The
AFL-CIO
Rally & March
in Seattle
by
Bob Banner
Some Personal Observations
I walked into an outdoor stadium full of posters, banners, and placards from Teamsters, longshoremen, unions representing carpenters, metalworkers, steel workers, auto workers, marine engineers, aviators, teachers, drywall workers, plumbers, electricians. There were farmers from Japan, supporters for opening the trade barriers to Cuba, banners that had photos of Che Guevara along side Zapata with the famous quote from Zapata: "I would rather die on my feet than live on my knees."
People who dressed like turtles gathered together. Union workers often wore the same hat and rain gear (you could see pockets of different colors throughout the stadium depending on which union it was); they would often chant their union slogans or sing their songs or roar loudly when their representatives came to the microphone to speak to the thousands participating in the rally (see photos).
What was truly remarkable was that so many different groups all had the same purpose... of saying "NO to the WTO!" What was more amazing to me was a feeling that the global village was getting smaller. We saw (not only the speaker on stage but there were two huge screens on either side of the speaker that magnified their face a few hundred times) and heard labor representatives for millions of workers throughout the world... from the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, Canada, Europe, the US. When a representative spoke about the children making toys who would never be able to play with those toys or that children working for slave wages should be in school (or the millions of US workers getting downsized to overseas labor) there was something that became more real to me. It wasn’t just some factoid that I’ve read in a magazine, website, or book. This had a picture to it... a man or woman speaking passionately about what is happening to our children, to our world... and it became closer to home. Their real genuine experience got transmitted to us viscerally... made it more real... more true... more compassionate... made it less easy to walk away into our private worlds of security and fantasy.
As it shrunk my world in that sense, it simultaneously expanded it by seeing all these people around me, in the stadium, walking around the main floor, either speaking on stage or chanting on the floor... seeing and feeling their concerns, their rage, their humor, their humanity.
To hear workers speak about the environment, to hear labor representatives rage against the social inequities and to hear environmentalists speak about wretched working conditions in the third world... it was truly a historical event.
To some, it may appear easy to organize people around a common enemy. Wars have always used such propaganda techniques. It’s also easy to yell out passionate cathartic sound bytes along with a roaring crowd who agrees with you. These are simple psychological facts about human behavior... we see it in sport’s stadiums and in churches every Sunday. But it can’t take away from the rage of the constant lies the developmental /economic/exploiting model has kept from us. We are tired of the lies. We are tired about the media dramatizing the violence between the police and demonstrators in Seattle when the institutional violence of the WTO/IMF/World Bank/GATT/NAFTA goes unheeded in mainstream journalism. We are tired of the manipulation, tired of the banal use of the word "democracy" whenever our overseas investments are at risk; tired of their incessant blindness and deafness to the growing chasm between the north and the south, between the wealthy and the poor, between nature and profits. And it’s not so much as the WTO as it is a world view, a paradigm that is prevalent in both the WTO and the chamber of commerce’s in the developed world. It exists every time we shop at some convenient global supermarket like Costco or WalMart. The WTO is not something out there that doesn’t affect us. It’s a focus of what we’ve become and what we’ve allowed ourselves to become. If it is a symbolic point for our rage, so be it. Let’s use it. Let’s learn about the WTO. Let’s educate ourselves on why sprawl and vineyards and box stores are creeping along at a faster rate in our beautiful bioregion.
The destruction of local economies in the first world and the perpetual continuation of an unsustainable economic model is very much related to the policies and paradigm of the WTO. We can study the WTO and see how its policies against the third world are very similar to our policies in our neighborhoods, our city councils, our board of supervisors. It is global and local. As I witnessed in Seattle, the days of the WTO are numbered. Like the AFL-CIO bumper sticker says about the WTO: "If it doesn’t work for working families... it doesn’t work."
It’s not a matter of easily blaming the WTO for all of our social ills. It’s a matter of studying the global economy and see how its wreaking havoc on us and THEN to come up with alternative creative models... fair economic models, true indicators that speak for a genuine health of our communities as in "advertising-free" schools, more community gardens, more SOAR like initiatives to thwart the destruction of eco-systems and prime ag land, more support for the family farmer and local businesses. As Daniel Quinn so eloquently put it in his latest book, "People will ordinarily put up with being miserable for only so long. It’s not the quitters who are extraordinary and mysterious, it’s we, who have somehow managed to persuade ourselves that we must persist in our misery whatever the cost and not abandon it even in the face of calamity." Well, we are living in calamitous times and it’s time to abandon our misery.. and create alliances and movements to thwart globalization and to increase the support for a true local and sustainable economy and culture.Bob Banner publishes HopeDance magazine.
