Last Monday, as I joined people around the Northampton police station, I was thinking about protests 20 years ago.
That morning in November 1999 began for me with prayers in Hebrew and blowing shofars to sound a call to arms in the middle of the street. After a short time, I lost track of my Jewish affinity group and was on my own.
As we started marching from Seattle Center toward the goal, an intersection near an off-ramp of Interstate 5, the Black Bloc anarchists in the crowd put on masks and started pushing dumpsters into the middle of the street and turning them on their sides, and a window was broken. At that moment I decided I was there as a spectator and not a protester — I just was not down with damaging property as a protest tactic.
The strategic goal then was big: stop corporate globalization by shutting down the World Trade Organization negotiations. But the Direct Action Network (DAN) plan was simple. They planned to array large crowds all around a perimeter surrounding the WTO meeting, in wedge-shaped zones pointed at the center. Then march everyone toward the middle.
The plan worked. Though protestors were tear-gassed, they put on their water-soaked bandanas and stood their ground. The meeting was shut down, the trade talks failed, and the march of global capitalism hiccupped. None of it mattered after 9/11, but for a time it felt like the world might change.
Today, the goals are even bigger — to end 400-plus years of institutionalized, deadly racism. We knew lives were at stake in 1999, because globalizing corporate capitalism would destroy ecosystems and labor rights. But in the protests today, 20 years later, we can pinpoint whose lives are at stake, knowing with deadly certitude that more black people will be murdered by racist police and vigilantes unless things change.
But what is the plan today? As I watched the protest last Monday, I was thinking that screaming protest slogans won’t achieve any goal, and neither will “F**k 12” graffiti on police stations. I saw myself again as a spectator.
On the third or fourth loop the crowd made through the center of downtown, I stopped a fellow redirecting traffic at the back of the march. I was searching for someone with answers. I asked, “Is anyone in charge?” “The people are in charge,” he said. “Does anyone have a plan for how the march will end?” My experience, I told him, was that once night fell, the remnants of a crowd like this could easily direct their energy toward destroying things.
He responded that he thought property damage was OK, because people are being damaged by the system, and looting was too, because it’s just a way to redistribute wealth. Hell, I thought, everyone is one step ahead with that plan, since we already had masks on.
His answers sent my imagination back again, to the second day of WTO protests. I had spent the afternoon wandering downtown, recording people’s chants. At day’s end, I was in a big crowd in Westlake Center plaza. Police were getting ready to arrest everyone. The protesters had no plan for what to do next.
I started running messages back and forth between a police captain and some of the spokes (spokespeople for affinity groups). The cops assented to everyone marching east and reassembling in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, in a big open area. But as we climbed up the road past block after block, people were saying they wouldn’t go to an out-of-the-way place where they couldn’t be seen. Instead, as we crested the hill, everyone turned down the main road and marched to the biggest intersection, not far from the police station.
At first it seemed OK — people were standing in a circle, sharing and singing — but the Black Bloc had a better idea: they were going to take the intersection and hold it. There was no strategic goal related to the WTO — they just wanted to force the cops into a confrontation. I grabbed a megaphone and started shouting, “Good night! Stay safe, get rest! See you tomorrow!”
When it seemed like everyone who was willing to had left, I gave back the megaphone and headed down the hill. A minute later the gas flew. This time I got a good whiff as I was walking past DAN headquarters. Soon after, the cops went out of control, arresting people at the laundromat, pepper-spraying through the windows of cars driving by, basically rioting instead of keeping order. Exactly what the Black Bloc was hoping for.
I wasn’t inside that riot, and still it was traumatic — and there I was in front of the Northampton courthouse last Monday, feeling all of that trauma in a way I hadn’t in years.
In short order, everything came to a head at the entrance to the lower level of the police station parking lot. Like the intersection in 1999, there was no strategic meaning to that entrance. No lives were being saved; no meetings were shut down. But the mostly young protesters crowded in anyway, just so they could confront the cops.
Even though people mostly kept their masks on, they were packed together like sardines in a can. Perfect conditions for a super-spreader event was what went through my mind.
They had one demand: “Take a knee! We Won’t Leave! Take a knee! We Won’t Leave!” A gesture would be enough to placate the crowd, but the police were not acquiescing. Finally, Police Chief Jody Kasper came out and led a few of the cops in kneeling alongside some of the protesters, while everyone cheered.
I wondered from my socially distanced perch on the other side of the parking lot, why didn’t this happen about an hour earlier or even at the very beginning, before pandemic precautions were thrown to the wind along with however much virus?
As the moment of resolution passed, people started filtering out, up the ramp and into the street. I asked a cop whose nametag was “True” how he was feeling. He said he never doubted that things would end peacefully. “I’m proud of Northampton,” he said, “and I give the protestors a lot of credit” for finding a peaceful way to conclude their protest. More credit than I had been giving them, I thought to myself.
Maybe there isn’t a strategy for a good reason. Perhaps screaming is exactly the right thing. As Genesis says about Abel after Cain murders him, George Floyd’s blood is “screaming from the ground.” We need to give voice to those screams.
Perhaps confrontation, if it leads to police and protestors becoming allies, is what we need. Because we may not know the strategy for how to get where we want to go, but we sure know we have to get there together.
Rabbi David Seidenberg, creator of neohasid.org and author of Kabbalah and Ecology, teaches at and attends all three local synagogues.