Steven Levenson: The First Time I Attended a Political Protest
|
Version 0 of 1. Growing up, I always had the feeling that history had somehow already ended before I’d been born. My parents’ childhoods had been haunted by nightmares of mushroom clouds and nuclear winter, their lives indelibly shaped by the social and political upheavals of the ’60s and ’70s. My mother was 13 in 1968, when the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. sparked riots across the country; her father’s business — Brown’s Corner, a men’s clothing store operating in Washington since 1892 — was burned to the ground. By contrast, the world in which I grew up seemed safe, stable and unchanging. War, revolution, financial collapse — these were things you learned about in school, fossils from a distant past. This assumption was confirmed for me when I was 6 and woke up to what I imagined to be the sound of machine gun fire outside my bedroom window. It was Dec. 31, 1990. The words “Saddam Hussein” and “Kuwait” were ubiquitous in the conversations of the adults around me, and I simply assumed — as I bolted out of bed to wake my parents — that the war, which everyone knew to be imminent, was finally here. The Iraqi Army had invaded Bethesda, Md. My mother put me back to bed, assuring me that all I’d heard were our neighbors setting off the illegal fireworks they had no doubt smuggled across state lines from Virginia. War, if and when it did come, would take place somewhere else, somewhere far away. Our lives would be unaffected, as would the lives of everyone else we knew. History didn’t happen here. It wasn’t until I was 16, a bored high school junior on a Friday night in December 2000, that this pleasant illusion finally died. Almost 10 years to the date after Saddam Hussein’s forces did not attack my house, I found myself, for the first time in my life, at a political protest. As a kid growing up just outside of D.C., I always loved politics. I loved the palace intrigue, the feisty pugilism of the Sunday morning talk shows, the thrill of the horse race. For me, it was just another form of entertainment — sports for smart people. The major political event of my childhood, after all, was the impeachment of Bill Clinton for lying about oral sex, and I followed every sordid twist of the hearings on C-Span as if I were watching a daytime soap. In the winter of 2000, the dramatic aftermath of the Bush-Gore presidential election felt like the perfect spinoff, less scintillating than the Starr hearings certainly, but full of heart-stopping reversals nonetheless. That Friday afternoon in December, in a major victory for Vice President Gore, the Florida Supreme Court had ordered a manual recount of the state’s so-called undervoted ballots, prompting George W. Bush’s legal team to seek an immediate emergency stay from the Supreme Court. I was at a friend’s house that night, watching on TV as crowds of protesters began to gather outside the court to urge the justices to reject Bush’s petition and allow the recount to proceed. I don’t remember which of us first suggested the idea, but before I knew it, my four friends and I were loading into a battered Toyota Camry for the 15-minute drive to the Supreme Court. I wish I could say that I joined the protest that night out of some deeply held principle, or righteous sense of moral outrage. Yes, I believed that Mr. Bush was a terrible candidate, too cozy with the religious right and clearly out of his depth intellectually. Yes, I believed that Mr. Gore had really won Florida and that the recount would prove it. But I’m not sure that I believed any of this with much passion or conviction. The truth is, I had never been to a protest before, and it sounded like a good story to tell at school on Monday. When we arrived at the court, we found a huge throng of people standing behind a police line, a seemingly endless array of television news crews on the other side of it. For a moment, I just stood there on the periphery, as if there were an invisible line separating me from the mass of protesters — one step forward and I would become part of the group, one step back and I would simply be an innocent bystander. And then, alongside the omnipresent red-white-and-blue Gore-Lieberman 2000 posters, I suddenly spotted a simple handmade sign, thick Sharpie letters etched onto a plain piece of cardboard: “This is America.” Something in those words froze me. I had never before considered that anyone would need to be reminded of that. I had never imagined that idea to be in question. Certain policies would change with each election, of course, but our rights, the fundamental tenets of our democracy, were immutable, eternally true. To suggest otherwise would be to suggest that history wasn’t yet finished with us, that the ground beneath our feet was not in fact solid but could shift at any time. I decided to step forward into the crowd. There is, in our hyper-individualistic culture, a reflexive fear of crowds. Even as children, we’re encouraged always to be unique, to stand out, to fight — at all cost — against becoming subsumed by the group. To my surprise, standing there surrounded by hundreds of strangers, a speck in a sea of people, I understood that we are not necessarily diminished by coming together. I found, instead, my sense of self enlarged. If we only stood together like this, I thought, we could change the world. Perhaps we already had. The next day, the Supreme Court would grant the emergency stay. Three days after that, the court would select George W. Bush as the 43rd president of the United States. The defeat felt personal. The ’90s were officially over, and my childhood along with it. The fact that I could have been naïve enough to believe that I existed outside of history speaks, of course, to my tremendous privilege as a white man, living in the wealthiest country on earth. The decade was not actually some Shangri-La of peace and progress (see: Bosnia, Rwanda, the unprecedented expansion of the prison-industrial complex in the United States). My wife and I had our first child, a daughter, 18 months ago. Looking around at the world she will inherit, I find it difficult to imagine that she will believe the same illusions that I did — that democracy is by definition permanent, that progress is irreversible, that history happens elsewhere. When she wakes up her parents in the middle of the night, terrified of the things she’s heard outside her window, will we tell her that everything is O.K.? And will she believe us? |