting all of our time and our resources going down to Cancun,’ because the struggle is going to come from the third world, anyway. The success of the WTO meetings in Cancun in 2003, they failed, ultimately, because the third word pulled out. The struggle is going to come from below, and, as a citizen, a second class citizen at best, of a first world country, I don’t feel like it is going to come from me, even. Like, maybe the struggle within the United States might come from people of color, you know, but the world struggle is not going to come from us, because we have that privilege. Like I said earlier, I was able to use my privilege as an American citizen in Cancun. It is pretty extraordinary and something to think about.
They started setting up the eco-village, and we started setting up the clinic, and, the week before everybody got there, there was the independent media center conference called *****, pardon my Spanish, but it was the Hurricane. It was all about the IMC centers and how they cover the news, and there were a lot of people from Chiapas, and all over Mexico there, and people from all over the world came, just for that. There were a lot of people there the week before, just for the IMC conference. It was pretty interesting to see how people use these convergences to have other meetings, and stuff like that, and I think that is a good use of resources. And then, for us, just getting everything together and kind of, like, going in and figuring out the city, and doing a kind of recon, figuring out where things were and how things were going to go down, and then the people who had come in earlier to set up the convergence center, and start the puppets, and start the art projects, and start coordinating things; that’s also a big undertaking as well, because you are trying to get everything coordinated with the people who are there, and then we had the unique situation of we had students who were coming in from DF, or Mexico City, who we didn’t know when they were coming in, but they were coming in on busses, and then there was the campesino forum. And then, inside of all of this organizing, there were these political things that go on with the Mexican government. One of the parties was having an alternative welcoming forum, one was the official welcoming committee, and they are funded by the Mexican political parties in order to kind of put a façade on it, of being liberal, or being about the people, but that is not really it, because people from those same parties are hiring instigators, like local punk kids, to throw rocks and start wreaking havoc, to make the protestors look bad. So the local politic of it is really crazy, in terms of, one is pitting against the other, because the mayor is going to be elected, and he is with the green party, and the PND doesn’t want the… the way that grassroots organizing in Mexico is handled is strange, because it is politically driven, to manipulate who is in power and who is in control. Being a protestor and not having anything to do with all that, and seeing all the stuff at the convergence center, you know, you gotta communicate with everybody, and so it was really intense and then the meetings were really intense, because you have to do Spanish, you have to do English, and they are twice as long, and, then, nobody can agree on stuff, but then there are certain people who are kind of like leaders in it, they are kind of telling you what to do, but they have to go through the same process to push their agenda. There is so much going on, it fills your head, and you are like, ‘I don’t really want to think about this; I just want to go home!’
When I got there, I went with a kind of small affinity group from Albuquerque, and so there were about five of us, six of us, as we had more people coming, and we had all just trained with Black Cross Health Collective, in giving first aid. Now, I had medical assisting experience, a lot of these folks were trained hololistic therapists and licensed therapeutic massage people. What I experienced when I got down there was, a couple of people kind of saw us as a clique, and then, they go from protest to protest doing street medic stuff, and they are EMTs or nurses, or whatever, and they have this kind of street experience, and a way that a lot of us run; we put our first aid kits in our packs and we run with the protests. We are not all geared up in Eddie Bauer camping vests and khaki cargos, looking like we are part of a little army of medics. And so, it was really different because I had seen that before in the DNC and at different other mass protests. I was never a part of it because I had always jus had my first aid kit and I was always able to treat people as I needed to. We were asked, ‘Well, maybe we should go in a circle and state our credentials and where we are from.’ And just the elitism that is harbored in these niches, in the protest movement, and it is like, people want to be part of the IMC, people want to be part of street medics stuff. That is great, but don’t use that as an excuse to go to a protest and not be involved in it, and have some sort of special [role]. And that is kind of how I see it, it is a way of being radical, but you are not really being radical, because you are not really with the protest, you are here to support, you are supporters of the protests. And it is like, why not put on a cheerleading outfit with pompoms and stuff and stand on the sidelines, and I am not talking about radical cheerleaders, I’m talking about, you know, real cheerleaders on the sidelines of the game, hoeing and hawing, because really, there is no sense. People get in there and do work, and the medics are great, but just the attitude that comes along with it. There has been this movement to get an official special medic certification card that you have to carry at a protest. The whole idea of street medics originally was to decentralize roles and to get away from using state funded Emits, and using the system’s resources. If you really needed to, you do no harm, you take them to the ambulance, you take them to the hospital, but, for bloody noses or stuff like that, it is something where we can be self-sufficient in our movement, and every single one of us should know basic first aid. It is to de-specialize basic care.
[discusses security in Miami with me].
The WTO is the new colonial army. It is going to take over everything. It is the roach of the system. It will fuckin' invade and infest the whole entire globe. But, people go very far to protect what little they have.
On Tuesday, it was kind of strange because, on Monday, we had marched with the students and it was supposed to be a peaceful march, and they had a ceremony where they laid out the beans and the corn, collage style, and they did their little thing in the square, and some of the people that had started kind of throwing rocks the day before were already at the fence the next day, before the march. I think they didn’t even march. I think they just showed up at the fence and started throwing shit. And, I had decided to go with Sonya from Tucson to do some video stuff and kind of be her buddy. It was fun. I’m glad I did that. We were kind of marching and we stopped, and she did some staggered footage of the march so she could get the whole march, but not waste all the film. So every few minutes we would turn it on, every two minutes, fun it for like a minute, and I was hanging back, kind of watching, and taking pictures, marching along. I was like, ‘God, there are a lot of people.’ It was a big day, it was the last day of the campesino forum, and we were able to catch some of that. All of the campesinos had marched, were marching to the fence, as a symbolic reclamation of space, because this area into the island, the northern entrance into the island, which became known as ground zero, which, actually, was kilometer zero, and I had a big difference with that name, because I really feel that the New York stuff was tragic, and I just didn’t feel like the same magnitude, well, it is, I guess it is, in a more symbolic way, but... We marched up there, and, as soon as we got up there, the Koreans had thrown, they were carrying this float. We had seen them the night before, in the evening, marching on their own through the streets of Cancun City, and the float was actually, it was decorated in colored paper, it had sreamers, crepe paper, colored crepe paper. It was a coffin. And they burned that, and Hyung Lee, and another Korean, climbed the fence, and they were on the top of the fence, and he is wearing a sign over his shoulders that, so you see it front and back, ‘WTO kills farmers,’ and he gets into his pocket for something, and nobody really knows what is going to happen, and, the next thing you know, this man is falling off the fence, and the Koreans are all there to catch him.
I don’t think [that everyone was watching]. What I saw was very temporary. And it didn’t hit me. And, all of a sudden, we saw an ambulance come up, and I didn’t even see him fall of the fence, I saw this on the news footage. I saw him up there, and we were like, ‘Oh, there’s already people up there, there is already the stuff going on.’ And there was such a sea of people, people were already, with the two men up there it was like, people weren’t going to shake the fence, but they were already working on the other side of it, more to the left. This guy, he falls off the fence, nobody really knows why, the medics tell people that he had had a seizure, and that he went to the hospital, and nobody really knew, because, by the time the medics got to him, the Koreans had already removed the knife. And, when you watch the stock footage on the news of it, he had gotten into his pocket, and grabbed something, he is waving a piece of paper, he takes his sign off and hands it down, and all of the Koreans are there waiting, and you see him with his paper in one hand, plunge his fist into his chest, and it is almost like he is just hitting himself, like when you are choking, you kind of hit your chest, it kind of looked like that. And, the next thing you knew, he is falling, and there is this red thing hanging put of his chest, and it s a Swiss army knife, it is a three and a half inch long blade Swiss army knife, and he has punctured his lung, and he bleeds to death because of it. And there is nothing they can do to save him. And then you find out that the guy tried to kill himself ten years before, in Geneva, at the GATT Summit in 1993, and that he has just done this huge hunger strike, he has been a small farmer all of his life, and his family farm, I think, got taken away, and he is now a grassroots activist in Korea, and has been the president of farmworker’s associations and stuff like that. And so it is like this guy… So you see he fire, and you see the ambulance, and you are hearing all of these people speaking, and you are seeing all of his havoc around you. And people throwing rocks. I bent down to take a picture over by the fence, where a lot people were throwing slabs of concrete at the police, and the police were throwing them back, and I hear this whizzing, and I hear this thud, and it was a rock that missed the top of my head by two inches and fell, right close, to the ground, and I have got some person saying, ‘Holy shit, did you see that!’ And I am like, ‘Uh huh.’ It wasn’t funny to me. It was like, I could have seriously been injured, like, that was a huge piece of street that just went over my head. So, it was really intense, and then seeing people panic, and treating, like, fifteen bloody noses, having a bag of gauze on you, and that is pretty much all you have, and then treating all of these people bleeding from the police, and seeing concussions, and people laying there. But was amazing, the Koreans went in, they just toppled over the fence, and when the police started coming through, they were taking their shields and taking their batons, and handing them back, and people were creating lines. I have never seen something like that in terms of protest strategy and street fighting. But people in developing countries, they see that all the time, that is their lives, they think about that, but we don’t think about that. We are busy running from tear gas, and running from the police. And we think that other people have it bad. We have it really bad. We live in a police state; that is why we are so complacent. And that is why we are so afraid to do simple things in our areas.
[talks about Federales and levels of violence, history, similar to Luis and readings]
What was in my head and what actually occurred were two different things in terms of intensity levels.
As far as what happened after Tuesday, I was in the Indymedia center on Tuesday when we found out that Hyung Lee had died. And a lot of people found out what had actually happened. Because there were a lot of rumors going around, and pretty much started by the medics who took care of him, saying that he had fallen down, he had had an epileptic seizure. And I remember sitting there, talking on the computer and people were like, ‘That guy died’ and thinking, ‘Oh my god,’ and then some guy coming in two seconds later, ‘Um, I have footage of that. What do I do with it?’ You know. And they had to go up and have kind of a meeting, I think. And, just like, seeing that, seeing footage, right after, and then walking along the streets at night, and it just felt like everyone had this solemn… solemn… It kind of broke everyone’s spirit. People were trying to figure out, ‘What do we do after someone does this?’ And I couldn’t help but smile, and think, ‘You know what? That guy, his only control was whether he lived or died. And he took control of the situation. And he made a statement that was one of the harshest statements you cam make against an institution that kills so many people.’ And, I am like, ‘The sacrifice that that man made for his fellow small farmers was probably one of the greatest sacrifices you can make, you know, it is ultimate.’ And I couldn’t help but be happy for him. I spent some time being sad, and then, when I came to the realization of what the WTO actually means to people, all around the world, it made me smile. And I think a lot of people felt sad, and they didn’t know how to deal with it, and walking from the IMC to the clinic, and seeing the pagans in the circle about to do a spiral dance, or whatever, but they were talking about how his death affected US. And I thought to myself that it is really beautiful that they are sitting and reflecting for self-healing or whatever, but this isn’t about us. And I kept that with me all week, and it seemed like the rest of the week, like the next day, was September 11th, and they did these symbolic actions for the Chilean disappeared prisoners, and the Koreans did a memorial for Hyung Lee. It was kind of like the rest of the week tended to be more, like, it shifted from, ‘We are going to take that fence down,’ to ‘Yeah, we are going to take that fence down, but we are also going to be very symbolic about the things that we do.’ So everything was symbolism. It started me thinking about how symbolism can actually be hinder some to our movement, because if we spend time thinking about how things are beautiful and symbolic, and holistic, and pure and… We don’t get to establish ourselves as, look, it is not just about symbolism, it is about, yeah, those symbols are great, but I want to get to what that symbolism means, and I want to win. And I want everybody to win with me, it is not just about me, it is about all of us. And then, the breaking of the Pizza Hut, those are obvious targets, it was great, and then the dancing and the partying, that is fun too, because you are like, ‘We can all do this, we can build this kind of pure energy with each other, and we can get along, and we can establish this feeling of solidarity and love and ultimate victory, within each other.’ But, you know, we are not there yet. And, just the rest of the week, it seemed to me, like we just continued to do the same things that we always do, it just kind of shifted some of the intensity levels, it shifted, a lot of people, where their spirits were in it, and I think it really changed the tone, because it really became more about the Koreans, more about Hyung Lee, more about farmers, more about those things rather than… I don’t think that, if we took that fence down, like for real, the next step is to get through the Federales and the security guards, and then we still have to walk five miles to the freaking meetings. It is not necessarily achievable, I mean, it is not impossible, but it is something that we need to think more about, like, ‘Why? Why are we doing these things?’ I don’t want to just tear down fences; I want to make sure they don’t get rebuilt.
The organizing between the different groups of people, cross-national organizing, I thought was really interesting because… The day that I got to Cancun, some of the American organizers had invited this guy, who I think was white, to explain Mayan culture. And I keep thinking of this habit white people have in trying to be spiritual, of cultural assimilation, er, cultural appropriation. It is like, it is really nice to respect people’s cultures and to make it, whatever, but it is also, in a way, it is also tokenistic. And I felt like, even with the medic house, we had this talk after we had to go through our credentials as to who could stay in the medic house, you know, street medics only, or could we have these people from Chiapas, or could we have other people? Granted, the house was really huge, it was two stories, it had a huge courtyard, and a lot of space. It could probably comfortably sleep about thirty people. Fifty people would be pushing it, but it was possible. And we maybe had fifteen people staying there, because we decided street medics. But of course, the people from Chiapas could come stay. And I was like really offended, when I brought that up, I got attacked by everybody else, who happened to be white. And I was like, ‘You know, just because people are from Chiapas, doesn’t make…They are special, everybody is special, but it doesn’t mean that they should have more, that we should be treating them as charity cases just because they are Chiapanistas, or whatever. That example was like the whole tone of how I felt down there, like, instead of a diversity of tactics, we are going to have a diversity of tactics, but we are going to make sure that we are doing everything to please the students and the campesinos. There is an element of respect that needs to be upheld, but also, if we are going to do these actions with these people, yeah, we should take our lead from them, but there is all this other time at the fence that is not being used. Why aren’t we at that fence? If that is the symbolic thing, if that is our tactic, why aren’t we there in shifts, as affinity groups, as people? Why do all the women, on the biggest day of the action, need to have that space to tear down the fence? Why couldn’t we have done that the evening before? We have to appropriate a time that everyone is going to the fence, and then nobody knows who organized it. For me, I just got told on my way there, ‘All the women are going to be a he front.’ And I am like, ‘Well, who organ…’ Obviously it had been pre-organized because people had gotten tools. But then I find out that some of the boys who had their own tools because they had planned their own thing, got beat up by some of the black bloc folks because they didn’t want to give their tools up. Their tools, that they paid for. Theirs. Got beat up, because they wouldn’t give their tools up to the women. Like, I don’t need tools that bad from a guy. I don’t need a whole peace police black bloc keeping my space for me. It kind of made me sick to my stomach.
I do feel like that action was very empowering to a lot of the women that were there that didn’t get a chance…
[talks about translation in sitting in the grass]
As someone who comprehends Spanish, and has people around her translating, sometimes what was being spoken in Spanish and what was being translated into English for the American anarchists or Australian anarchists was not what the person said, and one example of mistranslation is when we got to the traffic circle on September 11th, and the Koreans were still doing their ceremony, and the translators were like, ‘They said they want to do their ceremony, and that we should respect their ceremony,’ So people were like, ‘Okay, well that means we should turn around.’ The other part of the sentence that didn’t get conveyed was that they were almost done with their ceremony, and we should stay, they wanted us to go to the fence, and we were going. But somebody stopped and turned around, because of translators pushing their agenda, it is like, ‘We have got to do it peaceful, we have got to do this.’ They have a different vision of what the march should be. It is the bullhorn syndrome. Whoever talks loudest or whoever has the bullhorn, makes decisions, they are the leader.
Cancun, when I look back on Cancun, I just think, I wish I would have spent my $800 somewhere else, like going to language school, or putting all that time and energy into doing more anarchist people of color or spending more time writing resource guides for Copwatch so people can do something in their neighborhoods. It was a really good experience, and it brought me to a lot of places internally where I needed to be, in terms of the experience I had I Mexico, but I just don’t see… And that’s why I didn’t go to Miami, I didn’t see where being part of that was going to make any difference really, in my life, or anything else, putting money into a place I would never be able to go to otherwise.
A lot of people go down to these things or go from conference to conference, and it is social. Like, we have built, and PAC is a good small and local example, of why we go to things. We go to things to be social, we are the weird kids, you know, we are the ones that thought things were fucked up, we were always a little bit different from everyone else, and we have got each other, and so we have kind of based our movement on social commonalities. And it gets tiresome because there is a real lack of politics and strategy and vision and organizing. We need o look at those things, and those things need to take precedence, you know like, ‘Gee, I might go to this thing, and it might suck, and my friends aren’t going to be there, but I can bring some politics, and I can bring x, y, and z into it.’ And I am hoping that next year for the RNC, which is what I see as going to be one of the hugest protests ever in this country, like, bigger than Seattle, I think, because New York City as a whole is anti-Bush and anti-war, and they had September 11th happen to them, and, you know, when you have got eighty percent of the people willing to say ‘Fuck you’ to good old Dubya, you have got some makings for a volatile situation. I am really curious to see what is going to go on there. And that will be something I go to, because I want to be a part of… Having been to New York and having seen ground zero, it is like, it is weird, and it puts this bizarre kind of like, I don’t know… and the way that New York is so much a community, I am in love with it. And having friends there that are like, you have to come, and be a part of this with us. The man has totally fucked us all, by taking us to war, by letting those things happen, in terms of the buildings. That I will go protest; that is something that actually affects my daily life. I am just interested to see more politics coming out of these things, and more real revolutionary thought processes. It is not just about reforming what we have, it is about taking it down and starting over, because it ain’t workin’.
[talks about anxiety to get out of Cancun versus people having fun]
The march itself, I am seeing people, like, ripping stop signs out of the concrete and putting them in their shopping carts and loading up their arsenal of things they are going to throw at the cops. My eyes are big, and I am like, ‘That is amazing! We would never do anything like that in Phoenix! Ever.’ People roll over newspaper racks when no one’s around… It is like, ‘Ooh (mockingly)’… It is kind of crazy because you just keep seeing things, and you are like, ‘Whoa, that person just ripped a stop sign out of the ground, or that person did this or that.’ It is beyond you. It is beyond your realm of thinking, and you are like, ‘Wow. I hope they use that in a good way.’ But, in terms of tactics, while the women were cutting down the fence, you know, the cops were coming around the bend, they were going to encircle us and keep us from doing all these things. Or try to come in and gauntlet us in. And the anarchists, as people were ripping sections of the fence up, were taking it over to the street and building their own barricade. And they are confronting the pigs, and they are, like, ‘We are going to build our… Oh, you can build a barricade… We can build a fucking barricade, too.’ They are taking all of these implements that they have gotten, you know, to fight he cops, and they are building something to keep the police out of our space. In terms of symbolic reclamation of space, I saw the importance of that, like what it means. And it made me think about, I keep saying, ‘the new border,’ or whatever. I do really think that globalization, and people say it brings people together, but I really think that it breaks people up more, because it creates such a gap between the rich and the poor, and it eliminates the middle class, which is a myth, anyway. And you really see the divide. And, so, to have people who are struggling together from everywhere, even though people have different political ideologies, or people are devoid of political ideology, but have some sort of spiritual connection with the movement, I think it is really important for us to all come together and figure out what we want the world to look like. And, if it looks like dancing and singing but also spending four hours a week on the farm and working collectively to have control of our food, have control of our lives, or the way that communities deal with people. I think that speaks volumes. That is what gives me faith still in social movement. I think that the globalization movement has taken a big downturn, but the thing is, is that movements always go up and down. Politics are fluid. Society is fluid. The tides fall, but they will rise again. And that is what we have to keep in mind is that we are in a down swing, but the spirit and the love and the energy are still there, and we need to, this is the time that is crucial to not let it go, to not just write it off, but to really step back, and, ‘Ok, what has happened over the last four years. What do we need? What do we need to do? What do we need, to motivate people?’ And I think we saw kind of an upswing in the anti-war movement, but a lot of people are more willing to speak out against war than they are against globalization. I think that what it is coming to is who gets elected in the next term. And I think that could be a good foundation of thinking about things in terms of empire, and who is in charge.
[her recent thoughts]
What I see is that I still see white privilege in the movement, but I see that kind of correlating more with class than I would make the argument otherwise, and that there is still this kind of middle class trust fund anarchist milieu who is able to go from place to place, whereas I had to kind of save my money to go traveling, and I had to fit it in with some of my other vacation plans, and it is kind of a struggle that I wouldn’t have been able to do without finagling things. And some people are just able to put it on their credit card, and I am not saying everybody is. But, there is a tendency I think within the movement that is very privileged, to be able to go from place to place, to be able to take time off of work, things that your everyday worker person or everyday person of color can’t do, you know, kids and things like that. And it is also very young, so, of course, kids are kind of a rare occasion at these things. So I see that dynamic as far as race and class go, just who gets to go to these things, and who actually gets to go struggle, when people who are struggling in their everyday lives can’t go and say to the bigger guy, ‘Look, this is fucked up.’
And then, also, as far as gender goes, with the women’s action, my main argument for it was that women don’t often get to go and be insurrectionary. We don’t often get to go and cut down fences without a boy shoving us out of the way or taking our bolt cutters and saying, ‘Oh, I can do that.’ And there were men that were trying to push and shove us, even though there was a fuckin’ line. Men don’t often respect the spaces of women.
[talks about women’s manner of speaking]
Also, in terms of what I call the activist mating ritual going on. Sometimes I feel like there is a lot of societal beauty standards, even within the activist milieu, like there is the kind of fact of activist fashion that goes on at these things, where all the girls are wearing scarves of their heads, and they are all looking so pretty and cute, and we are all partying in our half shirts and our tank tops, and our hairy armpits, and the hairier the better. There are these kind of weird, it is different beauty standards, but there is definitely a standard. Fat phobia still exists. It almost feels like sometimes there is a dating, it is a dating service, to kind of go to these things and meet people, ‘Oh, I’m going to meet an activist, I’m going to be in love…’ It happens to some people. It happens to some people and I am not saying that I am exempt from that. But, for some people, it is a way meet people from different countries, and it goes under the tourism thing. I mean, you might as well go from hostel to hostel and they should just have activist hostels that we can all go to. It is just your normal stuff. It is just like anywhere, and people are surprised, like, ‘Oh, wow, men objectify women in the activist movement?’ Of course we do, because society isn’t fixed yet. Of course rapes go on, or sexual harassment goes on, at these things. Men have not, Patriarchy has not ceased to exist within the protest movement! You just put on your first patch and that just makes everything better. Race, class, and gender work in the same ways, I think, in the activist milieu, especially in the protest movement.