Henry was beginning to sweat. He and three friends had carried the giant puppet for several blocks in the direction of the demonstration's staging point. Now, with the museum honoring Martin Luther King Jr. approaching, Henry resisted the urge to ask his friends to stop and rest. He pushed on towards the destination, turning his head to one side to wipe the perspiration from his face onto his shirt sleeve, being careful not to disturb the bandage that encased a gash in his skull.
If asked, his friends would have graciously stopped and waited. Christian pacifists to a man, a kinder, more accommodating group could hardly be imagined. A sense of responsibility drove Henry on, rather than any fear of opprobrium.
Henry was thought odd for his choice of comrades. He was an anarchist, yet rarely socialized with his fellow revolutionaries, preferring instead the company of these Catholic Worker puppetistas. (The Catholic Workers being a group of religious believers driven by conscience to agitate for "peace and social justice".) Henry, though once a bit militant, increasingly gravitated to the pacifistic views and tactics of his friends. Mostly, though, he just liked them because they made awesome puppets. For two days prior the men had shaped and stapled cardboard, dabbed papier-mâché and painted, until now they bore a giant radiating sun with beckoning arms and the inscription, "Another World is Possible."
As the quartet entered the front lawn of the King Center, they passed a small group loitering on the grass. Henry recognized the leader, holding court before a rapt audience. Maoists. A formulaic bunch who passed out leaflets explaining why everyone else on the Left was wrong. A sect whose party line called for urban intellectuals to flee to the rural byways, there to lead the peasantry in insurrection against the centers of power. No Maoists ever actually took this course of action, of course, at least not here in the USA. Instead, they merely advocated such methods, and upon being ignored, assumed airs of smug superiority. Maoists never made puppets.
At last Henry's group reached the locus of the staging area and laid the puppet down. Henry noted with chagrin that his fellows seemed none the worse for the march. They, too, had been beaten by police at a recent sit-in, on the floor of a military recruiter's office. Although Henry could argue that his head wound had been the most grievous, still he was peeved at being so spent, and silently vowed to drink less and exercise more.
As he stood catching his breath, a young man increased the volume on a boom box and Bob Marley's voice greeted the new arrivals. "Everywhere is war, me say war." But Marley was long dead. And newly dead were the inhabitants of the World Trade Center in New York City, and now the United States was engulfed in fear and blood frenzy, with three of every four cars on the nearby interstate highway sporting a U.S. flag. The nation's President had fingered the Taliban in Afghanistan as the culprits responsible for the carnage, and preparations for an invasion were underway. In response, a tiny band of leftist diehards in Atlanta were preparing to march in protest, more from a sense of obligation than any notion that the attack could be prevented.
At the edge of the crowd hovered a lone man, fortyish, two days growth of beard beneath close cropped hair, and a Harley logo on his flak jacket. His denim pants were worn, but the shoes too shiny: an undercover cop.
From the direction of the King Center a young girl approached. Here was a new face among the usual suspects. She carried a sign that read, "Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War." Her features embodied that peculiar mix of African and Asian that hinted of a soldier and Vietnamese war bride's daughter. She wore a short denim skirt and tee shirt, her hair in dreadlocks, the absence of designer logos failing to conceal the care that went into her appearance. Hers was a studied casualness of dress. She laid her sign down and began to move in time with the music, causing unharnessed breasts to bounce slightly as her hips punctuated the beat. Henry forced himself to look away from her erotic post-pubescence. "Our movement is not a singles bar", he reminded himself. No consumer of glossy dogmas, Henry was instead an idealist.
All too soon came the appointed time to march. In Atlanta, the largest city in the South, a scant one hundred souls had showed up to protest the coming war. Henry felt discouraged, and not for the first time. He often wondered why he bothered to continue. But he knew the answer. Before activism, his life had been a morass of bitterness and cynicism. Protesting released a modicum of the pressure that accumulated over the course of a thousand daily outrages and humiliations.
The lone one hundred, their signs and puppets aloft, began the trek up Auburn Avenue, through the heart of Atlanta's historic black district. The path had been selected because African-American neighborhoods tend to be less jingoistic than their white counterparts. Still, passing motorists stared in disbelief. One driver, a white woman of the middle class, stopped her car and shook her head, mouthing "No, oh God, no," through a rolled-up window. Henry started as a motorcycle cop appeared suddenly beside him, revved his engine and glared into Henry's face, then roared away. "Fascist bastard."
The marchers passed below an interstate overpass, a mighty structure of steel and concrete, testament to the powers of corporation and government that directed the affairs of this great international city. Someone tried to start a chant condemning the coming "racist war", but it failed to light and catch. The procession continued on its silent way, the nervous tension mounting.
The marchers cleared the overpass and returned to the afternoon sun. The puppet again grew heavy. Henry's arms ached, his injured head throbbed, and he began to smell himself. Ahead and to his right a small crowd was congregating, evidence that something was amiss. A black man who appeared to be in his fifties, and was decked out in the blue-collar uniform of an industrial laborer, stood outside a barroom door. His arm was raised, his finger, pointed, his countenance, glowering, his taut jaws in motion. One of the march organizers- a man Henry knew to be a Trotskyite- stood with his back to the man, arms outstretched, waving for the demonstrators to ignore the ruckus and continue walking. As the giant puppet approached the entrance to the bar, Henry could hear the outraged man's words: "You all need to go live wit the Tally Ban! is what y'all need to do. Go own over there, if ya woan to. You think Ah-mur-ka so bad, just go on over there with THEM, see how ya like it!" He spat as he spoke, every word enunciated as though an obscenity.
Henry slowed. His comrades looked at him with concern. One spoke, "We can't stop here. Keep walking. If you're tired, we'll rest up the road a bit."
"I want to talk to him," Henry responded. All three of the other puppetistas vigorously shook their heads, "No." They walked faster instead of stopping, and Henry was forced to keep pace. As they continued up Auburn Avenue towards Woodruff Park, Henry relentlessly rehearsed the words he longed to tell the man, but couldn't. "We march for YOU. We march because the Pentagon uses citizens like you for cannon fodder. We march because the corporations use up good factory hands like yourself, until your body aches and your life is empty and the only relief you know is sitting on a bar stool, swilling bourbon. We march for you, because most of all, as a black man, the descendant of slaves, you never had a chance in this crooked game. We aren't here to offend you, for god's sake! We're here to liberate you…"
His spiel, his inner dialogue would have sufficed to soothe the anxieties of a Maoist. Without a doubt, many doctrinaire Communists were convinced that their destiny was to liberate a populace too ignorant to appreciate the fact of its own liberation. But Henry was not appeased. On the one hand, he knew that what he said was true. He knew that he truly did march for that old black man, him and a million more just like him. But at the same time, if all he accomplished was to piss the old man off- once again, him, and a million more just like him- than what was the point? What, finally, was the point? Henry's dilemma in this moment was not the same old frustration revisited. This dark night of Henry's soul was not merely another bout of disappointment at progress that came too slowly. This new crisis struck to the heart of his activism: If a man prefers the familiarity of his chains to the uncertainty of freedom, if he would trade liberty and justice for television, football, and war, what right do I have to challenge the powers that be on his behalf? Doesn't living freely imply the right to choose slavery?
The puppet left the saloon behind, and approached Woodruff Park. A contingent of policemen lined the northern perimeter. Late afternoon rays glinted off stainless steel pistol barrels. An officer crossed the street, his angry billy club bouncing against his leg. Henry knew that of all the patriotic passion amok within the citizenry, none were so infected as the police. He knew that these armed servants impatiently awaited the order to start cracking skulls, chafing at the restraints of laws that granted protestors certain circumscribed rights. And yet he as he approached the park, he breathed a sigh of relief. He did not fear the looming confrontation. Instead, he relished the impending conflict. He looked forward to seeing in sharp relief the dichotomy of brutal state power massed against the meager forces of the People's Non-Violent Army, the tiny band of resolute dissenters who would countenance no war, no matter how popular. He hurried forward to experience once again the stark moral distinction between the Good and the Bad, the Masses versus The Man, and away from the haunting complexities of the tavern patron's scorn.
Randy Lowens is a aging, disgruntled revolutionary and veteran of numerous mental institutions. Writing temporarily eases his pain, as does attention. Accordingly, he has been (or will be) published in Fifth Estate and Social Anarchism magazines, on the Thieves Jargon, sliptongue.com and Pemmican Press web sites, and elsewhere. He is currently writing a novel about life and alienation in the borderlands between the Deep South and Appalachia, the rural and the urban, and the working and middle classes.