Boot Camp for Roving Protesters

This is not your average summer camp.

Climbing classes here teach skyscraper- and billboard-scaling, essential for dangling banners. Arts and crafts include making puppets and signs to wave in the streets. And supper time around the campfire means settling down with vegetarian food on reused plastic plates to listen to speeches on campaign finance reform and U.S. intervention in Latin America.

This is the Ruckus Society’s Democracy in Action camp--five days in the hills of Malibu teaching activists how to take to the streets during the Democratic National Convention next month. Founded in 1995 in response to stepped-up logging plans in the Pacific Northwest, the Berkeley-based Ruckus Society has evolved into a counterculture phenomenon, training activists from all walks of life in the colorful but serious business of nonviolent resistance.

“I’m interested in taking the ethics of excellence and professionalism Greenpeace has and spreading it throughout the movement,” said John Sellers, who helped form Ruckus and is the group director. “There was a time for all of us when being an underachiever was very important and political. But not anymore.”

The camp, which ended last week, is the most high-profile wing of a protest movement that wraps together a disparate group of causes and courts media attention assiduously. Highly coordinated, it features cross-country conference calls, fact-laden glossy pamphlets and regular workshops in nonviolent civil disobedience. Organizers say their goal is to ensure that the 10,000 to 50,000 activists expected to protest in August do so in a strategic and orderly manner, without damaging property or people and without losing their chance to broadcast their message before the world media.

Still, even though Ruckus disavows violence, its curriculum includes training in performing illegal acts, such as using bicycle locks to join activists into human blockades, that could provoke police. How police and city leaders react to those tactics may determine whether next month’s convention goes smoothly or erupts into violence.

That makes the camp a lightning rod for critics, who see its tactics as deliberately provocative and intended to incite confrontations.

The organizational prowess represented by Ruckus is a double-edged sword for law enforcement. Ruckus participants learn how to get attention but also how to calm tense situations, especially with police. Police say that kind of discipline may make it easier for authorities to make mass arrests, but it also raises police concerns about other confrontations.

“When people train and conspire to break the law,” Los Angeles Police Cmdr. David J. Kalish said, “that is alarming.”

Mayor Richard Riordan, among others, has expressed alarm about the idea of the training camp. Riordan warns that protesters who block streets or break other laws will be arrested and jailed or fined. The mayor is not alone in raising those concerns. To many who value order, Ruckus’ emphasis on disobedience is troubling, its willingness to confront authority downright frightening.

Ruckus participants counter that the establishment needs to be shaken up because it favors giant corporations at the expense of working people and the environment. They cite Gandhi, Rosa Parks and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and say that, like those heroes of civil disobedience, they too are willing to risk arrest or injury to make their point.

Still, this is camp and there’s plenty of fun for the about 150 participants, a blend of old and young, protest veterans who participated in recent actions in Seattle and Washington, D.C., and teenagers preparing for their first ever. The days at Ruckus sometimes resemble a Grateful Dead show, punctuated by roving folk singers, spontaneous dance sessions and long conversations that tail into the night.

And yet, even that spirit of levity has its purpose.

“The Romans were taken over by the Barbarians, the Greeks by the Macedonians,” says Sean Karlin, a documentary filmmaker at the camp. “While the Macedonians were training how to use swords and shields, these people are learning to use banners, words and ideas.”

“That there,” Karlin adds, pointing to a field of dancing activists, “is like troop training.”

The Camp

It is Thursday afternoon and the Ruckus is just beginning.

This afternoon, Ruckus veterans trickle into the kitchen area--a deck shaded by two massive oak trees--and greet each other as the old friends many are. “What have you been up to?” one asks a woman named Sprout. Sprout, arrested during protests in Washington, D.C., replies: “Keeping up on my court dates.”

Roger, 21, just arrived from Tennessee. He lives in Bloomington, Indiana, where he majors in labor studies, but he hitchhiked to Tennessee for the Earth First! “skill share”--another roving training session. He knew that, from there, he could find a ride to Ruckus.

Roger, who like many Ruckus regulars would not give his last name, attended his first Ruckus camp two years ago “and got hooked. . . . A big thing of what got me into the movement is just meeting people.”

With only four people on the Ruckus payroll--the nonprofit organization gets most of its money from foundation grants and well-off supporters--volunteers like Roger essentially run the camp. Ruckus camps are logistical jigsaw puzzles and this one is no exception.

Many volunteers arrived four days early to help set up the site, located on a patch of Malibu land with views of surrounding mountains so striking that one Tibetan emigre at the camp says it reminds him of home.

The kitchen staffers, who work 15-hour days cooking for the camp, spent days visiting local markets and organic grocers to scare up enough nongenetically modified food to feed 150.

Members of the San Francisco-based Rainforest Action Network set up a solar charging station for the more than a dozen laptops and cellular phones brought to camp, with a cardboard sign dangling overhead reading: “Real revolutionaries fill their phones with the sun.”

Volunteers wielding bright yellow radios hop into white vans to shuttle participants from the parking lot at Santa Monica High School or Los Angeles International Airport.

Those shuttles bring them to Malibu, but not the Malibu of big houses and beach squabbles. The owners of the property, who did not want their names used because of Ruckus’ notoriety, live in low-slung buildings and a trailer. They often hold activist or spiritualist retreats.

As the sun sinks under the serrated hills, the students arrive and pitch their tents. Several will teach some workshops while learning in others, but many had to fill out an online application with questions such as “Describe your most powerful experience of social action.” Only one in eight is accepted--which makes getting into Ruckus statistically almost as tough as winning admission to Harvard.

Niun, a 28-year-old self-identified pagan from Oakland, wrote 14 pages for her application, dreaming of spending days and nights with some of the movement’s most accomplished activists.

“I really wanted to be here,” she says, “be part of the whole community.”

The Curriculum

The Revolution, Ruckus trainers tell participants as they settle in for classes, is hard work.

“There’s this myth about social change, the spontaneous combustion myth, that all of these movements come out of nowhere,” Adam Gold, an organizer from Oakland, tells an audience at one workshop. To debunk that myth, he reminds his class that Rosa Parks had been trained in nonviolent civil disobedience and that the Montgomery bus boycott that arose after her arrest in 1955 was engineered by local women activists working long into the night.

There are many reasons why activists have to be prepared, Ruckus trainers say. Their bodies are on the line when they take the streets and a wrong move could lead to grave injury. The eyes of the world may be upon them and it’s important that they are polished.

“Let’s all agree,” Sellers tells the campers, “that we’re not going to do half-assed, crappy actions because they’re going to tarnish the direct action movement.”

Classes begin with a talk on the history of European colonialism and oppression in the United States, Latin America and Africa. Then they move into nonviolence training, where students go through “listening exercises,” in which they learn to smile and nod to show that they are paying attention to people speaking to them. They act out protests and are critiqued by trainers for using too aggressive body language and for failing to de-escalate tense moments with police.

Next is climbing.

“Everyone can do it,” a woman named Omi reassures students gathered under a tarp next to a massive climbing structure that Ruckus has erected in a field. “We’ve had people from 3 years old to 80 years old.”

Omi hands the instruction off to Kimberly Medeiros, a 25-year-old who learned climbing at a 1997 Ruckus camp and has since used her skills for Greenpeace to, among other things, block shipments of coal into Toronto’s harbor. She goes through the top-to-bottom checks needed to assure safety, rattling off names of gear like a fighter pilot readying for takeoff.

Medeiros does a quick demonstration, and students follow onto the ropes, inching up at first but gaining confidence until the sky is filled with cheering activists dangling upside down.

There’s plenty of time to be cerebral at Ruckus. Mealtime conversations center on politics and activism. After dinner, speakers discuss campaign finance reform, the civil war in Colombia and the U.S. offer of military aid, and the history of the Los Angeles Police Department.

Many classes are less historical, with some discussing medical issues or how to fashion the perfect march chant, and others emphasizing strategy, from impersonation to organization.

Dress up as a UPS driver or a local homeless person to scout a location. Assign a police negotiator, a medic, a media liaison and a jail support person for any group planning actions. If you want to bind activists together to block an intersection or building entry, so-called lock boxes are more resistant to police cutting tools than bicycle locks but far heavier. Lock boxes are sleeves made of quarter-inch-thick steel. And if you expect to be there for a while, bring diapers.

The Race Issue

For all its appreciation of openness, Ruckus preserves a place for privacy.

Starting the first day of camp, the activists regularly retreat from the news media to discuss race, class and power--overlapping topics that touch a raw nerve in some of the participants. Ruckus and many of the groups that make up the new, roving protest movement are overwhelmingly white, a jarring sameness in a cause that aspires to global significance. Some participants are reluctant to discuss racial issues in detail. Several others, however, are blunt.

The message sent out by Ruckus and similar groups, said Hop Hopkins, a Seattle activist who is black, can be: “We’re here as white activists and you should come here to our hippie vegan world.”

Hopkins adds that “poor people can’t afford to take a week off work” to attend the camp. Nor can people of color lead the nomadic life of many of the white activists who hitchhike across country and camp in friends’ back yards. Nor do their struggles garner the headlines of white-organized protests or training camps.

Hopkins, a former vegan himself, and others urge against simplistic answers to the issue, but all agree that “the movement” must be more sensitive to diversity issues by doing things like sharing resources with minority groups that lack access to as many grants and stepping up local organizing.

One afternoon the camp is visited by a veteran Los Angeles activist, Ted Hayes, who has expressed concern that the protests in August will interfere with and overshadow his own convention for the homeless next to Staples Center. Hayes was invited by a former Ruckus trainer who has worked with him in an effort to mediate between the Ruckus crew and the homeless contingent. But he leaves still wary.

“It’s a party. It’s middle-class kids having a ball,” Hayes says as he surveyed Ruckus participants dancing and making puppets.

Ruckus, founded and run by white people, says it is highly conscious of the issue and wants to forge coalitions with minority activists. That’s why this camp included, for the first time, training on anti-oppression and community organizing, issues that could be of particular interest in highly diverse Los Angeles, and why so much was given over to lengthy talks about race.

Hayes eventually softens his skepticism, and others at the camp also are impressed.

“I thought it was going to be a bunch of hippies,” said Favianna Rodriguez, 21, who organizes youths in Oakland. “But they have really good skills, and I’m really surprised at the amount of critical thinking they provide.

“They’re not in this,” Rodriguez adds, “for fun.”

The News Media

Despite the occasional “media blackouts” during discussions of diversity, Ruckus cares--cares a lot, in fact--about how it’s portrayed in the news media.

Trainer Cathie Berrey advises her pupils in the blockade class to put stickers on their bicycle locks or lock boxes because that is where television cameras focus. Other trainers remind activists to pick spots for actions that will look good in a television or newspaper picture. Another, Sarah Seeds, reminds students that if they choose to leave an area rather than be arrested, they’ll have to “spin” their actions to the media to make it seem like a win, not a retreat.

Celia Alario, who has handled media relations for numerous progressive groups and trains Ruckus participants in dealing with the news media, says these strategies are essential.

“If we want to succeed in protecting the environment and countering the assaults on our rights by large corporations who can afford to hire public relations companies and have most of our politicians in their back pocket,” she says in a nicely crafted sound bite, “we have to be savvy.”

Still, many participants at Ruckus are wary of what they call the “corporate” media. Along with a host of television stations and print reporters that move in and out of the camp, four documentary crews are filming. Some students ask that certain parts of workshops be declared “no media” and pointedly ask cameras to leave. And with the media workshops and discussions on race closed to reporters, much of the camp occurs out of public view.

Apologetic Ruckus staffers say they strive to be “transparent” to show that the protest movement is not a threat. They attribute the sensitivity to the large number of people of color at the camp who they say are routinely misrepresented by the mainstream media, as well as to the increased crackdown on protesters since Seattle.

On the camp’s opening day, an opinion piece by Mayor Richard Riordan infuriated many of the Ruckus participants. Riordan referred to training camps where activists learn “guerrilla tactics” and warned protesters not to break the law.

“We cannot tolerate nonviolent civil disobedience, such as the blocking of access to roads or buildings,” the mayor wrote. “Those who insist on using such tactics point to Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. as their moral examples. Then, like Gandhi and King, they must be prepared to pay stiff fines and face arrest and jail.”

Han Shan, Ruckus’ program director, shoots back in an interview: “We are prepared to suffer. I hope he’s prepared to be judged by history the same way as those who visited violence on Gandhi and King.”

The mayor’s piece sends a chill through the camp, reinforced two days later by a surprise visit by 10 LAPD officers to the convention protesters’ headquarters near MacArthur Park. The next morning, a Los Angeles County sheriff’s helicopter hovers overhead for several minutes.

The anxiety is such that, after a discussion about infiltrators on the final day of camp, one angry student announces in a meeting that some at the camp have suspected that he was an undercover officer. Stunned, activists ask reporters to leave as they share stories of how undercover agents and police have infiltrated their ranks before, landing some friends in prison for years.

Part of the Ruckus training involves preparing for that intelligence-gathering. On the final two days of camp, students are assigned to role-play a “mass action.” They are protesters trying to block delegates from attending a fund-raiser at Arco Plaza and another downtown Los Angeles building. The Ruckus trainers play the police, but one insinuates herself into the activist group and insists she is really one of them. They eventually spot her sneaking off to warn the other trainers of their plans.

Both role-plays become a flurry of dashing protesters and police, with some students quietly dancing and chanting as police approach and others making fast breaks for the doorways. As the mock police spray water--meant to be pepper spray--from spray bottles into the activists eyes, the students cry “medic!” or “media!”

Some of the students cry out even when the pseudo-police have barely touched them, and two students pretend to faint to distract the police. In the “debriefing” afterward, the camp nurse, Lawrence Turk, warns against faking injuries.

“I don’t think the short-term gains of faking medical emergencies are worth the long-term risks of the cops not believing us,” he says to widespread agreement.

As the camp winds down, Ruckus participants cut loose with music and games.

Women and some men ditch their dusty T-shirts and shorts for slinky dresses. A band launches into salsa tunes as students take the dance floor under the stars. The music dies down at 10 p.m. so as not to disturb the Malibu neighbors--celebrants have been urged to party “respectfully.”

Before they finish, however, the participants form a circle and take their whacks at two red, white and blue pinatas. One is an elephant, the other a donkey.

*

MEDIA HELICOPTER

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* LEFTISTS’ CONVENTION

A coalition of leftist groups plans to hold its own alternative convention at Belmont High School. B1