Hidden beneath all the hype exists a great Democratic divide

By Jacob Wheeler
Sun editor
Despite presenting a unified front at their convention in Boston last month, many politicians, delegates and progressive voters swearing allegiance to the Democratic Party to rid America of George W. Bush find themselves torn between the party line and their true beliefs on volatile issues like the war in Iraq and civil liberties. Glen Arbor Sun founding editor Jacob Wheeler was in Boston for the week of the DNC, reporting for Utne Magazine on the happenings at the convention, itself, but also chronicling the mood at progressive seminars, workshops, debates and organized protests elsewhere in Beantown.

BOSTON — By the time the 2004 Democratic National Convention kicked off in a puff of pomp and patriotic smoke, much of New England had already grown sick and tired of the whole ordeal. A three-city-block radius of prime expressways and urban thoroughfares around the Fleet Center downtown had been closed off, as well as sections of the city Transit line to deter any would-be terrorist mischief. Senior citizens living in the neighborhood were told to keep forms of identification on them at all times, lest they be mistaken for Al Qaeda sleeper cells. Worst of all, the state security apparatus had erected a “free speech zone” in damp quarters hidden under the train tracks and surrounded by barbed wire and netting, into which the authorities sought to confine the thousands of protestors expected to crash the big party.
Analogies to Guantanamo Bay — even Auschwitz — abounded.
“I would expect to see this in other countries, but not in America. This is not what we’re about,” said John Tompkins a Bostonian whose family of three was legging out a three-mile detour on their typical evening stroll for ice cream.
“It doesn’t sound very good,” echoed Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich, after speaking at a panel at the Boston Social Forum two days before the convention. “It doesn’t sound very consistent with a Democratic society.”
Before the Convention got under way on Monday, approximately 60 organized protestors gathered in the Free Speech Zone at 9 a.m. to act out scenes of oppression reminiscent of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. Activists wearing DNC shirts ordered others in street clothes to don black hoods while their hands were bound behind their backs. The “prisoners” were then forced into the Free Speech Zone and forced to kneel in uncomfortable positions. Sound familiar?
According to Gan Golan, a graduate student majoring in urban planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a local member of the Save Our Civil Liberties group, the “prisoners” wore civilian clothing and not the orange suits of Guantanamo Bay infamy to show that they are normal, everyday people.
“This insulting protest pen proves that Democrats are unwilling to differentiate from Republicans on issues relating to civil liberties and our inherent right to protest,” Golan said. “Many of us naively thought this wouldn’t happen in Boston, but the lockdown is becoming an established pattern at mass protests. Over the last few years we’ve seen police gradually increase security and the potential for violence, even though the U.S. protest movement is one of the most nonviolent in the world.
“By trying to put free speech in a cage, Boston has unwillingly declared the whole city a protest zone,” Golan foreshadowed.
Sure enough, roughly two hours after the powerful street theater display, city police used physical force to pry Medea Benjamin, founder of the women-against-war organization Code Pink, away from a “Bring The Troops Home” banner, before removing it from a fence adjacent to the Free Speech Zone outside the perimeter of the Fleet Center.
“First they give us a concentration camp, and then they won’t even let us hang our signs!” the well-known activist protested. “In this post-September 11 atmosphere, free speech is equated with terrorism.”
This journalist heard an officer radio in for reinforcements, and just when arrests appeared imminent, the banner was moved to a different wall, and Code Pink’s anti-war speech was allowed to continue. An emotional Fernando Suarez, of San Diego, told of losing his son Jesus, a Marine who was killed in Iraq on March 27, 2003 when he stepped on unexploded U.S. munitions. The Mexican family had emigrated from Tijuana in 1997 so Jesus could reap the benefits of serving in the American military.
“My son and 900 other boys and girls died for Bush’s lies, and my question is ‘why?’” Suarez asked in passionate, heavily accented English.
Why the Orwellian Free Speech Zone, Why the war in Iraq and Why not a just, democratic society are questions protestors were asking here all week.
Boston Social Forum
America’s attention naturally centered on the Fleet Center, where the whose-who of the Democratic Party and celebrities including everyone from Michael Moore, to Bono to Sarah Jessica Parker gathered for one big cheerleader session.
But Anyone looking for discussions on the direction the Democratic Party is taking, and exactly what kind of platforms should replace the Bush administration next year, should not have wasted their time listening to the canned and scripted speeches that lulled Boston’s Ground Zero to sleep all week. The real brain action kicked off the weekend before at the Boston Social Forum on the University of Massachusetts at Boston campus, where thousands of activists, intellectuals, anarchists — anyone who wants change and is willing to engage in dialogue about how to reach it — gathered for three days of convocations, panels, workshops and powerful open-air exhibits.
The Boston Social Forum is the first such forum in North America and builds on the model of the World Social Forum, first held in Porto Allegre, Brazil, in February, 2001. “This is a reaction to the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, wealthier governments like the United States and their large corporations proposing economic policies that forced cuts to social spending and privatization of social services in an effort to reduce debt and encourage investment which results in humanitarian disasters and economic collapse,” said Sean Donahue, a BSF organizer. “We felt it was important to bring people from various social movements to Boston in an open-ended process. We wanted to encourage conversation between people from different social movements and different ways of life to try and share their ideas, experiences and strategies to build new coalitions, develop new ideas and hopefully move forward with more comprehensive responses to the problems we’re facing.
“What we want to do is find a common ground where someone who spent the winter working for (Vermont Governor) Howard Dean in Iowa or New Hampshire can get together with someone who locked out a Lockheed Martin plant or someone who traveled to Iraq to document the bombing. And when you find that common ground, you begin to find ways to move forward together.”
At UMass-Boston there were no delegates waiting on the edges of their seats for four cumbersome days to nominate the man we’ve known for months will run for President. Nor was there the menacing security in and around the Fleet Center that naturally curtails free speech. The Boston Social Forum featured no video monitors, no elevator music, no balloons waiting to fall from the ceiling at the climax of an anti-climactic week.
But it did feature spontaneous, original dialogue and conflicting opinions, and lots of them.
“Buying a lot of ketchup”
There was Peter Miguel Camejo — Ralph Nader’s running mate in 2004 — questioning John Kerry’s soul and the Democratic Party’s ability to survive if American voters began supporting third parties en masse. The controversial third-party candidate was both applauded and lambasted by the packed audience afterwards.
There was Winona LaDuke, Nader’s running mate four years ago who is focusing more on educating people about wind energy this time around. LaDuke called herself a critic of John Kerry and had words of praise for Nader, who “still sends little letters to me on his portable, manual typewriter.” But when asked who she would encourage people to vote for this November, LaDuke joked, “I’m a big Ralph supporter but I’m buying a lot of ketchup (presumably in reference to Teresa Heinz Kerry’s cash cow food product).”
There was former Marine Sergeant Jimmy Massey testifying to a stunned audience about how his platoon mowed down innocent Iraqi civilians amidst very little actual enemy resistance on the march toward Baghdad last year, followed immediately by the always cool and collected Dennis Kucinich — the only superstar Democrat to attend the Forum. The speaking styles of Massey and Kucinich differed like night and day.
There was the Frida Bus, an old Greenpeace school bus that runs on grease or straight vegetable oil. A contingent of activists from Maine drove her down to Boston where her couches served as an inviting space for “open dialogue and community connections,” as Alec Aman put it. The Frida Bus featured a Zine and literature distribution area and a lending library. Aman and his friends will help feed the Convention protestors in Boston this week. “We’re totally inclusive,” Aman said. “We believe everyone has something worthwhile to offer when they visit us here. We think this space appeals to people from all backgrounds.”
Aman added that just voting is not enough. “I think a lot of people become disempowered by voting because they feel that they’ve done their job every 2-4 years. They feel that they are affecting real change, yet we see the same rifts in society, the same fundamental problems, over and over again. Where you need to start addressing our social problems is at the local level, which is why the Boston Social Forum is so empowering.”
Shandra, a volunteer with the local chapter of Food Not Bombs, which is teaming up with the Frida Bus activists this week, took advantage of a blossoming discussion on the state of politics in the United States today and told how many Americans — especially minorities, the poor and those with criminal records — are excluded from this country’s political discussion. “It’s unfair. My friend Tanisha won’t vote in an election because three of her cousins have felonies and they are not allowed to vote.”
The Boston Social Forum wasn’t immune to criticism. Shandra noted that admission to the alternative convention cost $20 for those not part of the media or speaking at the panels — a burden to many African-Americans like herself and anyone struggling to pay the bills and a clear contradiction, given that the Forum was intended as a venue of open dialogue for all.
Still, the Boston Social Forum provided a breath of fresh air before the masses marched into the Fleet Center to the tune of “John Kerry, John Edwards, no questions asked.”
“Get a backbone”
Lauren Haldeman, a 25-year-old delegate from Iowa, felt the great divide within the Democratic Party in the pit of her stomach when she walked past anti-war protestors outside the perimeter of the Fleet Center on Monday afternoon to attend the opening ceremonies of the convention. The graduate student at the University of Iowa poetry program — one of the best in the country — was wearing a pink “Delegate for Peace” scarf around her right arm, and that immediately set her apart from most of her fellow Democrats.
“They asked me why I was going into that building if I supported peace,” Haldeman recalls. “It made me cry, and I felt torn over whether to go inside or join the protestors, because I agree with what they are saying. I said ‘I’m going in there because of Dennis Kucinich.’ I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for him.”
The young woman was swept off her feet by the congressman from Ohio, an outspoken critic of the U.S. decision to invade Iraq even as most of his fellow Democrats crossed party lines and fell in line with their commander in chief. Haldeman discovered Kucinich on his campaign website and was so moved that she showed up at her precinct on January 19 to support Kucinich. She even plays the accordion for the “Kucinich polka” on his website’s culture corner.
But her faith in the party is not so crystal clear. And what she heard at the DNC did little to change that, as speech after speech and song after sterile pop song have buried the issue most important to many delegates — the decision to support the Bush administration in going to war. A Boston Globe report claimed that a whopping 95 percent of all DNC delegates oppose that decision.
“I think we need to get a backbone,” said Haldeman. “We’re not unified, though we should be unified around the idea of change. And our elected officials need to be courageous enough to question the status quo.”
She added that the decision to vote for a party devoted wholeheartedly to peace vs. unseating the current war-mongering president is a difficult one because she has two brothers of drafting age, and she is worried what will happen to them if Bush is reelected in November.
“First and foremost we need to focus on the giant elephant in the room. Though it’s racking me inside, we need to do as Dennis has done and give Kerry our support, for the sake of party unity.”
Keeping the pressure applied
Jim Hightower, the well-known progressive columnist and author from Texas, agrees, calling the battle ahead a two-folded one. “First we need to get Bush out of office, then we can fight for our progressive values again. But we can’t lay back and make the mistake we did in 1992 after Clinton beat the elder Bush and then ran away with our progressive values, untouched for eight years.”
This time around, with another Bush on the dartboard, Hightower is happy to say he sees profound differences in the Democratic Party. The Dean and Kucinich campaigns, the backlash generated by the current Bush administration’s Draconian foreign policy, but especially the role of the Internet have democratized the process and helped grassroots campaigns bypass those “good ole’ boy blockages,” he says.
On a national tour for his new book “Let’s Stop Beating Around The Bush,” Hightower can’t help but notice that people are organizing grassroots campaigns like he’s never seen before. Still buoyed by the fantastic turnout during global antiwar protests on February 15, 2003 as well as the legacies of Seattle, Cancun and Miami, progressive activists are proving themselves a force to be reckoned with at major political and economic events everywhere.
“Our ultimate goal may not be John Kerry in the White House, but to take back our country. We’ve got to work with the tools we have right now,” Hightower said. “We as progressives need to do the heavy lifting of democracy and apply the pressure, either with websites, blogs (online diaries) or even street action, if necessary.
In Boston the activists were out in gale force, breaking free from the oppressive, barbed-wire bonds of the Free Speech Zone and taking their act to the Boston Common park for the Real, Real Democratic Bazaar on Tuesday. The Black Tea Society activist group set up shop in a well-organized headquarters near Copley Plaza. Critical Mass cyclists biked all over Boston, distracting and confusing police officers.
Though not stated openly, one got the impression that the demonstrations were a prelude to a much bigger event — one that will be protested with even more fervor — the “hats-off-to-George W. Bush and his neo-conservatives” party coming at the end of this month to the Republican National Convention in Manhattan.
Stay tuned for street coverage of the Madness in Manhattan in a future issue of the Glen Arbor Sun. Jacob Wheeler can be reached at jacobrwheeler@gmail.com