I went to three protests this month that turned out to be only one protest.
The first was billed as a Detroit Anti-War Committee Public Meeting.
It turned out to be an anti-meeting. It happens every Friday at 6 p.m.,
which ensures participants will face breathtakingly horrid traffic,
traffic that, on the way, just got comically more dangerous, potholes
getting deeper, people going from rolling stops at red lights to just
simply blasting right through them, illegal turns, and signs that, as
you got more to the center of Detroit, just got more confusing, as if
they were designed to make people get pulled over. I stopped to get
gas, paid, and, walking away, the person at the counter yelled,
“No rewards?” I didn’t know what she even meant, saying, out loud,
“No.” Adding, “Just punishments.” I got to the protest, which was
a plague of abandoned buildings, a maze of haunted-house buildings,
buildings that were the opposite of building, were tearing-downs,
slowly-rottings, passersby rare, and not any clichés of pimps or
prostitutes, but instead white joggers doing white jogging in white
socks under white clouds with white ghosts hovering in the dark
broken-glass windows. One of the buildings had a Michigan
Historic Site plaque, in MSU Spartan green and white with maize
lettering, letting me know it’d previously been a recording studio, for artists
like John Lee Hooker (memorable album title of It Serve You Right
to Suffer), Johnnie Ray (memorable chart hit “What’s the Use?”), and
bad-ass Dizzy Gillespie (memorable everything). This place is holy
and abandoned. Imagine areas of Heaven where the angels have all lost
their jobs, diaspora elsewhere, dispersion to the point of no person, or
rare person, medium rare, pale, pulled by their jogging route and gone.
Pearly Gates weeded, locked, closed. Across the street is the protest.
A can’t-miss building I found hard to find, but then this window
with a NO MORE WAR sign that, the first time I misread as
NO MO’ REWARD. Signs of punishments lining the window, about
Palestine, martial law, racism, Ukraine, Ukraine again, Venezuela,
the Pentagon, Black Lives Mattering, genocide, apartheid, Detroit,
Iran, and a final sign I couldn’t read. Global-minded. Concerned about
the world. But absent. No one. Noon-bright in the empty evening.
Police siren noise pollution fading. The building closed. The meeting
offering no one to meet. I was interested in anti-war, but this is just
anti-. The opposite of a protest. A pre-test? A practice? Just a test?
To see if you’d come. I’ve come. For nothing. For no one. I think
of how disappointing this would be for a protestor. Know there’s
an hour drive back. To think about wasting time. I think of the close
to one-trillion-dollar US military budget. One trillion. Do you know
how much Republicans and Democrats have to work together
to create a one-trillion-dollar military budget? I think of the RATM
video for “Testify,” how Gore is Bush, Bush is gore, how they bore,
gush, the same rhetoric, the same party pretending to be two,
the dichotomy of the two-party system really being a craniotomy
one-party system pretending that it’s two. I sat in my car,
realized how many of these protests are absences, one protestor
in Iowa, no protestors in Detroit, where two protests equal one
person, how the listing of protests online might be fake, done
to pretend there are the 66 upcoming events posted on findaprotest
for Michigan, but how many are there? Nothing? 0.0 protests?
Or is it conservatives posting fake protests? How much of it
is smoke-and-mirages? Across the board. I think of the Ann Arbor
Human Rights Commission, how I’ve heard of complaints that it’s
fake, how hard it is to find any information online on how to file
a complaint against the quote-unquote ‘Human Rights’ Commission
that seems to be a Corporate Rights Commission, whose mission
seems to be omission. Could they form another Human Rights
Commission that will examine the practices of the Human Rights
Commission? I sat in my car thinking maybe we just sleep now in the fire.
It’s a powerful thing to show up to a protest and have no one be there.
It speaks volumes. Except those volumes have been book-burned.
That was the first protest. The second protest was a Jewish gentleman
standing in front of the U of M library. He looked like he was protesting.
I wanted to hear his voice. I approached, asked if he was protesting.
“No,” he said, shocked, actually, honestly, looking afraid. I apologized.
There was something about his presence, the pacing, the waiting,
where it felt he was standing there to be seen. He was. He clarified.
“It’s a Jewish holiday,” he said. I didn’t know, found out it’s Sukkot,
celebrating Israelites forty years wandering in the desert, from what
I found online. And that’s what he looked like, felt like, like he
was wandering, wondering. When I spoke to him, there was
gentleness, but mixed with fear. He reminded me of one of the newly
partially paralyzed boys in the movie Murderball, one of my favorite
documentaries ever, deceptive title, but a film about disabled
empowerment, but a boy in the film who’d just had his accident,
freshly dealing with the reality he’d never walk again, and how
quiet-voiced he was, this revelation of how deeply life can hurt you,
how vulnerable we are, how much more vulnerable he is now
that—as a scene shows in the film—he struggles with Velcro,
how taking on and off a shoe is struggle, a motocross competitor
now competing against everything. Jesus Christ, did I cry during
viewing that film. Even though it’s filled with comedy. But this man,
telling me he’s from England, married an American, why he’s here,
shy, shyly, everything humble, but fear, this feel of fear, him asking me
why I’m talking to him, me telling him I went to Brandeis, looking
for some connection, him telling me he’s heard of it, barely, and my
shock, saying, “Brandeis?” as if the word is just filled with Jewishness.
I leave him alone. It’s not a protest. But it is, sort of, a protest.
U of M, to be honest, when I studied there, and I’ve taken classes here
and there, random, multiple universities, sometimes just one class,
a dozen universities, but University of Michigan, by far, was the most
anti-Semitic college I ever studied at, comments in class where I was
just shocked—from subtle anti-Jewish microaggressions to abrupt
Holocaust denial—where I turned to a student who told me she’s Jewish
and asked, after one comment, whispering to her, “What do you think
about that?” (about what was just said) and she said, “I’m used to it.”
Stayed silent. Always silent. I couldn’t believe how quiet she was.
A scared sort of silence. That was the second protest. I was done.
This was the poem… Except, driving, I saw a group of thirty or so
people walking, carrying signs. I pulled over, parked illegally, walked
quickly to them. A week ago, there’d been a couple of Palestinian protestors
and I’d tried to hurry to interview them, but they had disappeared, driving
with human-sized green-white-and-black flag with red triangle, pan-Arab
colors, young boys leaning out car windows with the energy of the maybe-
most-beautiful-woman-ever M.I.A. with her “Bad Girls” video with its
“Live fast, die young” repetition, and Moroccan keffiyeh drivers doing
drifting stunts, cars balanced on two wheels with tanker fires and land-
scapes that seem to hint at a Detroit Persian Gulf, and, like the editing
of the video, a blink and the boys were gone, impossible to interview.
So I parked quickly, rushed, not wanting to miss this obvious protest,
especially as I’d not been to one with the month ending, nothing official,
and this was. There’s a way that protestors walk, like they own the area,
and that’s what happened, as I approached, them coming down the side-
walk, with two elderly white men in crossing-guard gear acting as security,
walking straight towards me to let me know they were not moving off
of the sidewalk. I walked up, asked if I could interview one of them.
As always seems to happen, there’s a leader. A guy pointed, didn’t
want to be interviewed, said he was busy praying. He pointed to a woman—
Sandy. The second protest I’d gone to led by a Sandy. This conjuring up
of Sandy Hook. Of Navy Seal surf torture. Of Sandy Olsson turning from
prim and proper to black skintight leather by the end of Grease, where
you felt it was Janus. I went to the wrong woman. They corrected me.
I tried talking to Sandy, but it was too loud with the chanting recitals
through a mic and speaker. She told me to wait three minutes and
the protest was done. We walked and arrived, nowhere, the middle
of a dead-end, a cul-de-sac, this feeling like somehow we’d arrived
somewhere, but I looked around and it felt utterly random. They prayed,
“We want you to close this place down.” What place? They prayed
more. The realization that this was an anti-abortion protest. Shirts
of PRAY TO END ABORTION and I WAS ONE WAY AND NOW I’M
COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. Their ages everything, from eight
to eight decades. It ends. I talk with Sandy. As I do, men come over,
interrupt. I know this is just my opinion, one I’m sure people would
love to argue with, but I kinda think any abortion discussion should
be women-led. When the men would come over, they wanted to control
the conversation, yanking it in completely different directions than where
Sandy was heading, so that I asked her just that, “Should men listen more
when the discussion is about abortion?” She said, basically, no, that
they’re just as much invested, that abortion affects mothers and fathers,
and, especially, the babies. The word ‘babies’ gets spoken of a lot
during the talk. I ask the hard questions. What about rape? She tells me
“Eighty percent” of raped women don’t want an abortion. I don’t know
about the accuracy, but ask, using that figure, about the twenty percent
who do. They talk about “all” the alternatives. “Like what?” I ask.
“Give the baby up.” To? “Foster care.” I talk about foster care statistics,
how much abuse happens in foster care. A man takes over, says, “You just
have to do the research.” But about forty percent of foster care children
do experience abuse. I ask about poverty. How what we’re really talking
about is doing forced pregnancies on the poor. Sandy tells me that women
who’ve had abortions have increased statistics for alcoholism, suicidality,
drug use. I wonder if it’s chicken vs. egg, if it’s more complicated than
what she’s saying. I ask about overpopulation, that if there’s the 73 million
abortions globally per year, that it means by 2040 we’d have an added
increase of one billion people to the population, a population already
estimated to be 9.2 billion, so it’d make it 10.2 billion, and how those
pregnancies would directly impact some of the poorest areas of the world,
that you can’t talk about global banning of all abortion (always) without
discussing an obvious population explosion caused by it. She says,
“You’re the only person who’s brought up that question in thirty years.”
I tell her that it needs to be discussed. She’s honest, tells me she’s never
considered it, hasn’t done the research. I encourage her to do the research.
I ask her hard questions. She never turns to emotion, never shouting at me,
no frustration, anger, an anger I’ve seen so common at other protests,
one in Berkeley I remember where what was shouted through megaphones
had nothing to do with logic, but just sheer rage. I ask her why,
why she’s being so grounded, even when I’m pushing her about real
problems with global banning of all abortion that doesn’t consider
how it’s so much more complex than that. She tells me two things.
She says the left doesn’t come from logic, but only emotion, because,
she says, “They don’t have the truth.” She also says she’s coming
from “love,” not hate, telling me, “I hate no one.” She tells me
about women coming out of abortion clinics post-abortion and
not judging, but asking if they could pray with the women, how
they’d cry doing that, appreciating it. To be honest, she feels like
her main root issue with doing this is because she loves family.
The problem, of course, is that it’s her conception of family
and her choices she wants everyone to follow. But her heart
is worlds away from anti-abortion violence. I ask what she’s
doing to create change. She says, “Praying.” I ask what else
and she says that she works to get other people to pray too,
to stop this, says it’s succeeding, that abortion clinics are closing
across the U.S. I ask the statistics for that and she says nine
abortion clinics have closed in Michigan. She feels it’s because
of prayer. I ask if it’s because of Trump. She smiles. I say,
“You love Trump?” She says, “What’s not to love?” I think
about that question. What’s not to love about the President?
I ask if the Planned Parenthood nearby’s open, figuring, perhaps,
they might supply me with some responses to that question.
She tells me it’s closed. I ask why she’s here now, why she
isn’t here when it’s open. “Oh,” she says, “We’re here for
forty days.” Tells me from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. For forty days.
I think of Sukkot. I think of the world population in 2040.
I think of forty percent of foster care children being abused.
I think of 40-oz. malt liquor. I think of less than forty percent
of rape being reported to law enforcement. I think of Jesus’
forty days in the wilderness. I think of the forty days of rain
of Noah’s flood. I think of the more than 440,000 rapes and
sexual assaults occurring in the U.S. each year. I think of
two in forty women in the U.S. experiencing a pregnancy
from rape or sexual coercion. I think it’s more complicated
than forty days of prayer, from September 23 to November 1,
the Day of the Dead. I think of the Bible quote for Matthew
2:40, how the quote from Matthew 2:40 says so much, and
what it says—as I’m sure you all know—is that it doesn’t
exist, because Matt only goes up to 2:23, but it doesn’t matter,
because it could be any quote and I’ve heard Bible quotes taken
in every direction you could imagine, one of the most brilliant
things I’ve ever experienced being a New Testament class at CMU,
with Dr. Reader, a man who was exactly that, as well-read
as any human I’ve met, who knew ancient Greek, Hebrew,
Aramaic, destroyed anti-gay misinterpretations, mistranslations
where he’d say, “Let’s look at the original language,” and you’d
realize the quote wasn’t talking about homosexuality, but about
pedophilia, which is different, monstrously different,
and how he knew the language, did the work, didn’t just
take the Bible in whatever translation was offered, but
realized every choice the translator was making. And
there’s a translation that happens when talking about
abortion, a translation we do with our lives, where what
we’ve experienced and our view based upon our experience
becomes the answer for everyone else, when, my God,
it’s a lot more complicated. But my hat’s off to who can
discuss it with love. Romans 12:2: Do not conform to the pattern
of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
