Silly Thinking

POSTED BY DOUGLAS LAIN

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After 9-11, after the disappointment of the first PPRC rally, I was in a peculiar circumstance. At least, it was peculiar for me. I was being pushed by the world, by the morning paper, by conversations at the water-cooler, by an overwhelming sense of doom. I had to act, but I didn’t know how. There was only one organization in town that was visibly working against the war. My options seemed limited.

I started going to meetings. My life was soon overwhelmed by them. Head first into the process, I was to be facilitated, debated, proposed, and finally flummoxed.

My first PPRC meeting was at PSU. It was a planning meeting for a scheduled Teach In, and I went because this was the only PPRC meeting that fit my schedule. It could have been a PPRC meeting about catering or wallpaper design and I would have turned up. It was held in the PSU Student Lobby and this helped me feel good about it. Being held at the University helped the whole project seemed more legitimate.

There are only a few models for cooperating in large groups. That is, there are only a few settings where most of us actually do work together. On the job, at school, or at church are the places where we are forced to deal with each other, everywhere else we’re left alone—during leisure time most group decisions never get more complicated than deciding where to get a drink or what video to rent.

The first PPRC meeting seemed like school to me. I got the impression that if we weren’t exactly working for credit, we were still accredited. After all school is where society figures you out, it’s where you go to be slotted into your official position in the world. Thus, if something happened at school it automatically had an official position in the larger society, however marginal that position might be.

I took my five year old son Benjamin along with me to this peace meeting; I can’t remember now if my wife asked me to take him or if it had been my idea, but it seemed like a good idea when I got there. He’d be entering kindergarten soon, so it was a good precursor experience for him.

We were late, and the smile on the facilitator’s face was strained as she shook my hand and invited me to sit down in the farthest chair. She clearly didn’t appreciate the potential disruption that my five year old represented.

We sat down next to the meeting stenographer, and I gave my son a Superman comicbook to keep him distracted. This turned out to be a mistake as he kept asking me what Lois Lane was saying, asking me to read, read, read, while I tried to keep up with the conversation bouncing around the table.

“Just look at the pictures,” I told him.

The group was working on a question about Afghans. Specifically, the question was whether the Afghans should be invited back to the second Teach In. The Afghans had been out of line at the first Teach In, and many of the young, white activists didn’t want them back.

“We have established our points of unity and none of the speakers should speak in opposition to these basic principles of the group,” the facilitator argued. “Should they?”

“We’re not talking about inviting Colin Powell to speak, but we have to take the local Afghan community into account,” an Palestinian man who I’ll call B said. He seemed frustrated to debate what he clearly felt was obvious.

The Afghans were against the Taliban. At the first Teach In the Afghans had been unanimous in their hatred of the brutal Taliban regime and very soft in their opposition of the US bombings. While not quite supporting the US invasion, and with grave reservations about the Northern Alliance, the local Afghans couldn’t quite bring themselves to openly and directly oppose anybody who was killing Taliban soldiers and leaders.

“Who do these Afghans represent?” I asked. I was getting the hang of it. “I mean is this an Afghan rights group, or just a couple of guys that we’re talking about?”

B rubbed his face in frustration. “They are Afghans. They don’t represent an official group, but these men wish to speak.”

“Why don’t we invite someone from RAWA [Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan]?” I asked. “They’ve taken a strong stance against the US bombing.”

“Do you know someone from RAWA?” B asked.

“No.”

The meeting continued on, and the question of the Afghans was dropped. Instead people wondered if there ought to be a class on Islam at the Teach In, in order to facilitate deeper understanding and quash hate crimes. Someone else wondered how long the event would last, and whether there would be discussion groups or only speakers.

Perhaps I was doomed from the start, after all I’d never really fit in at school.

An example:

My strongest memories from my time at Steele School Elementary in Colorado Springs, the school I spent six years of my childhood attending, involve a painting of a Sad Clown and the Pledge of Allegiance.

Steele School was built in the seventies, during the open concept fad, so there weren’t any rooms inside the school. There were just various spaces defined by carpeted facades. We had our morning assemblies in the library space at the center of the school. I remember pledging allegiance and listening to Dr. Keely, our polyester jump suit clad principal. She’d introduce the pledge every morning by reminding us that many soldiers, many good men, had lost their lives defending our country. She’d tell us that these men were the reason we were pledging allegiance, and she’d stand there next to the flag and never even glance up at the kitsch clown painting over her head.

I don’t know who put the clown painting up there, but in first grade I assumed it was hers. I thought she’d brought it in to illustrate her point about the dead men. The clown was wearing a bowler helmet and crying, and I stared at him during every assembly because it was better than looking at the principal and chancing eye contact.

After a while it all became connected. Her polyester suits, the depressed clown, school and the flag were all part of the same thing. Steele School was the country, the clown was the sacrifice, and the pledge was our participation in this mystery, this depressing spectacle.

So, my natural response to facilitated meetings, my natural inclination when asked to raise my hand to speak, is to resent the structure and either act disruptively, or just space out. Still, at the time I understood that the set-up was there to ensure democratic participation. The rules were more legitimate than my impulses. I really tried to play along.

But my son couldn’t take it. About 30 minutes in he’d had enough. He slipped out of his chair and started climbing around under the table and scrambled out of my reach. I imagined him untying my fellow activists’ shoes.

“I missed that,” I said to the man next to me, giving up for the moment on retrieving my son. “Are we still talking about the speakers list?”

“I’m taking the minutes,” he said. “I can’t stop to explain anything to you.”

The facilitator was looking down at something under the table. This was embarassing. I decided to give up and take my son outside, but before I could gather him up, before I could collect all of our things, one of the meeting participants spoke out of turn, breaking through the official stack.

“7.5 million people are going to starve to death unless we do something,” a woman who I’ll call C said. She tried to be gracious, mentioned that she’d just read a Chomsky lecture off the internet and he’d gotten her riled up. Chomsky had spoken about the massive famine in Afghanistan, a famine made much worse by the closing of the Pakistan border and by American bombs. Chomsky called the American response to 9-11 a “kind of silent genocide.” This phrase would be thrown back in his face later on when some food aid finally got through to the major cities. Hitchens and other US apologists would use this phrase in an attempt to marginalize Chomsky’s views in the weeks to come. The right wingers would be wrong and complicit in a terrible crime. Even after the famine would be declared averted by the WFP, over a million Afghans would still be at severe risk of death from starvation.

“We have to do something now, otherwise we’ll millions of Afghan refugees will die,” C said.

It was what I wanted to hear. This was why I’d come to the meeting. This was the issue for me. Our retaliation for 9-11 would not only miss the real culprits, but also kill millions. The word genocide echoed in my head. Complicit to genocide.

“Let’s go!” my son said. I tentatively raised my hand to speak and then put it down again. There was no chance that the facilitator would call on me before my son went ballistic.

I took Ben outside to play on the campus grounds. We found a slide, some swings, and some wooden jungle-gym bars on the south side, beyond Lincoln Hall. We spent the rest of our trip to the University at recess.

On the way home I spotted C waiting for the streetcar, and I decided to talk to her. I wanted to tell her that I’d agreed with her, that I’d heard Chomsky’s speech too, that I’d read the WFP’s webpage.

She was glad to hear it, and told me about a protest that she was working on. She said that it wasn’t a PPRC event, that she and a friend had decide to go outside of PPRC for it because they’d couldn’t get it through the events committee, that C's proposal for a protest against the Famine had been tabled at the last meeting.

“We’re doing it anyway,” she said.

“Great. I’ll help. What do you want me to do?”

“Can you hang some posters?”

“Sure.”

Already, at the end of my first meeting, I was breaking rank and disrespecting the decisions of the group. I didn’t know it at the time, but this would define my experiences at PPRC as much as the pledge and the sad clown had defined Steele Elementary.