WEDNESDAY, JUNE 19,2002
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN = 11
Reza Shapla drifts on a foam toy while his parents Kristi Harris and Roman Shapla take time between workshops to enjoy the swimming area of Clinton Lake. Reza Shapla was one of many children at the gathering. Organizers created a special rest and play area for the children of attendees.
MANDALEE MEISNER/KANSAN
Anarchist gathering CONTINUED FROM PAGE 10
But neither Plummer nor Hoffman expected any trouble.
"I've been dealing with anti-fascist work more than anybody else here," Plummer said, rubbing a tattoo drenched arm. "I don't think they'll dare show up."
The gathering proved peaceful.
And excepting the occasional murder of an unwelcome deer tick, it also proved entirely nonviolent.
Anarchists embrace self-sufficiency, along with the fight against unjustified authority, as two of the most basic tenets of their ideology.
With these values in mind, organizers and attendees worked together to ensure a safe, anarchist-friendly environment for gatherers. Organizers decided, by consensus, to prohibit drugs and alcohol on site.
All decisions were unanimous. Hoffman described what happened when a group in one camp disrupted nearby campers with their all-night partying.
"After they passed out, we got everyone up that we could at seven o'clock in the morning," he said. "We explained to everyone the situation, and then sat as a unified group in front of them."
As they awakened, a group of ten confronted the revelers, explained their discomfort, and asked them to leave. The problem group slowly packed, and left without conflict. This situation exemplified, to Hoffman, the cooperative nature of anarchism.
"Our goal here is to prove that as a community, we can solve any problems that we have," Hoffman said. "It would seem very odd if whenever anarchists had problems, we just called the police."
Under a workshop tent in the mid-afternoon sun, Adrian "Ace" Allan stood and leaned over a volunteer who was sitting on her knees.
She held a water bottle about four inches away from a volunteer's head, and then squeezed a short, steady stream of water into her right eye.
This, she said, was the proper way to
flush a painful coating of tear gas out of a protestor's eye.
Allan helped out at a workshop, "First Aid at Mass Actions," at the gathering. It was one of many workshops that focused on one of the mainstays of anarchism: the protest.
"How many people here have experienced tear gas?" she asked, raising her hand slightly.
A few hands shot up.
A girl who called herself simply "Becca," described the sensation of accidentally running through a cloud of tear gas.
"You can't see anything," she said, bringing her hands to eyes shut in mock pain. "I couldn't breathe. I didn't think that I'd ever breathe again."
Frank Black, a street medic, agreed with Becca that tear gas is an awfully painful way to end a protest. Black is both an experienced member of the anarchist community.
He said that several recent large-scale protests have changed the shape of anarchism today.
"Things are heating up right now," he said, walking from a medic tent to his car to retrieve a pair of demonstration goggles.
Like battle sites, protests are known simply by the name of the city in which they take place: Genoa, Seattle, and Quebec, for instance.
Black said the 1999 anti-WTO protest in Seattle became the benchmark of the modern American protest.
"Seattle drew in lots of people to the movement," he said.
Tens of thousands of protestors, many of them anarchists, swamped the city during ministerial meetings for the World Trade Organization. Actions in the streets disrupted WTO discussions, and Mayor Paul Schell declared a state of emergency.
"I've made plans for next year, at least," he said.
For Black, Seattle was just one of many battles. He said he hoped there would be many more.
Contact Meisner at mmeisner@kansan.com This story was edited by Jason Royer
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