Reflections on Elections

Election night caught me by surprise. A week or so before the election, I read an article that said that people were experiencing unprecedented anxiety during this election season. They were not able to sleep, and while not sleeping, were reading more and watching more news and pseudo-news that was increasing their anxiety over what might happen. I shared that sense of dread and anticipation. I was terrified about the election being stolen; I was terrified of what the reaction to that might be, and what the reaction of the government to any reaction by African Americans was sure to be. I was obsessed by the fear of what would happen to Barack Obama if he were elected, and how people would react to that and the reaction to the reaction … More than anything, I was terrified of a McCain-Palin presidency, quite simply afraid that the world could not survive it.

Through most of election season, I did absolutely nothing except read and talk to my friends. But in the last weeks I threw myself into the campaign against Proposition 4, a California ballot initiative attempting – for the third time – to force teens to notify their parents before obtaining an abortion. The polls showed Prop. 4 likely to pass, and I was terrified about what that would mean for thousands of girls like I had once been, who felt they could never tell their parents if they became pregnant. (Currently in California, a pregnant teen can qualify for “confidential services,” a wonderful category that too few Californians know about, which means she can get whatever services she needs [whether termination or prenatal care] without her parents knowing, and she can qualify for Medi-Cal based only on her own assets, not her parents’.)

The one thing I wasn’t worried about was Proposition 8 passing. First of all, I don’t really care about gay marriage, and not just because I haven’t had a girlfriend in seven years. When I was in college, I thought marriage was an archaic institution that was on its way out, and one of the big disappointments of my adult life has been watching more and more of my alternative friends go through various kinds of marriage rites. In terms of the pragmatic reasons people give for why marriage is so important, there are much better ways to get health care for all, a just immigration policy, support for children and old people, than tying them to what type of sexual or romantic relationship someone happens to be in. And secondly, I was sure that Prop. 8 wasn’t going to pass. All along, the polls showed it behind though gaining, plus the youth vote was going to be a big factor in this election, and according to everything you hear, youth don’t care about people’s sexual orientation.

I spent most of election day holding a No on 4 sign 100 feet away from my polling place. I was standing next to the people holding No on 8 signs, who were much better organized than we were. All day people ‑ mostly African Americans, because most of the neighborhood is African American – drove or walked by and gave them the thumbs up, and a lot of them asked me, “Which one is Prop. 4?” And when I told them, some of them said, “Oh, I don’t know about that, I have a daughter.” I gave them our talking points and hoped that in two minutes I could convince them their daughters would be safer if they could make their own decisions around what to tell them about their sex lives. Even a lot of the No on 8 people asked me which one Prop. 4 was.

So my first surprise on election night came at 8:01 here, when the numbers flipped from 207 to 274 and the banner started to roll: “Barack Obama elected president of the United States.” I was not by that time surprised at the news, because we had been watching it for an hour and a half and we knew that he was going to win. I was surprised by the sheer elation I felt. Two friends and I walked out onto the balcony and started screaming, hoping to start a collective cheer but only resulting in someone calling down from upstairs, “Is everyone okay?”

And then the other returns started coming in and the first surprise was a good one – Prop. 4 was losing. When early returns showed Prop. 8 ahead, we didn’t worry too much – it was early, these were early voters, it didn’t count San Francisco or Alameda County … but as the night wore on and the numbers stayed pretty much the same, I was shocked to realize how devastated I was. Because this wasn’t about marriage. You can decorate it any way you want, but it comes down to the fact that people don’t think we’re as good as they are. A majority of California voters don’t think that I should have the same rights they have, and the fact that marriage is not a right I am interested in exercising doesn’t matter. We went to the Castro and wandered around, watching the huge TV screen they had set up in the street, and it was a bizarre mix of overpowering joy and gnawing sadness. Bizarre because neither was anything I would have told you that morning I would be feeling.

A week or so before election day, I had decided I was going to vote for Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney for President. After all, Obama was going to carry California, and McKinney’s platform was everything I could ask for. I had to turn off every debate after a few minutes, because I couldn’t bear hearing Obama rant about the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear program, the need to send more troops to Afghanistan and Pakistan, or his unwavering commitment to Israel’s military strength. Then I went to New Orleans. On Sunday, I went to a second line in Central City, and just about every person there was wearing Obama on their body. A woman had on an Obama dress, Obama’s face wrapping around her curvaceous body in a halo of glitter. Someone was giving out fans proclaiming, “Vote First & Be the Change,” which provided a surprising amount of information about how to protect your voting rights. To all of those people, it would have made no difference that McKinney is also African American. To virtually all of them, a vote for McKinney would have been a vote against Obama, and a vote against Obama meant you didn’t want a Black man to be president. Because they have had the experience of voting for a Black person who couldn’t win. I voted for Obama because, very simply, I feel that African Americans have the right to be disappointed by a president they chose.

I know very well that African American politicians can be just as disappointing as white politicians. I lived through the Willie Brown era in San Francisco and am living right now in the hugely disappointing Ron Dellums era in Oakland. The only Black girl in my elementary school was Lynn Wilder, whose father Doug became Virginia’s first Black governor, and trust me, it wasn’t a good period for the state.

When Obama named Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff, people in my circles immediately started sending around information about Emanuel’s hard-core Zionist background, the fact that his father was in the Irgun (the infamous Jewish terrorist movement in pre-1948 Palestine), and I got annoyed because it seemed like an inverse of the sort of “But is it good for the Jews?” mentality I grew up with. The chief of staff is responsible for a lot more than Israel/Palestine policy and nothing that Obama has said in the last six years has left any doubt about how good his administration was (not) going to be for the Palestinians. But then I learned that Emanuel is an ultra-successful investment banker, was the largest recipient of campaign donations from hedge funds and financial institutions … it’s not good news. Neither is the fact that one of Obama’s top economic advisers is Robert Rubin, who as Clinton’s treasury secretary started off the deregulation that set up the current financial and economic crisis.

Yesterday I went to the big rally in San Francisco to protest the passage of Prop. 8. It was a pretty good unity event, with speakers like Rev. Amos Brown, an African American former county supervisor who has at times been pretty anti-gay. There were great signs like “No More Mr. Nice Gay”, “Another Str8 Against H8” and “Two Nice Girls In Love = REALLY SCARY.” There were also some really offensive ones like “Black Is the New Gay.” You might think that all the white guys carrying that sign would at least pause to wonder why they didn’t see any Black people carrying it, or if not, you might at least think the fact that a Black lesbian yelled at them that they didn’t have Black skin so they have no idea what it’s like would cause them to think, but not so. We argued with them until we were hoarse and frustrated, but they just couldn’t get what’s wrong with expropriating someone else’s struggle. There were also a lot of signs saying, “Chickens Have More Right Than Gays” or “Chickens 1, Gays 0,” referring to the passage of Proposition 2, giving farm animals the right to turn around. Next time I go to one of these things, I’m going to carry a sign saying, “Queers Rights = Animal Rights.” (Some Israeli friends of mine are in a group called One Struggle, that is a largely queer anti-occupation animal rights group.)

Despite all these conflicts, I feel hopeful. I can’t help it. It feels like a huge cloud has lifted. I believe Obama is a supreme opportunist. I read Dreams from My Father a few years ago, and the person who wrote that book was a lot more progressive than the guy who is about to be president. So I believe he changed his politics to get elected, and that makes it hard to trust him.
The good thing about opportunists is that they sway with the wind. And that means it’s up to us, the progressive movements, to create a huge wind.

Code Pink plans to demonstrate at his house in Chicago for the next two months. That’s a mistake. But it’s not a mistake because Obama shouldn’t be pressured or criticized, or because, as one friend said, “Obama hasn’t done anything yet.” He has done plenty. His appointments speak loudly, as do statements he made during the campaign. It’s a mistake because one, it’s something only a small group of full-time activists can do, and two, they have not built broad support for such actions. It will make people who like Obama, especially African Americans, see the left as old racist nay-sayers, and will make Obama feel embattled before he gets started.

A better approach would be to target every Democratic congressperson or senator for the next two months. That is something everyone can do wherever they live, in whatever manner works for them, and it puts the people who depend on our votes on notice that we’re watching them, not just Obama. For eight years, we in San Francisco have heard from Nancy Pelosi’s staff, “It’s not us, it’s the Republicans. We’re with you. If only we had the majority, we would do what you want. If only we had the White House, we’d make change.” Okay, you’ve got the majority and you’ve got the White House. Let’s see it.

The left needs to get it together, and fast. The people who work on every issue, from health care to green jobs to prison abolition to housing rights to welfare, need to get together and come up with a 100 days agenda for the new administration and the new Congress, and we need to get it out there using all the communication technologies whose power the Obama campaign proved.

One of the things I’ve been thinking about recently is the constitution. All the big civil rights groups have announced campaigns to “Restore the Constitution”. Well the constitution is more than the Bill of Rights, though goddess knows, that is something that needs to be restored in a hurry. The preamble to the constitution says something about promoting the general welfare, and securing the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. Civil rights are more than freedom of speech and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. Civil rights include the right to housing, the right to food, the right to some leisure time, the right to education, the right to love whom we choose and marry them if we insist, the right not only to survive but to thrive. If we can convince the ACLU and CCR to make this part of their 100 Days to Restore the Constitution campaigns, and if we all unite behind that campaign, then I think we have a chance to get things off to a better start.

Germany 1939

I'm obsessed with prisons these days.

Especially with Guantanamo Bay, where more than 400 men have been held for almost four years in inhuman conditions – many of them outside, in rain or heat or cold, not able to wash regularly (and cleanliness is very important to Muslims), no privacy, no regular exercise, no charges, no arraignments, no trials, sometimes no lawyers.

Let me say that again – four years, no charges, no lawyers, no trials.

There have been at least 34 suicides which have been barely reported in our press, though they are widely covered in the Arab, British and even the Taiwanese press. The military has reported several hundred “SIBs” – “self-injurious behaviors”, averaging two a week. The other day, Jumah Dossari tried to hang himself in front of his lawyer. I heard the lawyer, Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, on Democracy Now! If I relied on CNN or ABC for my news, I could well have missed the story. Yes, it was there, but there wasn't the kind of up-to-the-minute breaking news coverage that there was when Terry Schiavo was sucking in her last artificial breaths, or when Scott Dyleski murdered Pamela Vitale in Lafayette.


But that's no surprise. The mainstream media works for the government or at least for the same agenda, we know that, and their interest is in burying stories of US atrocities. The surprise to me has been the lack of response from the left, even from the people I have worked with for years on other prison issues, against the death penalty, against control units.

When I mention Guantanamo to them, they say, yes, and people are also being tortured in Pelican Bay and in East Oakland. We are busy focusing on that.

Okay, I get that. But actually, I don't think that's right. I think we, the left, are in denial about the significance of what has happened over the last four years.

When the Guantanamo prisoners began hunger striking, I thought that would wake us up, make us realize this is an issue we need to target specifically right now. Just in solidarity. I mean, they are being force-fed with tubes up their noses, which are then put into the next person's nose without even cleaning the vomit and blood off of them.

And if that is not enough, now we know that our government is abducting people from their countries and taking them to Romania and Poland to be tortured.

Congress just said it's okay to torture people as long as they're not u.s. citizens and not on u.s. territory.

I'm not saying that what's happening in our own communities, what has been happening for years in our prisons, is okay, or is less important. The california supreme court recently found the state's prison "health care" system a form of cruel and unusual punishment, and ordered it reformed, and then a couple weeks ago that reform was put on hold because they can’t find a qualified person to implement it . And this is an issue that the California Coalition for Women Prisoners and other prison activist groups have fought hard on for years and years.

And then there are the stories about the prisoners in New Orleans. How the guards left the prison, the largest in the country, leaving the prisoners in locked cells to drown, how some of the prisoners were able to help others get out, how the guards surrounded the prison with rafts to round up the people who managed to make it out, and held them for days on a bridge where they were not allowed to stand up but had to pee on themselves, how then they were taken to a soccer field where they were held for like a week with no blankets and no mattresses and guards would come and throw peanut butter sandwiches over the fence for them to fight over. And on top of that, Human Rights Watch found that when they finally got to whatever prisons they were sent to all over the south, that some of them were badly beaten, just because.

I don't try to say that couldn't have happened eight years ago, because it probably could have and would have and maybe it even did. But I think that Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib made it more possible. Because we, the good people of this country, the ones who care, have heard about Guantanamo, and we have seen the pictures of Abu Ghraib, and we have been pretty silent. Not in our houses, not in our cars, certainly not in our hearts, but in the streets, we have been silent.

Guantanamo, and its counterparts in Iraq and Afghanistan and Poland and Romania and wherever, stand out to me for one reason: Auschwitz.

We have not had one major demonstration focused on the enormous erosion of civil rights that is represented by the newly legalized phenomena of indefinite detention, offshore prisons, "renditioning" and torture. I mentioned this recently to some friends, and I was shocked by their response. "Oh, I don't know, I think people have done some things, there's that group that does street theater, and the Center for Constitutional Rights is doing stuff about it." I don't dismiss those actions, some of which I have done myself, but if you heard that as of late 1942 the German left had done a few small theater actions about concentration camps, and some liberal lawyers filed a lawsuit, would you be impressed?

Why do they call Guantanamo a prison? The people held there – apparently for the rest of their lives, are not called prisoners. They are called "enemy combatants"? What is an enemy combatant? Isn't it a prisoner of war? Well, yes, except it's a prisoner of war who is not subject to any of the international covenants, to which this country is signatory, on the treatment of prisoners of war. The people we are imprisoning and torturing all over the world are not subject to these covenants because our government says they don't have to be. End of story. Well the Jews in europe were not called prisoners of war either. They were called “deportees” or “enemy aliens.”

A website dedicated to defining terms related to the nazi genocide explains, “Concentration camps were prisons used without regard to accepted norms of arrest and detention.”

Guantanamo is a concentration camp, and by all accounts, which are pretty sparse because not many people are allowed in there, and not many are trying to go as far as I can tell, it is becoming a death camp. Abu Ghraib, where torture and abuse did not stop when Lyndie England was sentenced, or when Janis Rapinsky was demoted, or when Newsweek retracted its story about the desecration of the Koran, is another concentration camp. Shebergan, in Afghanistan (CIA code name “The Salt Pit”), was another, where at least 43 men suffocated while being transported in closed metal containers, and at least five hundred were in danger of starving to death when the International Committee of the Red Cross “was forced to step in” (Washington Post editorial).

The truth is that we don't know how many more u.s. concentration camps there are around the world. And we don't know partly because we are not trying to find out. Because we are too busy with our lives, and with our other work, trying to stop the death penalty, trying to Free Palestine, trying to educate each other about sex trafficking and publicize the rape of a 22-year-old Filipina by six US marines (see article).

I grew up on the stories of the nazi holocaust, and how the good people of europe stood by and did nothing. And I always believed that I wouldn't do that. And I wondered how it could be that whole countries allowed people to be rounded up and starved to death and then annihilated.

Now I think I know. It's because it didn't start with millions, it started with a few thousand, and there weren't banner headlines that said, "Nine Million Will Be Killed." They were enemy aliens, they were traitors, they were troublemakers, they were cheats, they were fanatics; they were work camps, they were temporary detention centers, they were transit facilities, they were deportation centers; there was war, there were weddings, there were babies, there was work.

They didn't invade Poland one month and Czechoslovakia the next and France the month after that. They invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 and Syria in 2006 [note:  when I wrote this I was speculating; it actually happened in 2014]… and in the meantime they had coups in Haiti and Venezuela and the Philippines was reinvaded without anyone really hearing about it.

We the left in this country need to acknowledge the situation we are in. We are not Germany 1929. We are Germany 1939. It's not "Can It Happen Here?", it's not "If It Happens Here," and it's not "When It Happens Here."

A few weeks ago, I was skimming an article in the San Francisco Chronicle about the Democrats. It was titled something like, "Democrats bumble, Republicans fumble," and its point was that the Democrats are against a lot of things but they don't really stand for anything. Now if someone wants to argue that the Democrats are wishy-washy, I'm the last one to disagree. But the premise of this article was the Democrats are against tax breaks for the rich, against privatizing social security and against – um – letting poor people drown, and insofar as that's true, that's actually adds up to being for some pretty important things.

I don't care about the Democrats, because in fact, they never do stand for much. But the argument, that being opposed to enriching the rich and emiserating the poor or to wars of annihilation and weapons of mass destruction, is too negative, is the same one that is often made against the left, even by ourselves. We talk about needing to know what our vision is, that we only critique but don't offer an alternative, needing focused strategic campaigns that we can win. Somehow, when I read that article, I had a revelation:

If you read a news article in a German newspaper from 1938 and it was talking about a group of people who always seemed to be protesting the Nazi government, would you think, "Why are they so negative?" If in the same paper they had an article about another group that was organizing small collective businesses and a barter system for their neighborhoods, which would you think was doing the more important work?

I'm sure that there were Germans who organized summer camps and did cool art with underprivileged kids; some of them doubtless scandalized everyone by inviting a few Jewish kids. I remember reading about Polish Catholic women who took blankets to Auschwitz and threw them over the fence. But the people I grew up learning to honor are the ones who blew up train tracks and sabotaged weapons factories.

It's not true that we don't have a vision. We know very well what we're for. We are for good jobs and good health care and good housing and respect for every kind of communal or family structure people choose to have. We are for freedom from hunger and freedom to thrive and freedom from arbitrary rule. We're for just and peaceful resolution to conflicts over land, we're for sharing the earth's resources as fairly as possible, and for developing a lifestyle that tries not to destroy so many of them.

But let's be clear. That vision cannot simply coexist with the status quo. It's not an alternative vision, it's a counter vision. Sometimes, maybe most of the time, you need to tear down the old house before you build the new one.

I always thought, and I know that most of my friends did too, that If It Happened Here, I would resist to the max. But it is happening, and I'm not doing that, because one, I don't know what to do, and two, I don't want to sound like a nutcase, and three (and if I'm honest I admit that this is the biggest reason), if they don't succeed in wiping us all out, and they probably won't because that's not what they're trying to do, I have to have a life, I have to have a place to live and food to eat and clothes to wear, and money to live on when I can't work any more.

But when history is written, people are going to say, "How could they have known and done nothing?" And I guess maybe someone will read this article and say, "That's how."

Or maybe they will say, "They did do something. They blocked the bridges, they stopped the trains, they interrupted the ballet, they took over the airwaves, they sabotaged military equipment, they protested at the homes of the torturers; they didn't stop it right away, but they kept at it and eventually they made things change."