Back Story 7: School of the Americas

I had not been politically active in High School, although it was not for lack of opportunity. There was an Amnesty group, an environmental group, a chapter of the Young Republicans and Young Democrats and various other opportunities for involvement, but it was not what I was interested in. And truth be told, even if I had been interested, at that stage of my life I would have been more inclined to join the Young Republicans than the Young Democrats.

But my interests changed and when I entered Calvin I resolved to make up for lost time in High School by joining every progressive group I could. I joined them all my freshman year, and then dropped out of them all halfway through my sophomore year.

Because of my reserved personality, I felt like I was simply sitting in on the meetings and watching them take place, without really taking an active part. At first I was happy just to be there, but more and more I began to think that I was contributing nothing to these groups, and that they would function just the same if I wasn’t there.

So I dropped out of everything, and didn't get involved again until my Senior year, when my girlfriend encouraged me to do so. I started re-attending the meetings of the Social Justice Committee. I noticed that all of the upper class men who had intimidated me during my first couple years at school were suddenly gone, and the meetings were filled with friends from my own grade or younger students. I was no longer shy about speaking my own opinion, and became increasingly vocal in the group and started to enjoy myself. Then I rejoined every group I could: the Environmental Stewardship Coalition, the Calvin Liberals and Democrats (after Austin reformed it), and, with my girlfriend's encouragement, I even attended a few meetings of the Calvin feminists.

Although from the latter I kept my distance a bit. It wasn’t that I didn’t agree with what they were saying, but they never embarked on any projects I felt like I could get enthusiastic about. For instance during the Spring there was a protest march against date rape taking place in Grand Rapids, which the Calvin feminists attended. My girlfriend was very excited about this protest, and somewhat upset by my refusal to attend, especially given my willingness to protest just about everything else that year.

I tried to explain my protest philosophy. “I protest government policies that I want changed,” I said. “I don’t protest just bad things that happen. If you had a protest against murder, do you think the murderers would stop? Are you going to protest against earthquakes and hurricanes next?” She couldn’t respond to this, and so I won the argument but there are times, (and perhaps some of you can identify with this) when decisively winning an argument gets you into more trouble than if you had just let it go. She went to the protest anyway and marched down the street chanting slogans like, “Hey hey, ho ho, date rape has got to go!”

But I’m digressing now and probably needlessly offending anyone who was ever been involved with the Calvin Feminists. The point is that I rejoined a lot of these groups, and found the makeup of them a lot different than I remembered.

The Social Justice Committee (it had been known as The Progressives during my Freshman and Sophomore year) now seemed to be dominated by underclassmen, showing that not everyone had to wait until they were a senior before they felt confident speaking out. One of the projects they had undertaken was to attend the annual protests against the School of the Americas. The first trip had been the previous year, so many of the sophomores were already veterans by the time I joined my senior year.

The faculty mentor, a Calvin professor, gave us this word of advice before we set out. “Last year there was a lot of bad things said about the Calvin group to the SOA protest,” he said. “People said some of them were only going on the trip for fun, or to be with their boyfriend or girlfriend, or whatever. If you go on this trip, you need to take it very seriously. There are hundreds of people dead because of this school in Georgia. It’s no joke.”

And so while we were on the trip, I think we all tried to keep a somber and reverent attitude. But in spite of the tragedy we were confronting, our natural inclination was to be up beat. In fact, I think anytime you get a group of young people together, the atmosphere automatically becomes joyful. There were a few people on the trip who could really make me laugh hard, and we did a lot of laughing on the van ride down, and for the whole weekend in general.

For me the highlight of the whole trip was seeing Pete Seeger, who performed at the protest. I saw him play twice, once at the large rally in the afternoon, and again in a smaller auditorium in a workshop on non-violence. It was an amazing thing to be in the same room as such a legend.
His singing voice was pretty much gone, and he couldn’t sing without being accompanied by his grandson. But when he spoke in between songs, his voice sounded as clear as a bell, and it sounded exactly the same as the old records I had listened to growing up. (When I was a child I had a copy of his record “Pete Seeger’s songs about Animals”, which I must have listened to a hundred times. Of course I had no idea who he was at the time, and it wasn’t until I was 19 and bought one of his CDs that I realized the voice on the CD was the same one I had listened to on the record years ago.)

As in previous years, Sunday was the day when people would walk on to the base. Although the protest was entirely peaceful, it was illegal to protest on the actual base itself, and doing so could mean arrest. The previous year thousands of people had crossed the base to protest, and the police couldn’t arrest them all, so they had simply been loaded onto buses and driven away. We were pretty sure the same thing was going to happen, although there were no guarantees.

Opinion was somewhat split among the Calvin group. Some people felt that it was not okay to break the law even if it was in a non-violent way, and so opted not to walk onto the base. Others had class they had to return for on Monday, and so could not afford to take the risk of being arrested or detained by the police. About half of us chose to cross the line and walk onto the base.

We walked in an orderly line with thousands of other people, and proceeded down the road until the police stopped the march. At which point people just sat down on the road, and waited for the police to remove them. Following classic civil disobedience strategy, we were not resisting the police, but we were not cooperating with them either. We would refuse to remove ourselves from the base until they physically removed us.

Or at least that was the plan. But as we sat on the ground, the police continued to walk up and down the road reminding people, “The buses are here. Anytime you want to load yourself on the bus, just go ahead and climb on.”

It was a hot day. We left our spot on the road to sit under the shade of a tree on the grass. We were talking there for a while, until a nun came up to us and said, “We’re trying to get people to stay on the road. We want to keep the atmosphere here somber in order to remember the people who were killed, and we don’t want it turning into a festive, picnic like atmosphere like it did last year. So do you think you could go back to the road?”

I didn’t see how being excessively somber would help the people who were already dead, but how could we argue with a nun? So we returned to the road. But a while later I noticed some of my friends had returned to the grass, and I joined them.

There were literally thousands of people, and we were quite a ways back in the crowd. We knew that if we waitedl for the police to remove everyone ahead of us, we would be there all day. And so eventually someone proposed the idea of voluntarily loading ourselves up on the bus.

On one level voluntary putting ourselves on the bus and removing ourselves seemed to defeat the whole idea of civil disobedience. And yet what difference did it make if the police had to escort us to the bus, or if we came to the buses ourselves? Did it make a real difference if we waited until the police came to our line, or could we just skip ahead of some of the people in front of us?

The point was debated for a little bit. Someone mentioned the classes they had on Monday morning, which, if it was all the same anyway, he would just assume not miss. Someone else said she had traveled all this way with the intent of protesting, and thought voluntarily loading herself on the bus defeated the whole purpose.

I kept silent the whole time. My conscious was with the girl who wanted to be true to the spirit of civil disobedience to the end, but we had already been sitting on the ground for several hours now, and part of me was hoping that the other side would win. When we finally took a vote on it, I abstained, but was secretly relieved when the other side won.

Very similar discussions were going on in a lot of the groups around us. One group of students sitting next to us had been discussing the question in passionate tones for a long time. I didn’t catch everything that they said, but I saw them vote, and then revote, and then argue some more, and then finally agree to voluntarily load themselves up on the bus. They continued singing protest songs as they stood up and left their spot to walk on the bus, singing: “We shall not be moved.” The irony of this seemed to be lost on all of them but one at the back of the line who pleaded, “Guys, guys, can we please sing something else. Guys I really don’t think this song is appropriate right now.” She struggled to make herself heard above their singing, and eventually left her place at the back of the line to run up to the front where she persuaded the song leader to adopt a different tune.

Our group loaded ourselves up on the bus with not quite as much drama. The buses were regularly getting filled up and then driven out of the base. We were dropped off just outside of the base, and then regrouped and left for home later that afternoon.

One of the group later wrote up this article for Chimes. He e-mailed us all for thoughts or quotes, and I e-mailed him back some stuff that ended up getting put in the article.
The following year I was unable to attend the protest because I was student teaching, and couldn’t take an absence. (Yet another example of making politics subservient to student teaching). Instead, I wrote up this Chimes article the week before the protest as my contribution.