Fwd: Open Letter from Starhawk

[Guest guest]

Hi friends-here's an open letter I'm putting up on my web page about

the WTO experience. It's aimed at the broad, Pagan community--so

please help me circulate it where it needs to go, you who are more

web

savvy than I--

love

Starhawk

------------------------

Open Letter to the Pagan Commmunity

Dear friends, I want to thank you all for all the energy, healing,

and concern I've felt from you over the past week. I'm out of jail now,

and recovering rapidly from bronchitis. I've been through one of the

most intense and powerful experiences of my life--and I've had a few!

Physically, it was often very hard. But over and over again I would

look around at the other women I was locked up with, and realize that

there was noplace else in the world I would rather be at that moment.

Magic works. So many people were sending me protection that I had

some very surreal experiences. Just one example: When we got

arrested, clubs were smashing down on people to the left an right of

me. Cops were throwing protestors to the ground, smashing their

faces in the concrete, splitting a head or two. And I was arrested by a

reluctant young man who I could tell picked me especially so he could

be sure I wouldn't be brutalized and asked me politely after I was

handcuffed if I would like to sit on the curb. I saw incredible acts

of courage around me. On Tuesday, our group held a blocade line in

the only section that remained peaceful and festive all day. We

received whiffs of tear gas blowing in from afar, but were never

attacked by the police. Around the corner, however, was a war zone,

where groups of blockaders held their lines against horses and while

being beaten, tear gassed and pepper sprayed.

I was not myself hurt or beaten or roughed up. But I was locked up,

for five days, in a high-security real live jail, complete with

concrete cells and iron bars and lights that never turn off, even

when

you're sleeping. Along with over five hundred other people, I was

handcuffed, shackled, stripped of all my personal possessions, and

subjected to the force and control of other human beings who let's

just say did not have my personal welfare at their heart.

What criminal act did I commit to warrant this treatment? I walked

in a peaceful procession to exercise my constitutional right to freedom

of speech, and refused to relinquish that right. When ordered to

leave, I sat down.

The media is working hard to portray the protests as a violent riot.

Do not believe them. In reality, there were thousand and thousands

of peaceful protestors in Seattle and a tiny handful of people who broke

windows. The police did not pursue the windowbreakers--in fact, when

one of them was surrounded and subdued by a group of nonviolent

protestors the police refused to arrest him. While the police

complain that they " were not prepared for the violence " , in reality

they condoned and possibly instigated the vandalism that did occur,

and that is dwarfed by the immense violence of the police, who used

tear gas on peaceful protestors, pepper sprayed handcuffed women in

their cells, shot nuns with rubber bullets, beat seated blockaders

with billy clubs, ran amuck and terrorized whole neighborhoods.

What the police were truly unprepared for was the power of

nonviolence--not to mention magic! None of the media seem to have a

clue as to how the blockade was actually organized. The Direct

Action

Network, the group I worked with, had been preparing and training

people for months. Thousands of people went through nonviolence

trainings, to learn how to respond peacefully and courageously in the

face of brutality. I helped to give some of the trainings and have

the deepest respect for the organizers. We practiced ways to protect

each other in dangerous situations and prepared for jail solidarity

to

prevent individuals from being singled out.

Those who took part in the blockade on Tuesday and the civil

disobedience on Wednesday were organized like the Craft has been

organized for centuries--around small groups, affinity groups--kind

of

like covens-for-the-action. Each group made its own strategic

decisions by consensus, and included both people willing to risk

arrest and those who wanted to offer support. Groups sent

representatives to spokescouncils where the actions were co-ordinated

and overall decisions were made. There was no top-down leadership

telling people what to do--and in emergency, high stress situations,

small groups could quicky make their own decisions and take action.

The power of this model, I've come to believe, is that the police

simply cannot see this kind of organization. Our plans were made in

public meetings, there was no way to keep our strategy secret--yet

after months of preparation we were able to completely surround and

blockade the Convention Center and hold it closed for the first day

of

meetings.

Magic helped. We were, of course, working magic on every level,

from

rituals we offered before the action to a mditation on shared intent

that Margo Adair taught us to the trancework some of us did in our

own

circles to the WTO spell (an ice sculpture that melted throughout the

ritual) we had as an altar at the Spiral Dance.

We worked magic in jail, as well. We sang songs, told stories,

shared

meditations and learned to ground and call on the elements. About

fifty of us held an impromptu ritual while waiting in a holding cell

for arraignment and later danced the spiral dance. We practiced " the

art of changing consciousness at will " --and it worked. The guards,

the threats, the violence and the concrete could not keep out the

love, commitment and true joy we shared. The women I was with in

jail

were mostly young, but amazingly strong, caring, thoughtful,

intelligent and politically aware.

There were also a sprinkling of older women whose courage and humor

were an inspiration to us. I was hungry, sick, exhausted and in pain

a lot of the time--but I was never for a moment unhappy to be where I

was. Instead, I experienced a depth of almost radiant happiness like

a pure current in a roiling river that I could tap into whenever my

spirit started to flag. In one of our rituals, my friend Willow had

invoked the Green Man and reminded us that oxygen is his breath and

he

is everywhere. When I lay in my airless, torturously overheated cell

at night, coughing and feverish and struggling to breathe, I could

call upon him through such air as there was and visualize the cool,

moist scent of the redwoods by my home. I'd close my eyes and see

the

ancestors marching with us in great rivers, turning the tide. And I

could feel a depth of strength in myself that I didn't know I had.

It

was the most powerful initiation I've ever experienced.

Why did we do it? I did it because I am a Pagan and a Witch. I know

that in the vast, broad Pagan world out there, we don't all share the

same politics--but I think there are some core things that we do

share

and the WTO touches all of them. We worship nature. The WTO is part

of a global attempt to elevate profit as a value that supercedes

nature or any other value. It overrides the laws we have made

through

out own democratic governments, and in fact becomes a metapower that

makes elected governments ineffectual. Although I've been a

lifelong

pacifist, I know there are many Pagans in the military and I trust

that they believe they are there to defend our democracy--which the

WTO makes null and void. I don't know any Pagans, regardless of

politics, who enjoy being bossed around by outside forces and told

what to do. The level of police violence and repression that was

called out to attempt to protect this ministerial is an example of

the

kind of force we can expect to face in a corporate controlled world.

We won. The WTO will never, now, be able to quietly assume power and

consolidate its rule outside of public awareness. Whatever happens

with it, and whatever new strategy they devise to meet the same ends,

the issue has been brought to the public table. And a new generation

of young activists have been through a life-changing experience. A

few uncomfortable days in the company of heroic and beautiful women

seems a very small price to pay.

Again, thank you all for your energy. I was deeply touched to

realize

how many people were concerned for me. I truly believe that were it

not for all the energy and healing, I would have been much, much

sicker--and I've never gotten over a case of bronchitis so fast in my

life!

Love and bright Solstice to you all,

Blessed be,

Starhawk

F D G