RNC2­Raid on the Convergence Center

By Starhawk

It’s Friday night. Our Pagan Cluster is sitting on the bluff of the Mississippi having our firstreal meeting, when Lisa gets a call. The cops are raiding the Convergence Center, where we’reorganizing meetings and trainings for the protests against the Republican NationalConvention. It’s not a role play, the caller says. It’s real.

Instantly, we jump up and hurry back the six or eight blocks to the old theater we are using formeetings, trainings and social gatherings. I ‘ve spent the last two days doing magical activismtrainings, teaching people how to stay calm and grounded in emergency situations and when thingsget chaotic. Now it’s time to put the training
into practice. Aaron, a tall, red-headed young man who could be one of my nephews strides alongbeside me. “Are you grounded?” I ask him. He nods, and runs ahead.

Nobody can keep up with Lisa, who speeds ahead
like an arrow, walking, not running, but still
covering the ground quickly. Andy and I trail
behind. We’re often street buddies, because
we’re both big, slow, and supremely calm and
stubborn, willing to wade into almost any
situation and become the immovable object.

We’re stopped by a line of cops just before we
reach the building. They refuse to let us
through, or to move their van which is blocking
Scarecrow’s car. There’s an investigation
underway, they say, and won’t say more.

Brush, our dear friend, is inside, having gone to
a jail solidarity meeting, ironically enough. So
are two very young people who had just joined our
cluster that night. I try calling Brush’s cell phone, but get no reply.

We wait. That’s what you do when the cops have
guns trained on kids inside a building. You
wait, and witness, and make phone calls, and try
to think of useful things to do.

We call lawyers. We call politicians. We try to
call media. We call friends who might know politicians and media.

Through the kitchen door, we can see young kids
sitting on the floor, handcuffed. We walk across
the street, back, made more phone calls. An
ambulance is parked in front, and the paramedics
head into the building, leaving a gurney
ready. Susu, from her car around the corner,
reports that the cops have been grabbing
pedestrians from the street, forcing them down to
the ground, handcuffing them.

Song, one of the local organizers, calls her City
Council member. She wants to call the Mayor,
Chris Coleman, who has promised that St. Paul
will be as welcoming to protestors as to
delegates, but no one has his home number.

What I have forgotten to tell people at the
training is how much of an action is just this:
tense, boring waiting, with a knot of anxiety in
your stomach and your feet starting to
hurt. Song talks to a helpful neighbor, who’s
come over to find out what’s happening. He knows
where the mayor lives, says it’s just a few blocks away, and draws us a map.

We decide to go and call on the Mayor, who could
call off the cops. About five of us troop down
there, through the soft night and a neighborhood
of comfortable homes and wide lawns on the bluffs
above the Mississippi. The Mayor’s house is a
comfortable Dutch Colonial, and lights were on
inside. We decide that just a few of us will go
to the door, so as not to look
intimidating. Song is a round, soft-bodied
middle-aged woman with a sweet face. Ellen is a
tiny brunette with a gap-toothed smile, and Lisa,
formidable organizer though she is, looks slight
and unthreatening. The rest of us hang
back. Someone opens the door. Our friends have
a conversation with the mayors’ wife, who is not
pleased to be visited by constituents late at
night, and who tells us we should call the
office. The Mayor, she says, is asleep, and she will not wake him up.

We think a mayor who was doing his job would get
up and go see what’s going on. Nonetheless, we
head back to the convergence space.

A protestor has been released from the
building. A small crowd has gathered across the
street, and Fox News has arrived. They interview
Song, who does her first ever Fox media
spot. She tells them the truth­that people were
in there watching movies­a documentary about
Meridel Le Seuer. Meridel would be proud, and
I’m glad she is with us in some form.

One by one, protestor’s trickle out. Now we get
more pieces of the story. The cops burst in,
with no warning. They pulled drew their guns on
everyone­including a five year old child who was
there with his mother, forced everyone down on the floor. It was terrifying.

They had a warrant, apparently, from the county,
not the city, to search for ‘bomb making
materials.’ They were searching everyone in the
building, then one by one releasing them as they found nothing.

They continue to find nothing, as we wait through
long hours. Meanwhile, more and more media
arrives. These cops are not as creative as the
DC cops during our first mobilization there
against the International Monetary Fund and the
World Bank. Those cops confiscated the lunchtime
soup­which included onions and chili powder,
claiming they were materials for home made pepper spray.

We wait until the last person gets out. He’s a
twenty year old who the cops have accused of
stealing his own backpack­but apparently they relented.

And now it’s morning. I wake up to the news that
cops have been raiding houses where activists are
staying, bursting in with the same bogus warrant
and arresting people, including a four year old
child. They’ve arrested people at the Food Not
Bombs house­a group dedicated to feeding
protestors and the homeless. They’ve arrested
others, presumably just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The Poor Peoples’ Campaign, which had set up camp
at Harriet Island, a park in the middle of the
Mississippi, has also been harassed, its
participants ordered to disperse and its organizers arrested.

Let me be perfectly clear here­all of us here are
planning nonviolent protests against an
administration which is responsible for immense
violence, bombs that have destroyed whole
countries, and hundreds of thousands of deaths.

This is the America that eight years of the Bush
administration have brought us, a place where
dissent is no longer tolerated, where pre-emptive
strikes have become the strategy of choice for
those who hold power, where any group can be
accused of ‘bombmaking’ or ‘terrorism’ on no
evidence whatsoever in order to deter dissent.

Please stand with us. Because it could be your home they are raiding, next.

Call the Mayors of St. Paul and
Minneapolis. Tell them you are outraged by these
attacks on dissent. Urge them to let Poor People
encamp and to let dissent be heard.

FLOOD THE MAYORS' OFFICES ASAP

St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman

651-266-8510

Minneapolis Mayor RT Rybak

(612) 673-2100

(612) 673-3000 outside Minneapolis

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Starhawk is a lifelong activist in peace and
global justice movements, a leader in the
feminist and earth-based spirituality movements,
author or coauthor of ten books, including The
Spiral Dance, The Fifth Sacred Thing, Webs of
Power: Notes from the Global Uprising, and her latest, The Earth Path.

Starhawk's website is www.starhawk.

org, and more
of her writings and information on her schedule
and activities can be found there.

At least 100 people where arrested after police surrounded protesters at the anti-capitalist Everything for Everyone street action on Monday evening.  The anti-capitalist march started at Civic Center Park just after 6 p.m. Nearly 500 protesters were met with riot police using pepper spray in front of the Denver City and County Building, but protesters pulled a fast one and put the cops at their backs as they marched across the park to Colfax and 15th Street.

Outside of the Sheraton Hotel on 15th Street between Court Place and W. Colfax Avenue riot police formed lines at the end of both blocks trapping hundreds of non-violent protesters while well dressed DNC attendees looked down from hotel windows.

Police used pepper spray on peaceful protesters in order to, as the corporate Rocky Mountain News wrote on Tuesday, "gain the cooperation of protesters."

Riot police formed two circles around demonstrators, one on the 15th Street, the other on the adjacent sidewalk next to the Civic Center.

The anti-capitalist march was heavily infiltrated by undercover police officers wearing bandanas to cover their faces, in black bloc attire and filming crowds and individuals. As the police surrounded the protesters, they pulled out a number of undercover cops into the police lines. Undercover officers trailed protesters throughout the action and around the surrounding areas.

About 50 people who found themselves on the street where arrested and taken to a temporary holding facility set up by the Denver Police Department that activists have renamed "Gitmo on the Platte." At one point police arbitrarily released around 50 protesters from the street to the sidewalk police line.

More than 100 people held on the sidewalk were detained for nearly two hours as many outside of the police lines chanted "Let them go!" Police eventually released demonstrators on the sidewalk, but many preferred to stay inside the police lines to stand in solidarity with those arrested.

After the activists and riot police lingered on the streets in front of the Civic Center. Police targeted individuals and snatched them from the crowd. Arrests continued past 9 p.m. More than 100 people were taken into police custody by the end of the night.

Before the action, police pulled over a truck carrying banners, flags, and a pink-tank sound system that was successfully used during the Reclaim the Streets action on Sunday. Police confiscated the equipment, but released the driver and passenger.