"Are you stoned?" I asked a fellow I recognized from Cato's recent drug conference. I thought it a perfectly reasonable question, since we were at a pro-drug rally, his eyes were suspiciously glassy, and he thought I worked at the Institute for Humane Studies. "What difference does it make how you are dressed if you're demonized?" he demanded, referring to a request from the protest organizers to "dress conservatively." He denied any inebriation and argued, "We've been doing the respectable thing for a while and it isn't getting us anywhere."
I roamed through the crowd of around 150, mostly college students. They had gathered at the edge of Rock Creek Park for a protest and candlelight vigil aimed at the Western Hemisphere Drug Czars Conference, which was going down at a hotel not even a football field away.
A pair of Latin American indigenous people were telling their stories on stage in Spanish. "For us, coca is food," I heard the translator say. For us, I thought, it is a food substitute.
I was heartened to see that college students still smoke. But all they were smoking was cigarettes. I was looking for a communal joint, straining to smell even a bit of bud. No luck. I sauntered over to the refreshment table to see if they had any brownies. Nothing. D.C. is such a button-down town that even a pro-drug rally resembles a Midwestern meeting of the Young Republicans.
The protesters lit their candles, stood along the off-ramp, and waved signs. The most creative called for "Hookahs Not Bazookas." I asked a cop with an enormous dip of chewing tobacco in his lip if he'd confiscated any joints or smelled any marijuana smoke. Nope, he said, standing sternly while keeping an eye on a fellow who was dancing in the crosswalk while dressed in an oversized Barry McCaffrey costume. That's too bad. I bailed.
Date: Fri, November 5, 1999 2:29:38 PM
From: mlynch@reasondc.org
Subj: Giving Peace a Chance
"Paint your message on the wall," a slender, long-haired, bearded man said as he bounded toward me on the Capitol Mall, just west of the Reflecting Pool. I was there to check out the "Wall of Denial," promised in a press release to be a 200-foot replica of the Berlin Wall. A coalition of anti-nuclear groups called "Project Abolition" is using the wall as visual Viagra to pump some blood into their "Who really cares?" issue of world peace through arms control.
The theme is elementary: The Cold War is over, so we should get rid of the arms that, according to these folks, didn't help us win it. They are planning a ceremony to tear down the wall on November 9, to coincide with the 10th anniversary of the real wall's destruction. This wall is plywood, not concrete, however, so I suspect it will not chip or crumble. Perhaps they should burn it.
Although I declined to paint, I did strike up a conversation with James McGuinness, known as "Guinne" to his friends, who, like him, are mostly professional peace activists. "We're trying to tell the idiots over there," he said, pointing to the Capitol building, "to take it down. The idea of not having the [Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty] is ludicrous."
Guinne started his life of protest in the 1970s with Vietnam and has been at it full- time since 1986, when he helped found Seeds of Peace, a mobile group of multipurpose protesters. He has no mailing address, no ID, and no job. He does, however, have an e-mail address. When I asked him how he made a living, he replied, "What's a living?" If things get too tough, he'll take a job. He bartended in upstate New York for a spell and made lattes in Whitefish, Montana, where he kept busy protesting caged elk farming. He travels by bus, thumb, or friends. He spends a lot of time living at or near various protest sites, which come rattling off his tongue at too quick a pace to record.
Guinne, whose weathered face vouches for a life spent largely outdoors, offered much to agree with. He repeatedly referred to members of Congress as idiots and railed against the doubling of the president's salary. He said he doesn't pay taxes, since the money isn't spent the way he would like it to be.
He spoke of "trustafarians," trust-fund hippies who "you never see do anything but who always have money," and "media sluts," who show up to a protest only if the media are expected to cover it. He nailed D.C.'s meeting culture: "It's all they do in this town. Ten hours a day. Everybody always meets and does nothing."
Nothing was precisely what was happening at this event, billed as "most ambitious call to action we have taken in a long time." The peace movement, Guinne acknowledged, "doesn't have the cachet it used to." But he added, "There's still people working the issues."
On this brisk November morning, in front of a gray plywood wall painted with all sorts of banal slogans--"Peace Now," "Free the People," "Solar Power"--Guinne was one of those people. As I left, he approached a jogger stopped at a light. "Put your message on the wall. Be the Hundredth Monkey," he says, referring to an old peace movement legend of how one person's awareness can cause a society-wide change in consciousness. The jogger fled.
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