Taking It To the Streets, Again

“All we are saying, is give peace a chance,” Pete Seeger’s resonant voice rises above the crowd of half a million people assembled this morning, November 15, 1969, before the White House.  President Nixon is inside the heavily guarded building he’s called home now for ten months.  He’s already dismissed this crowd as “an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals."^[8] In San Francisco a quarter of a million people are also marching against the war in Vietnam on this Saturday morning.  

History will one day show that this demonstration, in concert with the peace movement on college campuses across the country, changed the course of Nixon’s escalation of the war and likely saved millions of lives.

I am twenty-four years old, and I am in my second year of graduate school at the University of Chicago, a hot bed of anti-war protest.  But I am not among the protestors and have no concept of myself as a social activist. I am, instead, using all my wits to make sense of this new, mind-spinning academic and social environment, one so different from the small, conservative women’s Catholic college in New England from which I’d graduated. 

Now 79, I am ready for the streets.  I wish I had been in the 60’s and 70’s.  I wish I had been in a place in my intellectual and emotional development to have participated in both the peace movement and the civil rights movement.  I believe, looking back on it now, that I missed a seminal coming-of-age experience of taking civic responsibility for critical social change when political or corporate institutions refuse to do the right thing.  

My question this morning is what does it take to get to this point where you believe that mass mobilization in the streets is necessary for social change to happen?  What does it take to not only believe, but be willing to take the risks or perceived risks involved in that kind of action?  And close by those questions is this one: what happened to all the people my age who did participate in those movements?  Where are they now?

When Bill McKibben started Third Act, his climate organization for people over 60, he was, I sense from his blog, optimistic that his new organization could mobilize large numbers of those now gray-haired demonstrators.  It made sense to me that millions of us, now retired with time and some degree of blood on our hands for our part in this warming world, would be ready to take up his call, return to the streets and demand the big banks, the oil companies STOP FOSSIL FUEL CARNAGE. But at least here in Maine, while a dedicated group of diehard activists has turned out, it’s been difficult to get large numbers of people off their couches and into the streets.   

The need for this kind of mass mobilization is made very clear by Dana Fisher, a scholar and researcher in social movements and author of the new book Saving Ourselves, From Climate Shocks to Climate Action.  In the book, she makes a convincing case that the banks, the fossil fuel companies, the corporations which have amassed wealth and power from fossil fuel extraction, have a “stranglehold on economic and political power.” She also makes it clear that our individual actions like eating less meat, consuming less, flying less, while important, will not bring about the degree of change that must be made in the immediate future to prevent massive climate disruption.  

She points to the need for mass movement activism to arise from local organizations and the relationships built up in those organizations. Churches and labor unions are two examples of groups she feels have good potential for this kind of civil activism, as are local grassroots climate organizations like ours here in Freeport. 

Yesterday, eager to learn more about what motivates some people to stand on the street corner in the cold, I stand out in front of Chase Bank in Yarmouth, the town next door, with Bill Rixon, a retired science teacher living here in Freeport, who has quietly but steadfastly committed himself to calling out corporations like Chase which operate so innocently in our towns.

“How did you get started with this Bill?”, I ask as we tie his big hand-painted sign that reads Chase Bank Funds Climate Chaos to the lamppost and cars whizz by. “I’ve always remembered the story of a man in California who protested in front of a nuclear power plant for years and years. His persistence and belief in his cause impressed me as very courageous and I think about him a lot,” Bill replied. 

Unlike me, Bill was an activist in the 60’s and 70’s and was able to roll out a long list of demonstrations he’d attended or mass movements he was familiar with that changed the course of history which included the civil rights march of 1963, the women’s suffrage movement in the early twentieth century and the anti-war marches.

“What do you hope to accomplish by standing out here?”, I ask him in a quiet moment. “I want the people in town to know who they are dealing with.  I don’t want Chase to get away with pretending to be good when they are doing so much harm.”  Bill has no expectations about whether his actions will lead to systemic change, though he does believe that change happens in mysterious ways.  The reward for Bill, he tells me in a voice filled with conviction, is in the witnessing: holding up these signs bears witness to the unseen, hidden violence committed in the name of profit-making and, for him, that is enough.

For a few minutes while Bill goes back to his car to retrieve yet another sign, I am alone on the corner, and I confess I suddenly feel unsafe.  In the three or four times I’ve accompanied Bill this year on other demonstrations sponsored by Third Act Maine (TAM), a few people have yelled at us from afar or walked by and treated us as if we were invisible, or worse, dangerous, and not worthy of recognition. But to my surprise, two people roll their windows down, smile, and cheer me on.  Bill says he’s never felt scared or been threatened in any way during his standing out.  Still, I don’t think I would ever do it alone.

Last November Bill took it upon himself to stand out in front of the L.L.Bean’s corporate headquarters with a big flowing canvas sign that reads Protect Mother Earth.  Bean uses a Citibank credit card, and it is this card that Bill and members of TAM are protesting. Steve Smith, the CEO of Bean, came out one morning to meet Bill and ask him about his presence and, according to Bill, they had a very polite conversation. The original ask was for Bean to drop using Citibank if it wouldn’t agree to stop investing in new fossil fuel infrastructure. Bean made it clear they had no intention of proposing this as they believe that the credits people earn from their card, called Bean Bucks, allow people to buy more things which then afford them the chance to “Bean Outsider” and enjoy nature which then will lead them to want to preserve it. Hmm. Consumerism buys a chance to love nature which only then can lead to environmental action.  Hmm. The current ask is for Bean to request Citi to drop their investment in new fossil fuel infrastructure. Bean won’t do even that.

Protesting Bean in a town like Freeport is seen as much like throwing mud at your mother.  Bill reports that only two people from Freeport other than myself, have shown any interest in what he is doing or asked a question about his intentions.  Bill is a good, kind soul and doesn’t take this personally. If you were to ask me why no one talks to him about it, I would hazard a guess that it is because Bill is seen as breaking the rules of decorum: keep the peace, don’t make waves, be nice—particularly to the town’s Big Daddy, employer of many. 

And that brings me to the sense I have, entirely unproven and unresearched, that more people don’t join us in the streets because we are seen as too radical, and as radical as my generation may have been in the 60’s, they aren’t anymore.  Or maybe they never were. One of my activist friends I interviewed for this piece thinks that in the past many were in it for the sex, drugs and rock and roll: for the excitement of it more than the deep commitment to the issues. 

Or maybe my generation isn’t radical because they don’t see the use in this kind of action which is characterized by very long term delayed gratification and my generation, one of the most fortunate of the fortunate, knows very little about delayed gratification.  After America’s success in WW2, the economy took off like a rocket and many, many of us, particularly if we were white, were able to go to college, get good jobs, buy houses, educate our kids without a lot of strife and struggle.  I don’t mean to say we didn’t work hard.  We did, but we got what we wanted quickly, without much frustration.  Nothing that we do now in the streets will be rewarded quickly.  Many of us won’t be around when and if the good chickens come home to roost. 

So I am back to the same question: if it’s up to us to save ourselves how do we mobilize our friends and neighbors to take actions against the corporate bad guys who hold all the power?  Maybe we need a little sex, drugs and rock and roll for the elders.  Maybe we need different kinds of advertising and media stories about activists that make this activism look admirable and rewarding and fun. 

Or maybe people aren’t motivated for direct action because, in the same way I was when I entered grad school, they are confused and spun around by this mind-boggling reality we have been so unexpectedly thrust into at the end of our lives. Maybe they need time and support and imagination to process not only all we have lost and the uncertainty of the future but how they can show their love and care for life at this existential moment in history. 

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I encourage you to use the comment button and share your thoughts about what it would take to get you out on the streets!!