Republican National Convention Convergence Center Raided

I just received this e-mail, and I am completely appalled by the level Big Business and the Religious Right will go to stifle Free Speech.


Kris


I am forwarding this email to everyone who needs to know this information. Starhawk went to St Paul to help organize peaceful protests during the RNC, and last night the closed theater they're using as a staging ground and training center was raided by police, claiming they are terrorists and have bombs.
Please forward this email to everyone you know and get the word out!

NOTICE: Due to Presidential Executive Orders, the National Security Agency may have read this email without warning, warrant, or notice. They may do this without any judicial or legislative oversight. You have no recourse nor protection save to call for the impeachment of the current President.


It's Friday night.
Our Pagan Cluster is sitting on the
bluff of the Mississippi having our first real meeting, when Lisa gets a

call. The cops are raiding the Convergence Center, where we're organizing
meetings and trainings for the protests against the Republican National

Convention. It's not a role play, the caller says. It's real.


Instantly, we jump up and hurry back the six or eight blocks to the old

theater we are using for meetings, trainings and social gatherings. I have
spent the last two days doing magical activism trainings,
teaching people how to stay calm and grounded in emergency situations and
when things get chaotic. Now it's time to put the training into practice.


Aaron, a tall, red-headed young man who could be one of my nephews strides
along beside me. "Are you grounded?" I ask him. He nods, and runs ahead.


Nobody can keep up with Lisa, who speeds ahead like an
arrow, walking, not running, but still covering the ground quickly.
Andy and I
trail behind. We¹re often street buddies, because we¹re both big, slow,
and supremely calm and stubborn, willing to wade into almost any situation and
become the immovable object.


We're stopped by a line of cops just before we reach the

building. They refuse to let us through, or to move their van which is

blocking Scarecrow's car. There's an investigation underway, they say, and
won't say more.


Brush, our dear friend, is inside, having gone to a jail solidarity meeting,
ironically enough.
So are two very young people who had

just joined our cluster that night. I try calling Brush's cell phone, but get no reply.



We wait. That's what you do when the cops have guns trained on kids inside

a building. You wait, and witness, and make phone calls, and try to think
of useful things to do.



We call lawyers. We call politicians. We try to call media.
We call
friends who might know politicians and media.


Through the kitchen door, we can see young kids sitting on
the floor, handcuffed.
We walk across the street, back, made more

phone calls. An ambulance is parked in front, and the paramedics head into
the building, leaving a gurney ready.
Susu, from her car around the
corner, reports that the cops have been grabbing pedestrians from the street,
forcing them down to the ground, handcuffing them.


Song, one of the local organizers, calls her City Council member.
She wants
to call the Mayor, Chris Coleman, who has promised that St. Paul will be as
welcoming to protesters as to delegates, but no one has his home number.


What I have forgotten to tell people at the training is how much of an
action is just this: tense, boring waiting, with a knot of anxiety in your

stomach and your feet starting to hurt. Song talks to a helpful neighbor,

who's come over to find out what's happening. He knows where the mayor
lives, says it's just a few blocks away, and draws us a map.


We decide to go and call on the Mayor, who could call off the cops.
About
five of us troop down there, through the soft night and a neighborhood of
comfortable homes and wide lawns on the bluffs above the Mississippi.
The
Mayor's house is a comfortable Dutch Colonial, and lights were on inside.


We decide that just a few of us will go to the door, so as not to look

intimidating. Song is a round, soft-bodied middle-aged woman with a sweet

face. Ellen is a tiny brunette with a gap-toothed smile, and Lisa,
formidable organizer though she is, looks slight and unthreatening.
The

rest of us hang back. Someone opens the door. Our friends have a
conversation with the mayors' wife, who is not pleased to
be visited by constituents late at night, and who tells us we should call

the office. The Mayor, she says, is asleep, and she will not wake him up.


We think a mayor who was doing his job would get up and go
see what's going on. Nonetheless, we head back to the convergence space.


A protestor has been released from the building. A small crowd has gathered
across the street, and Fox News has arrived.
They interview
Song, who does her first ever Fox media spot.
She tells them the
truth, that people were in there watching movies,a documentary about Meridel Le

Seuer. Meridel would be proud, and I'm glad she is with us in some form.



One by one, protestors trickle out. Now we get more pieces of the story.


The cops burst in, with no warning. They pulled drew their guns on
everyone‹including a five year old child who was there with his mother,
forced everyone down on the floor. It was terrifying.


They had a warrant, apparently, from the county, not the city, to search for

bomb making materials. They were searching everyone in the building, then
one by one releasing them as they found nothing.


They continue to find nothing, as we wait through long hours.
Meanwhile,

more and more media arrives. These cops are not as creative as the DC cops
during our first mobilization there against the International Monetary Fund

and the World Bank. Those cops confiscated the lunchtime soup, which
included onions and chili powder, claiming they were materials for home made
pepper spray.



We wait until the last person gets out. He's a twenty year old who the cops
have accused of stealing his own backpack‹but apparently they relented.



And now it's morning. I wake up to the news that cops have been raiding
houses where activists are staying, bursting in with the same bogus warrant
and arresting people, including a four year old child. They've arrested
people at the Food Not Bombs house, a group dedicated to feeding protestors

and the homeless. They've arrested others, presumably just
for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.


The Poor Peoples¹ Campaign, which had set up camp at Harriet Island, a park
in the middle of the Mississippi, has also been harassed, its participants
ordered to disperse and its organizers arrested.


Let me be perfectly clear here: all of us here are planning nonviolent
protests against an administration which is responsible for immense
violence, bombs that have destroyed whole countries, and hundreds of
thousands of deaths.


This is the America that eight years of the Bush administration has brought
us, a place where dissent is no longer tolerated, where pre-emptive strikes
have become the strategy of choice for those who hold power, where any group
can be accused of bombmaking or terrorism on no evidence whatsoever in
order to deter dissent.



Please stand with us. Because it could be your home they are raiding, next.



Call the Mayors of St. Paul and Minneapolis. Tell them you are outraged by

these attacks on dissent. Urge them to let Poor People encamp and to let dissent be heard.


FLOOD THE MAYORS' OFFICES ASAP

St.
Paul Mayor Chris Coleman

651-266-8510

Minneapolis Mayor RT Rybak
(612) 673-2100

(612) 673-3000 outside Minneapolis

Starhawk is a lifelong activist in peace and global justice movements, a leader in the feminist and earth-based
spirituality movements, author or coauthor of ten books, including The Spiral Dance, The Fifth Sacred Thing, Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising, and her latest, The Earth Path.



Starhawk's website is www.starhawk. org, and more of her writings and information on her schedule and activities can be found there.