We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For

The arrest went smoothly. I thought the police were considerate, human. Some of us tried to help them do their job by sticking our arms out in front of us but the handcuffs go behind, not in front. We sang in the paddy wagons, we sang later in the holding cells. We recited poetry to each other and told stories from our lives. And all the while, there was this sweetness. Even though the floor of the cell, where some of us had to sit, was cold, and even though the toilet wouldn’t flush. I found Fannie Lou Hamer’s voice coming out of my throat and led our cell in singing “This Little Light of Mine.”

Amy (who within minutes would be arrested herself) asked each of us how we felt about being arrested.

Maxine said she felt it was the least she could do. I said I felt happier than I’d felt in years. Susan said her happiness went beyond happiness to joy. None of us could live with ourselves if we sat by and did nothing while a country filled with children, a lot of them disabled, homeless, and hungry, was blown to bits using money we need in the United States to build hospitals, housing and schools.

He called us traitors and murderers and accused us of nagging.

Nagging. What century was he from? we thought.

That he could not make the connection between the gruesomely dismembered bodies in his photographs and those of children bombed in Iraq seemed unbelievable. As he shouted at us we sang: “Protect the women and the children of Iraq.” Eventually, scowling, looking extremely churlish, he left.

Standing between my Irish American sister (Susan Griffin) and my Chinese American one (Maxine Hong Kingston), and with twenty-four other courageous women all around us; with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! interviewing us for our communities across the world, and Kristin Michaels, a videographer, taping us, I felt the sweetest of all feelings: peace. The police began to gather their horses, their paddy wagons, their plastic handcuffs. We sang. Being women, we noticed and made much of the fact that a rainbow appeared suddenly in the sky.

Several hours later, having sung “Peace Salaam Shalom” and “Give Peace a Chance” the entire time, we were arrested. And it is of that moment, that hour—because it took a long time—that I wish to speak; and of our time in a holding cell before being set free.

If our species does not outgrow its tendency to fight wars, we can kiss all we have created, and ourselves, good-bye

To bring children into the world at all, given the state of things, seems not only thoughtless but cruel.

At Lafayette Park, across from the White House, we paused