Alternative Voices Ready to Be Heard at L.A. Convention

Paul Revere never had these headaches.

A dozen peace and justice advocates gathered around three folding banquet tables in an Irvine community room last week to plot the logistics of their part of the revolution.

How to get from Orange County to Los Angeles to protest the Aug. 14-17 Democratic National Convention? Carpool? Take the train? Where do you meet once you’re there? And do you carry big cutout oranges on sticks, flying the home-county colors, or do you go with the orange hand puppets?

“Maybe we should just wear Mickey Mouse ears,” suggested Gordon Johnson, 46, a Green Party member who was peddling two army-surplus gas masks for $10 each to other protesters at the meeting.

Last week’s Orange County Peace and Justice Coalition meeting was one of several such gatherings around the county as disparate groups--from anarchists to labor activists to Libertarians--solidified their plans to join the D2K protests, as they’ve come to be known.

Beyond the anomaly of finding leftist protesters anywhere in Orange County--where liberals are as rare as rain--the social activists say they are united in their deeply held conviction that not all is right with this country, and that a booming economy is not the only measure of national health.

“The trend is that corporations basically do business and they don’t yield to the people’s needs and the environment’s needs,” said Hermine Bender, 24, a Costa Mesa mother studying psychology and biology at Cal State Long Beach. “It’s gotten to the point in society that if something produces money, that’s good.”

For activists, individual motives are merging into a movement, she said.

“People are coming for gay rights issues and all sorts of things,” Bender said. “We need to pull together and join our voices to be heard. I think they did a pretty good job of that in Seattle.”

Ah, Seattle. If there is a benchmark for the modern peace and justice movement, it is that rainy hub of the Pacific Northwest, site of two days of anti-globalism protests last year during the World Trade Organization conference. The event was emblematic not only of civil disobedience but also violent excesses on both sides of the police line.

The scenes were repeated in miniature at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia last week, when hundreds of protesters were hauled off by police, including at least 10 charged with felonies after police said the protesters attacked them.

D2K’s organizers contend they are planning peaceful demonstrations. As long as both sides give the other a little room outside the Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles, they say, all should proceed smoothly.

But Andrew Tonkovich of Laguna Beach, who trains protesters in how to commit acts of civil disobedience, warned that confrontations are inevitable.

Three types of protests are likely, he said: those for which city permits have been obtained, impromptu displays by activists pushing various causes, and the “affinity groups that may stretch the meaning of the word illegal.”

Affinity groups are ad hoc linkages of people interested in drawing attention to specific issues. They exist outside the formal organizing structure of the protests and devise disruptive acts of civil disobedience such as draping banners from hard-to-reach places, blocking building entrances and shutting down traffic. Greenpeace, the international environmental group, was one of the early practitioners of the technique.

“I wouldn’t be surprised to see someone shut down the freeways,” Tonkovich said, speculating that the image of closed freeways--Los Angeles’ lifeline--would be hard for protesters to resist. “We aren’t invited to those [actions]. In fact, they don’t even want us.”

Tip: Stay Beyond an Arm’s Length

Katya Komisaruk says she hopes the protests go off without violent confrontations with police. But she’s planning for the worst.

Komisaruk is a longtime peace activist and staff attorney for the Midnight Special Law Collective, a new, progressive legal advocacy group. It formed after the Seattle protests and moved on to Washington, D.C., for the April protests before setting up shop in the Los Angeles area to prepare for the Democratic National Convention protests.

Komisaruk has been leading seminars around Southern California--including one in Irvine--to train activists to be legal observers at protest marches. The Irvine seminar detailed everything from how to take notes to narrating live while videotaping street violence. And she offered specific instructions in how much space to give a ticked-off cop.

“If you’re within grabbing distance, you might lose your camera, your notes and your freedom,” Komisaruk warned.

Marilyn Vassos, 64, was among those absorbing the lesson. For her, much of the presentation was old hat. Vassos has been protesting U.S. foreign policies since her daughters, now in their 30s, rode in strollers at peace rallies. Her core argument: A civilized nation should be able to find less violent ways to settle disputes than bombing.

Vassos’ message hasn’t been popular with everyone. She has been spit on, yelled at and jailed while speaking out against environmental degradation, nuclear weapons and U.S. support for military regimes in Central America, among other issues.

It’s not the kind of behavior you expect from a fourth-grade teacher from Irvine, now retired, with a winning smile and a soft, encouraging voice. New enthusiasm among fellow activists has given her fresh heart.

“A lot of people said after Seattle that this was a one-shot deal,” Vassos said, sitting in the orderly living room of her comfortable townhouse. “It’s important for people to know this was not a one-shot deal. These are not just ‘today’s hippies.’ We want people to know it’s not all young kids. It’s across the board.”

Alisa Ross, an Irvine mother of four who has been fighting her Turtle Rock neighborhood association over access to the communal pool, doesn’t see herself as “today’s hippie,” either. Ross attended the Midnight Collective seminar to try to connect with others who are also dissatisfied with what she sees as excessive connections between government and corporations.

Ross plans to take part in an Aug. 14 protest in Los Angeles against corporate greed, and she is considering joining a march against racism the following day.

“I don’t know if it’s really possible to achieve a lot, but being able to vent our frustrations through the 1st Amendment rights and being able to peacefully march is sort of a stress release,” she said. “That’s what drives people to [protest], when they feel frustrated by a system that won’t listen to them. It’s cathartic.”

In some ways, the protest movement reached Vangee Oberschlake, 45, of Orange sooner than it did other people. A former corporate account executive, Oberschlake walked away from her burgeoning career a decade ago to become a registered nurse and activist.

“The scales fell from my eyes,” said Oberschlake, who has scheduled vacation for convention week so she can be part of a medical support team there. “I worked in industry and got to travel and had the expense account and all that stuff. But I was feeling very disenchanted. I had a crisis of conscience and completely shifted my career. Instead of trying to be one of the captains of industry, I just woke up and went, ‘Oh, my God, what did I buy into? I’m not going to take this anymore.’ ”

Oberschlake, as a Green Party activist, focuses on environmental issues but also on broader themes such as corporate responsibility and social justice. She hopes Seattle and Washington are the seeds for a new movement to rival the civil rights and antiwar struggles of the ‘50s and ‘60s.

The motivations--anger, frustration and a sense of righteousness--are already in place.

Now all the movement needs is persistence.

“I’m not settling,” Oberschlake said. “We’re not going to settle any more. This isn’t the end of something; this is the beginning of something. It’s starting to gel. Sometimes I feel like I can almost reach out and touch it. I think it’s incredibly exciting.”