Anarchy creating a healthier reality

By SHANE EDWARDS

WHEN THE SUN WENT down Dec. 4, after a week of conflict in the streets of Seattle, a candlelight vigil was held in downtown Eugene. About 40 people introduced themselves and shared their thoughts on one of the most powerful political demonstrations in American history. Although nearly everyone at the vigil was a self-proclaimed nonviolent activist, only one person expressed dissatisfaction with economic sabotage against corporate property or with radical anarchists. One by one, all the others voiced their desire for solidarity with everyone who was in Seattle, many thanking the anarchists for their contributions and dedication.

The overriding sentiment was joy for the amazing power amassed and taken by the people. The government's divide and conquer tactics are not working.

The power that people took that week brought several at the vigil to tears; it changed our lives. Ask yourself if that's what you want life to be like or if you merely want to beg your masters to make life a little more tolerable for you. Is a steadier job and less guilt about the rest of the world's condition all you want?

As the protest in Seattle showed us, we can take a lot more than that. The cowards aren't the people who don masks and take real risks. The cowards are the beggars who can't even link arms to block a meeting of people who kill entire societies and rape the Earth. It takes no political sophistication to understand that.

The action in the street showed the same spirit as all the proactive alternatives to helplessness and victimization that anarchists and their allies offer their communities. We work to feed, clothe, teach, heal and protect ourselves, instead of being at the mercy of out-of-touch professionals who cannot fill our needs. They can only inhibit the growth of our self-reliance. They invariably do a shoddy job of filling our other needs because they just don't know or care as much as we do about our own lives. Most people agree that the closer the power is to the people the better.

That's why so many people like local government and local businesses better than globalization. With enough self-respect and creativity, we can take those values all the way to self-determination and intimacy with the nature around us. Bill Clinton cannot solve our problems because Bill Clinton is our problem.

Anarchists and like-minded people around the world are creating a healthier reality without help from rich, powerful experts. When they came to Seattle they joined forces with oppressed and freedom-loving people there to defend themselves and the Earth.

Protecting yourself is much healthier, more empowering and ultimately safer than paying someone else to do it for you. When the last glimmers of the Earth and our souls are hunted by enemies such as McDonald's and Starbucks, the promises from government and their police to protect us are a sick joke and a scam.

The extent to which anarchists from Eugene actually contributed to property destruction in Seattle is not known. It is, in fact, unknowable. Assertions, for example, that 50 anarchists trashed the city and 25 of them were from Eugene are fabricated, arbitrary, dishonest and absurd.

Whatever part people from Eugene played in the fracas was small in a demonstration of more than 60,000 people and a week of around-the-clock street warfare. The police were shooting tear gas at crowds of labor and environmental protesters who refused to disperse and took over key intersections as well as shooting tear gas at masked anarchists. Likewise, news footage clearly showed that many people breaking windows, spray painting and throwing things were unmasked, common people liberating their desires and attacking a system that makes them miserable.

Conversations on the street proved that many different people were willing to act aggressively in response to issues such as environmental destruction, corporate control and annoying police that no one can deny are serious. (The issues are serious, that is, not the police. Seriousness requires thought, and police are paid not to think. They will admit that freely.)

The reality in the crowd was that whenever a brick flew through the air toward a multinational corporation, huge cheers of support drowned out the pacifists' chants to stop.

Though there was no shortage of support that week for direct action, it should go without saying that not very many of those supporters want to talk about it openly in the mass media for fear of government repression.

When the event was reported on, the people behaving aggressively in the street were split up by the media and discounted in different ways. If they were poor and black, then they were called gang members taking advantage of the situation. If they were young, they were called politically unsophisticated. Don't worry, they tell their audience, this very bad turn of events was the fault of very few people. No one who lent their physical presence to the mass in the street in either tolerance or support supposedly even existed.

Ask yourself a few times: If all but a tiny group were compliant with authority, why were the police attacking thousands of people day and night for a week? If Eugene's anarchists joined in the destruction, it was in solidarity with many members of the working and lumpen classes in Seattle. Even middle-aged, middle-class people came out at night and danced around the fires.

By far the most significant contributions to the disruption of the World Trade Organization that anarchists from Eugene can be credited for were cultural and political. Anarchists from Eugene fed many of the protesters, and they documented the events in brilliant video documentaries. They were medics. They distributed quality literature and engaged in discussions about the fundamental issues in defiance of the establishment's portrayal of them as apolitical and brainless.

All of this work has been going on in Eugene for years and has helped radicalize the whole American culture of resistance to a point where utilization of militant tactics came to Seattle from all around the country. Likewise, Eugene's thriving anarchist community is a national leader and inspiration because of its huge number of healthy, proactive alternatives to mainstream society.

Many people in Seattle were defending in their rebellion exactly the kind of creative, cooperative culture we have helped create in Eugene against the global agents of homogenization and exploitation that threaten us all.

To portray a growing and well-rounded international movement of good-hearted, capable people as a tiny, unbalanced group of freaks in one town is the kind of stupid, dirty trick that a power structure as rotten as ours can be expected to use in its defense as it breathes its last breaths.

For more information, including access to videos that respect our perspective on the protests in Seattle, contact Anarchist Action Collective, P.O. Box 11331, Eugene, OR 97440.

Shane Edwards submitted this statement on behalf of the Anarchist Action Collective.