I consider “faith” a dirty word, yet I made an act of faith last Thursday, the 26th of August, by joining the demonstration in Las Cruces outside the Pan-Am Center, while President #43 spoke to a crowd of thousands.
What kind of act of faith was it? Well, one that involved a compromise. I live in El Paso, 40 miles from Las Cruces. In order to get a ride back, I had to go first to a town called Mesilla and attend a Democratic Party rally featuring that guy who looks like John Ritter when he played a homicidal robochief on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
I also had to go to a vegetarian restaurant, but I refused to compromise my nature to the point of paying five dollars for the privilege of eating something a rabbit wouldn’t touch. Nor did I join in the prayer, quite, but then I wasn’t eating.
Still, it was a pleasant way to fill the empty hours of unemployment. I felt the warmth of a community affirming its solidarity. Since I hate sports, I don’t get that much.
The polls say that 50%+ would vote for #43 for four more years, which makes me think the election is indeed already stolen, and the press is in bed with, excuse me, “embedded” with the President. Despite thinking this, I managed to think this was a worthwhile witness to make, even if I was my own most important witness. But what was I witnessing to, aside from my own need to have people to stand beside me?
More than I knew.
I am a member of the Border Peace Presence of El Paso, which originally described itself as an anarchist organization, in the words of two or three of the four or five marginalized activist pacifists who nurtured it from the official end of the war to the point when more people noticed the war hadn’t ended. By “anarchist” we meant we had no formal structure, and work was done simply by those of us who were willing to do it.
As a member of BPP, I was showing solidarity with our brothers and sisters in the peace movement of Las Cruces, but many of the demonstrators were Democrats. I am from a state in which voting successfully for that lesser of the two evils is not an option, so I could vote my convictions, if any candidate shared them, instead of voting for “anyone but Bush.”
I would estimate I saw about forty, or maybe sixty demonstrators, but more experienced folk, such as Friar V. were talking about a hundred people. I passed out flyers about our upcoming “Peace Jam” concert. Also, trying to make performance art out of my life, I carried my sign, which says on one side, “TeXas uber alles” and on the other, “Get Texas Out of Iraq”. We had a sound system, so I sang one verse of that good comrade Country Joe’s Vietnam We’re-all-gonna-die Rag, updated for the current war (I’ve gotten a lotta miles outta that song, over the decades).
I forgot to wear my politics on my sleeve, or rather, emblazoned on my chest. I had meant to wear a tee shirt with the quotation “How can there be a revolution without general copulation?” but I forgot. I consoled myself by thinking, “Just as well, that would have been inappropriate for a gathering of the Far Left of the mainstream American political spectrum, a mainstream,” I added to myself, “which runs between the banks of national socialism and social fascism.”
I am an Anarchist. To the extent I have any serious political thoughts about the organization of the world, I am a regenerate Maoist. By that I mean I had given up on Communism for a while, but now days I’d rather see China try to run the world than US. So my basic behavior was Taoist. I didn’t talk to my fellow demonstrators. I enjoyed standing by and letting the world spin on its own.
At lunch, later in the day, Friar V. asked me my religious views. My mother, I told him, belonged to a respectable cult, Christian Science, which I never had much respect for. My father was a former Baptist, but he lost his respect for that when his minister taught him to drink and play poker at summer camp.
Years later, when I was a child, my father was told he would be likelier to be promoted in the Army if he was churched, so he climbed his family tree and determined that, as a Scot, he ought to be Presbyterian. Unfortunately, the church he picked, for its architecture and location, was of the sect that first defined the “fundamentals” in which a fundamentalist must believe. I summed up by telling Friar V. I became a Pentecostal in order to marry, and recently the local rabbi told me I am a Jew.
One of those fundamentals this Presbyterian sect adopted in the 1920’s was Biblical inerrancy, which in turn implied creationism, the equivalency of “Pi” with the number 3, and the holiness of the US Constitution as it stood in 1860 (they made up the last one). I was told in Sunday school I was going to Hell for believing in dinosaurs.
I already had been taught I was descended from the primordial protoplasmic globule via the apes. My father also introduced me to relativity, and to dialectical materialism, although he did not call it that. Most important, he taught me an empiricism founded on our one certainty: “Cogito, ergo sum.” I think, therefore I am. I even knew where I was; I was a holographic homunculus sitting in my pituitary gland. That was the “ego” that thought. In other words, I was raised a free thinker. “Faith” was a dirty word. It was lonely.
Around eleven o’clock, the floodgates opened, and the thousands began to stream past us, bearing their signs proclaiming “Viva Bush!” One man shouted “Traitors!” as he drove past in his SUV, but mostly they just shouted, “Get a job!”
I had noticed one of the Democratic demonstrators had a sign proclaiming the number of US jobs lost in the last four years. That is an issue I have a problem with myself. When the Republicans shouted “Get a job” I shouted back, “Can you find me a job? I’ve been out of work for a year!” I found it amusing that we, the victims, should be blamed for our problems with the economy, but that is part of Republican theology.
But the most important act of faith I made was an opportunity to dialogue. Three young warriors came walking towards us, holding their “Viva Bush!” signs high. “When are you going to sign up?” I queried.
“What?” one of them asked.
“You support the War?”
“Yes,” he replied.
“Are you going to enlist?”
“No,” he replied as his friends walked off, “but I would go if they called me up. Wouldn’t you?”
“No,” I said simply.
“Wouldn’t you fight for this country?” he asked.
How to phrase this, I wondered. “No.” I said.
“But, it is a beautiful country,” he said, waving a hand at the cloud draped Big Sky over a green desert. I couldn’t argue with that. I love the Southwest.
I said, “After 9/11, I gave the President the benefit of my doubt. He had it until the second week of the war, when it became obvious there were no weapons of mass destruction.”
“He made a mistake, but we have to support him.”
“For years, we have been going into countries and setting up tin-pot dictators who will cut deals with the corporations and send out death squads, and for almost as many years we have been saying we’ve made mistakes, but we won’t do it again, and then we do the exact same thing. It’s not a mistake. It’s policy.”
“But we are setting up a democracy!”
“We are setting up Negroponte as our ambassador. He ran the death squads into Nicaragua in Reagan’s dirty war.”
He was silent after that. Nothing but the sound of the cry “Get a job!” I shortly concluded by saying, “It was good to talk. We listened to each other. I appreciate that.”
“Yeah, that’s important,” he said, and went on his way. Maybe I made a dent, I thought. Each drop of water counts.
