The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope (50 page)

The Last Mountain
is a documentary about the threat to Coal River Mountain in West Virginia, which is slated for destruction by mountaintop-removal coal mining, one of the most environmentally devastating forms of mining being practiced today. The worst offender is the coal giant Massey Energy and its former CEO, Don Blankenship. A broad coalition of activists from around the world has been active in trying to stop Massey, led by regular, working-class people from the surrounding towns and hamlets of Appalachia. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime environmentalist and lawyer, joined them in the fight and is featured in the film. I asked him about the struggle:

This film is about the subversion of American democracy. Last year, the Supreme Court overruled a hundred years of ironclad American precedent with the Citizens United case, and got rid of a law that was passed by Teddy Roosevelt in 1907 that saved democracy from the huge concentrations of wealth that had created essentially a corporate kleptocracy during the Gilded Age, and Americans had forfeited their democracy during that time. . . . For the first time since the Gilded Age, we’re seeing those kinds of economic concentrations return to our country.

Kennedy describes the subversion by corporate power of the press, the courts, and Congress and state legislatures: “The erosion of all these institutions, I think, of American democracy have forced people who care about our country, and who care about civic health, into this box of civil disobedience and local action.”

This is a historic month for Robert Kennedy Jr.: It is the fiftieth anniversary of his uncle John Kennedy’s inauguration as president, and also of his father Robert Kennedy’s inauguration as U.S. attorney general. I asked him about those two, felled by assassins’ bullets:

To me, the most important thing that John Kennedy did, and my father was trying to do, was to stand up to the military-industrial complex, which . . . President Eisenhower, in his final speech just before my uncle took the reins of power, said this is the greatest threat to American democracy in the history of our republic, ever: the growth of an uncontrolled military-industrial complex in combination with large corporations and with influential members of Congress, who would slowly but systematically deprive Americans of the civil rights and the constitutional rights that made this country an exemplary nation.

In a moving moment here at Sundance, Kennedy, who had just flown in from the funeral of his uncle, Sargent Shriver (founder of the Peace Corps), came out after a screening of
The Last Mountain
, and was embraced by Harry Belafonte, himself the subject of the film that opened this year’s festival, the breathtaking biopic of the singer and activist called
Sing Your Song
, which is really a chronicle of the movements for racial and economic justice of the twentieth century.

Belafonte was one of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s closest confidants. I spoke with Harry about his lifetime of activism, and about his feelings about President Barack Obama. He told me, “During his campaign for the presidency, he was talking before businessmen on Wall Street in New York. I said, ‘Well, you know, I hope you bring the challenge more forcefully to the table.’ And he said, ‘Well, when are you and Cornel West going to cut me some slack?’ I said, ‘What makes you think we haven’t?’”

Belafonte was a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, who told him of an exchange between her late husband, President Franklin Roosevelt, and A. Philip Randolph, a key organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, and before that the major force behind the black train conductors’ union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Randolph described what needed to happen to improve the condition of black and working people in the country. Roosevelt said he did not disagree with anything Randolph said. Retelling the story here to me at Sundance, Harry leaned back in his chair and repeated what Roosevelt told Randolph: “Go out and make me do it.”

September 7, 2011

9/11 Victim 0001: Father Mychal’s Message

The body bag marked “Victim 0001” on September 11, 2001, contained the corpse of Father Mychal Judge, a Catholic chaplain with the Fire Department of New York. When he heard about the disaster at the World Trade Center, he donned his Catholic collar and firefighter garb and raced downtown. He saw people jump to their deaths to avoid the inferno more than 1,000 feet above. At 9:59 a.m., the South Tower collapsed, and the force and debris from that mass of steel, concrete, glass, and humanity as it hit the ground is likely what killed Father Mychal. His was the first recorded death from the attacks that morning. His life’s work should be central to the tenth anniversary commemorations of the September 11 attacks: peace, tolerance, and reconciliation.

One of the first vigils held this year was in honor of Father Mychal. About 300 people gathered Sunday in front of the St. Francis Church where Judge lived and worked, just down the block from the Ladder 24 / Engine 1 Firehouse. The march followed Father Mychal’s final path to Ground Zero. The man behind the annual remembrance is Steven McDonald, the former New York police detective who was shot in 1986. He was questioning fifteen-year-old Shavod Jones in Central Park. Jones shot McDonald, leaving him paralyzed for life.

I caught up with McDonald as he led the procession, rolling down Seventh Avenue in his wheelchair. He talked about what Father Mychal meant to him: “He, more than anything . . . reaffirmed my faith in God, and that it was important to me to forgive the boy who shot me. And I’m alive today because of that.”

Father Mychal had managed to get Jones on the phone with McDonald and his wife. He apologized from prison. Taking the lessons of reconciliation, McDonald joined Judge in a trip to Northern Ireland, where they worked together to try to help end the violence there.

Father Mychal was well known to the poor and afflicted of New York City and New Jersey. He helped the homeless, and people with HIV/AIDS. As a member of the Franciscan order, he would often wear the traditional brown robe and sandals. But there was a half-known secret about him: He was gay. In his private diaries, the revered Catholic priest wrote, “I thought of my gay self and how the people I meet never get to know me fully.” The diaries were given to journalist Michael Daly by Judge’s twin sister, Dympna, and appear in Daly’s book
The Book of Mychal: The Surprising Life and Heroic Death of Father Mychal Judge
.

Brendan Fay is a longtime Irish-American gay activist who was a friend of Judge’s. He produced a film about the Franciscan friar in 2006 called
Saint of 9/11
and is finishing up another one called
Remembering Mychal
. Fay told me this week: “He was one of the priests at Dignity New York, an organization for gay and lesbian Catholics. . . . He ministered to [us] during the AIDS crisis, when there were few priests available to our community.”

I first interviewed Fay in October 2001, after an Associated Press photo appeared showing a U.S. bomb before being dropped on Afghanistan, with the words scrawled in chalk, “High Jack This, Fags.” The offensive slogan forced the military to order its sailors to pen more “positive” messages on their bombs.

On September 20, 2001, President George W. Bush addressed a joint session of Congress. He declared, famously, “They hate our freedoms.” He welcomed Lisa Beamer to the Capitol, the widow of Todd Beamer, the passenger on board United Flight 93 who was heard to say, “Let’s roll” before attacking the hijackers. Beamer’s fellow passenger, Mark Bingham, a rugby player and public relations consultant who also joined in the fight to prevent the hijackers from using the plane as a weapon, was openly gay. As was David Charlebois, the co-pilot of American Airlines Flight 77, which hit the Pentagon.

A decade later, Brendan Fay reflects on the life of his friend: “On 9/11, the one thing we can take from Mychal Judge is, in the midst of this hell and war and evil and violence, here is this man who directs us to another possible path as human beings: We can choose the path of compassion and nonviolence and reconciliation. Mychal Judge had a heart as big as New York. There was room for everybody. And I think that’s the lesson.”

Stop the Violence

August 9, 2012

Sikh Killings: On Gun Laws, It’s Bipartisan Consensus, Not Gridlock, That’s the Problem

Another mass murder, another shooting spree, leaving bodies bullet-riddled by a legally obtained weapon. This time, it was Oak Creek, Wisconsin, at a Sikh temple, as people gathered for their weekly worship. President Barack Obama said Monday, “I think all of us recognize that these kinds of terrible, tragic events are happening with too much regularity for us not to do some soul-searching.” Amidst the carnage, platitudes. With an average of thirty-two people killed by guns in this country every day—the equivalent of five Wisconsin massacres per day—both major parties refuse to deal with gun control. It’s the consensus, not the gridlock, that’s the problem.

The president’s press secretary, Jay Carney, said, “We need to take common-sense measures that protect Second Amendment rights and make it harder for those who should not have weapons under existing law from obtaining weapons.” It’s important to note where Jay Carney made that point, reiterating the phrase “common sense” five times in relation to the president’s intransigence against strengthening gun laws and invoking “Second Amendment” a stunning eight times. He spoke from the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room in the White House, named after one of Mr. Carney’s predecessors, who was shot in the head by John Hinckley during the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan in 1981. Brady survived and co-founded with his wife the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. After each of these massacres, the Brady Campaign has called for strengthened gun control.

This latest mass killing was very likely a hate crime, perpetrated by Wade Michael Page, a white, 40-year-old U.S. Army veteran with links to white supremacist groups and membership in skinhead rock bands. Page grew up in Littleton, Colorado, the same town where, in 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold plotted and executed their mass-murder plan at Columbine High School. Page was in the U.S. Army from 1992 to 1998. He did missile-system repairs and later was a “psychological operations” specialist, although it is not clear in what capacity, based first at Fort Bliss, Texas, then at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

Page received a “general discharge” from the U.S. Army: lower than an honorable discharge, but not as bad as a dishonorable one. Reports suggest he had a problem with alcohol, with several arrests for drunken driving. He recently lost a truck-driving job for the same reason, which may have precipitated the loss of his home to foreclosure. Page may have been troubled, but he was by no means unknown. After the shooting, FBI special agent Teresa Carlson of Milwaukee told the press, “There may be references to him in various files, and those are things that are being analyzed right now, but we had no reason to believe, and as far as we know, no law-enforcement agency had any reason to believe that he was planning or plotting or capable of such violence.”

Page was a prominent member of the neo-Nazi skinhead music scene, was known to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks right-wing hate groups, and was also personally interviewed, between 2001 and 2003, by Pete Simi, associate professor of criminology at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Despite the arrests, despite the history of membership in hate groups, Page was able to walk into a gun shop and buy the 9 mm pistol legally, according to the shop owner. The fact that it was legal is the problem.

As if on cue, two days after Page’s murderous rampage in Wisconsin, Jared Loughner appeared in court to plead guilty to the shooting spree in Tucson, Arizona, that left six dead and many injured, including former member of Congress Gabrielle Giffords. Loughner has been diagnosed with schizophrenia and will spend the rest of his life behind bars. Patricia Maisch survived the shooting. As Loughner was tackled that day in January 2011, Maisch grabbed the high-capacity magazine that Loughner was using to reload his gun. Maisch and two other survivors of that shooting have launched an advertisement with the group Mayors Against Illegal Guns, demanding that both President Obama and Governor Mitt Romney come up with a plan to deal with guns in this country.

The day after the Wisconsin shooting, I spoke with Gurcharan Grewal, president of the Sikh Religious Society of Wisconsin. He told me: “Ultimately, the problem comes to gun control. I don’t know when we’re going to get serious about all this, and I don’t know how many more lives it will take before something will be done. “

Neither Obama nor Romney agrees that gun control is the answer. It will take a movement to make it happen.

August 2, 2012

The Obama Administration Torpedoes the Arms Trade Treaty

Quick: What is more heavily regulated, global trade of bananas or battleships? In late June, activists gathered in New York’s Times Square to make the absurd point, that, unbelievably, “there are more rules governing your ability to trade a banana from one country to the next than governing your ability to trade an AK-47 or a military helicopter.” So said Amnesty International USA’s Suzanne Nossel at the protest, just before the start of the United Nations Conference on the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), which ran from July 2 to July 27. Thanks to a last-minute declaration by the United States that it “needed more time” to review the short, eleven-page treaty text, the conference ended last week in failure.