Obstructing political protests silences speech

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By ROBYN E. BLUMNER

© St. Petersburg Times, published July 16, 2000

The Wobblies have a new incarnation and city fathers are responding about as they did in the early 1900s.

In case you can't dredge up the name from your college-level American History classes, between 1909 and 1913, the Industrial Workers of the World, known as the Wobblies, set up soapboxes on street corners across the country to organize workers, encourage civil disobedience and broadcast their brand of anarchism.

Their activist efforts were dubbed the "free speech fights" because invariably after exhorting the crowd to defy capitalism, they would be arrested and charged with such convenient violations as obstructing a sidewalk, blocking traffic and unlawful assembly. Often police didn't wait for the Wobblies to start speaking before carting them off to jail.

Today's Wobblies-equivalent are the anti-globalists, the sort who showed up in Seattle last year to protest the World Trade Organization. Their massive demonstrations in support of the downtrodden workers of the world were designed to non-violently shut down the meeting, which they did successfully the first day.

But rather than offering a measured response -- securing meeting access for WTO delegates, arresting serious law violators, while simultaneously letting peaceful protests occur -- Seattle police reacted like an occupying army. The police closed down whole swaths of the city around the meeting, tear-gassing peaceful protesters as well as bystanders, indiscriminately shooting rubber bullets and making arbitrary arrests. People were ordered to stop passing out copies of the First Amendment and tear-gassed for merely walking toward their car. (Of course we all also saw the news video of the "anarchist" vandals smashing "capitalist" windows. Nothing excuses that behavior, but it doesn't justify Seattle's excessive response toward the peaceable.)

Welcome to the free speech fights of the new millennium. Rather than tolerate demonstrations, cities and police are devising ways to cut them off at the pass. In Washington, D.C., at the April meeting of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, city police closed streets to protesters and engaged in preemptive arrests, taking in hundreds of protesters and shuttering their headquarters for alleged fire code violations.

Democracy is a messy thing. It's full of factions, interest groups, +

angry protests, marches and even sometimes civil disobedience. Crowds of protesters are the antithesis of calm order, which means they are inherently unnerving to police and city officials.

At the same time, the freedom of people to assemble in massive groups to express a viewpoint is a cornerstone of a democracy. It may be rare these days for people to turn out en masse for something other than a parade for victorious, spoiled, millionaire athletes, but when something does spark public consciousness, that should be considered a good thing for our democratic system. Right?

Wrong, say city officials in both Philadelphia and Los Angeles where the Republican and Democratic conventions -- the very stuffing of our democracy -- are soon to arrive. These cities are doing what they can to relegate protesters -- who are expected to number between 30,000 and 50,000 -- to the periphery.

With the cry "the anarchists are coming," both cities have established "protest zones" as a way to cordon off people who want to deliver a message to the convention delegates. Free speech is being pushed aside, contained and boxed to keep people with actual ideas from participating in our national political conventions.

The stanchions around the protest zones, or "protest pits" as they've been derisively dubbed, should read "sanitized for your protection." Convention organizers are trying to micromanage dissent the same way they've "handled" the conventions, which are now so staged and scripted that "rah-rah" is the extent of political debate.

The anti-globalists, like the Wobblies before them, are refusing to play their part as written. Expect them, along with people demonstrating on dozens of other issues, to ignore these containment zones and take to the streets to get their message across.

Whatever your view on these social issues, it should be refreshing that people are willing to abandon daily routines and comfortable apathy in order to weigh in. Such involvement is a shot in the arm to a democratic system like ours where the shaky presumption is that the electorate is engaged and informed.

Cities should be at least as tolerant and accommodating to political protesters as sports team revelers. After the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team won the championship and some revelers got violent, the city's response wasn't to kick the team out of the city, preemptively arrest fans or relegate future celebrations to a downtown parking lot. Mayor Richard Riordan appropriately blamed the mayhem on "a few hundred hoodlums" of the 30,000 celebrants. Then, he invited fans by the thousands to attend a Laker's victory parade.

Don't you think people with something to say about public policy should be given the same consideration?

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