A Shoe's
Eye View
of the
Pentagon:
A Lesson
in
Non-Violence

by
Toni
Flynn

 

Well I woke up this morning with the cold water, with the cold water, with the cold. Tom Waits

When they come for the innocent without crossing over your body, cursed be your religion and your life.

As printed on a Viva House C.W. T-shirt

A couple of years ago in May, I took a trip to Washington D.C. and literally landed flat on my face at the Pentagon. Voluntarily. I had joined about 100 other protesters, playing the role of ‘dead bodies’ in a dramatic reenactment of a Guatemalan massacre at the hands of the School of the Americas graduates, while several other protesters traced around us with red soy paint, representing the bloodshed of innocent people. It was the least I could do in the way of a small (but nevertheless frightening) gesture of compassion and solidarity with the poor of Central and South America.

While we performed our drama, 2000 other peace activists rallied and sang in the hopes of closing down the School of the Americas, nicknamed the SOA. For those of you who don’t yet know, the SOA is a tax-payer-funded U.S. Army school founded in 1946, originally based in Panama, now located at Fort Benning, Georgia. The school has been documented as teaching torture, disappearance, and death tactics to Latin American military who in turn, use their training to kill and suppress the poor – and champions of the poor – in their own cities, villages, and countryside.

The outrageous history of this school was on my mind throughout the morning of our Pentagon action – a morning which dawned gray, cloudy, dreary and cold. The Pentagon building itself, as we approached it, projected an equally gray and frigid persona. Its stark walls and narrow windows loomed above us ominously, as though to glare us into submission as we approached its enormous military eye to the world; an eye created to target and annihilate splinters from the eyes of other nations, while remaining blind to its own Promethean-proportioned log, lodged so deeply as to distort its own vision.

Most of us wore long-sleeved shirts and thick sweaters to ward off the uncompromising chill in the air as we processed around the Pentagon in white death masks with white crosses bearing the names of murdered, massacred, or disappeared victims. Some held up names we knew: San Salvador’s Archbishop Oscar Romero, the Jesuit martyrs, the slain missionary women. Others held up names of simple villagers killed in remote areas of El Salvador, Guatemala, and other neighboring countries.

The procession culminated at the grassy parade grounds in front of the ceremonial entrance to the Pentagon. Inside, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were no doubt gathering over coffee, anxious to begin preparing new strategies for bombing Kosovo or for continuing the Sanctions against Iraq. We SOA protesters clustering outside were – most likely – a relatively minor irritant to these powerful decision-makers wanting to concentrate on more blatant war matters.

Still, we persisted (though unsuccessfully) in our endeavors to send a representative inside the Pentagon to present Defense Secretary Bill Cohen with evidence of the outrageous destruction wreaked upon our poorer neighbors by the violent teachings at the School of the Americas. (After all, hadn’t Clinton, in the wake of the Columbine High School tragedy (where children with guns shot down other children) announced the need for our schools to instruct students about non-violence?)

By late morning, as part of our dramatization of real events, I found myself prostrate, belly down and silent, on the cold and unforgiving cement walkway that stretched alongside of the grassy field where I had just been standing. From the ground, I could only see the legs and arms of my fellow resisters who were also sprawled about, as though dead. A friendly pair of sneakers approached me; an arm and a hand moved around me, painting symbolic red outlines around my body.

Soon, I heard the swift, hard steps of the Pentagon Police, saw the spit-shine on their black shoes as they began arresting the painters. One policeman stepped on my right hand. I’ll admit it ... even though I had willingly chosen to participate in a non-violent action, even though I had prepared myself mentally and spiritually, even though I felt it was a righteous deed, still and all, my hand hurt and I was scared. What would occur next? Would I too be arrested? I was momentarily rendered powerless over my fate.

And then it happened. The Pentagon Police gave orders to a couple of other Pentagon security men to turn hoses on those of us who were lying on the sidewalk. I saw a pair of strong hands screw in a big black hose. I watched while those same hands turned the water pressure on full blast. I felt the water as it whisked over the red paint surrounding me and puddled around and under my body. I didn’t move. I didn’t make a sound. Nor did any of my comrades. We were deep into the practice of our non-violent responsiveness to violence.

This man – the one with the hose aimed at me – must have gotten angry over our stillness. With a fury, he turned the hose on my body and on my face. My glasses fell off. Water spilled into my mouth and up my nostrils. I was more than scared. I was horrified. And humiliated. The water felt freezing cold. The icy air was merciless. I started to shiver uncontrollably. My feet and hands were numb. I thought to myself, this is the point where I’m supposed to pray for my enemy, but I was too frightened to do anything more than catch a soggy breath. Finally, the man moved on to spray others. I saw the back of his boots, wet and splattered with red. Someone from the crowd approached me and placed a jacket over me. It seemed like forever before a few of my friends came up to lift me out of the red puddles, saying, "It’s over."

I’m back home now in the modest house that serves as a little Catholic Worker outpost in the High Desert of California. The sun is shining as I write and I feel grateful for the warmth. I’m safe and comfortable. But I don’t want to become too accustomed to safety and comfort. Here in this affluent country, it is tempting to join the status quo in the unfettered pursuit of security and ease. I need to daily remind myself that until all peoples are free to live without poverty and fear, we must make sacrifices on their behalf.

I’ll never forget the sobering humiliation of being hosed down at the Pentagon. I came away from that day with a cold, a fever, and a painful fire in my heart. But in truth, it was only water, not bullets, that assaulted me; red paint, not blood that pooled under me. I walked away from my experience into the arms of nearby friends and supporters. The victims of the SOA will never walk again with family and friends except in our remembrance of them. They are the voiceless dead for whom we must speak – with our voices, our pens, our non-violent actions, our compassionate cry for justice and mercy to all peoples.

So there you have it. My recollections of a day in Washington D.C. – my shoe’s eye view of the Pentagon. I wish I could say that the non-violent protest was far-reaching, that, as in my wildest, most prophetic dreams, the Pentagon stopped making war and the SOA ceased teaching war tactics, that new institutions arose in their place wherein peacemaking, social justice, and creative conflict resolution abounded, that the U.S. government started putting human rights before supremacy and that the people who share the Americas with us became free from fear and oppression. Such – as yet – is not the case.

I’m afraid that, at best, we tugged at the consciences of a handful of Pentagon police officers and we enlightened those few citizens who bothered to read the back-page press coverage in the next day’s newspaper. Our accomplishment seems small compensation for the dead who are still dead and for their surviving family members. And yet, there is a certainty I take as a sign of hope: On an ordinary day, ordinary people (myself included) showed up unarmed, to face the powers of the Pentagon, and for several hours we stood for, we fell down for, we loved ... our neighbor.

Toni Flynn, a long-time resident of San Luis Obispo County, currently lives and volunteers at the High Desert Catholic Worker located in the High Desert region near a Benedictine monastery and several detention centers.