Wow, I'm writing this on December 12, as reckoned by the secular world, knowing that it won't be read until the next century, not to mention the next millennium (for those not holding their breath until 2001...) Makes me more keenly aware than ever of the delayed news value of my little screeds. Folks have been asking me if I will be writing about my adventures in Seattle during the anti-World Trade Organization uprising. Which I am of course very happy, even itching, to do. But it makes me ask: what about that tumultuous week will still be meaningful a month later? After the fun is over, what will still matter?
While the Thanksgiving pies were in the oven at our house, my dad was asking me why I wanted to go to Seattle. I had both a personal and a political answer. The personal answer is that one of the gifts of our Tu B'shevat seder at Headwaters Forest three years ago was that Miszka Evans came into my life. Miszka is a forest activist in her early twenties, a powerful, committed, incredibly articulate and fierce young woman that I admire very much. She called me from Seattle, her hometown, where she was organizing the WTO festivities full-time, and said, "It's going to be great. You should come..." I hadn't given a second of thought to coming. But when I hung up the phone I thought, "I want to go." It was as simple as that, simpler still when I heard the next day that a Green Tortoise bus had been chartered to take many dozens of Mendocino County resisters up north. Deciding to become a rabbi was like that, as was coming up to Mendocino to be your rabbi a decade-plus ago. An idea appeared, and I suddenly knew that I wanted to pursue it with all my heart. Something like a "calling," maybe... Of the petite variety, not grand. But still compelling.
But my dad wasn't asking what white lights I was seeing... "So do you really want to disband the WTO?" he was asking me. A good question, and one I can only partly answer. What I said than, and think even more strongly in retrospect, is that this demonstration was a huge NO! to a welter of issues which are only very partially parsed out at this point. It was a NO! to the huge box stores, to the chains overtaking small businesses, to the phantom Wal-Mart that is always threatening to devour Fort Bragg, to the cell tower, to raw logs from our coast being shipped to Japan, to Denny's eating up Ada Belle's breakfast business (now there's a personal issue for me!), to not being able to get health insurance around here, to genetically engineered soybeans in our soymilk -- not to even mention the prospect of corn engineered to not reseed, or products made by child or slave labor and imported at prices that vastly undercut locally made items, not to even mention the huge subsidies and setasides and changes of whole legal systems to accommodate the needs of huge corporations, not to even mention that many of these policies are being made without public oversight by people whose fealty is owed to business and not to society, or that their net result is to have concentrated 90% of the world's wealth in the pockets of 10% of its people -- and that 10% is now reshaping the world to funnel even more of its resources into the hands of even fewer people. Okay, got that?
We weren't in Seattle to agitate for suffrage for women or for an end to slavery in the American South. Nothing that specific and precise. Instead I was -- and I think I can probably speak for many of my fellow Tortoise riders and marchers and blockaders -- there because somehow all of this snuck up on me and it had all along felt too amorphous and too insidious to fuss about. Globalization just seemed like the way of things, and it seemed inevitable that one day soon there would be no locally owned bookstores (this despite Tony Miksak's eloquent cries in the wilderness) or clothing stores or local anything or organic anything or artfully distinctive anything.
Back now from Seattle I know that far more is threatened than even just Gallery Books or Fancy That or Thanksgiving Coffee, that the free trade movement has its eyes on our schools and our medical care and our water sources as well as the things we usually buy in stores. BUT that it is not inevitable and it is not incomprehensible either. That the Seattle demonstrations were so huge and so successful -- far beyond even the organizers' fantasies, as I understand it -- signals to me the beginning of a movement that doesn't yet have a name, much less a platform. Fair Trade is part of it, the public policy part. But it is a whole new way of looking at our own economic behavior, as well as that of the wealthiest and most powerful players. We are connected to the slave laborer in Burma through what we buy, what we use, what we need and think we need, where we work, what we manufacture, how we earn and spend our own money. It's a lot to think about. I came home from Seattle with new eyes through which to look at my own economic behavior as well as the behavior of the obscenely wealthy. I have some understanding of how local efforts like SEED and artisans cooperatives and farmers markets and hemp clothing manufacturing emerge as healthy outgrowths of this new kind of analysis. It's of passing interest that we all came home into the peak of the winter holiday buying season. Maggie Watson wrote a great little piece in the Beacon about how we could bring our WTO consciousness home for the holidays. Personally I've been enjoying neither giving nor getting Hanukkah presents this year. (Actually I gave none and received one -- no one can accuse me of generatingparsing a trade deficit!)
In some ways this new movement is starting out like the environmental movement (as well as containing many crucial environmental issues within it, of course.) Many of us can probably remember back to whenever we first heard of environmentalism. In the beginning it was just a crashing awareness that the earth itself was under siege. We began looking at how everything helped our hurt -- our own households as well as government and big business. Now there's been thirty years of parsing out the environmental issues, so that many of us are now engaged in specific, well thought out campaigns on particular fronts. Still with the odds stacked against the small players, but at least we understand what's going on... The feminist movement has progressed similarly -- first there was a cry of outrage, and now there are longstanding struggles on many fronts: equal pay, voting women into political office, rape law reform, redress for sexual harrassment and you can name the many others.
We can't yet name the many other fronts to come from the movement that had its coming out party in Seattle in the beginning of the last month of the last millennium. But the cry was thrilling, empowering, invigorating. To me in my early middle age, it was especially exciting to be led into action and reflection by so many people in their teens and twenties, who were so powerful, so beautiful, so intelligent and so brave -- my friend Miszka, our Ben Corey-Moran and the many thousands like them who led the charge. The last thing in the world that I expected to experience on the eve of the secular millennium was anything that would make me feel hopeful of big political change. Much less called (inadvertently) to a prophetic moment. The hard work is all still ahead. But ahead is coming. Happy 2000.
Copyright 1999 Rabbi Margaret Holub
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Last updated 01/30/2000(rge)