The carnage continues, and so do the protests -- from the half a million who just marched in London, to the 300 that shut down Portland's Burnside Bridge the same day.
I wake up every morning in a state of dread, along with most of the people I know around the world, for the same reason. The feeling is reminiscent of being stuck in a locked room, desperate to escape. Except this isn't a game, there's no secret way out. Hoping there might be, against all odds, you just keep frenetically going over every possible thing you might do in order to get out.
For me, and I'm sure for others, it's only when I'm in the act of trying to do something when I feel comparatively calm. The calm, even contentment, that comes at least temporarily with the focus required to carry out a task that I've at least momentarily convinced myself might have purpose.
My efforts generally revolve around trying to help people understand what's going on and why they need to do whatever they can to make it stop. I spasmodically go from trying one thing to another thing. I wrote a dozen essays, then I wrote a dozen songs.
It's obvious how many other people are feeling the same way, just looking at how random people out there who I've never met or had contact with before are sharing my songs, using them to make videos of the carnage, making subtitled versions of them in Farsi and Arabic.
If people aren't creating content that might influence people in some way, they're trying to amplify other content that's out there in various ways. The number of people throughout the Arab world who have just recently gotten X/Twitter accounts seems very high indeed, and a whole lot of them are mainly posting in the English language, because that is the language spoken by most of the people living in the countries that are actually in a position to put a stop to the slaughter.
People are also taking to the streets globally in absolutely stunningly massive numbers. "Unprecedented" is a word that gets thrown around way too much by truly ignorant people, often falsely. But in this case, the word would seem to be appropriate -- as it should be, if humanity has humanity.
The numbers pouring into the streets day after day in London have been breath-taking. I remember the Palestine solidarity rallies I've sung at over the years in that gigantic city, and I yearn to be there, where I might feel more useful. As the latest half-million-person march in London was wrapping up on Thursday, I was part of a crowd of 300 or so that had taken over one of the main five bridges that crosses the Willamette River here in Portland, Oregon, linking the west side of town with the east, the Burnside Bridge.
I'll tell you about the occupation of the bridge, because I was there, and only a few hundred other people were. For what little it's worth, before I go on I'd like to say how deeply I appreciate anything anyone is doing to try to bring society's attention to the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people by the US protectorate of Israel. There are many reasons why London gets a half million people in the streets and Portland doesn't, and if my exploration of some of the reasons for this seem unfriendly to the organizers of the bridge protest, I truly do not want to criticize anyone, but just to explore how we might build on actions like this.
To comment on London first, because I'm familiar with the scene there: of course it's an unfair comparison, London is not just the capital of the UK, but one of the capital cities of the world.
It also has a huge population of people with the sorts of colonial backgrounds that viscerally tend to identify with people being besieged by settler-colonial regimes backed by the UK, the country that ran the empire that one way or another is the reason so many of them ended up living where they now live.
Along with this population, it has a multigenerational left, with organizations such as Stop the War, the Socialist Workers Party, and left labor institutions as well. As with other countries outside of the US, longstanding left institutions like these, along with mosques and active community groups of all kinds, are able to mobilize large crowds quickly. There are known radicals in the parliament and known artists who are sympathizers or associated with various movements or causes, and they can all be instantly mobilized as well.
By contrast, here in the USA, especially outside of the biggest poles of historic leftwing activity such as the San Francisco bay area or New York City, I feel like I spend much of my life helplessly watching people reinvent the wheel. Sometimes they do a darn good job of it, too! But it's such a shame how necessary the exercise seems to be, and how cumbersome it is.
One thing that's always so striking to me, as a participant-observer of social movements in many different countries, is how everyone works with the resources they have, and the ideas and tactics they're familiar with. Why did the rioters in Dublin, Ireland last month make their points by burning buses? They may or may not have much politically in common with the IRA, but that's where they learned that if you want to make a serious point, you burn a bus or two.
In Portland we burn dumpsters, or at least that's what was happening most every day for much of 2020, among lots of other things. But this event was billed as one free of such activities, and so it remained, which was nice, both for PR purposes as well as air quality.
We wear masks, too, apparently -- masks are, as far as I can tell, how leftwingers demonstrate solidarity with the immune-compromised among us, even at outdoor gatherings. It's very notable to me, though maybe not to some other folks around here, that no one else anywhere around the world outside of the US at these marches are wearing masks. Instead, they're showing their beautiful, pro-Palestinian faces to the world, along with their tears.
Not in Portland. If these folks on the bridge are smiling or crying, no one knows, they're all masked, faceless. Is this how we reach out to the broader population and build a movement? No, I'm sure not, no one else is doing it. But here at least, no one will get sick in the process of occupying the bridge. They may get brutally arrested or shot by a rightwinger for looking like a scary bunch of masked protesters, which just happened in this city a couple years ago. But they won't get sick.
After I had been on the bridge for about a minute, a masked young man approached me and asked me to wear a mask. I knew masks were required and I did bring one, but I wasn't wearing it. I'm just a rebel, I guess. But when he nicely asked me to put on a mask he didn't say anything about protecting sick people. He said we should wear masks "for security" and "to protect ourselves from doxxing." So we want to take over a bridge, make a big scene, have a public demonstration, disrupt traffic, but do it all anonymously, and somehow in his brain that's all consistent. Perhaps to others as well. To me, it's a massive hotbed of ridiculous contradictions.
I'm skipping ahead though. The bridge occupation was one of eight that were taking place in different cities across the US, organized locally and maybe in all the other cities primarily under the auspices of Jewish Voice for Peace, a group that has been doing so much important organizing in cities across the US in recent months.
I heard about the protest on the bridge because I personally knew one of the few older-generation organizers involved. She asked a friend who then asked me if I had a sound system to use for a protest, which my regular readers will be aware I recently purchased for just such occasions.
If not for this personal query about a sound system, I never would have heard about this action. This gets to my reinvention of the wheel comment before. As many people have complained on many occasions, our means of communication with each other keep changing over the years, decades, and generations, and they're not necessarily changing for the better. There have been many ups and downs as technologies have changed along with social movements, and there are lots of advantages to the internet, generally, and even to some social media platforms, in particular. But overall, the age of hegemony of Big Tech over our communications, and the government censors embedded into most of their operations, has been nothing short of catastrophic.
The most recent social movement that they were calling the biggest social movement this country had ever seen was three years ago, in 2020. I was in Portland throughout it, and engaged in various ways with what was going on. There were many successes in terms of new ways to organize movements that were worth remembering, here in the country that my late friend, the great historian and poet, John Ross, called the United States of Amnesia.
There were some high-tech folks involved with things in 2020 who understood the limitations of relying on the media and on social media algorithms to get the word out about the next action folks were planning. They also saw that there were problems inherent in discussion groups where anyone can say anything, and no one can keep track of the important stuff. So people organized well-moderated announcement lists on platforms like Signal and Telegram.
The problem with that was that it required someone taking the time to be the moderator of these lists, and having people with time on their hands to do that requires some kind of ongoing movement infrastructure that we don't seem to have. With those announcements lists I knew what was happening in town every day, but those lists are all gone, and if anything has come along to replace them, no one has told me about it. With the Portland chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace, the key is to remember to look at their Instagram account daily for announcements that may be there. (Probably there's a way to make their posts come up first in your feed, but I'm chronically behind on these things, like most other people my age and older.)
One of the coolest things about 2020 were the folks who became so expert at traffic management. Despite the occasional hostile driver who was sometimes not particularly sympathetic to Black lives mattering or to the masked white youth marching over the bridges and burning dumpsters in that cause, at least up until the rightwinger fired into the crowd and killed one of them, it was always impressive to see the blockade of motorcyles and pickup trucks and the folks riding and driving them, who had early on found their place in the movement, as the folks who would block the streets and prevent anyone from driving into the crowd of protesters, as happened on so many occasions in so many cities across the US that year.
Here now the infamous Corkers were back in action, coordinating a smooth, simultaneous blocking off of both ends of the four-lane, 1,300-foot-long bridge, rendering it safe for the initial crowd of around 150 people wearing matching black "JEWS SAY CEASEFIRE NOW" t-shirts over their jackets, including me, carrying that spiffy new sound gear.
Also reminiscent of various earlier social movements such as 2020 and the global justice movement before it, there were various blocs with various responsibilities. Along with the bridge-corkers, there was the group responsible for setting up the very cool giant menorah that folks had built together in preparation for the occasion, which they set up in the middle of the bridge. I set up the sound system just in front of it, as instructed. With the Bose S1 elevated on a stand above everyone's heads, it was one of the minority of rallies I've been to in Portland over the past 16 years of living here that had a sound system loud enough to be heard by the assembled crowd. And definitely the only one with a giant menorah at it!
Press releases were sent out about the bridge occupation once we were on the bridge, for the benefit of people and media who might not have seen the post on Instagram two days earlier that something was going to happen downtown on December 14th. In any case, within an hour of the bridge being shut down, local TV stations showed up to document the event and talk to organizers.
Notably, almost immediately after the press started getting the word out that this was happening, the crowd doubled in size. The people who joined us were not wearing black, and they were not wearing masks. They had not heard about the protest because they followed JVP's Portland branch on Instagram. They heard about it from the media, and they dropped whatever they were doing on a workday afternoon and got themselves over to the middle of Burnside Bridge. In case anyone needed one, this is a clear indication that the cause is a popular one. If people know something like this is happening, they'll come.
I'm of Jewish lineage, but I've been to Temple twice in my life that I can recall. Once for my grandfather's funeral, and once for my grandmother's. That is to say, I'm of Jewish lineage, rather than Jewish in any religious sense. My great grandmother spoke Yiddish and a little English. My grandmother spoke fluent Yiddish as well as English. My father never learned Yiddish, but he grew up going to Hebrew School every Saturday, where he was raised, in Brooklyn, New York. I never learned Yiddish or Hebrew and never read the Torah either. Like most people of Jewish lineage in this country, I suspect.
So it was a surprise for me to learn that Thursday was the last day of Hannukah, or that Hannukah was actually pronounced "Hannukiah" in Hebrew. The youth-led presentation was very heavy on speeches, and liturgical music with updated, antiwar, pro-Palestinian lyrics. There were no performers doing music with instruments.
One of the speakers was talking about the importance of music in bringing people together, and in sustaining community. I so agree with that sentiment, and talk about it often, so I was feeling especially dejected that the organizers of the event didn't want to have music other than the a cappella churchy bits.
But here again, we inherit the environment we inherit. We're in a country that for years has lost any connection with the tradition of having live music as a central, community-sustaining feature of any protest. This is how it is at protests around the world, from Germany to Brazil to Jordan. But by the totally nonmusical standards of protests across the US characteristic of recent years, having a protest that is 90% speeches and 10% a cappella chants is actually a big step forward. Which is incredibly depressing.
I seriously don't mean to diss liturgical chanting. I actually love liturgical chanting of many different musical traditions, east, west, south and north -- really. And I was reminded of the liturgical chanting that went on for most of every Sunday at the weekend-long, annual protests outside the gates of Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia that used to happen every November. Very fond memories indeed. But those rallies also featured lots of people singing and playing instruments, along with liturgical a cappella stuff that could also be so powerful -- as the speeches could be as well, as long as most of the program consisted of music.
The police, or the mayor, or whoever, seemed to have decided to cede the bridge to the protesters, as they have often done in the past. Well-coordinated preparations for jail support turned out to be unnecessary. I packed up my sound gear, slung it over my shoulders, and walked off the bridge like everyone else was doing, scattering in different directions, as there are many ways you can get off that bridge, once you're at its mouth.
I dropped my gear off in my car, walked around the corner to look for a bite to eat and mostly a toilet -- past the people laying unconscious on the sidewalk, or forced to subsist in some form in stinking tents -- and came across a scene with cops running across the street, guns and flashlights drawn, shouting at someone to get on their knees and put their hands in the air immediately. I couldn't see who they were shouting at, but apparently they complied, as no shots were fired.
The sense that I was doing anything useful faded, and the usual dread returned. Feeling as dejected as I had felt when I got up in the morning, I drove home, listening to a report about the latest Al-Jazeera cameraman to be murdered by Israeli forces with American missiles, in the tiny corner of the Gaza Strip where they're left able to do any live reporting at all, where those who fled the north to Khan Younis, and from Khan Younis to Rafah, are now being bombed in the flooded streets where they're trying to survive another night without food, potable water, or shelter.
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