SEATTLE — Those who marched or stood or sat in the streets of this city last week made history, and they knew it. And like the great marches against the Vietnam War, or the first sit-ins in the South during the late '50s, it was not always easy to see just what history was being made, especially for those closest to the events. Tear gas, rubber bullets and police sweeps, the object of incessant media coverage, are the outward signs of impending change that the guardians of the social order have grown to fear. And there's always a little history in that
Poeina, a young woman sitting in the intersection at the corner of Seventh and Stewart, waiting nervously for the cops to cuff her and take her away in her first arrest, knew what she and her friends had already won: "I know we got people to listen, and that we changed their minds." It was a statement of hope, like the chant that rose last Tuesday from streets filled with thousands of demonstrators as the police moved in: "The whole world is watching!"
The Seattle protests put trade on the roadmap of public debate, making WTO a universally recognized set of initials in a matter of hours — what it took a year of debate over NAFTA to accomplish.
But perhaps the greatest impact will be on the people who were there. Just as anti-war demonstrations and civil rights sit-ins were focal points, from which people fanned out across the country, Seattle is also a beginning of something greater. What will the people who filled its downtown streets take with them back into this city's rainy neighborhoods, or to towns and cities across the country?
A certain common understanding of the world was forged in the streets here. Environmentalists came protesting the impending destruction of laws protecting clean air and water. Animal rights activists came to protect sea turtles. Trade unionists came fighting for jobs and against child labor. Fair trade campaigners arrived to debate corporate domination of the process by which trade rules are decided.
Even the generational cultures of the protesters started to spill from one group into another. Environmental activists in their 20s came with the tactics from the battles in the forests of northern California and the Pacific northwest. They carried giant puppets, dressed themselves in costumes rather than carrying signs, and laid down in busy intersections during morning rush hour.
In groups of 20 and 30, they chained their arms together, slipping metal sleeves over hands and chains. Two years ago, this tactic was answered by Humboldt County sheriffs, who swabbed pepper spray directly into the eyes of protestors at Pacific Lumber Company. Even for veterans of civil disobedience, the chains are a tactic that demands determination and commitment.
As police rushed in to make arrests and cut them apart, a young woman stood to the side, crying out in tears to the helmeted and shielded officers — "I'm your daughter!"
Later the same day, tens of thousands of union members marched into downtown to join the protest. Having shut down all the ports along the Pacific Coast from Alaska to San Diego, union members chanted and waved picket signs as their ranks filled the streets as far as the eye could see.
Each union's members marched together, each with their own color jacket or T-shirt, each carrying banners and signs printed for the occasion.
Many of the morning's young protesters were visibly impressed by the strength of the numbers and organization. For Annie Decker, "the power and size of it made me feel joyful. I was proud that we were together, bringing the WTO into the public eye."
In the midst of the tear gas, it was not hard to see that this culture of protest is starting to spread, whether through union jackets on protesters in the redwood forests, or giant puppets on union picket lines in Oakland. But under the culture is the germ of an idea — the linkage.
For unionists, the depredations of a global trading system has pitted workers in many countries against each other in a race to the bottom in wages and workers' rights. Environmental activists see a system that values profit-making over laws protecting health and the environment.
Rather than creating an atomized assembly — each group pursuing its own interests in isolation — protesters came ready to see what they had in common.
Decker, an organizer and observer at an intersection filled with sitting bodies, called her own realization liberating. "We don't have to just express an opinion on one issue," she said. "Trade and the power of corporations are affecting us in so many areas that we can all make connections, and see the common element behind the problems we share."
President Bill Clinton may regret planning a summit of the powerful which has become overshadowed by street protest. But in the long run, he will regret this realization more. It is an indictment, not of a particular company, or even a single country, but of a whole economic order which is uniting its enemies in opposition to it.