Adventure to Obama’s White House, part 1

We sat in a holding pen in our 4th jail since our arrest at the White House the day before. As we awaited to go to court, I wondered aloud to Joe Palen, a Pax Christi Twin Cities Area board member and one of my fellow arrestees, whether we would need time to decompress from the psychic trauma we incurred by seeing the dehumanization of the fellow humans being processed and prodded alongside us in these warrens of Washington, DC, places that are usually excluded from the routine tourist sites of the nation’s capital. Did what we witnessed contribute to a kind of PTSD? Can the cumulative effect traumatize you even if the oppressive actions occur to others in your presence rather than directly to yourself? It seems especially cruel that most of the dehumanizing and over-zealous oppression we witnessed victimized people of color by their fellow African-American police officers and guards.

Admittedly, it was hard for me to distinguish between Secret Service, Park Police, DC Metro Police, US Marshalls, and Corrections Officers as we proceeded through the gauntlet precipitated by our arrest. So maybe it is best to start at the beginning.

My friend Kathy Kelly and her fellow co-coordinators at Voices for Creative Nonviolence (VCNV) shared their vision for a Peaceable Assembly Campaign with some of us in Minnesota last fall. They hoped to see groups of concerned citizens traveling to the nation’s capital to call for an end to the wars and military occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq to coincide with the first anniversary of Obama’s presidency, his State of the Union speech, and the unveiling of his proposed budget for fiscal year 2011 during the end of January.

A group of close to 25 Minnesotans decided to answer the call and scheduled a morning of vigil and demonstration in front of the White House on Tuesday, January 26th followed by visits to our Members of Congress and Senators. Although a lot of planning occurred back in Minnesota, the group hoped to fine-tune what the presence at the White House would include and how it would unfold with members of VCNV and others from around the nation who would be joining us that Tuesday. Unfortunately the logistics of getting everyone together for this last-minute planning was made more difficult by the late arrival in Washington of some of the group.

We planned to symbolically “throw shoes at the occupation” in honor of the courageous Iraqi journalist who hurled his shoes at President Bush in Baghdad several years ago. Close to a dozen pairs of shoes had messages inscribed on the sides, bottoms, and insides of the shoes with bright-colored paint. A few of the shoes had been mailed to President Obama and although many of us are angry at the President for his continuation of these wars and occupation, we wanted this action in front of the White House to avoid threatening already nervous Secret Service agents by not “accidentally” hurling some of the shoes over the fence into the President’s yard. Instead, we folded the large “End the Occupation Now!” banner so just the word “Occupation” was visible as the target for our messages on the shoes. Although the banner was in the middle of the street, the direction toward which our shoes were thrown was also toward the residence and office of the Commander-in-Chief.

The group also decided to remember the lives of Minnesotan soldiers killed in these wars by reading the names, age and hometown of soldiers and National Guard members who have fallen in Afghanistan and Iraq since the wars began in 2001. A Veterans for Peace member, Bill Habedank, brought the symbolic tombstones with those names inscribed which had previously been carried to the Republican National Convention in St. Paul a year and one-half ago. Opposition to war is not a partisan political affair but an overriding moral and practical necessity. We decided to ring a bell after the reading of each name as we together intoned, “We remember.”

The more difficult task was deciding the timing of the civil disobedience action component for the morning. At least eight people had expressed the willingness to risk arrest by staging a “die-in” on the sidewalk immediately in front of the northern side of the White House. Ever since 2001, Secret Service and the Park Police have designated a 20 yard area there as a “no protest zone” where folks who remained stationary in that area were subject to arrest. Should we wait until the end of our vigil to do this or incorporate it as part of the reading the names of the dead? We decided to let a couple of the group organizers decide when it would occur so we could get down to the White House for our planned 10:30 AM start time for the vigil.

Soon after some of us arrived at the north side of the White House fence, we were approached by law enforcement personnel who asked who was “in charge.” Because we had no official spokesperson, I volunteered to talk with the cops. It turned out they were Secret Service officers and I described what we intended to do, including the shoe throwing and the civil disobedience. They called in their commanding officer who wanted clarity on the shoe throwing plans. He was satisfied that we were not intending on throwing anything over the White House fence when I described the how and where of our scenario. We were told that the US Park Police would be involved in the arrest for any civil disobedience taking place on the sidewalk area. I was treated with respect and we shook hands and told them we would keep them informed as we proceeded. Our commitment to nonviolence also included an openness for what we planned to do so the officers would not be surprised.