Sunday, December 5, 2010

Madison April 24, 1983

In the beginning, there were strangers.  
One by one we picked them up in Columbus,                          
Springfield, Dayton, Indianapolis... going to                    
Madison, Wisconsin to protest the “infliction
of pain to elicit information” -- the  torture  and
superstitious non-science of animal experiments.

Driving and driving past the gray of Gary
and Chicago, the world in delicious color again
in Wisconsin. Driving and driving past over
around through inconjunct perpendicular
parallel to roadkills slaughterhouses farms
labs shelters pounds puppy mills -- I never knew
how much killing this country can comfortably contain.

The next day the assembly site is incredibly bright,
four thousand hearts heat up and beat as one,
thumbs up from people sitting in windowsills
where archangel Gabriel blows out “Shock the
monkey tonight!” Organizers pass out strips
of black cloth, armbands to symbolize the killings
in the lab, cops everywhere, supposed bomb threats,
someone corporeally in charge says via bullhorn
to form four lines to march down the street,
everybody up front dressed in black.

Empowerment is not knowing anybody,
not being anybody, but knowing instantly that this
is what  you were made for and going to the front.
Screams from the back relay up to us: “We’re five
blocks long -- pass it on!... We’re ten blocks long!...”
Now the lines are fourteen blocks long, four thousand
strong chanting shouting marching clapping drumming.
CBS NBC ABC churn away... yes, we’re coming out.

We stop for a moment before turning the final corner
to the lab. Several of us volunteer to be coffin carriers,
not realizing that we’ll get to see everything:
that today is the birth of the animal rights movement
and the thousands of faces who pass will go back
to the hinterlands and build it fast, up from nothing.
We turn the corner. More cops cameras security guards.
And two wooden coffins in the street near the primate lab door.

The  isolated pasts of thousands light up the day.
I see my own little wildfire: the kinder-veterinarian          
bringing home stray cats and injured birds, the                        
flaming arguments with adult hunters, then one day        
while our cat was dying we heard the receptionist say  
the reason our vets were away -- a hunting trip to Montana.

Two lines now, two by two they go by,
silent but for crying, and drop the armbands
in the coffins. On and on they come, it seems
like everyone in the whole world is turning
that corner -- young old radical conservative,
some walking dogs (with black armbands on their paws),
people on crutches and in wheelchairs (sign: Mankind?),
the deaf, the disabled, people sobbing. America,
we’re showing you something you rarely see --
what’s good in you; justice here, mercy there,
all the daring revolutionary pushes and pulls
into a better world. On and on the armbands float down.
People with cancer (sign: Don’t Do It In My Name),
signs speaking for animals around around the globe,
this is the Mobe, the Mobilization for Animals --
today protests in Melbourne Wellington Brussels
Oslo Paris Manchester London Geneva Munich
Boston Cape Town Atlanta Barcelona Heidelberg
Stockholm Davis Marseilles The Hague Edinburgh
and others, on and on like they’ll never stop.
Now I realize what I want out of life: this passion,
this rightness, this thing I can live or die with
and get behind 100%; give it to me,
pour it in me because I am opening up.

Everyone passes. We pick up the coffin: unbelievably,
profoundly heavy these little black armbands,
this weight of death -- no one calculated the heaviness
or considered that we might not be able to lift it.

Far behind, out of sight from the last
of the straggling marchers, we carry the coffins
through almost deserted streets. Feeling lighter,
I could keep walking and walking right out of this world.
I imagine we’ve entered a new land of vegetarianism
and no hunting, trapping or vivisection,
as if all our animal-saving  and animal-dying lives
were a dream and this was the real world, the good world...

Walking and walking on a sunny Sunday
in Madison, Wisconsin... What’s that music?
Drums-- you always hear the drums first.
I don’t know the song but we follow the music                    
to the commons area on campus. Wow! Jesus!                    
We’re entering a triumphant city of teeming                        
dreaming laughing feasting chatting napping                
laying embracing dancing human beings.
We carry the coffins up on stage as the band plays
then lose ourselves among four thousand friends.
Everything real and imagined, everything I ever
doubted the existence of, everything inside me
blows out in inexhaustible fire in a billion directions.
I am at home everywhere.

published 5/29/2009 at counterpunch.org