The WTO protests in December contrasted rather oddly with those at the Army School of the Americas only a week or so before. At Fort Benning, Georgia, participants who joined the protests bought into the set-up of the whole protest as planned by a central committee. If they didn’t like the plan, they didn’t cross the line to risk arrest. Nonviolence trainings there focused largely on learning the script of the protest. In Seattle, the trainings prepared people to do their own thing in small, decentralized affinity groups, releasing the maximum amount of creativity and energy in the streets. In three hours we skimmed through the theory of nonviolence, the guidelines for the protests, consensus decision-making, possible responses to crisis situations, and what happens when you’re arrested. Given the complexity and unpredictability of the task that everyone faced in the next few days, it seemed like much too little.

In retrospect, I am dissatisfied with the trainings in one important aspect. As far as revealing the underlying violence of the system, the Seattle protests (like Dr. King’s Birmingham campaign) were quite effective. Unlike King, though, we demonstrators were somewhat unprepared, and did not make as strong a connection as we might have between the violence we were experiencing in the streets of Seattle and the military power which underlies the global capitalism. By Thursday morning the focus of our demonstrations was slipping, because we'd been harassed, gassed, chased, and beaten by the police for two days. It was hard not to focus on police brutality as the issue. Furthermore, a good part of the downtown area had been proclaimed a "no protest" zone. We did a marginally better job of connecting the lack of democracy in Seattle to the lack of democracy inside the WTO meetings. However, in many ways we were not prepared to use the violence we had revealed in the system to make our very real political arguments.

My own nonviolence workshops before the actions contributed to this weakness. Often, before an action, fears run high and participants have an exaggerated sense of the danger they may face. Lulled by almost two decades of polite, practically scripted nonviolent direct actions and civil disobedience, I internally discounted the fears people expressed of a repeat of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. I missed the opportunity to stress that a violent response to nonviolent protest is actually a tactical advantage. If I'd gone over that in the trainings, demonstrators may have been better able to link police violence to the WTO itself (or to its servant, NATO,) later on.

Given the dramatic events in Seattle, neither I nor any other trainers felt complacent about the Washington police! In D.C. we tended to go in the opposite direction, focusing a lot on how to stand up to a police charge, how to hold the line, and how to counter crowd-control techniques with mobile tactics of our own. Every workshop on first aid for teargas and pepper spray was jammed. Gradually, I realized that many participants, and even some trainers, believed that nonviolence meant learning these defensive/offensive measures to deal with police brutality. Nonviolence equaled using one’s body to create a blockade. Nonviolence equaled civil disobedience. Nonviolence equaled outwitting the police’s repressive measures. One of my co-trainers (with thirteen years of experience in forest defense in British Columbia) remarked with surprise about my quick run-down of nonviolence theory. He said he seldom talked about the theory of nonviolence in a nonviolence workshop -- instead, he made sure that people knew how to maintain their solidarity against the police. In the future, I hope that we can come up with a blend for our trainings: militant, confrontational, creative tactics grounded in the broad sweep of nonviolent theory developed by people around the world.

Applying nonviolence in a chaotic political action is challenging! All of us -- demonstrators, city residents, police, and WTO/IMF/World Bank delegates -- were stressed by the chaos we created together. None of us could count on anything working in the ways we are accustomed to them working: restaurants and stores weren’t open at regular hours; peaceful protesters were arrested and looters went free; buses and trolleys didn’t follow their routes; capitalists couldn’t be insulated from the unhappiness their decisions cause. If we demonstrators are going to intentionally create a chaotic situation, we also have to have a strongly internalized code of nonviolence. Ideally in such a situation, nonviolence would be an almost-instinctual set of behaviors, and we would have an almost-unlimited access to our creativity. As a nonviolence trainer and activist, I go on the assumption that violence is actually a last resort -- and as such, it is an expression of resourcelessness. We resort to violence when we can’t come up with anything else to do in a situation. If violence is resourcelessness, then nonviolence must be a state of boundless creativity, a state of inventiveness, of outrageousness and unconventionality and humor.

This has implications for training design. If we are helping to prepare people for a relatively predictable demonstration (even if it includes civil disobedience), we may be able to focus more on tactical questions. If we are helping to prepare people for a chaotic demonstration, we need to dig deeper into playfulness. I collect and tell stories of funny ways to deal with potentially dangerous situations, because humor is such an antidote to fear and anger. Sometimes I encourage people to come up with the most ridiculous behaviors they can imagine for a tense moment, then underline the point that our power lies in noncooperation with what is expected of us. I think this is a key concept in political nonviolence: that we always have the power to withdraw our cooperation, and refuse to do what’s expected of us.

In one of our workshops in Seattle, though, no amount of humor would dispel the cloud of fear that seemed to hover over the room. In a last-ditch attempt to salvage the training, I addressed the fear directly with a parallel-line role-play in which demonstrator faced off with police officers. With a great deal of yelling and even some shoving, the group released some of its fear (even though the role-play yielded very few helpful ideas of what to do in that situation in real life!) After simply acting out their fears, participants were able to absorb information about arrest procedures. For that group, the information seemed quite reassuring.

In D.C. I heard about (though did not witness) a workshop in which the trainers ran one half of a parallel-line role-play to practice deescalating conflict, then led the group through a grounding exercise. The second half of the parallel-line role-play went differently: the group playing demonstrators got less carried away with "winning" an argument, and expressed the strength of their convictions. I would like to experiment some more with grounding exercises to help people stay centered in the overall purpose of the demonstration, especially when they are feeling frightened, angry, and/or cynical about their effectiveness. In a closed-eye process, I might suggest that participants connect the force of their purpose at a demonstration with the force of gravity. I might even guide them into some fearful thoughts, and then help them to remember the strength of gravity is like their own strength of purpose. (After our experience in Seattle, I wouldn’t suggest deep breathing as a way of centering, because when the air is filled with tear gas and pepper spray, deep breathing can be downright dangerous.)