Up all the Time

Power is in the people. They're sharing it around, so generously, and it's hurting out there, but not as much. I've been obsessed and triggered with the news, with the simultaneous uprising of the loving people and the crumbling of the corrupt and hating power structure. They are moving apart in the most possible opposite directions.

He says dominate, and the people sit down and ignore him and get to work. Down at the protest tonight, some truth came out. They have been marching all day, for days, losing track of time. I watch as much as I can. They walk for miles and miles, repeating themselves into openness. If you say it enough, you start to understand a little bit. "Say his name: George Floyd!" Say her name: Breonna Taylor! Say their names: Too many!

Enough is right. These kids can't get enough. I remember it so well, fifty years ago now, when it was me in the streets, me sitting at the table with actual Black Panther Party members, me at a party in Westport with the Chicago Eight. And I was a little white college girl, just starting to learn, and when they told me how to help, to organize, to be powerful, I knew I could not. It was all I could do to be there at all. I was only there because my roommate's father was their lawyer, and worked with their other lawyer, Charles Garry. Those were the most powerful people in the world right then, in the world of trying to make justice in the stacked system that was falling on them, and on all of us, and in the world of social revolution.

I wasn't up to the challenge, but I tried my best to keep up. She and I decided to go to New Haven, all the way from our college in DC, because that was where it was going to happen. The student  strike was about to be called, and we decided to go see it for ourselves. it was dark, and foreboding and grim. By that time, we'd been teargassed on our campus for yelling at Melvin Laird as he drove by daily on his way to engage in killing the young men of our generation. We yelled loud from what we thought was safety. It hurt to be gassed, and I remember walking around in the back of the crowd one of the times, telling people to get out if they didn't want to be sprayed. I didn't want any innocent people to get caught up in our serious business. I didn't know enough to be a medic or anything truly helpful. I only knew what it felt like to be caught up in something dangerous when you were innocent. We were shocked that the police could come on our campus and gas us.

We went to lots of demonstrations, from the first Moratorium, when all we did was stand still, crushed in a huge crowd blocking the street. We didn't hear Pete Seeger or Joan Baez but we all sang together. We noticed how it was all ages, all nationalities, all of us in the street. We all wanted the war to end, we wanted peace, we wanted justice, and we wanted with all our hearts to be part of making the world better. Once I took my little sister, who must have been fourteen if I was twenty, to a big march. We were just walking around when a phlanx of cops on horses came out from behind the Washington Monument, swinging clubs, and we ran like hell. We walked all the way home, miles and miles. We wer scared that time, but a lot of the transgression was fun. The Yippies were crazy, and we ended that goddamn war, after a few years of relentless protesting. We gae up our lives for it, but until Kent State we didn't really think they would kill us. That was then.

The chronology is a little confused in my mind, because right then, as if the world crumbling wasn't bad enough, my dad killed himself. My emotions weren't regulated at that age, so I can't separate the various traumas, which of course were already in place from the things that happened at home before his suicide, and from being away at college all alone, and from all the ways a 20 year old girl wakes up. The political part helped, I think, though it came with the hippie movement, the sexual revolution, and women's liberation all of it at once. The late sixties and early seventies were, on the scale of traumatic times, over the top. Maybe a lot like it is now.

Kent State was May 4, my 20th was the next day, and Dad's death was May 17th, 1970. I was on strike, visiting friends at Purdue, where I had gone the year before. I transferred to AU in DC in the fall of 69, and immediately had my political awakening and huge life change internally, just beginning the decade or so of reeling and careening that landed me here in Eugene in March of 1976. There was a lifetime packed into those years. I remember them vividly. I was traumatized the whole time, but the hippie life saved me. I went to the woods in Colorado as Nixon fell, and with the help of kind people and other more thoughtless ones, learned a lot of what I would need when I finally landed here.

I left DC politics behind, not living up to the expectations of David Hilliard, though I don't suppose he really thought more than a few seconds about what I might do for the movement. But I did pursue a life of working for peace and justice, and equality, and fearless emotional exploration. Trauma will do that to you.

My favorite reading has always been narrative nonfiction. I will read the rape stories, the confessions, I will watch all the videos. I want to see the true emotions. I want to know the motivations, the thought processes, the decisions that got people to their moments of truth, of strength, or of despair. I don't want it as fiction, I want the real thing. That is the way I am fearless. But I'm no good in person with that stuff.

I went downtown to the bank and Kiva today, one of only about three times I have been out in the last three months. I nearly cried several times. Masked up, I know I looked hungrily at people. I wanted to walk through Kesey and see what was to be seen, if anything, but I stayed away. I saw it last night on the livestream. I watched the young people walk all over town and end up there. The movement wanted to go to the jail to cheer up those who had been arrested, but they decided to celebrate instead. They danced and drummed. No doubt they got high. I switched over to the livestream from DC, watched the park get cleared for the Bible photo op, watched Colbert and Fallon as they respectfully drew out W. Kamau Bell, Leslie Jones, Keisha Lance Bottoms, Keegan Michael Key, watched how these white guys asked for the real. Seth let Amber speak first. She told her stories. Her way speaks to me, her unflinching honesty, her ability to find laughter and humbleness in it.

I counseled someone in emails who was having a racist reaction but didn't know it. I was too easy on her, but she still didn't accept what I told her, to just listen, to put her fears where they belonged and let someone else take the emotional stage. She didn't get it. She hadn't been watching, reading, or listening. That doesn't make me great, it just makes me obsessed, but I have to lose my own racism, that I know, that is the first and best thing I can do. I'm working as hard as I can at it.

Even as obsessed as I am, what I want more than what the movement is asking for, is for it to take down this regime. Those aims are connected, but I admit I was missing the focus. I'm getting it a little better, the urgency of this wound, the absolute limit people have reached. I certainly can only feel the edges of it. As someone feeling targeted and disposable by the regime, as far as coronavirus goes, I got it a little at first, but there's a lot more for me to feel yet. I honor those who are willing to speak.

Tonight, sitting in front of the jail, the white kids had to listen. The black kids yelled and cried and spoke softly and asked and demanded and let out their disgust with us. We deserved it. If I had been there I would have been hanging my head. If anyone started to argue, they were shouted down. The white kids sat or took a knee, the black people stood. It was honorable. It was a much better education than those kids would have gotten in the last months of senior year. It was real.

I'm so glad people shared it with people like me, stuck at home, chicken and trying to stay alive and not get sick. I was lucky to see and hear it. I honor those who cared to share it. I have hope for us, white people. If we work really hard, we might be able to help someone. We might be able to deserve to know these people who are rising. They leave us far behind.