Just As I Thought (17 page)

Then we were embarrassed. We kissed each other, we nodded, we laughed at ourselves, we said “Enough!” She crossed the street, and I continued to give out leaflets.

—1977

Cop Tales

At the Wall Street Action last October, the police were on one side of the sawhorses. We were on the other. We were blocking Wall Street workers. The police were blocking us. One of them was very interested in solar housing. Our solar expert explained the science and economics of it all. Another cop from Long Island worried a lot about the Shoreham nuclear power plant. “Can’t do anything about it,” he said. “They’ll build it. I hate it. I live there. What am I going to do?”

That could be a key to the police, I thought. They have no hope. Cynical. They’re mad at us because we have a little hope in the midst of our informed worries.

Then he said, looking at the Bread and Puppet Theater’s stilt dancers, “Look at that, what’s going on here? People running around in the street dancing. They’re going every which way. It ain’t organized.” We started to tell him how important the dancers were. “No, no, that’s okay,” he said. “The antiwar demonstrations were like this at first, mixed up, but they got themselves together. You’ll get yourself together, too. In a couple years you’ll know how to do it better.”

Earlier, about 6 a.m., two cops wearing blue hardhats passed. One of them looked behind him. “Here come the horses,” he said. “Let’s get the hell out of here!” And they moved at top casual walking speed in the opposite direction.

Also at 6 a.m., but about fifteen years ago, we would walk up and down before the Whitehall Street Induction Center wearing signs that said
I SUPPORT DRAFT REFUSAL
. It wouldn’t take more than a couple of hours for the system to gather up its young victims, stuff them into wagons, and start them off on their terrible journey. At 9:30 on one of those mornings, about twenty women sat down all across the street to prevent the death wagons from moving. They sat for about thirty minutes. Then a plainclothesman approached an older gray-haired woman: “Missus, you don’t want to get arrested.” “I have to,” she said. “My grandson’s in Vietnam.” Gently they removed her. Then with billy clubs, a dozen uniformed men moved up and down that line of young women, dragging them away, by their arms, their hair, beating them, I remember (and Norma Becker
¹
remembers), mostly in the breast.

Last May at the rainy Armed Forces Day Parade, attended by officers, their wives, and Us, some of Us were arrested by a couple of Cops for Christ. At the desk, as they took our names, smiling, they gave us “Cops for Christ” leaflets. We gave “Disarm for Human Life” leaflets.

Another year, one of the first really large antidraft actions—also at the Induction Center at dawn. We were to surround the building. The famous people, or
Notables,
as the Vietnamese used to say, sat down to bar the front entrance. That’s where the TV cameras were. Our group of regulars went around to the back of the center and sat down. Between us and the supply entrance stood a solid line of huge horses and their solemn police riders. We sat cross-legged, speaking softly as the day brightened. Sometimes someone would joke and someone else would immediately say, Be serious. Off to one side, a captain watched us and the cavalry. Suddenly the horses reared, charged us as we sat, smashing us with their great bodies, scattering our supporting onlookers. People were knocked down, ran this way and that, but the horses were everywhere, rearing—until at a signal from the captain, which I saw, they stopped, settled down, and trotted away. That evening the papers and TV reported that a couple of thousand had demonstrated. Hundreds had been peacefully arrested.

At Wall Street, too: A gentleman with a Wall Street attaché case tried to get through our line. The police, who were in the middle of a discussion about Arabian oil, said, “Why not try down there, mister. You can get through down there.” The gentleman said he wanted to get through right here and right now, and began to knee through our line. The cop on the other side of the sawhorse said, “You heard us. Down there, mister. How about it?” The gentleman said, “Damnit, what are you here for?” He began to move away, calling back in fury, “What the hell are you cops here for anyway?” “Just role-playing,” the cop called in reply.

There were several cheerful police at the Trident nuclear submarine demonstration last year. One officer cheerily called out to the Trident holiday visitors to be careful as they trod the heads of the demonstrators blocking the roadway. “They’re doing what they believe in.” He asked us to step back, but not more than six inches. He told a joke. He said he hated war, always had. Some young state troopers arrived—more help was needed. They were tall and grouchy. A black youngster, about twelve, anxious to see what was going on, pushed against the line. One of the state troopers leaned forward and smacked the child hard on the side of the head. “Get back, you little bastard,” he said. I reached out to get the attention of the cheery cop, who wore a piece of hierarchical gold on his jacket. “Officer,” I said, “you ought to get that trooper out of here, he’s dangerous.” He looked at me, his face went icy cold. “Lady, be careful,” he said. “I just saw you try to strike that officer.”

Not too long ago, I saw Finnegan, the plainclothes Red Squad boss. I hadn’t seen him in a long time. “Say, Finnegan,” I said, “all these years you’ve been working at one thing and I’ve been working at the opposite, but look at us. Nothing’s prevented either of us from getting gray.” He almost answered, but a lot of speedy computations occurred in his brain and he couldn’t. It’s the business of the armed forces and the armored face to maintain distance at all times.

—1980

Women’s Pentagon Action Unity Statement

For two years we have gathered at the Pentagon because we fear for our lives. We still fear for the life of this planet, our earth, and the life of the children who are our human future.

We are women who come in most part from the northeastern region of our United States. We are city women who know the wreckage and fear of city streets; we are country women who grieve the loss of the small farm and have lived on the poisoned earth. We are young and older, we are married, single, lesbian. We live in different kinds of households, in groups, families, alone; some are single parents.

We work at a variety of jobs. We are students–teachers–factory workers–office workers–lawyers–farmers–doctors–builders–waitresses–weavers–poets–engineers–homeworkers–electricians–artists–blacksmiths. We are all daughters and sisters.

We came to mourn and rage and defy the Pentagon because it is the workplace of the imperial power which threatens us all. Every day while we work, study, love, the colonels and generals who are planning our annihilation walk calmly in and out the doors of its five sides. They have accumulated over 30,000 nuclear bombs at the rate of three to six bombs every day.

They are determined to produce the billion-dollar MX missile. They are creating a technology called Stealth—the invisible, unperceivable arsenal. They have revived the cruel old killer, nerve gas. They have proclaimed Directive 59, which asks for “small nuclear wars, prolonged but limited.” The Soviet Union works hard to keep up with United States initiatives. We can destroy each other’s cities, towns, schools, children many times over. The United States has sent “advisors,” money, and arms to El Salvador and Guatemala to enable those juntas to massacre their own people.

The very same men, the same legislative committees that offer trillions of dollars to the Pentagon, have brutally cut day care, children’s lunches, battered-women’s shelters. The same men have concocted the Family Protection Act, which will mandate the strictly patriarchal family and thrust federal authority into the lives we live in our own homes. They are preventing the passage of ERA’s simple statement and supporting the Human Life Amendment, which will deprive all women of choice and many women of life itself.

In this environment of contempt and violence, racism, woman hating, and the old European habit of Jew hatred—called anti-Semitism—all find their old roots and grow.

We are in the hands of men whose power and wealth have separated them from the reality of daily life and from the imagination. We are right to be afraid.

At the same time, our cities are in ruins, bankrupt; they suffer the devastation of war. Hospitals are closed, our schools deprived of books and teachers. Our black and Latino youth are without decent work. They will be forced, drafted to become the cannon fodder for the very power that oppresses them. Whatever help the poor receive is cut or withdrawn to feed the Pentagon, which needs about $500 million a day for its murderous health. It extracted $157 billion last year from our own tax money, $1,800 from a family of four.

With this wealth our scientists have been corrupted; over 40 percent work in government and corporate laboratories that refine the methods for destroying or deforming life.

The lands of the Native American people have been turned to radioactive rubble in order to enlarge the nuclear warehouse. The uranium of South Africa, necessary to the nuclear enterprise, enriches the white minority and encourages the vicious system of racist oppression and war.

The President has just decided to produce the neutron bomb, which kills people but leaves property (buildings like this one) intact.

There is fear among the people, and that fear, created by the industrial militarists, is used as an excuse to accelerate the arms race. “We will protect you,” they say, but we have never been so endangered, so close to the end of human time.

We women are gathering because life on the precipice is intolerable.

We want to know what anger in these men, what fear that can only be satisfied by destruction, what coldness of heart and ambition drives their days.

We want to know because we do not want that dominance which is exploitative and murderous in international relations, and so dangerous to women and children at home—we do not want that sickness transferred by the violent society through the fathers to the sons.

What is it that we women need for our ordinary lives, that we want for ourselves and also for our sisters in new nations and old colonies who suffer the white man’s exploitation and too often the oppression of their own countrymen?

We want enough good food, decent housing, communities with clean air and water, good care for our children while we work. We want work that is useful to a sensible society. There is a modest technology to minimize drudgery and restore joy to labor. We are determined to use skills and knowledge from which we have been excluded—like plumbing or engineering or physics or composing. We intend to form women’s groups or unions that will demand safe workplaces, free of sexual harassment, equal pay for work of comparable value. We respect the work women have done in caring for the young, their own and others, in maintaining a physical and spiritual shelter against the greedy and militaristic society. In our old age we expect our experience, our skills, to be honored and used.

We want health care which respects and understands our bodies. Physically challenged sisters must have access to gatherings, actions, happy events, work.

We want an education for children which tells the true story of our women’s lives, which describes the earth as our home to be cherished, to be fed as well as harvested.

We want to be free from violence in our streets and in our houses. One in every three of us will be raped in her lifetime. The pervasive social power of the masculine ideal and the greed of the pornographer have come together to steal our freedom, so that whole neighborhoods and the life of the evening and night have been taken from us. For too many women, the dark country road and the city alley have concealed the rapist. We want the night returned, the light of the moon, special in the cycle of our female lives, the stars and the gaiety of the city streets.

We want the right to have or not to have children—we do not want gangs of politicians and medical men to say we must be sterilized for the country’s good. We know that this technique is the racist’s method for controlling populations. Nor do we want to be prevented from having an abortion when we need one. We think this freedom should be available to poor women, as it always has been to the rich. We want to be free to love whomever we choose. We will live with women or with men or we will live alone. We will not allow the oppression of lesbians. One sex or one sexual preference must not dominate another.

We do not want to be drafted into the Army. We do not want our young brothers drafted. We want
them
equal with
us.

We want to see the pathology of racism ended in our time. It has been the imperial arrogance of white male power that has separated us from the suffering and wisdom of our sisters in Asia, Africa, South America, and in our own country.

To some women racism has offered privilege and convenience. These women often fail to see that they themselves have lived under the unnatural authority and violence of men in government, at work, at home. Privilege does not increase knowledge or spirit or understanding. There can be no peace while one race dominates another, one people, one nation, one sex despises another.

We must not forget that tens of thousands of American women live much of their lives in cages, away from family, lovers, all the growing years of their children. Most of them were born at the intersection of oppressions: people of color, female, poor. Women on the outside have been taught to fear those sisters. We refuse that separation. We need each other’s knowledge and anger in our common struggle against the builders of jails and bombs.

We want the uranium left in the earth, and the earth given back to the people who tilled it. We want a system of energy which is renewable, which does not take resources out of the earth without returning them. We want those systems to belong to the people and their communities, not to the giant corporations which invariably turn knowledge into weaponry. We want the sham of Atoms for Peace ended, all nuclear plants decommissioned, and the construction of new plants stopped. That is another war against the people and the child to be born in fifty years.