Vets Gulf March (Day 3), Walking to New Orleans

[noamnety]

Intertwining Circles:

1. Oyster Shells and Oak Trees

There is an oyster shell in my daughter’s backpack. It’s from Caroline, who was visiting Mobile for the first time in 40 years, Caroline who protested against the forced integration of her high school, until she saw the frightened looks of the two black students who were integrated into her all white school of three thousand people, as they left the building one day. Caroline, a slight soft-spoken woman, who realized that day, “They think I want to kill them.”

Caroline sat down by us today, during the drumming circle. She didn’t want to interrupt them, but she wanted to tell someone about the drumming. Her ancestors came over from Scotland, and moved to the Gulf Coast, where they obtained a large house as a reward for driving out the local Indian tribe and forcing them onto the Trail of Tears. The river we had just crossed over, the Singing River, was named after the group of Indians who refused to leave their land. Instead, they joined arms, and sang, as they waded into the river and drowned themselves. She sat, listened to the drumming, reflecting on how her family had gotten that house, by killing the Indians, and how the drums echoed what our ancestors had done to the Indians, to Africans, to our veterans. She was here to make amends, in her own way, to show support for those shoved aside and neglected by our government. The house itself was wiped out by Katrina, but she was heading out to the site to see if any of the pottery she had collected as a child remained on the site. If there was, she said, she would bring us a piece to keep. As it happened, there was none. All that remained of that ill-gotten house was the oyster shells of the soil it was built on, and a giant old oak tree, that was left untouched. And so, there is an oyster shell in our backpack, to take back to Detroit.



2. Generations

When we arrived at the Vietnam memorial, the IVAW sign was set up, and the Iraq Veterans were asked to stand by it. Opposite them, the Veterans for Peace sign was set up, and the Vietnam Veterans stood under it, facing them. The Vietnam vets talked first, talking about the cost of that war, in human terms, about how they discovered that the only ones who would take care of them were each other. Stan has an uncanny ability to switch from the unflappable guy in charge that my daughter automatically looks for when she has a question about anything – about whom she says “let’s just follow him until he talks to us through the bullhorn” – to the guy that can move you to tears in an instant. He talked about the absence of the VA when they are most needed; the failure of government to take care of those whose lives they risk without a second thought, and the lives that have been lost not only in Iraq during action, but of those who came back, desperately pleading for help, only to be turned away by the VA. The Iraq vets, in turn, spoke about how they hoped that in another 30 years they would not be standing on the other side of that lawn, in the position of the Vietnam vets, talking to a new generation of veterans returning from war.



We were asked to take a flower, and place it in the memorial where it felt appropriate. I’m not sure what I expected the memorial to look like, but I know I was not prepared for it to be filled with the photos of those who had died. No words.

3. Redemption

At the Macedonia Mission Baptist Church, people affected by Katrina came up to the microphone, one by one, and talked about what they had lost. In some cases, they rode out the storm, moving up the levels of their houses until they were able to escape by boat or by swimming. In some cases, they went to their churches to ride it out, watching out the window as their cars floated past, then keeping their congregation calm as sections of the roof began caving in. In other cases they lost everything they had, left with only the steps to their houses, with no insurance to cover it because they weren’t in a “flood plain.” It was the church organizations which first moved in with supplies, when the government failed. When they began bring supplies into the bad sections of town, they weren’t greeted by people with shotguns or criminals. They moved in without security, without police escort. They just went. They were welcomed – and it’s shameful that such a thing needs to be said, but with the news coverage that was given, it does.

Veterans for Peace began organizing relief as well, arranging for truckloads of supplies, and working with local churches to ensure they were distributed where needed. Much of the aid went to Ocean Springs, the community where the Macedonia Baptist Church is located. For those who were unable to participate fully in the civil rights struggles of the South because they were dealing with the war in Vietnam - and its aftermath, in one way or another, this is a chance to atone for what they hadn’t done. For a veteran who has fought in an immoral war, for someone who has witnessed things that nobody should have to see, these are the acts of redemption.

4. On Not Having a Hurricane
I live in the Detroit area. We haven’t had a hurricane; we haven’t had a natural disaster that required FEMA’s assistance. Our disaster doesn’t attract media, doesn’t attract emergency agencies, doesn’t attract outside assistance, because it’s not dramatic. It’s a slow economic disaster. We have street after street of burned out or boarded up buildings, factories that lie abandoned, the train station is a gargantuan monument to what used to be in our city, standing in the heart of Detroit, with broken out windows that let you see skylight clear through to the other side as you drive down the highway.

I would like people to remember that while we’re here asking why we are spending money to bomb Iraq when we should be rebuilding the gulf, there are other areas of the country that are also in a world of hurt. Those disasters were not the sudden unanticipated disasters that left our government trying to budget for the unforeseen. Those were the results of outsourcing jobs, of refusing to raise the minimum wage, of cutbacks in health care and welfare. Those were the disasters we watched in silence, entirely predictable, and occurring even as the decision was made to go into Iraq. Every bomb dropped in Iraq explodes over the Gulf. They also explode over Detroit, and over every family that watches a loved one die for lack of health care, or has a child that goes to bed hungry. They explode over every one of my students that misses a day of school because their boyfriend was shot and they had to go to his funeral, or shows up in class but slips me a note saying not to call on them please, because their mother died yesterday, and they couldn’t stay home because they were afraid to miss a day of school.

At my home, we’ve been restoring the woods behind our house, ripping out the invasive trees and replanting with oaks. There is a stream that runs through the backyard, where muskrats eat the freshwater clams they find in the water, the shells pile up in the soil. Our land used to be a slaughterhouse. When it rains in spring, bones and shells are washed up from the earth. It doesn’t matter whether we are in Mississippi or Michigan – we each have our ghosts and redemption, our oyster shells and oak trees.