(Wednesday,
July 19th, 2006)
The
day began with the obnoxious howl of alarm clocks going off just before 7am. It
quickly improved. A group of us had made a plan to be outside Jackson’s last abortion clinic bright and
early.
Before
even going to the clinic, a couple of us went into a grocery store for some
supplies, and a clerk’s eye was caught by our “abortion on demand & without
apology” T-shirts. She said she’d been instructed not to voice any opinion on
abortion on the job, but defied this restriction and said that she’d had an
abortion when she was a teenager and regretted it, but felt passionately that
this is a right that no one should be legally denied, and asked for one of the
shirts. She got a shirt, exchanged contact info with us, and later called back,
saying, “maybe I shouldn’t have that shirt,” expressing concern that her job
might be in jeopardy after getting a “talking to” from her boss.
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When
we got to the clinic, we were a presence. We all wore the “abortion on demand
& without apology” shirts, and a chant of “from Jackson to D.C., no fascist theocracy” rang
out into the muggy, already hot morning air. We spoke with some of the
reporters who were there, being photographed, giving interviews, and just
talking informally, as the OSA storm troopers lined the other side of the
street. This informal chatting led to some interest in media covering us
tomorrow as we go out among the people of Jackson with the Call for World Can’t
Wait and the Call for the October 5th National Day of Resistance, making connections
between what the theocrats are up to, trying to shut down the state’s only
abortion clinic, and what the Bush regime has done and plans to do here and
around the world.
As
the day went on, we encountered Katrina survivors on two occasions. Both times,
they seemed to jump at the chance just to talk – as if finding someone who would
actually listen to their story was something that only came along every once in
a while. There was the young woman in the housing project, who told of a grandmother
of hers who, after repeated promises, has not received the $10,000 she is owed
from FEMA, and has had to hire a lawyer to deal with all the financial troubles
the storm and the regime’s response to it have upon her. Then there was the car-full
of young men, cruising down the street, system blaring, who, at a certain point
noticed that we were affixing a huge banner announcing the October 5th Day of
Resistance to our RV, and slowed down, turned the music off, and shouted: “we
gotcha back! Bush need to go!” We made sure to stop them and talk, and learned
that the driver of the car has been through Katrina, was stranded in New
Orleans until he was able to get out, and has been in Jackson, essentially
homeless, ever since. He and his friends had somewhere to go, but he just
wanted to stay and talk as long as he could. We touched on OSA and what we were
doing in Jackson.
He was adamant that reproductive choice is “not something you should mess
with” – a basic sentiment we’ve encountered repeatedly in different ways among
Black people in Jackson.
We exchanged contacts and he took a handful of copies of the Call for get out.
An
interesting (and sobering) aside on Katrina, and the kind of future we can
expect if the Bush regime is not driven out: at a time when tens of thousands
of Katrina survivors are finding themselves homeless or close to it in places
like Jackson, very often with harrowing stories of days spent on rooftops or
promised money brazenly denied, Jackson Mayor Frank Melton last week imposed an
unprecedented and heartless 10pm curfew on homeless people, complete with
middle-of-the-night roundups to take the homeless to a gymnasium. Here, in the
Deep South, with its ugly history including things like attack dogs being
loosed on civil rights demonstrators by racist police commissioners, and in the
90 degree-and-up heat, these homeless people (or just Katrina evacuees who
don’t have ID’s with permanent addresses on them) are being told that if the
gymnasium they are brought to is to have working air conditioning, the bill for
it will have to come directly from the minimum wage they will earn picking up
trash off the city’s streets as part of a program implemented along with the
round-ups. This is a cruel insult and should by itself make anyone with a heart
cringe – and be driven to act to reverse and repudiate the whole direction it is
a part of.
In
the evening, we had our first meeting of people we’ve met in Jackson since we’ve been here. A middle-aged
woman who works for a non-profit who we met at last Saturday’s Pro-choice
rally, sharply expressed a lot of the sentiment felt by a whole section of
people in this country who are searching for a way to act to oppose the whole
direction the Bush regime is taking society. She talked about how she was a
member of the Mississippi Democratic Party, but couldn’t get her head around
why the leadership of the Party in Mississippi
would proclaim “unelectable” anyone who wouldn’t go along with a reactionary
program of so-called “moral values” (i.e. opposing gay marriage and reproductive
freedom). We had a lot of rich
discussion over what is driving the political paralysis among progressive
people and the role of some stepping out and that setting terms and creating
space for others to take a stand. The meeting ended with everyone fired up and
talking about what to do next. At a burger joint after the meeting, two Jackson
residents who’d been at the meeting continued the discussion about what October
5th might look like in Jackson, and what kind of local people they could get to
come out and speak that day. We all went home (or to our temporary homes)
feeling like something was starting to take off down here in Jackson, Mississippi.