A Protest March That Has No End

In June, Rux Johnson hitchhiked from Colorado to Georgia to protest the G-8 economic summit. Three weeks later, he bummed a ride to Lawrence, Kan., for a conference on anarchism before moving on to Nashville to work at a radical bookstore.

This month, Johnson joined up with members of Democracy Uprising, a group devoted to grass-roots activism, and marched 258 miles with them from the site of the Democratic Party convention in Boston to the Republican Party gathering in Manhattan.

Of the thousands of protesters converging on the Big Apple for next week’s GOP bash, many, like Johnson, have been traveling the radical political circuit, moving from one hotspot to the next.

Unlike the demonstrators who have disrupted events in Seattle, Miami and other cities in recent years, these increasingly visible itinerant protesters say they are opposed to violence. They don’t plan to antagonize police in New York but insist on their right to engage in provocative street actions.

It’s a new kind of activism, a marriage between Jack Kerouac and Abbie Hoffman. Although many of these protesters have turned their backs on mainstream America, they are part of a burgeoning subculture that embraces direct political action, said Alex Vitale, a Brooklyn College professor who writes about the policing of demonstrations.

“We’ve seen elements of this kind of population before, but we’re not talking about hippies or people who simply drop out,” he said. “What’s new is the phenomenon of activists who travel about mainly to stay connected to a group of like-minded folks.”

Democracy Uprising is a good example. The idea for the group was hatched this year by members of the Next Step political collective, based in Olympia, Wash. They wanted to rekindle the spirit of movement politics and decided that a protest march from Boston to New York would underscore their conviction that neither party has a cure for what ails America.

On a recent humid morning in New Haven, Conn., members of the group began chanting during the march to New York. Both parties are run by corporate masters, they said, and Americans must take back grass-roots power.

Then it was time for political theater. As one member shouted, “Instant protest at Starbucks!” Johnson, 23, sprinted into the shop with seven others, reading a list of Starbucks’ “corporate sins” from a short, prepared script. Before stunned managers could react, the rowdy demonstrators swept out of the store.

“I decided I had to get off my butt and into the streets because I can’t just watch this country fall apart,” said Johnson, a tall, athletic-looking writer who demonstrates against big corporations every chance he gets. “To make things happen, you have to be ready to travel. For me, this has become a way of life.”

Although most activists are under 30, the circuit is sprinkled with older protest veterans as well as neophytes. Some proudly tick off their most memorable demonstrations -- Chicago 1968, San Francisco in the 1970s -- while others say they are mainly on a quest for spiritual growth, with little interest in who wins the 2004 presidential election.

“People make a mistake if they try to put demonstrators into categories,” said Ryan Harvey, a spokesman for the Democracy Uprising march. “And that’s especially true of the people walking from Boston to New York. Everybody here is an individual.”

Life on the political highway has been adventurous, and uncomfortable. Marchers spent nights in strangers’ homes, in church basements and in campgrounds before arriving in New York City this week.

They had braced for criticism. New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and other officials have warned that such events as the Starbucks protest would be a disruption in New York and could result in arrests. More than 10,000 officers will be guarding Madison Square Garden as well as parks, bridges, tunnels and other areas during the convention.

On a hazy August morning, several members of Democracy Uprising spoke of the personal odysseys that had turned them into protesters with a well-worn roadmap.

Besides Johnson there were Kristine “Thistle” Pettersen, a guitar-strumming activist from Texas; Cedar Springs, a Zen Buddhist from Indiana, who plans to meditate 12 hours a day at the convention; and Peter Sears, a veteran San Francisco activist who will head to protests in Washington, D.C., after New York.

Pettersen heard about the march at an Austin concert and was hooked. She was drawn by the fact that those affiliated with Democracy Uprising were free to break away and pursue their own protest activities once the group arrived in New York.

“My partner and I did some soul-searching,” the 36-year-old musician said. “We shipped our bikes to Maine and bought tickets to New York. We rode a bus to Bangor and began riding our bikes down to Boston, spreading the word about the march.”

Before that, she traveled to protest the International Monetary Fund in Washington and demonstrate against the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Ga., where the U.S. military trains Latin American officers. Last year, Pettersen rode her bike from Madison, Wis., to New Orleans, contacting peace groups along the way and rallying opposition to the Iraq war by singing, speaking before groups and distributing literature.

Cedar Springs, the Buddhist from Bloomington, Ind., said she got involved in Democracy Uprising because it gave her the chance to join forces with activists who did not take sides in the election and a group that had no rigid structure.

“I’m doing this because I want to be in a space that’s not part of the problem, and I won’t be violent,” Springs said of her plan to meditate at the Republican convention.

Sears, a 63-year-old activist from Mendocino, has traveled a similar path. His decision to march from Boston to New York represented a political rebirth, he said, after being away from protest politics for many years.

He goes back a long way, to the anti-Vietnam War marches in San Francisco during the 1960s. Sears grew disillusioned with the violent tenor of many radical groups, dropping out for a time to relax and grow organic vegetables in Northern California.

But anger about the war in Iraq drew him back into the fray. Sears deplores violence and fears that it may distort whatever good comes out of the protests at next week’s convention.

As he spoke, a militant chant boiled up from the group, which had reached the outskirts of New Haven and was heading down a backcountry highway for a 10-mile hike to Milford, Conn.: “Whose streets? Our streets! Power to the people!”

Johnson grinned at the memory of Starbucks customers whose jaws dropped when his group stormed in, and said he expects to repeat such actions in New York. Then, when the GOP convention is over, the radical highway will roll on.

“I don’t expect to be stopping my travels anytime soon,” he added. “If you think about it, this activism doesn’t have to end. You just keep moving.”