The World Can’t Wait Bus Tour recently moved on from its
week-long stop in muggy Jackson, Mississippi, where organizers from Atlanta,
New York City, Texas
and California contributed to the debate
surrounding the last abortion clinic in Mississippi.
From July 15-22, Operation Save America,
a Christian fascist organization whose slogan is “Homosexuality is a
sin. Islam is a lie. Abortion is murder,” attempted to shut down
the last abortion clinic in the entire state. They did this by lining the
entrance and street with bloody-fetus placards and intimidating comments
designed to spur feelings of guilt and shame at women and pro-choicers.
These
are people who publicly burned a Qur”an in Jackson; who held a Christian
fundamentalist open mic in front of a progressive church, calling the pastor a
“minister of Satan”; who descended upon a pro-choice demonstration
with unrealistic signs and attempted to force their way onstage as people were
speaking; and who kicked off their attack on Jackson with promises of a
“week of violence”. The more we saw of the OSA foot soldiers, the
clearer it became that something like this was made more powerful by its ties
with and support from the highest levels of government, from Congress, to the
judiciary, and all the way to the White House. And we can’t challenge OSA by
itself, but need to put this in the larger context it is part of and take on
the Bush agenda as a whole.
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The residents in this city of about 300,000 were acutely
aware that there was a political battle raging over reproductive rights in
their city. It was the lead news story most of the week, and participants in
the Bus Tour made several appearances in the local media (including an article and a paid ad in The Clarion-Ledger, and segments on
WLBT TV News). We focused our efforts on three things: one,
making an impact in the media that would help mobilize people from
Jackson–conveying to residents, media and organizers from across the country the
threat to abortion rights in the context
of what the theocratic movement and the Bush regime are really up to:
“radically remaking society very quickly, in a fascist way, and for
generations to come”; two, mobilizing door-to-door and through street-corner
exchanges, reaching Jacksonians who knew something was up with this attempted
clinic siege, and who, we increasingly learned, didn’t like the smell of it;
and three, taking part in protests, forums, and press conferences as well as
being a consistent presence at the clinic in the mornings. The latter effort
was made in order to make a clear point to the world that the battle over the
clinic itself was two-sided. Throughout all of this work, we brought out to
many people that the October 5th Day of Mass Resistance was the time
to act on a level that could really be the start of the unraveling of the Bush
program. We struggled for the need to do “more than fighting Bush’s
outrages one at a time,” and to actually drive the Bush regime from power
through the mass political action of millions.
Everywhere we went, people had a deep disgust for what the
Bush regime is doing in the world. There was the owner of the soul food restaurant
who whispered to one of the volunteers, “I’d go all the way up to DC to
tell Bush to move out”. There was the mailman who asked what some
volunteers going door-to-door were doing, and when they briefly explained what
was in the Call, he grabbed a stack of copies, and then demanded more to give to
houses as he delivered mail. We also observed that the prevailing view on
abortion itself among Black people in Jackson
was that it is not a right that the government or anyone else should be able to
take away. We even heard this repeatedly among people who were adamantly
against abortion on a personal level. We got the sense that this was an issue
that a lot of the people we talked to had to confront in their lives. For
example, we met a young woman of about 18, who was 3 months pregnant, and after
hearing what we had to say about the Bush regime and the right to abortion in
that context, she asked what we thought she should do. It was clear that this
was someone who had been pulled along by a lot of the guilt-tripping and
confusion whipped up by forces like Operation Save America, because she seemed
to never have counted actually controlling what happened to her body as one of her
options until that moment.
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As inspiring and deep as the disgust for the Bush regime was,
especially among the poor and Black people that make up the majority of the
city, it was one part of a complex picture. At a meeting of Bus Tour volunteers
and Jackson residents wanting to start a WCW chapter, one gay man from Jackson spoke
of how he’s felt stuck inside his home as the hateful, Christian fundamentalist
social climate has gained steam in Jackson in the last few years. He said he
seldom went outside, except to go to work, for fear of relentless harassment
for being who he is. He was quite inspired in finding people who saw this
climate for what it is: a harbinger of fascism. He and others left the meeting
feeling uplifted and already talking among each other about how to make October
5th the massive day of repudiation of the Bush regime that it must
be.
We left Jackson
having learned a tremendous amount about what we’re facing and what people in a
typical, so-called “red state” area think about it. But we also left with
much remaining to be done to take that sense that “something is up, and it
don’t look good,” and turn it into an organized resistance that is guided
by an understanding of the seriousness of what we face. This seriousness and
realness was made vividly clear through OSA’s week of onslaught. However, as
our experience of reaching out to and beginning to involve people from Jackson in the process
shows just as vividly, the potential for stopping the Bush Regime in its
tracks–as well as reversing its sick program for society and bringing into
being something that actually benefits the masses of people in this
country–was made even clearer.
