protest Archives » Lyndsey Medford

photos courtesy of Gary Votour https://www.facebook.com/gvotour/posts/10213769297799199

Today I ugly cried in front of a group of about 40 strangers until some guy came and held my hand for long enough that I could finish what I was trying to say:

As long as our systems are designed and maintained to hurt people, business as usual cannot go on. The time has come for drastic action.

That doesn’t sound like a terribly weep-worthy statement. In the quiet before the Poor People’s Campaign protest today, as everyone risking arrest shared their reasons for joining the campaign, we weren’t supposed to stand up and fall apart. I don’t exactly know why I was crying in that moment, except that months of frustration and anguish and fatigue started to pour out the moment I said these words out loud. Years of pain I have witnessed and (just barely) experienced welled up alongside the simple words and few sentences that made up the story of my journey to that seat, in the Unitarian Universalist church with forty beautiful strangers.

I’ve not long felt that protesting was a worthwhile thing to do. Shouldn’t we do something concrete to effect change besides shout at the general public? Couldn’t we put all that work into caring for someone specific, or meeting with our elected officials, or expressing our opinions as individuals?

I suppose I’ve also not long been convinced that democracy, peace, and basic human rights were actually threatened here. While I’ve understood for several years that oppression and injustice were alive and well in the USA, I didn’t see voter protections being actively rescinded and voting barriers erected; I didn’t see basic welfare programs like housing assistance and food stamps being gutted. I didn’t see education treated increasingly as a privilege, I didn’t see a gun violence crisis casually dismissed, and I didn’t see xenophobia, racial profiling, and racial terror becoming national policy before my eyes.

For the first time I have understood what it means to discover that all the normal channels and lawful means of making change in our communities mean nothing. To find yourself up against a government that’s happy to let us plead, write, phone, post—and yes, cry—while it goes about its death-dealing business as usual.

This afternoon, I watched on the sidewalk with my friend’s children while she was arrested in her clericals and stole. Later a friend posted a photo of the arrest, and the inevitable comment came: why was she arrested if she was peacefully protesting?

The short answer is that civil disobedience is a form of peaceful protest. We can’t go around praising [wealthy white dudes in] Silicon Valley for idolizing “disruption,” then roll our eyes when regular people are actually disruptive. Protest says, this cannot go on.

Civil disobedience is meant to call attention to the injustice of the State. Civil disobedience proclaims,

Life under this government is no longer tolerable—I will do anything rather than let this go on—By any means necessary other than violence, I will refuse to acquiesce to my own disempowerment, disrespect, and abuse.

As long as these policies remain in place, I will force this government to symbolically enact that abuse on my own body, until the law guarantees the safety of my body and all bodies.

The more specific answer is that if you take a photo of a person being arrested to mean that that person is a violent criminal, you have never loved a truly poor person—someone trapped in the ghettoized poverty of urban housing projects, immigrant communities, or rural Appalachia. Someone who lives in fear of the police because our society has imagined a thousand ways to criminalize poverty. The Columbia police were models of professionalism and respect—but as a broader group, police officers can usually only enforce the laws handed down to them, through the cultural lenses they’ve been given. As long as our society and our laws display contempt for the poor, racial hatred, the belief that poor people deserve additional obstacles while the wealthy continue to rig games in their own favor, and the belief that violence solves problems? Our police will display those same biases.

The fact is, peaceful and innocent people are arrested every day, and we who stand to benefit from business as usual declare ourselves judge and jury—ruling in favor of the uniform every time, because the uniform represents power, represents more of the same, represents the comfort of benefiting from the system.

And I guess that’s why I was crying. NOT, to be clear, out of pity or guilt. I was crying for myself, for the pain that pierces when you open yourself up to a world that is hurting, a world in which some people can no longer bear to live, a world where we continue to act out horrible, broken—and frankly, boring—old stories of fear, violence, and greed. I was crying for myself because the Bible that guides my every day tells me our lives cannot be untangled from each other’s any more than a hand can choose to live without an eye. When I pray to see with Holy Spirit’s eyes I find that there is no suffering anywhere in the world that does not touch my life; there is no unjust system that truly benefits anyone.

There is no place to really escape from the suffering of others and the voice of truth deep in our own hearts. There is no material advantage worth the price of injustice—the loss of community, trust, learning, joy, simplicity, neighborliness. There is no privilege that, once given up, isn’t exchanged for something of a stranger, more difficult, and vastly deeper beauty.

That is why I’m honored to belong to a movement committed to the leadership of poor, black and brown, queer, disabled, and other non-privileged people. The heroes of today’s story of protest are the trans, black, and poor people who put their bodies on the same line as the white clergy, even though the marginalized have real reasons to fear arrest. And as long as they are willing to stand in the street toe-to-toe with the State, I have no choice but to be there, witnessing and standing with their declaration:

I am a human, and I will stand in the way of the machine of oppression until I am crushed if that is what it takes to retain my humanity—if that is what it takes to resist business as usual. I stand for life, beauty, prayer, song, joy, I stand in defiance of the uniform-as-tool-of-oppression, I stand for the future of God’s peace and prosperity for all, the future that is breaking in here and now in this street and in our world, the shalom I still believe will always find a way.

I am reluctant to speak into the din of these days.

An observation: we have reached a point where the two major sides in our debates are both driven by fear. Our president was elected for his projections of strength: for promising to protect us from bad hombre immigrants, from the globalized market, from terrorists, from the pace of social change. And now his policies have stricken terror into the hearts of his opponents—worried for themselves, for minority friends, worried about international relations or about creeping authoritarianism.

Though the cacophony appears to address many issues, in the end we are mostly responding to threats. We all perceive our particular threats to be very real, while dismissing others’ fears and blazing with disbelieving outrage when they dismiss ours. In our anger we cannot see how lonely this has made us. We feel the loneliness, but not consciously; the ache only fuels our outrage.

The Ph.D. in political science ~~whom I keep on retainer~~ who is my dear friend tells me that the biggest protests work, even when they’re not supposed to, even when no one expects it. So I will go to the protests. But I won’t be outraged; it’s not in my nature. With Paul I will proclaim that we all have gifts differing and I will thank God for those who do outrage well and righteously. I’ll be the one giving out water bottles, or crying. You’re probably not supposed to cry at a protest, but I’m mostly sure that’s what I’ll do.

What is in my nature is to passionately declare the extreme urgency of everyone sitting down and thinking some more. This is an unglamorous and unpopular vocation. Thinking sells best when paired with a vice—traditionally pipe tobacco or whiskey. Outrage is brighter, the work of a moment, and pairs well with that comfort food, superiority.

Still, even the most active of activists is already acknowledging that our task won’t be over for a long time, and we’re going to need something that burns a bit slower. I hasten to add that, while we must equip ourselves for a long-haul future, we have a yet lengthier past with which we must also deal. This crisis did not develop overnight, as if caused by some particular genius of Trump’s for villainy. This is the overflow of ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred years. If we accomplish political goals without any mention of these things, they will only fester. The colonization of rural places, for instance: extracting resources from a place while systematizing contempt for its people. The abandonment of national politics to lobbyists and of local politics to the dogs. The abandonment of our minds to our screens. The utter lack of restraint on our consumerist desires, so that each side accuses the other of entitlement with great accuracy and total hypocrisy. And an extreme failure, on all sides, to know the oppressed, to sit with them in their pain, to share bread with them.

These things, of course, cost more than five minutes and 1000 words. These things rarely go viral.

But perhaps, I concede, the past is a discussion for another time. Perhaps what is before us, just today, is to excavate and banish our fear. If you are a Christian, you have no excuse for it; if you are not, let me assure you fear remains a hindrance to you. It is not naive to resist fear. You may be aware of a danger without giving that thing power over you. To the contrary, once fear is acknowledged and set aside, you are more agile, more perceptive, less prone to mistakes. Once fear is set aside, it clears the way for that most searing weapon: love.

I read an article several days ago about what to do, the basic actions that would be essential to resisting the extremism we’re witnessing. I found it wise and compelling in its simplicity—things like interacting with your representatives; seeking out reliable news sources; taking care of yourself (in the long term, going to bed on time and eating your vegetables); learning about privilege and oppression; getting to know the people in your community who stand to lose the most. And as the list went on, I realized that these were all things a truly excellent citizen would be doing regardless of who was in power. It was comforting and intimidating, I suppose, to realize that all anyone needs to do to stand up against a bullying President is become a truly excellent citizen.

What was, for me, conspicuously absent from the list was becoming aware of any new development within ten minutes of its occurrence; scrolling through Twitter with increasing indignation and despair; firing one-liners or articles at people on Facebook who would then be compelled to recognize the error of their ways. As the days have gone by, I’ve felt more and more antipathy towards the hot takes and the outrage machines and even the copied-and-pasted Bible verses. So much blame for our situation goes, in my mind, to our penchant for preferring the viral to the true; to our self-righteous armchair activism; to our willing deliverance of our attention to the antics of national figures, at the expense of understanding the goings-on in our own cities and states.

Do you want to drive out fear? It doesn’t happen when you get a good grasp of the situation from twitter or even from the news. It happens with love. Have the courage to love yourself without the safety blanket of self-righteousness. Have the courage to love someone else without assuming you already know who they are. Walk around your neighborhood and talk to the people you meet. Plan an uncomfortable dinner party: invite someone different from you. (Have lots of comfort food.) Call your representatives on behalf of someone else even though it inconveniences or terrifies you. Read about an issue you don’t want to face. Take up that habit you know you’re supposed to do—riding your bike places, donating to charity, praying for your enemies.

Pray. Pray more than you tweet. Pray before your political calls. Pray for the country. Pray for refugees. Pray before you eat. Pray before you buy. Pray with other people.

Read books. Gather with friends. Don’t think about doing good deeds; do them. Be aggressively present to your own life, your place and time.

Be still. The Lord will fight for you. The noise will take care of itself.