Kopkind Colony

by Kweku Toure

A continuing series of dispatches from Kopkind participants, advisers, guests and friends on life in coronavirus time as they observe and experience it.

If You Want to Make the Gods Laugh, Tell Them Your Plans

Atlanta

This is a story, two actually, about expectations and the chance that even the most reasoned plan is at risk of surprise. One involves elections, the other love, during Covid-19.

Before working as a nonpartisan election protector in Georgia this November, I took a training that stressed the importance of making a visual inspection of people’s faces and physical demeanor as they exited the polls. Did they look distressed? If so, maybe something had happened inside to obstruct their vote: Check it out and report any irregularity. On Election Day, as I floated between Dacula and Suwanee, in Gwinnett County, things turned out to be less straightforward. Be mindful, I’m doing this split-second visual inspection while social distancing, trying to read people’s eyes, looking for stress above their face mask as they walk at a steady pace to get to work or home, or simply go about their day.

Where people wore masks, visual observation was virtually impossible. In one large polling place in Suwanee, traffic was nonstop. People got out of their vehicles, put on their masks, entered the community center, and hurried out when they were done. For a minute, my fellow protectors and I thought about stopping people who weren’t wearing an “I voted” sticker to ask if they’d had difficulty. If they were anything like me, though, they would have rejected the sticker, a clear problem with this strategy. Where people didn’t wear masks, like the mostly white voters at an elementary school out in the sticks in Dacula, I didn’t spot signs of distress. Did that mean no one was distressed?

I didn’t find any major irregularities, and as of November 9, Biden lead Trump in Gwinnett County 241,827 votes to 166,413. As I write, Georgia is doing a recount; the news is focused on that and the latest spike in coronavirus infections and deaths. But people always have a lot more going on in their lives.

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I’d planned to read people’s facial expressions for signs of distress at the polls on Election Day. I’d planned when packing my silk pillowcases and fully stocked bar to move in with my lady, at the start of the pandemic, that we were a match.

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Late last year, around the same time that we in the United States started hearing news about Covid-19, I rekindled a relationship with a love interest. I had fallen ill with flu-like symptoms during December and felt sick the entire month of January. In February, the relationship evolved as we articulated to each other that at our age we are in the autumn of our lives, with winter rapidly approaching. We thought it would be a good idea to pool our resources and cohabitate, especially because we spent so much time together on weekends. We thought we matched.

Until then, I had lived as a true bachelor in D.C., with satin pillowcases for the ladies and a fully stocked bar, with no children or pets in the house. My lady lived in Baltimore, with her young daughter.

The plan! I would move to Baltimore and start living and working in “Charm City.” So around the second week of February I rented out my house, packed my belongings, including the satin pillowcases and fully stocked bar, and moved.

Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out. For anyone who doesn’t catch the reference, that’s the line in I, Claudius where Claudius, the Roman emperor, lets his court know that he has decided to marry for a third time. My lady and I discovered we had fundamental differences early on. I mean, try living with someone who does not believe in the thing that has forced everyone in the country into isolation. I am a news junkie. She avoids the news like the plague and relies on Instagram and Facebook. I vote, and planned to work with an election protection civil rights organization. She does not vote, mainly because of her citizenship status; however, I get the feeling that if she could vote, she would not.

I love her free spirit, “Grand Central Station,” social butterfly attitude. That is what so attracted me to her, right? But now, it’s a pandemic, and people have died, and her personality is a liability. Her favorite phrase is that the pandemic is a “Plandemic.” I am sure she got the phrase from her Instagram feeds.

I took the pandemic seriously from the start, and gave her daily updates. The city and the entire country were heading for shutdown, I said; we should stock up on supplies and wait this out. At first, I commuted to my law office in D.C., which was occupied by me and my associate. We had separate offices, and when meeting clients, we wore face shields as well as masks. When we stopped allowing clients to visit, I was, for the most part, alone all day; then I would return home to Baltimore.

Contrariwise, my lady felt she was not going to be “mind controlled,” as she would often say. “We are all operating out of fear.” On occasion, when I would return home, she would be entertaining guests—no one wearing a mask, no social distancing. Lesson: You never know someone until an emergency hits. What a way to discover differences!

I am in Atlanta now, waiting to start work as a public defender in Macon, Ga., expecting, as any criminal lawyer must, that nothing is a sure bet. What can be said is that no matter the best-laid arrangements, if you want to make the gods laugh, just tell them your plans.

Kweku Toure is an attorney and a member of the Kopkind board.

Scenes From a Pandemic is a Kopkind/Nation magazine collaboration. This piece originally appeared on The Nation‘s website on November 18, 2020. We thank Katrina vanden Heuvel, D.D. Guttenplan and The Nation crew.

Bonus: David v. Goliath, Then & Now

In 1984, Jesse Jackson (with whom Kweku once worked) spoke about electoral power and participation, using the metaphor of “Little David” to urge nonvoters to “pick up your slingshot, pick up your rock.” In 2020, people did just that, as US voter turnout was the highest in 120 years. But as Jackson well knew, politics is about more than voting. Watch part of that famous speech here.

Goliath takes many forms. In this post-election discussion on The Laura Flanders Show, Laura (a former Kopkind mentor) speaks with activists from around the country, including Scot Nakagawa, another former Kopkind mentor, about the meaning of the 2020 election and the struggle for a humane future.

by C. Douglas Lummis

A continuing series of dispatches from Kopkind participants, advisers, guests and friends on life in coronavirus time as they observe and experience it.

‘We Won’t Quit Until We Stop It’

Naha, Okinawa

Every day except weekends, holidays, and typhoon days, even in the pandemic, charter buses leave from Naha and other cities on this island to transport protesters to three locations in the north, where the Japanese government is trying to build a super airbase for the US Marines.

One location is Shiokawa, on the East China Sea side of the island, where the government’s Okinawa Defense Bureau is tearing down a mountain and loading it into dump trucks. There, protesters delay the work by standing in front of the trucks. The second location is the nearby Awa pier, where the mountain-become-dirt is loaded onto small cargo ships. There, by milling around on the sidewalk at the gate where there’s a traffic light, protesters reduce the number of trucks entering the area to one per green light. This reduces the number of ships that depart each day. In the water, the ships are further delayed by a brave fleet of sea-kayakers, who crowd around the bow of each ship until they are hauled away. Once free of the kayakers, the ships sail to the Pacific Ocean side of the island, to Cape Henoko, site of the US Marines’ Camp Schwab, and dump the dirt into the sea as landfill to support the airstrip that is planned to cut across the cape and stick out into the sea on both sides, wreaking ecocatastrophe on the coral garden there. Another team of kayakers meets them, delaying the process still more. 

The third charter bus destination is the gate on the inland side of Camp Schwab, where a daily sit-in slows down the huge fleets of trucks—cement trucks, trucks carrying building materials, and dump trucks carrying more dirt from nearby locations—that enter the construction site in the form of three convoys of 200-300 vehicles a day, even during the pandemic.

Okinawa was a peaceful independent kingdom until Japan seized it in the same historical era that the US seized Puerto Rico. Legally, Okinawans are Japanese; culturally, they are a colonized indigenous people. Occupying 0.6 percent of Japanese territory, they are stuck with more than 70 percent of US military installations in Japan, a situation they call structural discrimination. Okinawan conservatives and progressives are united in opposing the construction of yet another base.

The protesters are mostly retired people. It makes sense. Direct action targeting construction needs to be carried out during working hours. Also, people living on retirement incomes don’t need to worry about getting fired. But more than that, most of these folks remember the Battle of Okinawa or the devastation that came after, and see this as their last chance to put their hatred of war into the form of a concrete achievement. Asked why they think they can win against the combined force of the US and Japanese governments, their fixed answer is “Because we won’t quit until we do.”

Last week I took the Wednesday bus to Henoko. Fifteen people were on it, a bit down from the previous average of around 20, probably because of Covid, but the reduced number made it easier to keep our distance. 

The mood was good, with lots of happy greetings. These people enjoy one another’s company and love having something meaningful to do each day. The 90-minute drive was spent listening to self-introductions from three who’d come down from mainland Japan (these buses have mics), discussing politics, exchanging information, and singing. H-san, who presides over the Wednesday bus, was her usual bubbly self, alternating between humor and anger as she talked about Japan’s new prime minister. Her punch line: “As for being Japanese, I resign. I’m Okinawan!” C-san, an eloquent raconteur who always sits in the left rear seat, talked (half in Japanese, half in the Okinawan language) about why he is confident the airbase will never get built: the sea bottom on the northern side of Cape Henoko is unstable slime—mayonnaise, they call it—and will never support a concrete airstrip. T-san, who specializes in irony and black humor, got lots of laughs. The Henoko action, including the bus ride, has been called Henoko University.

 A couple months ago, Covid appeared inside the construction site, and work was shut down briefly. When it resumed, the question at the gate became How could both the protesters and the riot policemen carry out their respective roles while observing social distancing rules?

This was the 2,313th day of the sit-in. Our job at the gate, together with several dozen others who’d come on different buses, was to delay the second and the third of that day’s truck convoys. In the past, the interaction between police and protesters was pretty rough, especially when most of the riot police were from mainland Japan. In those days there was a lot of anger on both sides. Nonviolence resembled that of a rugby match—no hitting but lots of pushing and shoving. Now most of the Japanese have been sent home. The remaining Okinawan riot police have probably heard more anti-Henoko-base speeches than any humans on earth. Most of those speeches are delivered by women, who must remind them of their mothers or grandmothers. That, plus the adamant nonviolence of the protesters, has had its effect. The action has come to look less and less like rugby.

It’s quite something to see. With a convoy of a couple hundred trucks halted on the highway, the officer in charge of this police unit—who has become pretty friendly toward the protesters—repeats through his bullhorn that the sit-inners are violating traffic law and must move aside. From time to time, he looks at his watch. The sit-inners continue speech-making and singing. The riot police stand silently, waiting for the order. After fifteen or twenty minutes, he gives it—not to carry protesters away, but to ask them politely. This the riot police do, one by one. The protesters refuse, and refuse, and refuse again, but when the policemen make as if to pick them up, they stand up and amble to the side.  

This slow-motion, spacially distant enactment of conflict may not be exciting, and it slows down the delivery by only about 20 minutes. But repeated three times, that’s one lost hour a day. More important, the sit-in deprives the builders of free access to the gate and the efficiency of just-in-time deliveries; it forces them to organize convoys and protect them with hundreds of police. Through the repetition of these protest tactics, combined with refusal of the Prefectural Government to issue permits, refusal of the City of Nago to allow construction work on land it controls, and many lawsuits and protests from environmentalists, the cost estimate has tripled, the target date has been postponed by more than a decade, and many people—including some in the US Congress—believe (or worry, in the case of the Congresspeople) that the thing will never get done.

C. Douglas Lummis is the coordinator of Veterans for Peace—Ryukyus/Okinawa Chapter Kokusai (VFP-ROCK)—and the author of Radical Democracy. Doug was a mentor at Kopkind in 2002.

Scenes From a Pandemic is a Kopkind/Nation magazine collaboration. This piece originally appeared on The Nation‘s website on November 12, 2020. We thank Katrina vanden Heuvel, D.D. Guttenplan and The Nation crew.

Bonus: ‘It’s I Give Up, or I Have Nothing to Fear’, Bill T. Jones

In the midst of the AIDS epidemic, dancers Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane created a stunning performance piece, D-Man in the Waters. Until November 19, the DOC NYC festival is screening online a film called Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the Waters (click to watch trailer and get tickets). It chronicles the love story between Jones and Zane, the diverse dance company they founded, and the devastation of AIDS, as told through their company’s signature piece, recently reinterpreted for a new generation. The festival calls the film “an engrossing examination of … the power of art to move through pain.” The dance is also an expression of the will to fly—something Jones talked about with great feeling in John Scagliotti’s film about growing up different, Oliver Button Is a Star.

With thanks to our friend Susie Day, author of The Brother You Choose, for sending notice about this new film. She calls it “one of the most moving documentaries on AIDS — and art — AND Bill T. Jones I’ve ever seen.” For the festival’s full line-up, which also includes the documentary 76 Days, made in Wuhan during lockdown, click here.

by Molly Bolick

A continuing series of dispatches from Kopkind participants, advisers, guests and friends on life in coronavirus time as they observe and experience it.

‘Why Tell Me That We’re Safer Here?’

Merrimack County, New Hampshire

Frost came early this year. My tomatoes hung unripe on dead vines while it was still summer. If you’re one for metaphor, this is 2020: It gives, but it also takes. The take will be swift, cold, and absolute. It happens like this sometimes, my neighbors tell me about the frost. They are resigned to the loss with a knowing headshake. None seemed as devastated by the taking as I.

I am new here, having moved to central New Hampshire a little over a year ago. Covid-19 arrived in Northern New England with—what I’ll dare to describe as—a bang. News of contagion in Wuhan had been consistent throughout the late winter, as had reports from Seattle in early March. Then, overnight it seemed, New York began to turn part of Central Park into a makeshift morgue. Manhattan is a little less than 300 miles from here. The nonprofit where I work shut down temporarily. I talked with co-workers remotely, and I was struck by the lack of concern for what I saw as the virus’s inevitable progression northward.

I listened to the reasoning for a sense of security: We are too remote, too sparsely populated, too rural, too out of reach, to be susceptible to infection on a cataclysmic scale. We aren’t at risk. Merrimack County is located along the postindustrial zone of the Merrimack River north of Manchester, about an hour northwest of Portsmouth and the sea, and roughly an hour and half southeast of the Connecticut River Valley at White River Junction, Vermont. In the 2010 census, Merrimack County had a population of 146,445 people in 955 square miles (compared with Manhattan’s 1.58 million in 22.8 square miles). It is reasonable to assume there would be fewer infections. But I am not a doctor or mathematician. I’m a folklorist. I’m trained to listen, see, observe as an outsider, and note cultural and group patterns. This is how I move through the world. There is no Off switch. It was not census data or infection modeling that struck me; rather, I noticed a specific cultural response to a pandemic threat.

I listened to people in my small circle. What emerged was a narrative of New Hampshire as able to weather the virus’s effects at the community and state level. Sometimes thoughtful, sometimes brazen, the reasoning hovered at an intersection of geography, population density, and, largely, what I can identify as central New Hampshire Yankee culture. From my perspective, this appears to be a shared sense of determined self-reliance born of generational survival on small, rugged hill farms and interaction with the natural environment for everyday survival and joy.

People had absorbed scientific information. That is not in question. The governor held press conferences with the state epidemiologist, which streamed live, aired on local TV news stations, and were highlighted in print and on radio. Safety guidelines were easily accessible online. People knew, and continue to know, the science. Whether or not it was accepted is not my point here. Scientific facts existed alongside cultural perceptions of New Hampshire as somehow safer, and this idea appeared to be shared throughout my community in everyday conversation.

As an observer and cultural outsider, I see a disconnect between science and community response. As a folklorist, I see parallels to research by Diane Goldstein, a folklorist at Indiana University, on AIDS narratives in the Canadian Maritimes. She argues that the process of telling AIDS legends—stories that distance the teller from populations identified as “at risk”—takes over and fills the gap where expert percep-tions of health do not seem to make cultural sense in context. Understanding community perceptions of risk, she writes, is essential for “understanding attitudes toward risk at the very core of health care.”

Can we see the same pattern emerging with local Covid-19 responses? When a retired neighbor tells me we’re less likely to be exposed to the virus, does she say that because a field separates our houses? Or because neither of us works at a meat processing plant, or is in a nursing home? Our risk is certainly lower, but I do not believe that is the only reason motivating her idea of safety. We both shop at the same gigantic supermarket, whose parking lot is consistently full. We both encounter people who don’t wear masks. My neighbor and I are not living on top of one another, but we are living in 2020, and that means living with the threat of viral exposure.

So, why tell me that we’re safer here? If articulating a belief about safety amidst a global pandemic fills a gap in perceptions of risk, what is the gap? Can it be explained by the trope of Yankee toughness—the dedication to self-reliance and prosperity by one’s own blistered hands? This is the “Live Free or Die” state; can the gap be attributed to a cultural aversion to state intervention?

The importance here is understanding that a gap exists, and varies by community. That may sound obvious when we consider the pushback to mask mandates and limits on large gatherings, but it is not.

We, collectively as a nation, will be forced to examine the overall cultural response to Covid-19 in the decades to come. A loss of 225,000 people (and counting) will not be swept away without a demand for answers as to why and how this happened. The lack of federal governance has ensured that the demand for answers will start at the family, community, and county level. Here, an understanding of culturally motivated actions, perceptions of risks, and the gap between community response and scientific fact will be crucial information for guiding future response to crisis. American culture is not the monolith we often assume. Our responses to Covid-19 exemplify this.

As of October 23, 2020, there have been 814 positive cases and 26 Covid-19-related deaths in Merrimack County, New Hampshire.

Molly Bolick is a folklorist; she participated in Kopkind’s political camp in 2018. Between the time she finalized this article and November 1, her rural county posted 137 more positive cases and three more deaths. The US total, meanwhile, has risen to 231,000.

Scenes From a Pandemic is a Kopkind/Nation magazine collaboration. This piece originally appeared on The Nation‘s website on October 28, 2020. We thank Katrina vanden Heuvel, D.D. Guttenplan and The Nation crew.

Bonus: Days of the Dead

The image above is from Oaxaca’s famed Dia de los Muertos celebrations last year. This year, Mexico has endured more than 90,000 deaths from Covid-19 officially, with perhaps as many as 50,000 more uncounted. “We broke records [for visitors celebrating the holiday] in 2019,” Roberto Monroy, tourism secretary in Morelia, Michoacán, told The Guardian this year. “We also broke records in 2020—just the wrong records.” Below, a woman in Mexico City arranges marigold petals before a private altar in her home for a relative who died of the coronavirus.