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Epilogue
Back in Knoxville a week later, I hold debriefing sessions with Shinara and David and Hobbes and Gabe. I start by asking again why they went. Again the talk turns to alienation from the political system and, more broadly, from the values of a consumer society.
Shinara, an art student who constructs evocative sculptural installations, talks about the last presidential election. "I didn't feel that Bush or Gore represented me," she says. "The people that are supposed to speak for us are so far removed from us. It's so distant."
"Your voice can never mean anything compared to the people who are putting down thousands and hundreds of thousands of dollars," David says. "If they're failing you, then to me the proper thing to do is to go out in the street and speak for yourself."
"What I saw in Quebec City," Shinara says, "all the people that were coming together and all the creative things they were inspiring was to me so much more flavorful... I don't like the whole air of corporations, the kind of monoculture they push."
"They surround us," David says, gesturing at a passing KAT bus with advertisements on the side. "They go by on cars, it's on billboards, it's on your shoes. It's so hard to live every day in it and not participate in it. When you go to a big protest like this, it's your biggest chance to say, 'We know we're involved in this, but we don't agree with it.'"
"I get the sense that there wasn't as much media attention as there was in Seattle," says Hobbes, the only one who was at both protests. "But I felt [Quebec] was a lot more important in a lot of ways than Seattle as a sort of group-building process. I got this real sense of belonging, around the campfires and in the streets."
Gabe agrees. "You could see it as a hodge-podge," he acknowledges of the disparate groups and messages at the protests. "But you could also see it as a coming together, a phantasmagoria."
Among other things, Hobbes found a freedom that he envied in some of the other protesters. They didn't have his American hang-ups about mixing passion with their politics. "Talking to a lot of Francophone folks, they seem really comfortable being passionate," he says. "And I'm not. And I'd like to be."
"We grew up in a very cynical age," Gabe says.
"I've had a hard time believing in anything," Hobbes says, nodding.
"Our larger goals were all complete failures," David says, sitting in the sunshine on the porch of the 11th Street Expresso House. "I think Bush will get fast-track, I think the FTAA will be created, I think we didn't have any real impact on that at all. But I think in a lot of intangible, spiritual ways, that it was really a wild success. I got the sense, for the first time in my short activist life, that we are going to win. The fact that we were all there dancing around a bonfire..."
"I got this wonderful sense of strength," Shinara says. "It was rather tribal. It felt strongly connected to that innate sense, that thing in ourselves that we've been trained to turn so much against."
"That massive embrace of life," David says.
Shinara nods. "That deep voice," she says.
May 10, 2001 * Vol. 11, No. 19
© 2001 Metro Pulse
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