On Wednesday, 19 April 2000, Amber Gallup wrote to her friend, Philip John Metres, who sent this to the PEACE STUDIES listserv:

This is written by Amber Gallup, a friend of mine, who's been involved in Amnesty International, the anti-sweatshop campaign, and the other related human rights causes here in Bloomington, Indiana.  Her words provide a very different perspective on the demonstrations than I've seen.  pjm

Hello all:         

I and many other No Sweat! members just got back from the IMF / World Bank protests in Washington D.C.  All of us have our own impressions, feelings and thoughts on our weekend --- I certainly don't mean to represent everybody's opinion here --- but I would like to share mine with you --- especially concerning certain aspects of the weekend which mainstream press has not adequately covered so far.         

In the Washington Post, New York Times, USA Today, and other AP stories I have read since Sunday, disturbance of the downtown D.C. area and clashes with police have been headlining stories.  Almost every news photo I have seen in the papers involves  some aspect of violence --- protesters wearing gas masks, an officer with a club beating an activist, an anarchist under a police horse's hooves.  Other stories noted the fact that part of D. C. was closed on Monday so that government employees couldn't attend work.  Others quoted World Bank officials disputing activist claims or highlighted the "failure" of the demonstrations and actions to shut down the financial bodies' meetings.         

It is clear that our claims about the IMF and World Bank are valid and corroborated by the history of the institutions and the current state of the world's poor and the environment --- widening gaps between the rich and the destitute, worldwide governmental cuts in education and health care, the rise in sweatshops . . .even increased spread of AIDS in developing nations . . . can be traced in part, both directly and indirectly, to the Bank's and the Fund's policies.  In fact, this information is all so well-documented and accessible that even it is not the real news story that should come from this weekend --- it's hardly news.          

The real story from this weekend is the character and dynamics of a nascent movement.  The real story is deep, self-conscious celebration and appreciation of a common humanity that the thousands of protesters reveled in throughout every moment of every day.  The real story is NOT that these activists are trying to tear down an old world order --- embodied this time in the Bank and the Fund -- but that they are actively and successfully CREATING and LIVING a new one. 

Most descriptions of protesters --- and certainly many of the arguments I heard from people I helped to block out of the IMF building on Sunday --- focus on how "strange" they are....the way they look, dress, speak, behave.  They are marginal, and perhaps partly arising out of a fear of people they don't understand (obviously a common phenomenon among us humans), the press and others feel a need to marginalize them further, treat them as the other, either mocking them or merely tolerating them with a wry, resigned smirk, as if they were oddities in a circus or wild animals in a zoo.  If they could come to terms with this fear and put it aside to judge fairly, they would open themselves to a new experience and experiment in love and democracy.

This weekend I saw thousands of people, with no central decision-making hierarchy, pull off beautifully orchestrated collective actions of civil disobedience.  Affinity groups of 5 to 25 people formed clusters with other groups, sent delegates to long meetings, kept in touch with each other at all times via cell phones and bike messengers and word of mouth passed from one group to another as they met in the street.  I saw thousands of people so dedicated to consensus decision-making that they would spend all night in a circle talking rather than vote over the opinions of a minority --- and it worked.  Even in the middle of mass actions, as thousands locked arms and surrounded the IMF building, the spokespeople of affinity groups met, and dispensed messengers who walked among all the lines, soliciting opinions from small groups, building consensus for the next stage of the current endeavor. I saw techniques in action that had been developed and consensed upon to keep large groups communicating --- hand signals, chants, rituals.

Democracy and nonviolence and love were principles --- at once spoken and unspoken --- that informed every move they made.  And it wasn't that they didn't recognize or even demonstrate other tendencies of human nature --- hierarchy, violence, anger, peer pressure, insensitivity --- these were all there.  But there was a deep recognition of our common humanity, our tendency toward these behaviors/emotions = and they had non-violent, socially-agreed upon techniques of handling these situations in a loving and transcendent way.         

Once, during a long hot meeting in a church basement, as hundreds of young activists struggled to form consensus on a course for Monday's actions, a man became angry at the facilitator and began to yell. Immediately the assembled crowd groaned and quietly hissed its disapproval.  The man did not lower his voice, and chants of "nonviolence" and "respect" could be heard throughout the basement.  Still the man did not lower his voice = and suddenly (it seemed to me to be almost immediate and simultaneous) the hundreds assembled began to sing one beautiful musical note.  The man swallowed his anger, the singing stopped, and the meeting was able to continue through to consensus.  There were hundreds of people in the room --- no one responded to his anger with more anger, no one raised their voice in response, no one overrode his opinion as the meeting progressed....just his method of communicating it, which had been out of sync with the principles that he and his comrades were operating from and were in struggle to uphold and propagate in the world.  They acknowledged his common humanity and dealt with it with love, respect, and firm dedication to the needs of the many.  In this movement, everyone is fit to govern.  Methods such as these may seem strange and even silly to many of us --- but they WORKED, and they were truly representative, truly patient, truly democratic, and hence deserve careful consideration and respect.  I had never seen democracy in action like I saw it this weekend and it is a lesson we as a country could learn a lot from.          

There are a lot more impressions that I could share with you --- one surprise (strange that it should have been a surprise to me, but it was) was the warmth with which we were met by the ordinary people in D. C.  We were certainly treated with contempt by many of the delegates and business people kept out of their jobs on Sunday and Monday --- but we were thanked and fussed over and treated with affection by the line workers in cafeterias, the immigrants having coffee in the Ethiopian restaurant, the working and non-working poor in the part of town in which we had our convergence center, the woman in the subway who had been a "radical herself" in the 1960's.  Unlike the monied elites we confronted in the papers and during the blockade, these people treated us like we were on their side and represented hope = which I think, indeed, we were and we did.  I was touched by the reception.  I enjoyed being part of the thousands that milled through the city that weekend, who everyone recognized by the way we were dressed and the conversations we had --- I enjoyed sitting down in the Metro next to someone reading about the "invasion of the protesters" on the front page of the Post, and getting a sideways glance.  I enjoyed the dignity that my work afforded me during those days.  We were there to side with the poor, to use our civil rights to help others claim theirs, to shut down those meetings that, through undemocratic secrecy and irresponsible unresponsiveness to the opinion of those affected, had helped lead to the suffering of so many and to the amassing of huge wealth by a few.  One of our chants during the blockade was, "This is what democracy looks like!  This is what democracy sounds like!" and this chant came to encapsulate my experience for me.  No matter what you might think of the of the protesters --- their image, their behavior, and their message --- they definitely know what democracy is and how to live it.         

As I said, there are a lot more impressions I could go into now --- negative and positive --- but I've tried to convey two or three of the strongest of them that come to my mind so shortly after the event.  I don't know if any of you have actually gotten to the end of this message....but if you have, I hope we can use some of the lessons that we learned in D.C. to make our movement for social change here in Bloomington stronger.  Ultimately it will be in our small towns and cities, in our families and in our friendship groups, that the this change plays itself out --- D. C. and experiences like it are just staging grounds for mass display of the revolution in consciousness that goes on all around the country (and the world) among small groups of committed people.    

-- Amber Gallup

"World order," like "domestic order," is based on decisions made within institutions that reflect existing power structures. The decisions can be changed; the institutions can be modified or replaced.
-Noam Chomsky

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