We ended with a presentation at a refurbished home site. Presenter after presenter told us what they were doing to make the neighborhood more comfortable. It’s been a decade, and they finally have financing for a housing market. Everything involves massive government subsidies, which have worked so well…where, exactly?
I wish these folks success, and I hope they have the answers. I just don’t think they do.
Subj: The Protests
Date: 8/15/00
From: mwlynch@reason.com
Lowell Fletcher and his girlfriend set out for Los Angeles from Kansas 12 days ago, their thumbs extended on the side of the road. It took them a while to get picked up, but the hitching got good soon enough, and a series of trucks and cars got them to L.A. in time for the protests at the Democratic National Convention.
Despite living in the most prosperous era in the most prosperous country the world has ever known, Fletcher, 19, said he’s neither happy nor prospering. "I absolutely don’t feel free," he told me in L.A.’s Pershing Square, the staging area for the protesters. "I have to watch my back for the cops. I have to work to pay my rent. I only travel twice a year. I have people over me."
There’s a reason Lowell has to watch his back. He’s running with the now notorious Black Block, a loose confederation of young anarchists. He was with them in Seattle and D.C. "Seattle was empowering," he told me, in language borrowed from Lawrence, Kansas, the college town he calls home. "But it hurt, too." D.C. was just a disappointment, he added, because his tactics failed.
By now, all the reporters know to follow the Black Block: That’s where the action is. If car windows get smashed, it’ll be them. If the police line is charged, chances are it’ll be by people dressed in black, their faces covered with signature black bandannas. Those are the tactics of which Lowell spoke. The cops know about the Black Block too. Later, when the march set out for the Staples Center, the LAPD flanked the Black Block; the cops went so far as to clear local onlookers from the sidewalks as the marchers passed.
Lowell’s a well-spoken, intelligent guy. He became interested in radical politics through the punk scene, and he’s envious that I, 11 years his senior, used to regularly catch such bands as Suicidal Tendencies, the Circle Jerks, Seven Seconds, and Social Distortion years ago. He wants to be a teacher but says he can’t afford college out of pocket and is unwilling to take out loans for that purpose. He feels hemmed in, oppressed. He takes his intellectual inspiration from Noam Chomsky and Emma Goldman. He recently saw former Dead Kennedy frontman and failed Green Party presidential candidate Jello Biafra read poetry.
"I’m an anti-capitalist," he told me, as the So-Cal sun baked us both. "I support autonomous communities, power at the local level, not the state." He said he wants to get his message out to the people in the streets and especially to the suits in the offices. But when I asked him what his message was, he replied, "I couldn’t give that to you. So much needs to change."
I pushed him on the issue of "freedom," asking him what system other than capitalism provides more individuals with more freedom to find meaning, pursue their happiness, and live life on their own terms. He said he hasn’t studied the other prime alternatives–Castro’s Cuba, Tito’s Yugoslavia, Mao’s China, Soviet Russia, post-colonial Africa–and he got upset because he thought I was implying that he’s a socialist. Yet he’s sure that other things could work. At rock bottom, what he seems to want is not simply a guaranteed income but guaranteed success.
"There’s a lot of things I want to do, but since I have to work for money they’re just not options," he told me, as we walked toward a returning march dedicated to saving trees. "I’d like to be a musician, but I can’t make enough money. I want to be a writer, but I can’t make enough money. So I have to serve coffee to rich people."
I pointed out that people do earn livings both as musicians and as writers. But that’s no good. "Even if you’re a major musician, you have to do what someone else wants," he complained.
Lowell is just one data point–and I make no claim that he represents the General Will of the protesters. But having been of like mind in high school and part of college, and having spent two days among the protesters recently in D.C., a day with them in Philadelphia, and another with them in Los Angeles, I don’t think he’s an exception either.
Many protesters are kids raging not against the machine per se. Rather, they’re upset that growing up entails a series of bitter disappointments. First, they find out that there’s no Santa Claus. Then they figure out that one has to work to eat and to make rent, that having more free time generally means having less money, and that fame and success aren’t a birthright, not even in America. You’ve got to earn everything, and that, they conclude, just sucks.
In the evening, I marched with the protesters to the Staples Center. On the way, I witnessed the cops mindlessly moving onlookers off the sidewalk and onto the street, even though they were simply shopping or working and had no active interest in the march. I witnessed protesters mindlessly taunting cops, who are working 12-hour shifts, plus overtime if they want it, every day in the unbearably hot sun. "Racist, sexist, anti-gay, LAPD go away!" chanted a woman at the front of the march as we passed an intersection secured by the cops. Just for effect, she also threw in "Fascists!"
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