So, When Did You “Wake Up”? : AZ IMC

“So, at what point do you guys feel that you woke up to all this shit?”

This question, asked by my good friend Ryan to myself and two other close compadres, got me to thinking about the whirling events of last Wednesday, the thirteenth. I began to ponder, as I often do, the state of the world and of America. I began to wonder if anything we do, whether it be voting Bush out of office, or protesting the fallacies of our next President, whoever he may be, can really change the sliding of our society. I thought about the many political activities that I had recently participated in, and of the many more activities that I had not. I worried that maybe it just doesn’t matter.

The morning of the thirteenth my activist friend Ed and I woke up late, as activists tend to do I hear, and scrambled to get ready and make it to the first event of the day. This happened to be, for us, the Unemployment Line. This line, put on by Code Pink, was in protest to the many jobs lost during the Bush years. We were given our pink slips, which had on the top in bold letters THE NEXT SLIP MIGHT BE YOURS!, and walked over to our place in line on the north east corner of University and Mill. The line slowly built in numbers, all single file, and all holding the oversized pink slips toward the passing cars. An older gentleman constantly waved a thumbs-up to all the cars, attempting to gain their attention I assume, and various others stood in silent protest of the weakening economy.

Reporters from ABC, Telemundo, and other stations were eagerly gaining another scoop, though none of them really seemed interested in participating themselves (to remain objective, I’m sure). One of the most interesting statistics on the slip was that, “long-term unemployment among college-educated workers grew 299.4 percent between 2000 and 2003,” which became even more interesting to me later in the night when George W. Bush’s response to the loss of jobs was that we need more education.

At its peak the line stretched to Forest Ave, and had roughly two hundred participants. We all remained until Code Pink called the line to a close, roughly around 10:45, but people were urged to stay around until other scoop-hungry reporters arrived to deliver a live broadcast. Unfortunately Ed’s and my schedule did not allow for this, and we were off to the next sight of protesting.

This was the CNN booth, held on Hayden Lawn at the ASU campus. Unfortunately CNN was running behind, or we were actually running ahead, but nothing was really going on here except some squabbling between Kerry and Bush supporters. Stacy, a contemporary cute ASU Republican, was shouting that she felt safer now than before the US attacked Iraq. Ed tapped her on the shoulder and responded with a Rumsfeld memo paraphrase, that we are creating more terrorists than we can defeat (the actual quote he was speaking on is, “It is not possible to change DoD [Department of Defense] fast enough to successfully fight the global war on terror…Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?). She rebutted that Iraqi women are now free, but by then there was a small mob of anti-Bush students, all with their two cents to add. We left her frustrated and slightly quivering at the mouth. My only comment was that I felt sorry for her; she had the passion, but without the knowledge (even on accurate information supporting her stance).

So, off to the next activity, which was a spokes council meeting for the October 13th Alliance. Here we learned about the final touches put on the march that afternoon, and I was given a press badge for the Arizona Independence Media.

Once again the two of us had to duck out a little early in order to drive to the Celebrity Theater in time for Michael Moore, who was brought to us by the good people at Changing Hands Bookstore. Moore was passionately anti-Bush, as usual, but this was a man with the information. Some of the more startling information given by him was about the media ~ the media, which he knows is necessary in this country to keep the government and others in check, though he felt (as many people do) that they haven’t really been keeping their end of the bargain. Matt Lauer recently had him on the Today Show, and sliced into Moore with the conviction of a shoot-at-the-hips cowboy. Michael’s response was if Lauer uses one-tenth the passion on this administration that he used on him, then the American public would really know half of what’s going on around the world. And Michael Moore wondered why. Could it be that General Electric, the parent company of NBC, which Matt Lauer reports for, was recently given 600 million dollars to “rebuild” Iraq?

But Michael Moore doesn’t feel that all journalists are giving in to their conglomerate owned affiliations. He pointed out one journalist who writes for the Washington Post, Dana Milbank, who wrote a story entitled “Plane Carried 13 Bin Ladens” on July 22nd, 2004. The story was Milbank trying to find out which plane it was that took the Bin Laden family out of America the morning of September 19th, 2001. What Milbank learned was that the plane was the White House Press Core plane. This could very well be just a simple coincidence, though Moore obviously didn’t think so.

At one point Michael Moore brought onto the stage a vet from the current war in Iraq, Mike Hoffman, who spoke to us about his personal experiences with this conflict. He told us that his commanding officer, even before going out to Iraq, told the platoon that they were not going to Iraq to be heroes, or to free the Iraqi people, but they were going for oil. They were going anyway, regardless of the reasoning, because they had all signed a contract with America saying they would do what the government told them to do, and go where the government told them to go. And they were going anyway because the C.O. wanted to make sure that everyone else out there had a shot of coming back alive. So Mike went, and he served his country doing what they told him to do, and now he is back and doing whatever he can to bring the rest of his comrades home.

A final note about Michael Moore’s Slacker Uprising Tour: he recently published a new book entitled Will They Ever Trust Us Again?, which he claims to be his most powerful work, though he only has a quick introduction at the beginning. The rest of the book is a collection of letters from soldiers and their families. He read one of the letters from a soldier who hails from Chandler, Arizona, and his plug for the book was the most interesting I’ve ever heard, saying, "check it out (from the library), Xerox it, or even steal the book; I don't care about America's copyright laws."

After sneaking out early once again (we had a damn schedule to keep!), Ed dropped me off at the Co Op Library to attend the Ralph Nader Press Conference. I arrived early to speak with Sharnell, the Nader representative in Arizona, about the candidate’s plans. He was coming to the conference directly from the airport, where he spoke in Las Vegas earlier in the day, and pretty much directly after the conference he would be flying out to New Mexico. As a mere write-in candidate in Arizona, he is the only candidate this year to hit every one of the fifty states during his campaign.

During the conference Ralph Nader brought up a few key issues, mainly dealing with the debates, saying, “in a recent poll 57% of the American people wanted me on the Presidential debate…both George W. Bush and John Kerry are for intensifying the war in Iraq; the Nader/Camejo ticket has a reasonable 6 month withdraw strategy from Iraq. We have a peace strategy, the other two major candidates have a war strategy; a quagmire strategy.” He went on to talk about the skyrocketing home heating and gasoline prices; corporate crime; and the poisoning of the environment by large corporations. He spoke on how George W. Bush does not care about these issues, and that John Kerry will not debate Bush on these issues. He wondered where the debate is. He said he wants to debate these candidates on these issues, but that this cannot happen because of the “rigged system” that is the Presidential debates.

Nader then opened the conference to questions, and with my handy-dandy brand new press credentials I was able to ask him the last of many inquiries. My question to Nader was “how do you feel that you have and will be more effective in this election than in 2000?” His response was as follows: “First of all you are going to see John Kerry in a few minutes start talking populous language. It’s recorded in the New York Times that he’s going to criticize the drug industry, the oil industry, the commercial HMO, the health industry; and if he does that I think it’s in part due to his strategist saying that he better start talking about consumers and workers if he’s going to take votes away from the Nader/Camejo ticket. So, we’ll see how it goes. We’ll also see how that corporation in the white house disguised as a human being, George W. Bush, manages to respond.”

As Nader was leaving he added, “hats off to the Independent Media, by the way.”
So I finally was able to stay for the full event of at least something. This was due, in part, to Nader keeping his conference short and sweet, and also due to a wonderful woman and her pre-teen protestor of a son giving me a ride to the meeting grounds of the march. And we made it minutes before the march began. I joined up with Ed, now with a small group of our politically active friends, and we walked with the masses from Daley Park, down 14th Street and Mill Avenue (respectively), into the heart of the ASU campus.

All the time there were various chants and songs shouted by the multitude of protestor. There were signs saying Food Not Bombs, Say No To The War Economy, Bush Sucks, No Love For Bush, and the sort; giant Bush and Kerry puppets; naked groups, dancing as they went; and even the local Anarchist tribe came out with their cries for revolution.

And of course there were cops. Big cops. Little cops. Conservative cops. Liberal cops with friends in the march (“Jeff, hey Jeff!”, but he could not respond for obvious reasons). Cops on bikes. Cops on motorcycles. Yes, even cops on horseback (“get those animals off those horses!”). Some were agitated with their protest duties, and took it out verbally on us whenever anyone would set a foot on the street, though it didn’t make sense to me that they could ride their motorcycles northbound on a southbound only Mill (the other side was blocked off, with the secret service hiding behind the chain link fence), and we couldn’t even walk in the sidewalk gutter. But hey, such is the dichotomy of our American system, right? Some cops made the best of it all, occasionally bobbing their heads to the more rhythmatic chants that came from the crowd. But the best part of it all was that they weren’t aggressive toward us, and allowed us to march with relative ease. I was told by Ed, who joined the protestors out in NYC for the Republican National Debate, that the cops out there were much more violent, sometimes tackling and arresting people for something as simple as calling them “fucking fascists.”

The march was intended to continue on through ASU to end up at the southeast corner of the campus, but once the group saw the CNN booth at Hayden Lawn it was all over. They crowded around the Bush supporters; even overwhelming those with megaphones who were shouting “flush the Johns”. And there we all stayed to give a constant barrage of chants to the CNN correspondents as they were attempting to broadcast live. Later I learned that the microphones picked some of the chants up: chants like, “Fuck Bush,” and “Wolf Blitzer tell the truth,” which cracked me up.

After the momentum of at least our group began to die down, right around the time that the debate was starting, we left the field for a quick bite to eat, only to turn around and join thousands of supporters at the post-debate Kerry rally. Here we listened to the musical stylee of the Foo Fighters, and we were able to see Kerry fresh from the debate. He spoke for roughly twenty minutes, and urged us to vote and help him win the upcoming election. Anyone who is somewhat knowledgeable about Presidential politics in Arizona will know that Kerry’s request would be quite a feat in this constantly conservative desert.

So, who knows if any of this will make any difference. I certainly don’t. But I shall definitely look for the signs of progress. Maybe Arizona will turn blue for the first time in more elections than I can look back into. Maybe Kerry will replace Bush, and he will stand true to his word of cleaning up the mess in Iraq as quickly and efficiently as possible, without leaving the country in a chaotic ruins. Maybe Nader will receive his 3%, and will force the Republicans and Democrats to take a third party seriously in the future elections. Maybe he will startle everyone and actually win this election, though he is only a write-in candidate in Arizona. Then again maybe Bush will be reelected, and the war in Iraq will continue for years, and the rich will get richer, and the poor will get poorer. All I know, all I’ve learned from the explosion that was October 13th, is that these questions and worries are exactly what people in power want us to mull over. If we concern ourselves enough with them we become paralyzed, and then it is corporate business as usual. So I say vote for who you feel would be the best President for the next four years, and research anything you feel is suspect, and let your opinion be heard one way or another. Because if we won’t, who will?