Thoughts on direct action

Ruckus Society Interview

The roar of the crowd was defening as the twenty-five police officers in full body armor clutching three-foot billy clubs and riot shields turned around and disappeared down F Street. The last few minutes had been some of the longest of my life, as a hundred rag-tag activists occupying the intersection of Eghteenth and E stood facing the heavily armed riot cops. When the cops turned tail, the band of activists spontaneoulsy sang Twisted Sister's '80s schlock anthem, "We're Not Gonna Take It," and a dance party broke out.
This was the morning of the April 16, 2000, protests against the Washington, DC, meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund -"a 16," as it has become known. But it was more than just tens of thousands of bodies filling the streets of DC: a16 was testing the coalitions and networks that formed in November of 1999 around the WTO protests in Seattle.
This coalition, a tenuous mix of anarchists, environmentalists, trade activists, progressive religious groups, and old labor, has captured a great deal of attention since tear gas filled the streets of Seattle eight months earlier. Successful in shutting down the WTO meetings and in bringing the work of institutions like the World Bank into the forefront of the public debate, this "new" left coalition has carried the day.
Since Seattle, institutions like the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank have found their agendas pried open for public scrutiny. But the conflict has moved beyond international finance, as corporations like Nike, the Gap, and Starbucks have found themselves on the defensive as well, as their use of sweatshop labor, anti-union sentiments, and corporate greed are exposed by puppet-wielding leftists ont he evening news. Rainforest destruction, the corruption of democracy, the liberation of Tibet, and many other issues have, in fact, made it onto the evening news. The agendas of the groups involved in this movement are as disparate as the groups themselves. So much so that it can be overwhelming.
But it is this asepct of these developments that puts the "new" into today's new left. Instead of focusing on specific issues, activists are looking at the "big picture" and finding common ground. Coalitions have been formed between groups that have rarely seen eye to eye in the past -- environmentalists and unions, for instance, or anarchists and religious organizations.
One organization that has been instrumental in bringing together and training these groups is the Berkeley, CA-based Ruckus Society. Ruckus is a unique organization: It trains people for direct action, both at the actions themselves and at "action camps" held around the country. And Ruckus takes its work seriously. It teaches people to climb buildings and drop banners, to lock themselves to each toher -- or to barricades, trees, and roads. It teaches effective organizing of actions and how to deal with the media. If it happens at an action, Ruckus addresses it. Buti it also teaches the philosophy behind those actions.
Since it was founded in 1995, the Ruckus Society has trained thousands of activists at is action camps and at protests. The Society's work has won accolades among the left and demonization among its detractors -- "It's just insanity," said a spokesperson for the British Columbia lumber industry.
As the training provided by Ruckus becomes more widespread and mroe sophisticated, so too are the powers aligned against them. At the August 2000 protests in Philadelphia against the Republican National Convention, Ruckus founder John Sellers was singled out by police, arrested, and held on $ 1 million bail, in part for having an "instrument of crime" -- a cell phone. Undaunted by intimidation practices like these, Ruckus continues to train activists to use their voices against the powers that be.
I spoke with Han Shan, program director of the Ruckus Society, shortly after DC's a16 protests. Our conversation opened my eyes even wider to the work that Ruckus does, and my respect for them has grown exponentially.

Interview by Daniel Sinker

Ruckus is an interesing organization in that it's so "behind the scenes." You're not organizing protests, you're organizing people. What was the impetus behind the idea?

Ruckus has been around for about five years now. Mike Roselle founded it. He was one of the cofounders of the Earth First! movement as well as the Rainforest Action Network. He also was the first action team coordinator for Greenpeace. There was a model by which Greenpeace and a couple of other organizations would put together these training camps. They would teach themselves the technical aspects of direct action. The first camps started as action camps for Earth First! as welll as ex- and current Greenpeace forest activists. But it was very focused on forest and wilderness defenders. The idea was to impart an essence of excellence and a validity to direct action because every single important, effective movement for social change has employed the tactics and strtegies of nonviolent direct action.

There were so many people who didn't understand the history of the giants upon whose shoulders we stand. People who didn't understand where they had come from and didn't understand what the strategies of nonviolent direct action meant. Thus became the action camps that we put out, the first several of which were in the woods of Montana and Oregon, where Earth First!ers would learn technical tree climbing, road blockades to stop logging, and things like that.

Over the last two and a half years, we've significantly broadened our scope to include social-justice activistss, human-rights activists, animal-rights activists, and folks working on trade and labor. We recognized that every single disparate facet of this movement really is all part of a larger movement working towards a more just and sustainable future. You really can't separate human rights and social justice from the environment. A healthy planet is man's first right and the planet's first right is to be left the fuck alone by man. We want to try to make people understand that direct action is a really valuable tool -- if not the most valuable tool -- in our toolbox. But it has to be recognized that it's not a strategy onto itself, it's a tactic that can fit into a strategic framework and it has to be understood as such.

When you started to broaden your scope, was it something that you felt you needed to do, or was it that all of a sudden there were organizations outside of the environmental groups you were working with that were approaching you for training?

It was a pretty organic process. There has been a realization and an evaluation of thought within the "new American left" if you will, that you can't have one without the other. You can't separate these struggles. All struggles for justice and sustainability, for human rights and for social justice are deeply intertwined. So yes, there were definitely groups and communities contacting Ruckus looking for training and looking for assistance in their campaigns. But parallel to that was a natural evolution and understanding that we have to work together. Steelworkers and Tibetans, animal welfare activists, hippies and anarchists all have to realize that we're working towards a common goal. We might have different visions about how it comes about, but basically we're trying to turn back the corporate takeover of our planet. We're looking towards a world that will actually be able to sustain itself.

Why do you think that realization has finally happened now? That's one of the really interesting things to me. Having been active in leftist politics for ten years now, I know it used to be that no one talked to each other. All of a sudeen we're seeing these seemingly divergent groups putting aside their differences for a common good.

There have been times throughout history -- even fairly recent history -- when people did understand that very clearly. But a generation forgot it, I think. The real giants of anarchism, such as Emma Goldman, and the American, Italian, and French anarchists from the turn of the century, all understood that human rights in the developing world, social justice in the cities of the Americas and Europe, factory workers, and nature all had equal rights. The struggles to secure rights for all those different things were indeed totally interconnected. I think that recognition has been there throughout history, but it has been forgotten somewhat.

The reason I think that iti is being understood again is somewhat complciated. But I think one of the best reasons is that we've watched our adversaries find common ground enough to slaughter us and put into place a power structure which is killing the planet. Looking at their model, realizing that they've been able to put aside their differences, we've recognized that we have to as well.

There's another phenomenon that I think is probably the most important one in the year 2000, particularly among young, white, middle-class Americans. There are a lot of people growing up without their own struggles, without being affected parties within any of these dynamics that we're talking about. They're not struggling to feed themselves, they're not running from the cops every day, they're not worried about what kind of job is going to be available for them, they're not dealing with toxic waste in their backyard. What they're realizing is that there are so many sympotms that it's impossible to work on them all. People are looking at the underlying economic paradigms, they're looking at the international financial institutions, and they're looking at capitalism as a whole.

It's like you're standing on the side of a river bank with a group of your friends and babies keep floating by in the river. You're jumping in to try to save them, but they just keep coming. Eventually, you have to leave a few people by the river to catch the babies, but you've also got to fucking send a team up to the bridge to find out who the hell is throwing the babies into the river! And right now, there are too many babies! There are too many symptoms. We need to look at the underlying ilness and treat the disease as we treat the symptoms.

In the '80s particularly, there was a lot of do-it-yourself environmentalismthat placed the blame on the consumer, like recycling. Of course that stuff's important, but no one was really allowed to look at the waste in the first place. People are forced to do that now because it's absolutely overwhelming to attempt to deal with the struggle in Tibet, with sweatshops, with poisoned rivers, toxic sludge in communitites of color, nuclear waste on native land, ongoing militarism, Iraqis dying under a ridiculous embargo, and global racism. There's too much going on! So people are looking at capitalism becasue it's the economic paradigm upon which so much of this oppression is based.

That's why people are looking at the WTO, the World Bank, and the IMF. These neocolonial financial institutions are foisting an imperialist economic system upon the developing world, making sure they have export-driven economies that are making the business elites in their country -- and corporations in G-7 countries such as our own -- very rich while leaving the majority of the people extremely poor. Not to mention destroying the environment and shredding labor standards in the process.

How many camps do the Ruckus Society run? How many people are you guys training for this stuff? Are you seeing your numbers increase?

The number of camps that we do each year hasn't changed a lot. There are a few reasons for it. Since late last fall with the WTO uprising and the confrontation at the IMF meetings, this spring we were very, very busy with the organizing around those two events. Those two things took the resources that four camps could handle! There has also been some turnover. The Ruckus community is definitely a tight family, but sometimes it's 50 people, sometimes it's 120 people, it changes. But to try to estimate numbers of folks that we're training, it's pretty difficult. We've trained well over two thousand people in our main action-camp program and then there are folks who would self-identify as Ruckus all over North America who are offering discreet training to people all the time.

So what happens in a camp?

The core curriculum that everyone has to go through is nonviolence. It's what we always start with. We talk about the history, philosophy, and practice of nonviolence. We discuss Thoreau, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King. We talk about some tough issues, like "is property destruction nonviolent?" We don't have an answer to that question; we just want to make sure that people are considering these things.

Then we teach people action planning and strategy. We go through a checklist of what it takes to put together different kinds of actions. We talk about different models for organizing actions. We talk about spontaneous actions. We talk about very planned-out, team-oriented actions that are much more technical, like hanging a banner from a building. We talk about mass-action strategy organized with clusters and affinity groups and the problems of speaking as one voice when you're thousands. We talk about strategic campaigning so that people understand the framework and infrastructure that ou need to build in order to have an action make sense. That's the theoretical stuff. Then we get into tactics.

We teach blockades -- low-tech and high-tech. We teach people how to use their bodies as obstacles, how to use bodies with other bodies to block streets, to take intersections and logging roads. We teach high-tech blockades, where we deploy very heavy things that are hard to move, like junker cars of buses or trucks that we lock down to take a road. Or things like sleeping dragons that would take a logging road and prevent a logging crew from getting in and starting to cut. We teach tripods, we teach bipods. Then we get into climbing. Something that we're best know for is constructing a sixty-foot scaffolding to mimic a building. We teach folks to rappel and to hang banners and do hanging blockades. We've blockaded shipments of old-growth lumber and driftnet ships by hanging in their way off bridges. We teach technical tree-climbing as well to do tree-sits. We teach people how to build a tree village, to take an entire grove if they have to.

For the climbing and some of the more tactical, physical stuff it'a also very very powerful because it challenges people. It challenges people to do things that they didn't know that they could do. And we make sure that they succeed -- actually, they make sure that they succeed. There's a real power in watching people overcome obstacles. It's kinda corny and Outward Bound-y, but people leave very transformed by that experience of overcoming heights and trusting their friends -- maybe friends they just made that morning -- trusting their gear and seeing that it's not magic, that we can all do it, that we can all take power back and we can all throw our bodies into the machinery and shut down the machine if we need to.

I was in DC for a16 and it was the first time that I'd really seen a lot of the strategies of the environmental movement taken outside of the forest. Obviously, that was also used in Seattle to great effect. Why do you think that those stategies have begun to filter into the streets and into actions that aren't about logging and things like that?

Particulary for environmentalists, there has been an ongoing recognition that even though you should always leave a team in the woods defending the growth, you also have to go find the folks that are making the decisions and creating the laws -- or lawlessness -- that is making that cut possible. The tactics and the organizing structures are only natural because it's what the forest defenders know -- it's what they've been practicing for so long. So when they go to the streets, they take those practices with them, of course.

But eco-tactics like sleeping dragons are really starting to be employed by people that aren't just environmentalists.

By "sleeping dragons" you probably mean lock-boxes. In DC cops called them "sleeping dragons" but those were really lock-boxes. A sleeping dragon is when you bury something in the road, like rebar, so it can really only be used in soft roads, unless you're really ballsy like the fuckers in England who go and tear up the highway the night before [laughs]. But basically, it's when you bury something in the road -- a bunch of concrete or rebar or something -- with a pin in it. You dig a hole, cover it up a little bit and in the morning, right before the loggers come in, your run in and slip your arm right into the road and lock yourself into it. It's impossible to remove you. The only way for someone to move you is to put you in so much pain that you unclip yourself. That's pretty much the strategy that's used by law enforcement more than any these days 'cause they recognize that the weakest link in the chain is you. That's what a sleeping dragon is.

Lock-boxes are what folks have been using a lot of in the streets. In Seattle there were hundred and hundreds of lock-boxes out in the streets. Most of the lock-boxes that were made in DC were confiscated by a little sting operation a couple nights before.

What's the theory behind the lock-box?

It's easier to take a street. The hardest part is that people say it's illegal. You're fortifying your ability to trespass. But I couldn't disagree more. Especially around Seattle and DC, we saw dozens of city blocks become police states in which it was illegal to protest, in which the citizenswere locked out of the process once again. It was made very, very clear that we the people were notto get anywhere near the meetings where these unaccountable bureaucrats were makind decisions behind closed doors. My answer would be if we were allowed to exercise our First-Amendement rights as they were intended and speak truth to power and allowed to be a part of this process, we wouldn't have had to resort to such tactics. It's a fortification. It's a way of saying, you won't allow me to be here and you'll beat the shit out of me for being here, but I'm going to become an atom in this human molecule, and so you have to deal with this. on the morning of the thirtieth in Seattle, there were hundreds of people running around with lock-boxes on their right arm looking for someone with a free left arm to join up with. It was very, very powerful -- these individuals, these "free radicals" running around in the streets looking to become a molecule. There's a real metaphorical power in that, but it's also about strengthening one's position when our bodies and our voices aren't given the credence that they should be.

In a way, that's a metaphor for all the training that you all are doing. How effective do you think it's been?

It's kinda funny. Certainly I think we've been incredibly effective, if the index by which we judge our success or failure is if we get people to talk about macroeconomics and get people to look at the underlying paradigms upon which so much that we work on is based. People are talking about the WTO. People are talking about the IMF and the World Bank. We have allies.

The thing that's really important to understand is that when we talk about this burgeoning new movement, it's not new at all -- it's just new here in the United States. I rode in a cab the day before a16 talking on my cell-phone like a dork. The cab-driver could tell by what I was talking about that I was a "protester," as he called me. He asked if I was a protester and I said I was. He said, "Well, I just want you to know that I was in my first IMF riot thirty years ago in Nigeria. And I'm really glad you guys are out here. But I have to say one thing: It's about fucking time you woke up to what's happeneing in your backyard and it's about fuking time that Ameicans realize the privilege that you have and what foes on for your supposed benefit around the world." That was a very humbling experience.

Here we are, a part of this brand-new movement, which in fact has been going on for fifty years, essentially since institutions like the IMF were formed, and folks have been protesting what is essentially the new colonialism all along. Yeah, it's new here, but we've just started to join this party and we started pretty late in the game. That's really humbling, but at the same time I'm also really excited. We all feel like we're part of something new, that's big and that's also growing.

Do you think the movement is sustainable? The last eight months or so have really been easy. In order to keep things going, you have to get more numbers in. You have to cross more boundaries with groups, organizations, and communities that have different outlooks and different ideas and agendas. That is in some ways much more challenging than working with mainly -- at least here in the United States -- middle-class white people.

Absolutely. It's a huge challenge. First of all, if we are to build a populist movement, we have to be communicating to people that what we are fighting for is all the same thing. And, very importantly, we have to demonstrate that we're not just fighting against stuff. We're also talking about beginning things and building things. What we want is really pragmatic, it's not a pipe dream. We're just saying that we want to make livable cities. We want to reclaim the streams and rivers. We want to protect biological diversity. We want to prioritize education and health-care over incarcerating people. We're talking about a kind of family values, essentially.

Certainly, we do have a lot of class and racial divides that we all need to bridge. And that's not just for white kids to bridge to communities of color; it goes both ways. I have great hopes for the conventions this summer, for people coming together with a lot of disparate issues focuses but with an understanding that at the root, we're talking about communities over corporate profits. Whether you're talking about the sellout of health-care to HMOs, whether you're talking about the prison industrial complex and how it's thriving, whether you're talking about human rights in China and Tibet, you're talking about corporate power standing in the way.

So how do you start moving forward, then? How do we go about making these connections so other people can make connections with us?

I think there are a hundred different wasys that we do it and we have to work on every single one of them at the same time. We work to our strengths and we do what we know how to do in our communities. I think we need to talk about things that we want when we talk about what we don't want. And I think concentrating on how pragmatic our real wants and desires are is important, too. I mean, yeah, I want art and beauty and truth, but I also want livable cities and green space and education for my kids. I want our government to stop being militaristic imperialists. We have to let people know that what we're proposing is not some austere, horrible future where everyone has to live in the cold and eat tofu [laughs]. We're not just a bunch of angry idiots that want to smash and destroy everything.

Do you think it's possible to achieve these goals before people lose interest? Right now, it's all so young and so exciting, but already -- in mainstream media circles at least -- it's already becoming yesterday's news. Seattle got huge coverage, but DC, not so much.

I think if we use our coverage in the mainstream media as an index of success or failure, then we're doomed. It's great to come together in these huge carnivals of resistance in Seattle and DC and come speak truth to power en masse. But in the end we really need to go back to our communities and talk to one another and talk about how we're really going to work together. We need to make people understand that decisions being made on local levels are often far more influential in our lives and probably the only real way -- unless we're able to radically change the way our one-party Republicrat system works -- to make change. Local politics never registers on mainstream media screens, so who cares? The bigger question is do I think it's possible? I think we don't have a choice. Either we turn back this fucking corporate takeover and take back democracy, or we all perish by it. That sounds so cynical, but implicit in that is hope, because when folks understand how desperate the situation is, they'll wake up to it before it's too late.

-- Punk Planet 38, July-August 2000

* Direct Action on Nonviolence.org:

‘Direct Action’ is a term which is often misunderstood. It has the cachet of dramatic zealotry, yet in essence, it is often quieter and more powerful than this stereotype.

To act directly is to address the actual issue of your concern. If you’re working against hunger, it’s might be simply giving someone a meal. If you’re working against homelessness, it might be taking over an abandoned house and making it livable. If you want to stop military spending, it might be refusing to pay your income taxes.

Direct action differs from symbolic protest action, which is lobbying someone in authority to change their policies. An advantage to direct action is that it doesn’t require the cooperation of the authority to be effective. If they intervene to stop your action, you have a dramatic story; if they ignore you, you’ve followed your conscience and can continue following it further. Since the action in itself has a direct effect, it has a power and strength. In practice, the most effective actions are both direct and symbolic, providing a clear witness to your beliefs.

Direct action is only one form of engaging in social change. For more on civil disobedience, which tends more often to be symbolic and conscience-led, see “Conscience and the State”.

* Methods of Nonviolent Protest and Persuasion

* International Direct Action, The Spanish Revolution to the Palestinian Intifada

* When Civil Disobedience Becomes Bloody
Laura Stengrim

Laura Stengrim is a graduate student at
the U of I. The motivation for this article
started while she was a college student
in Minnesota and took several
trips to Washington, D.C. There, she
met members of the Jonah House,
Dorothy Day House, and Catholic
Worker Movement, many of whom participate
in regular acts of civil disobedience as well as the
high-stakes protests described here.

Carol Gilbert, Jackie Hudson, and Ardeth Platte are each currently serving time in prison for protesting the buildup to the United States’ War on Iraq. Mary Lee Sargent only recently left Champaign-Urbana after a long career of feminist and gay and lesbian advocacy and has also served time. What these four women have in common, besides their time behind bars, is a blood sisterhood of sorts, a history of political commitment so guttural that it includes using human and animal blood to protest institutions such as the deadly U.S. military and stubborn state of Illinois which has yet to support equal rights for women. This article details the nuns’ case and Sargent’s actions in order to question the use of blood as a dramatic means of symbolic protest.

On October 6, 2002, the Sisters performed a Plowshares action at a Minuteman III missile site in Colorado. This style of direct protest is based on Isaiah’s prophecy that to “beat swords into plowshares” is to demand peace at the source of violence, to create a disarmed world. Since 1980, there have been approximately 75 plowshares actions at U.S. and worldwide military sites such as NATO weapons centers. In Colorado, the sisters tapped on the missile silo with household hammers and marked the shape of a cross with their own blood. When alarms began to sound, soldiers ran to the bunker where the Minuteman III is stored and trained automatic weapons on the nun swho had 45 minutes to sit quietly, sing, and pray before authorities even showed up.

After approximately six months in jail awaiting felony conviction, the three were sentenced to a combined total of 104 months in prison for trespassing, damaging property, and obstructing national defense. The sentences, sister Ardeth’s 41 months being the longest, are moderate considering that maximum penalties were 30 years apiece. The damage, including the chain links cut to make an opening in the fence surrounding the site, amounted to a whopping $1000, which is puny compared to the U.S. military budget or the cost of the war on Iraq.

Wearing white jumpsuits and calling themselves the “citizens’ weapons inspector team,” the sisters found some weapons of mass destruction that apparently do not qualify as such for the Bushies. In Colorado alone, there are 49 nucleararmed missile sites, each having explosive power 25 times that of the Hiroshima bomb. Certainly one of the goals of the action was to call attention to military and presidential warmongering. Ardeth, in a letter dated November 12 of this year, explains that part of the blood action is to expose the bitter blood-letting of war, which Fox News does not show. The timing worked so that the sisters’ trials were held in April 2003 during the War on Iraq, allowing anti-war activists to use their case to expose systemic perversion. The thought of treating elderly nuns as violent criminals is appalling proof of a cruel military-industrial complex.

Carol’s and Ardeth’s letters from Federal Prison Camps in West Virginia and Connecticut, respectively, indeed testify at times to enraging prison conditions, especially for women who are quite old. Carol is a sprightly 55 years of age, while Sisters Jackie and Ardeth are in their 70s. Nevertheless, a woman who has taken vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience and has been a member of the religious order for 38 years, who spends most of her time knitting and writing in silence, Carol is intimidated by guards “every chance they get.” On September 19, 2003, she wrote, “ I was told my attitude needs to be monitored by the guards and they want programmed leisure time.” So she was programmed with a schedule of classes like “Anger Management.” Each of these so-called programs brings revenue to the private companies administering them. Both Carol’s and Ardeth’s letters are overwhelmingly positive, making jokes about the prison wardrobe and profound statements about the surrounding mountains, crisp fall air, and anonymous women to whom they minister. Knowing fully the consequences of plowshares actions and having been convicted of numerous protest actions in the past, the women accept with humility whatever position from which they feel they can enact social change. Even from a prison cell.

Those of us who advocate nonviolent protest and acts of civil disobedience but not necessarily on theological grounds might question using blood as symbolic protest as going a step too far, as political extremism so adamant as to undermine its presumed peacefulness. In other words, when is blood too violent? Does it ever undermine itself? I once asked Phil Berrigan, infamous for burning a draft-card with napalm to protest Vietnam, about this. His answer was something to the effect that violence is in the eye of the beholder, that those who see blood as violent do not see what others understand as deeply religious. Yet those who advocate peaceful living through practicing Ghandian resistance with or without subscribing to the Christian tradition might react to blood as violating the body, as a violent tearing-open of the vessels that sustain our voyage towards peace. The plowshares argue that they would rather see their blood shed than that of innocents falling victim to war.

To understand how blood has been used to protest causes other than war,we have to go no further than our state capital, which was the site of a high-profile case in the early 80s.Mary Above: A Plowshares action at the Minuteman III missile site in Colorado. Below: ERA advocates pouring blood on the floor of the Capital in Springfield, Illinois. Lee Sargent, a former long-time (37 years) Champaign-Urbana resident, teacher, and activist who was arrested in July of 1982 for pouring blood at the state capital in Springfield upon Illinois’ refusal to pass the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Sargent and her comrades, unlike the sisters and Berrigan, used pigs’ blood rather than their own. Part of a Champaign-Urbana area group of radical feminists called the Grassroots Group of Second Class Citizens, Sargent and others practiced a number of acts of civil disobedience against the state of Illinois that spring, including chain-ins, street theater, and taking over the floor of the House of Representatives. The most extreme action took place as the ERA was voted down in the Senate. Right after the votes were counted, the nine women who participated wrote the names of the Governor and anti-ERA legislators on the marble floor outside senate chambers using pig blood. Blood, according to Sargent, was used “to symbolize the death of ERA and the blood of women who suffer without legal equality.”

Women Rising in Resistance was a continuation of the Grassroots Group founded in the early 1980s that served as a network for radical feminist activists. Lasting until the early 1990s, it promoted high-profile direct action and encouraged women to question their reluctance to take risks, because women have been socialized into passivity and have “lost their sense of adventure.” The action in 1982 in Springfield, which gathered nation-wide media attention, communicated women’s pain and symbolized back-alley coat-hanger abortions. “We wanted something really dramatic to happen,” explained Sargent in a recent phone conversation. The act of “blood writing,” she explains, was a nonviolent but nonetheless direct action against institutional oppression against women that served to grab attention, even frighten, men. Men, she claims, are not as used to blood because they don’t menstruate. They are not as accustomed to the messiness of womanhood and motherhood. When I asked Sargent why, if it was a symbolic gesture anyway, they used real blood, her response was that at that particular moment – the death of the ERA in Illinois – feminists needed to take dramatic action. The intention was to write, with the blood, not splatter it about. Media coverage would have it that the two gallons of pigs’ blood were dumped everywhere. The women were charged with a felony destruction of property amounting to more than $300 which was bargained into a misdemeanor. Sargent’s advice is to consider the costs and consequences of direct action before engaging in it, to pick and choose; but her mantra seems to be that “we need to be really creative.” In the early 1980s, the feminist movement was suffering the conservative backlash that continues today. It is more and more difficult to have a progressive mass movement
when we are always on the defense, she says.

What might this mean and why does it matter now? Women, says Sargent, continue to suffer the effects of the 1980s backlash and, if you are keeping track of waves and ebbs and flows, have been lost among more and more talk about firefighting heroes and shadowy enemies. What all of these women express in their activism is that we need to pay attention to politics; we need to speak up; we need to recognize other women, whether in our cell bloc or cubicle. And sometimes we need to take creative action. Locally, this might mean re-interrogating the place of women and perhaps feminism within political conversations such as those occurring in this newspaper. Globally, it might mean re-opening conversations about gender and sexuality while protesting the ghastly effects of globalization, such as black-market trading of domestic workers and child prostitutes, the effects of AIDS on mothers and orphaned children in Africa, and large-scale human-rights abuses against women in the Middle East and Asia.

-- Public i, v3 #10, Dec.-Jan. 2003-4

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