Singing in Spite of Fear: Overcoming Violence at the Republican National Convention

This is the final night of the convention, Thursday, September 4, the night that John McCain is scheduled to speak. There's also an antiwar march scheduled to begin on the steps of the Capitol -- an un-permitted march. We make our way there through a city that has become an occupied zone. There are rumors that the whole city will be under curfew from 5 pm on.

We gather up our cluster, only about ten of us. The Capitol is surrounded by clumps of riot cops and the tension is throbbing as speakers on the stage rile up the crowd. A few people in our group are having a moment of panic. Nothing's happened, yet, but all our intuition tells us that something could, at any moment. They decide to go back, and be our support if something does.

There are two great instincts that war in the human breast; not sex and death, as Freud maintained, but the urge to stay safe, and the urge to get into the action or, at least, see what's going on.

For the moment, the second urge is dominant in all of us who remain. But we're extra alert. We're looking for the escape routes, positioning ourselves always so there is somewhere to go.

The march heads up the street alongside the Capitol, and then tries to turn across one of the bridges. The police move in, and block us.

There's a tense crowd of people on the bridge and filling the intersection. Around us are police in full riot gear and gas masks. There's also a group of bike cops, looking slightly under-dressed in shorts and gas masks. They've brought in the Minnesota specials -- a line of snowplows across the bridge. On them are perched black-masked cops in heavy leathers holding thick-muzzled rifles that shoot rubber bullets.

The energy is unfocused. Nobody knows quite what to do. It could all fall apart, in a moment, with the cops attacking the crowd, or it could remain a standoff for a long time. I am softly drumming, not quite sure what to do, when a young, African American woman with long curls and a ring in her lip comes up and says, "Do you know how to sing, 'Ain't Gonna Study War No More?"

I shift the beat, we begin singing, and soon gather a small chorus that forms around us. A tiny, round, young black woman in spectacles steps in front. She has a large voice, and she takes over as lead singer. The chorus grows and a space opens up in the center of the intersection, which is soon filled with riders on bikes, circling around and around, counterclockwise. A young man turns a cartwheel. A clown on stilts appears, out of nowhere, and joins the ride. Suddenly, it's a circus in the street. The mood shifts and becomes almost festive.

My own mood has shifted, too. I've been practicing a more Buddhist-style meditation lately, just watching my breath in odd moments and being present to what's happening. I'm doing that now, breathing and drumming with the bikes and the song and the riot cops, and for no rational reason whatsoever I feel a surge of pure joy.

The young woman in front of me turns and taps my elbow. "Let's sing, 'We Shall Overcome,'" she says. I drum and the others join hands and sing. Now, after all the pain and the ugliness, the tension and the snatch squads and the media lies, after all the arguments and conversations about violence and nonviolence and tactics and accountability, after the splits between Obama and Clinton and the fruitless arguments about which is more crucial, gender or race, it seems deeply and oddly wonderful for me, a white woman in my 50s, to be asked by two young black women to sing the old Civil Rights songs of the sixties here in the face of the riot cops. As if something is truly welling up from the earth, some spirit that knows and values rage but persists in remembering the power in acting out of love.

It's a spell. For just one moment, in one place, we sing in spite of our fear, and the violence abates.

It's been a hard week. We've seen the full machinery of the violence of the state called out to quell any semblance of dissent. I've seen friends arrested, beaten, shoved, nearly trampled by horses, tasered, pepper sprayed, beaten and literally tortured in jail. We've seen organizers targeted for 'terrorism' and media lies paint a totally warped picture of what has happened here. They've tried to make us feel powerless and afraid, and at times, they've succeeded.

But we're here, at the end, still singing.