Fanning Flames

I made my first protest sign when I was very little. There was this impending tax cut called Proposition 2½ that would impact public schools, and my mom and her friends were against it. My sign, drawn in red and orange crayon, had a picture of a flame and the words, "Proposition 2½ is like a flame: it fires people."

The next morning, parents and children and teachers gathered for the protest. We marched around an intersection. We blocked traffic. One driver got so pissed that he rammed through the crowd and carried a guy away on his hood.

I've always gone to protests. It's part of the American tradition. It's what we do—what we've always done when our government isn't working for us. We've refused to pay taxes. We've thrown bales of tea into the harbor. We've freed slaves. We've marched and stood and sat where we've been told we couldn't march or stand or sit. We've decreed the right of the people to alter or to abolish any destructive form of government, and we've done that. And we continue to do that.

150 years after the abolition of slavery and 50 years after the Civil Rights Movement, people of color are still getting a raw deal in the United States. Police and courts and jails carry on persecuting, prosecuting and executing African-Americans at much higher rates than other citizens. Folks are fed up with this, and they are protesting. So yesterday I marched. And people blocked traffic. And police came and I saw cruisers and horses and nightsticks. And I heard sirens and helicopters and shouting. 

Having low vision makes being at protests a little confusing. I can't really tell you everything that happened yesterday, because I couldn't see much. Sometimes this makes things scary, and sometimes my ignorance might save me.

Several years ago I was at a manifestação in Brazil where activists were publicly occupying a building. The police came and the crowd I was with suddenly shouted and ran away. I had no idea why. I'd only been there for a week, was just learning their language, their history, their laws, their culture. So I didn't know that Brazil's polícia militar can just pull out their guns and shoot them. And if they did this, I didn't see it. I just stood there. And if the tiras did draw their guns and I just stood there, they must have thought that I wasn't running because I wasn't a troublemaker, so they ignored me.

As I see less, I go out and protest less, but I think it should be the other way around. Even though no one is "doing" blindness to me, things are getting harder. And when things get harder, we need to raise our voices more. Yet as time marches on, I access fewer services for the visually impaired, not more. What's happened? Have I become the visual equivalent of a complacent liberal whose flames of discontent have been reduced to little embers burning dimly in the back of my eyes? Or has this blog become my protest sign that I waggle around from the safety of an armchair?

Happy May Day. See you in the street.