What’s on the minds of the demonstrators in Denver?

Interview with Iris Bright, Kasama Project
The interview was conducted Monday evening, August 25

Zerohour for Kasama: So how did the day look?

I: We walked around and talked to people a lot today — like kids, youth, wearing Obama buttons — just asking them why do you support Obama and how do you feel about the FISA bill he voted on and the extension of the Patriot Act, that he funded the war. And we found that young people who support Obama, support him tentatively because he’s the lesser of two evils and they’re just disappointed on a lot of levels. We talked to the libertarians about communism and they ended the conversation with “I pretty much agree with you guys but I don’t think it’s possible.” We got that a lot today. “It’s human nature or it’s our best option.”

Z: So the main argument seemed to be the lesser of two evils?

I: Yeah. We had signs – this is how all these conversations happened, by the way – that said “735 Military Bases in 132 Countries On Earth / Obama Won’t Get The Cops Off The Block.” And my friend had a sign that said “Same System, New Face = No Change / Don’t Vote, Revolt.” And people kept walking up to us saying “What do you mean?” The flipside of my sign was “Attention Democrats, Change Comes From Below Not From Servants Of The Ruling Class” and people keeping kept walking up and taking pictures.

We got several interviews with the media. One guy said that that was the most articulate belief on a sign that he’d seen so far here in Denver and he wanted to ask us what we meant and we just articulated that Obama represents the same thing to us on a lot of levels that Bush does. He kowtows to the Bush agenda. In Detroit there’s a huge Arab population and they’ve been reporting in their weekly Arab paper that Obama used to go to Palestinian rights meetings now he does speeches for AIPAC. So this is a necessary audition for this part of the system, this part of representing the ruling class. A lot of people actually feel that and are kind of disappointed by it and you can feel a sort of grasping like “We just want to have hope”

Z: Were there any specific things they thought made Obama more attractive than Bush?

I: Pretty much everyone thinks Obama is more attractive than Bush — he’s more eloquent, he speaks the language of social justice. When he doesn’t support it in legislation, he keeps putting out these arguments for social justice and putting out his background as someone who worked for social justice in Chicago before his political career really took off.

People are really latching onto that part of who Obama is. Part of this thing in Detroit is a t-shirt with Obama and a little picture of Malcolm X in the corner. It’s like such a massive projection from the people on what they want from Obama, we see a lot of t-shirts with Martin Luther King, Jr., and Obama on the same shirt.

Z: Did you deliberately decide to speak mainly to these people [Obama supporters]?

I: Some people kind of laughed and they’d take pictures of our signs and they’d be wearing Obama buttons and we’d ask “What do you think of the FISA bill?” and they’d know exaclty what we were talking about, and say “Oh well, we have to do that” and then it would turn into a conversation about whether elections are a real choice for change, and also while at the same time, the ruling class wants their selections for you to be legitimized [through] elections, they also disenfranchise people at the very bottom. It was kind of depressing, you want to say there’s something better, but we all have to see it as a possibility, that’s communist revolution and then that leads into a much larger conversation.

Mostly we were at Civic Center Park today and people would approach us, we did see Republicans for Obama, but we didn’t get a chance to talk to them, it’s mostly just youth walking around with Obama buttons they got for free or maybe they’re doing campaign work. We did talk to two women, single mothers who were in their 60s who were really angry with us for even asking why they supported Obama, they got very defensive off the bat and in the end they appealed to their credentials from the 60s and said people can’t just sit around with signs and do nothing

Z: How was the general mood today? How do you feel about how things went?

I: It wasn’t a big turnout today for much of anything. Today was the day that they “levitated” the Denver Mint.

Z: Who did that?

I: I think it was Unconventional Action and Recreate 68. There was a guy dressed up like a wizard who led everyone over there. There was also an 8-hour rally by the Minutemen in Congress Park. Tom Tancredo spoke, Alan Keyes spoke and I heard from people who were there that only 50 people had shown up. There were people during the rally for Recreate 68 from the day before yelling “White Power”, just a couple of people. We’re assuming it was the Minutemen who were yelling “White Power”. A small group of people showed up at the protest and tried to hand out Ku Klux Klan hoods to the Minutemen and they wouldn’t take them, so that didn’t go over very well. It was really great exposure though. Tonight there was an anti-capitalist rally and we actually went to the Food Not Bombs area and we saw a huge police presence. They had their mock rifles with pepper spray bullets held up to their chests. They were snaking through the FnB crowd and generally intimidating people that were sitting down to eat. They were making jokes about making shish kebabs on their batons and it was ridiculous. They were making fun of kids who had masks on.

It turns out there was a call for a Black Bloc so a large group of kids went down to the 16th St. Mall. They actually got stopped after half a block by Civic Center Park. They were walled in by the police and then doused with pepper spray, doused, there are a bunch of shirtless kids standing in the mall – we’re in the mall right now actually, and there’s a police line cordoning off the area, but they did make a lot of arrests. They cordoned them in with nowhere to go and they told them to leave and proceeded to attack them.

Z: Were there speakers today? What did they say?

I: Ward Churchill, Kathleen Cleaver and others spoke yesterday but I didn’t see anyone today. I saw Larry Everest today though. It was pretty good. He was talking about Iran’s strategic importance for the US and how Obama is going to uphold all that and people were asking about finer points like “How does OPEC work?” “What will happen if Bush attacks Iran before the end of his term?”

The owner of the restaurant where the speech was at was Palestinian and he told a story about himself, the last time he was in Palestine was in 2005. He was born in Palestine and he left in 1967 as a refugee, he was in Jordan and he became a refugee again and he went to Syria and he came to the US and became a US citizen which is the only reason he was allowed to return to Palestine in 2005. He said before he went back to Palestine, he supported the peace talks, the Oslo Peace Accords, and he thought that there could actually be a two-state solution with the West Bank, with the economic agreements, airspace, water, etc., and he went there and he drove on networks of roads that were only for Israelis and Americans. Non-Palestinian vehicles have yellow plates. He saw settlers living on the hills while Palestinian live in garbage literally. There were assassinations going on where the Israeli Army would come into neighborhoods and assassinate 18,19, 20 year old leaders of their generation against the Israeli government. He said it changed his perspective forever, he said that there would never be a two-state solution, there’s a one-state solution, it’s Palestine. It was just really good to hear him talk about it and he just spoke out against religion of all kinds. It was really great and I hope we get to visit with him before he leaves.

Z: Did anyone talk about Afghanistan?

I: We did, with Obama supporters and it always came down to “Yeah, well we’re hoping he’ll pare back the intensity of American imperialism.”

Z: In spite of the fact that he explicitly said he wouldn’t…

I: Exactly. We had these surreal conversations all day where we were telling people what he actually said and they would sometimes say the he never said that or “you’re not listening” or “you have to do that – he has to say that”. We were lucky to have some really good conversations with people who saw that what Obama was saying was wrong we didn’t really deal with any hardcore Democratic Party flacks or anything like that.

Z: How would you describe the overall mood of the crowd?

I: There were way less people than yesterday, almost no vendors. I think a lot of people were wishing there was going to be another anti-war march and there wasn’t. There was the political prisoner march this morning. There was a hip hop show, stuff for Leonard Peltier, the Cuban 5, Mumia Abu-Jamal. There was a march of several hundred people at lunch to the steps of the federal building. FIST was there, Workers World, World Can’t Wait was pretty vocal, RCP not so much.

Z: Why do you think it’s important to be there?

I: A bunch of people asked us that today, and commented on the small numbers, kind of a snarky comment. I think that it’s really important that people expose the Democrats for colluding with Bush every step of the way and that includes Pelosi, Sen. Obama, for voting to renew the Patriot Act, to give immunity to phone companies for illegal spying and increasing powers to spy on Americans, for kowtowing to Israel, AIPAC, just every step of the way, funding the war, approving $400 billion dollars for covert operations against Iran, and that’s pretty heavy. There are Obama signs everywhere, it’s pretty Obama-tized downtown and I think that people putting their hopes in the Democratic Party is pulling energy away form the anti-war movement, pulling energy away from a movement that would push for criminal charges to be pressed against Bush and Cheney for war crimes, and I think that it’s important to expose that to people who are out here and we have been making people think. When we actually stop and talk to people and they hear that we’re reasonable they stop and think. The press has demonized all the protestors who have come out, the Democrats have demonized the protestors, the Democrats have put out false press reports so people wouldn’t show up to rallies. Police have intimidated people into not coming to protests by leaking pictures of the inside of the detention facility, “Gitmo on the Platte” as it’s been called and there aren’t as many people here but I think it’s important to keep working at that exposure and tell people that you don’t have to keep choosing the lesser of two evils, people are really tired of it, and it just needs to be appealed to.

Z: How do you see the RNC in relation to this?

I: I think the RNC is going to be a lot bigger. People are laughing, saying the RNC’s where the party’s going to be at. I think that there is proportionately going to be less radical people at the RNC. All the radical people that are here, a lot of them are actually riding buses out on Thursday morning to the RNC directly. They’re going to be at the RCN but proportionately there are going to be a lot more Democrats, a lot more liberal-type groups like United for Peace and Justice to kind of put a spin on America’s problems: we haven’t fought this war in the right way, American imperialism is being squandered by the Bush regime. It’s going to be a platform to say “We want Obama, not you” and there’s going to be a small contingent of anti-imperialists, and anti-capitalists that are going to say the problem is both. So I think there will be more mainstream groups at the RNC but it has some explosive potential in terms of people being really angry.

Z: How would you describe the crowd?

I: Lots of really young people like 17 to 21; we’re staying in an apartment full of people who don’t look old enough to buy beer. The people who are with UFPJ who are supporting Obama, or with Code Pink, seem to be middle-aged. The protesters in the crowd tend to be really young especially at the anti-capitalist marches which seem to be more anarchist oriented, everyone seems to be under 25.