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Berkeley Marine Recruiting Station Campaign
In order to begin to grasp the many actions, activities and forms of resistances that have occurred in the last five years, we have put together this survey. (Note this survey was completed via a phone interview conducted in May –08 and an email exchange in July ’08) 1 Your name, names of collaborators or collective name (aliases are fine).
2. Name of activity, campaign, project etc… 3: Is this activity affiliated with any other groups? 4: Dates of activity (month, year, duration, is it ongoing?). The police have brought various codes down upon us. For our use of the sidewalk, we’ve gone back and forth in order to have such things as tables, chairs and ironing boards. The judge has upheld our right to have 4 feet of space on the sidewalk, plenty for our ironing board and a few chairs Though we’ve been in the street, right in the street, and on the sidewalk, 5: Location(s) of activity (city, street, store, gallery, web site, be specific). Zanne (the main organizer of our MRS campaign) has a large colorful truck. She’s a full time activist but used to be antique dealer. She’d try to park right in front of office and with this permit now she can. Except none of us Pinkers park in the space during "our" 4 hours on Weds - we always stand and sit, keeping it vehicle-free. Zanne parks across the street.] In March we had a week called “The Real Green Zone”. We had a huge platform truck like the kind that can be used for parades. It had all kinds of plants on it. We moved the plants and all kinds of stuff into the streets. Doing so, peoples’ energy changes. It is a way to recover the space from vehicles. 6: Type of activity (please attempt to classify the tactic).
7: Target and goal of activity. The bigger goal is to take part in a larger counter recruitment campaign. We want the office to be closed. We have meet with the landlord to try to get him to break the lease. Medea Benjamin said that this office has become a symbol. There’s been so much public notice of it. As you know the city of Berkeley was in the process of outlawing military recruitment with in the city, but this law was voted down. This is definitely a turf and identity issue. For the Marines as well. it's as if they are saying, “We can go anywhere we want”. And people in Berkeley are like “What are you doing in our city?” So folks are reasserting their position as antiwar. A recent development with the Marines is that they lock their door during business hours. The have a sign in there storefront explaining, ”due to increased foot traffic we keep this door looked”. They have a siege mentality. Numerous times in the past, woman have gone in and just sat. On the day of the 4,000th soldiers death, 4 women (co-founder Medea Benjamin, activists Zanne Joi, Toby Blome, and Pamela Bennett) went in with fake blood and did a mourning action- all were arrested (the judge's decision exonerated them, dropping all but one minor charge.]. When this is going on in your workspace, you’re not getting work done. Capt Lund (the recruitment officer for Sept- Oct 2007) wrote a long letter in Berkeley’s Daily Planet about why the Marines had set up shop in Berkeley. Code Pink wrote a letter back. This spurred on a flurry of letter to the editors in the local papers. Captain Lund has since been re-assigned, I believe at his request. He's not in Berkeley anymore. 9: What was the outcome of activity? I think that there haven’t been many actual interventions. I have only been in 1 conversation with a young man going into Marines. His uncle was in the Marines –which is a powerful draw for him- we talked for 45 minutes. I think some people have criticized us saying that we should be set up where we could interact more with high school students. Some people are thinking of doing actions In the Richmond mall. 10: What did you learn from this activity? When you are carrying on a high-energy campaign that attracts people and media through negative attention and energy it’s more demanding on the group. In these high visibility campaigns differences of style and opinions, that wouldn’t be so import otherwise, rises to surface. It’s not like we set out in September to say, “This will be the next 3 years of my life”. And it has taken a lot of time and energy to discuss and figure out what piece of a long campaign people can fit in with and sustain. Another thing I’ve learned is that while it’s necessary to work with people with a diversity of views, you better figure out how you’re going to handle divergent opinions that get expressed by a group. Especially in terms of how the media works today. You have to get clear within group where peoples positions are. Dealing with the hate mail that we’ve received its been intense and hard. We’ve received some straight up sexist violent mail. There have been folks who’ve been critical but not abusive. This is an opportunity. Here we can connect with mostly men that we wouldn’t otherwise reach. I remember one young man who said, “I don’t understand what’s going on? How could you protest the Marines?” To many they represent the male ideal of protection. I exchanged emails with that student in Massachusetts several times and this was great. I have gotten used to the hate/critical email, and the level and intensity have come down a lot since. I have had numerous good exchanges with young men and boys. However, on Monday I listened to a long, intense rant on the Code Pink office voicemail from a Marine sergeant who said he was calling from Iraq, and he seemed to think we Pinkers were somehow interfering with Marine training. So who knows what all is being said about us in the right wing/military grapevine. I wished I could have spoken with him, actually. He described holding a dying buddy in his arms and was speaking out of this swirl of rage, grief, impatience, hurt pride, concern about "his" men's morale, anxiety, a bit of coarse humor -- and underneath it all, a frantic desire to connect with -- and dump on -- some unknown woman. That is the kind of energy we have attracted and will need to continue to deal with for a long time, both Code Pink and the larger civilian society. 11: What influenced the decisions you made in creating this activity? (Be specific) 12: How do you measure success for this activity? B) The practical goal of getting the station closed- we haven’t achieved this yet. I ask myself what that would that would look like? There was a recruiting station that was closed down in downtown Oakland. We’d love to see the Berkeley recruiting station go a way. 13: In order to continue and be successful with this or other related activities, what would you do or need? (Be specific: is it a question of tools, more people, concepts, lock boxes, training, cultural change.) What is it going to take to close the recruitment station? Is it going to take a new Cindy Sheehan moment to close that particular office, to bring recruitment down to that level where the government can’t maintain the war?
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