-----Original Message-----
From: starhawk-owner@lists.riseup.net [mailto:starhawk-owner@lists.riseup.net]On
Behalf Of Starhawk
Sent: Saturday, August 30, 2008 11:00 AM
To: Starhawk@lists.riseup.net; To-EAT; Liv Riv; pagan cluster; spider
Cc: pga@lists.riseup.net
Subject: [starhawk] Republican National Convention--Convergence Center
Raided
RNC2—Raid on the Convergence Center
By Starhawk
It’s Friday night. Our Pagan Cluster is sitting on the bluff of the
Mississippi having our first real meeting, when Lisa gets a call. The cops
are raiding the Convergence Center, where we’re organizing meetings and
trainings for the protests against the Republican National Convention. It’s
not a role play, the caller says. It’s real.
Instantly, we jump up and hurry back the six or eight blocks to the old theater
we are using for meetings, trainings and social gatherings. I ‘ve spent
the last two days doing magical activism trainings, teaching people how to stay
calm and grounded in emergency situations and when things get chaotic. Now
it’s time to put the training into practice. Aaron, a tall, red-headed
young man who could be one of my nephews strides along beside me. “Are
you grounded?” I ask him. He nods, and runs ahead.
Nobody can keep up with Lisa, who speeds ahead like an arrow, walking, not
running, but still covering the ground quickly. Andy and I trail behind.
We’re often street buddies, because we’re both big, slow, and
supremely calm and stubborn, willing to wade into almost any situation and
become the immovable object.
We’re stopped by a line of cops just before we reach the building. They
refuse to let us through, or to move their van which is blocking Scarecrow’s
car. There’s an investigation underway, they say, and won’t say more.
Brush, our dear friend, is inside, having gone to a jail solidarity meeting,
ironically enough. So are two very young people who had just joined our cluster
that night. I try calling Brush’s cell phone, but get no reply.
We wait. That’s what you do when the cops have guns trained on kids
inside a building. You wait, and witness, and make phone calls, and try to
think of useful things to do.
We call lawyers. We call politicians. We try to call media. We call
friends who might know politicians and media.
Through the kitchen door, we cansee young kids sitting on the floor, handcuffed.
We walk across the street, back, made more phone calls. An ambulance is
parked in front, and the paramedics head into the building, leaving a gurney
ready. Susu, from her car around the corner, reports that the cops have
been grabbing pedestrians from the street, forcing them down to the ground,
handcuffing them.
Song, one of the local organizers, calls her City Council member. She
wants to call the Mayor, Chris Coleman, who has promised that St. Paul will be
as welcoming to protestors as to delegates, but no one has his home number.
What I have forgotten to tell people at the training is how much of an action is
just this: tense, boring waiting, with a knot of anxiety in your stomach and
your feet starting to hurt. Song talks to a helpful neighbor, who’s come
over to find out what’s happening. He knows where the mayor lives, says
it’s just a few blocks away, and draws us a map.
We decide to go and call on the Mayor, who could call off the cops. About
five of us troop down there, through the soft night and a neighborhood of
comfortable homes and wide lawns on the bluffs above the Mississippi. The
Mayor’s house is a comfortable Dutch Colonial, and lights were on inside.
We decide that just a few of us will go to the door, so as not to look
intimidating. Song is a round, soft-bodied middle-aged woman with a sweet
face. Ellen is a tiny brunette with a gap-toothed smile, and Lisa, formidable
organizer though she is, looks slight and unthreatening. The rest of us
hang back. Someone opens the door. Our friends have a conversation
with the mayors’ wife, who is not pleased to be visited by constituents late
at night, and who tells us we should call the office. The Mayor, she says,
is asleep, and she will not wake him up.
We think a mayor who was doing his job would get up and go see what’s going
on. Nonetheless, we head back to the convergence space.
A protestor has been released from the building. A small crowd has
gathered across the street, and Fox News has arrived. They interview Song, who
does her first ever Fox media spot. She tells them the truth—that people
were in there watching movies—a documentary about Meridel Le Seuer. Meridel
would be proud, and I’m glad she is with us in some form.
One by one, protestor’s trickle out. Now we get more pieces of the
story. The cops burst in, with no warning. They pulled drew their
guns on everyone—including a five year old child who was there with his
mother, forced everyone down on the floor. It was terrifying.
They had a warrant, apparently, from the county, not the city, to search for
‘bomb making materials.’ They were searching everyone in the building,
then one by one releasing them as they found nothing.
They continue to find nothing, as we wait through long hours. Meanwhile,
more and more media arrives. These cops are not as creative as the DC cops
during our first mobilization there against the International Monetary Fund and
the World Bank. Those cops confiscated the lunchtime soup—which included
onions and chili powder, claiming they were materials for home made pepper
spray.
We wait until the last person gets out. He’s a twenty year old who the
cops have accused of stealing his own backpack—but apparently they relented.
And now it’s morning. I wake up to the news that cops have been raiding houses
where activists are staying, bursting in with the same bogus warrant and
arresting people, including a four year old child. They’ve arrested people at
the Food Not Bombs house—a group dedicated to feeding protestors and the
homeless. They’ve arrested others, presumably just for being in the wrong
place at the wrong time.
The Poor Peoples’ Campaign, which had set up camp at Harriet Island, a park in
the middle of the Mississippi, has also been harassed, its participants ordered
to disperse and its organizers arrested.
Let me be perfectly clear here—all of us here are planning nonviolent protests
against an administration which is responsible for immense violence, bombs that
have destroyed whole countries, and hundreds of thousands of deaths.
This is the America that eight years of the Bush administration have brought us,
a place where dissent is no longer tolerated, where pre-emptive strikes have
become the strategy of choice for those who hold power, where any group can be
accused of ‘bombmaking’ or ‘terrorism’ on no evidence whatsoever in
order to deter dissent.
Please stand with us. Because it could be your home they are raiding, next.
Call the Mayors of St. Paul and Minneapolis. Tell them you are outraged by
these attacks on dissent. Urge them to let Poor People encamp and to let
dissent be heard.
FLOOD THE MAYORS' OFFICES ASAP
St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman
651-266-8510
Minneapolis Mayor RT Rybak
(612) 673-2100
(612) 673-3000 outside Minneapolis