Diary of the March of the Mothers


By Jeanmarie Simpson

Washington - Week of Mother’s Day:

Day 1

Our plane arrives in a hot, muggy DC evening. The airport shuttle takes us to the house where feminist luminaries smile, nod, offer cool hands and sandwich trays. Strategies, laptops, cell phones, backpacks, vases filled with pink carnations churn post-feminist-activist butter.


Greeters like popcorn:
Look at the board!

There’s your room!

Here’s the toilet, towels, mugs, number to call if you get arrested.
Cold shower, hot room, noisy and with a hard, hard bed.

Day 2

Up at 7am, out at 8, muffin, coffee, hit the streets with the Pink Police at the Capitol. Secretary of State hearing on the ‘International’ budget. Twelve Pink Police – how many Capitol Police? They have guns. We carry copies of the Constitution. Our signs:
Stop Lying.
You Lied. Children Died.

Capitol cop pulls us all out of the hearing room.
We don’t want to have to arrest you.
Don’t hold signs up so others can’t see.
Don’t stand in front of people.

Don’t make verbal expressions of any kind.

We understand it’s not okay to demonstrate until the hearing is over – Dirksen Senate office building, room 105 or 6.

We understand 20 of you were demonstrating out front.

There were 12 of us. Nineteen or fewer and you don’t need a permit.

Dispatch told me it was twenty.

Well, it wasn’t.

We start to go back into the hearing room.

Ma’am, I need to be sure that you understand –

We know our rights, officer. Do you?

Ma’am, I only know what I was told.

By whom?

By Dispatch, Ma’am.

Who at Dispatch? What’s the name of the person who called you?

Ma’am, I just need to know that you understand you will be removed if you disrupt the proceedings. Any demonstrations –

What’s a ‘demonstration’?

Ma’am –

Please define the term ‘demonstration’, because the rules keep changing.

Any disruption of the proceedings, Ma’am –

Great. Thanks.

We return to the hearing room, I hold my sign and wait, wait, wait. When? When? WHEN?! Hearing finally begins, the Secretary postures, senators comment and question, polite, collegial exchanges. The new US Embassy in Iraq will have a thousand personnel. Domestic programs…? – pfff.

Gentlewoman from Louisiana enters, chides, questions, ends with a zinger:
We have one, ONE mental health bed in the New Orleans area.

She leaves.

A Pink Shirt moves to the back wall, holds up her sign, is warned that she will be removed and arrested. She isn’t blocking anyone’s view!!! She sits and holds her peace.

Gavel falls, hearing ends, two Pink Shirts unfurl a banner and the cops swarm like so many cockroaches in the dark. Our sisters are detained, their banner confiscated. They are arrested. We are not permitted to accompany them, follow, hear the reasoning.

You can’t demonstrate at the Capitol.

We didn’t disrupt the hearing.

They are taken away.

My friend and I move to the Quaker House where we’ll spend the night. We change our clothes, go to tea at the Mott House where Rep. Harman strides in, proud of her pro-McGovern Amendment vote. Hugs, kisses for her from Pink leadership.

We mourn our caged sisters – pending cases mean they’ll spend the night in jail. No blankets, no food for 24 hours. They’re tough, they know what they’re in for.

Evening fund raiser – clips of A Single Woman – the film. Auction for the Pink Shirts, food drink dancing.
Night falls silent on the Quaker House - only the snoring of a bunk mate breaks the stillness.

Day 3

Breakfast near the Capitol. My friend and I walk in the morning sun, lose our way, find our way to the Cannon office building, meet up with the Pink Shirts, split up into three groups, head to Dem’s offices – those who voted against the McGovern Amendment.

All Reps have returned to their districts, some legislative aids talk to us, some interns simply take our information. Two aides are very courteous, sit down, spend time with us. One aide from Georgia is particularly kind and respectful, one from California is also very good.

Rep from Ohio’s Sixth District isn’t in. No aides, they’re all in a meeting. We think an intern has gone to look for one of the aides, we stand at the desk, look in the mirror admire the shade of our pink shirts and make small talk with the Scheduler. We ask her if she knows why the Congressman voted against the Amendment.
I’m sure he has his reasons.

A Capitol policewoman, gun on her hip, appears.

You were asked to leave and you didn’t, so they called me.

We weren’t asked to leave.

Look. Don’t make a ruckus.

The intern was frightened? Of us? Of our pink shirts? She went next door and they called a cop?!
You couldn’t come in here and talk to us? You had to bring a gun in here?

She smiles with that familiar strain of disingenuousness one encounters in the bureaucratic underlings with which corporate America is rife. We leave.

My blood boils.

I still haven’t completely released my belief in the myth of America, the dream, the great hope of the world - Democracy, the Constitution, Free Speech - in spite of the fact that I know this nation was founded and is sustained on stolen land, labor and resources and that all of us privileged, white Americans, have perpetual blood on our hands.

Day 4

My friend and I play hooky and visit the Smithsonian – the American Indian Museum. The Mall is full of Army tanks, helicopters – it’s adjacent to a Folklife Festival, families with kids, ripe for early recruitment. Block after block we walk past uniformed men in our own uniforms – mine says ‘Zapatistas!’ hers, ‘Women For Peace.’ My bag says ‘No War.’ We pass a tank of water with a Navy Seal demonstrating underwater maneuvers, as we ascend the steps to the museum where Hawaiian music plays and Hula dancers teach their ancient maneuvers to a giggling gaggle of girls and women. I wonder how much it costs to air condition the place – my tax dollars at work – as they search my bag and I pass through a metal detector.

The Institution’s exhibits are state-of-the-art, the food is adorable (‘Indian Tacos’ are the special). The gift shop sells mugs and t-shirts, note cards and cheap jewelry. Downstairs, the store sells fifteen hundred dollar ‘Hopi’ pots. We take a long walk down the Mall past the George thing and the WW2 memorial and on the path to Abraham, take a detour and touch the Vietnam Wall. We wonder where the names of the five million might be found and pause at the Women’s Memorial – a beautiful sculpture – and wonder why only eight women’s names are on the wall. A Google project for back home. Ride the metro back to my WILPF sister’s house, where we’ll spend the night, bone tired.

Day 5 - Mother’s Day

Glorious blue skies after a night of thunder, lightning, and rain that washed away the mugginess. A day with mother-friends, relatives with and without our children. Breakfast, coffee, music, community, dancing in the park walking, walking, walking. Lots of laughter and some tears. The joy of our shared struggles, the tragedy of the piles of dead sons on shores and in deserts and jungles back ten thousand years and stretching before us as far as far is.

It’s up to us, the mothers, to protect the men and the boys from themselves. It’s up to us to convince our complicit sisters that their sense of ‘pride’ or ‘patriotism’ is cannibalistic. Their ‘sacrifice’ is human sacrifice, no less barbaric than the ancients’, no more honorable, no more sane.

Day 6

10,000 Mother of a March. Rally at noon, Lafayette Park, in front of the White House. Plenty of Pink Shirts, Veterans of three wars, children and babies, mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers. Hip hoppers and a cappella angel singers, reverends and priests, Jews and Catholics and WASP Queers and Quakers, hippies, congresswomen, senators, Gold Stars and words, words, words:
End the War NOW!

STOP THIS KILLING NOW!

The rally builds as cops, rangers, park police swarm.

Peace Mom holds up a picture of her boy, lost to us all years ago, but kept alive forever by his mother’s grief and outrage and courage.
Not one more mother’s son!

The reverend shouts:
Are you ready to march?!!

We set out, down Pennsylvania Avenue, toward the Capitol. I roll my bright red suitcase behind me, chant with the crowd, fist in the air, beside my friends and my sisters in the struggle and many, many brothers who share the kind of courage it takes for men to stand in solidarity with women, against war and militarism and obscene, immoral budgets that suck the health and life out of the masses, their children and their children’s children.

Hey Congress! What do you say? How many kids will die today?

Supporters honk, shout, and flash peace signs and many join us. A man stands on a corner and holds up a middle finger until each and every demonstrator has passed him by.

We pause in front of the Justice Department and cry and whisper and shout and roar:
SHAME! SHAME!

We make our way to First Street and the reverend stops the march to tell us that when we left the White House the US casualty number was 3,396 but now it is 3,398. Our march resumes with a new, more mournful resolve. How many Iraqis have died? How many Afghanis? No one knows for sure, but certainly hundreds of thousands. We mourn our own complicity in their deaths, we express our outrage at an administration that we didn’t elect, that doesn’t represent us, that refuses to listen to us as we pour letters and faxes and emails into their cushy, air-conditioned, heavily-staffed offices, made that way by our tax dollars.

We arrive at Independence Avenue and turn left, taking up the whole street as the cops start ordering us to get on the sidewalk. I’m one of the first to obey, my suitcase in tow, my cell phone turned all the way up to ensure that I don’t miss the airport shuttle’s call, won’t miss my plane, won’t miss my cat and my coffee and my muffin in the morning. I’ll sleep in my own, warm bed tonight and fall asleep listening to Nanci Griffith sing:

I want a simple life, like my mother
and one true love for my older years.

I don’t want your wars to take my children.

I want a simple life while I’m here.

The brave ones make a valiant circle in the middle of the intersection, link arms, sing, chant, weep, shout as the cops pry them apart and handcuff them - mothers and grandmothers, great-grandmothers and the reverend and veterans for peace and against war - drag and walk or carry them to police wagons as those of us safely on the sidewalk shout our love and solidarity as each disappears into the darkness, head high, every one.

My cell phone rings - it’s the shuttle. I hug my friends goodbye and roll my suitcase down the hill where the nice man takes it and hefts it into the back of the air-conditioned van, drives me and some others to the airport, music playing, toes tapping. I arrive at the gate with my boarding pass, belly full with more food than most of the world sees in a week’s time, talk on the cell phone to a friend who makes me laugh, hang up, get on the plane, sit by a window with no one in the center seat, a handsome, friendly man on the aisle, pull out my notebook and write this down.

Jeanmarie Simpson is a theatre/film artist and peace activist who appears in the forthcoming film, ‘A Single Woman,’ as lifelong pacifist and first US Congresswoman, Jeannette Rankin. Jeanmarie sits on the national board of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). When she returned from the DC action, Jeanmarie changed her party affiliation from Democrat to Peace and Freedom.

Posted: Fri - June 1, 2007 at 07:00 PM          

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