What We Owe the Hari Krishnas
I stood still, or tried to, for an hour and a half today, a black nylon sheath covering my body and a black plastic bag over my head (don’t worry, there were some small airholes). Rebecca stood next to me, in an orange jump suit, a blindfold covering her eyes and duct tape binding her wrists.
We could hear travelers, hurrying by us pulling their carry-on luggage, stop short. “It’s not real,” some reassured their children while others asked each other “Is it real?” Carwil would respond, “15,000 Iraqis are held in prison without trial. Help us stop torture in Iraq and Guantanamo.”
“Thank you,” I heard quite a few people say.
“Stop torture? Oh, okay.”
Robert Fisk calls talking about the Israel lobby “Breaking The Last Taboo” (http://www.counterpunch.org/fisk04272006.html), but what we were doing comes much closer to deserving the phrase – Exercising free speech at the airport.
As we were planning this small outreach action, some members of our normally fearless bunch expressed trepidation about participating. They thought it was likely we would be arrested, interrogated, and/or physically attacked for talking about indefinite detention and torture in an airport. In fact, a virtual parade of security and police, some with dogs, walked past us without breaking stride.
As I finally took off my sweat-drenched hood, I saw a uniformed man hurrying by. “I can’t take that,” he said in response to Carwil’s outstretched flier; “I’m an airport employee.”
“You would not be the first,” Carwil said. In fact, he said, airport screeners were among the most enthusiastic consumers of our literature.
One of the amazing things about U.S.Americans is how easily we are convinced we can’t do things. Several people who approached our table said, “I don’t think we could do this in the airport in Miami.” “We couldn't get away with this in Seattle.” Carwil conducted some impromptu mini-workshops on the origins of the “free speech zones” in our nation’s airports.
A website for would-be religious proselytizers explains that “In 1992, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns and operates the Kennedy, La Guardia, and Newark airports, adopted regulations prohibiting persons or groups from soliciting money or distributing literature within terminals. The International Society for Krishna Consciousness challenged the Port Authority's regulations on the grounds that the regulations deprived the Society's members of their free speech rights under the First Amendment. The trial court ruled in favor of the Society, holding that the airports were public forums and that the regulations were too broad. The Second Circuit of Appeals concluded that the airports were not public forums and that the ban on solicitations was reasonable. The Court of Appeals, however, affirmed the trial court's ruling that the ban on distributing literature violated the First Amendment.”
The result of all these back and forth rulings in the landmark case, International Society for Krishna Consciousness v. Lee, 505 U.S. 672, 830 (1992), is that every airport in the country has to provide some form of “free speech area,” or else the entire place will be fair game for flower-sellers and prisoner-impersonators.
Free speech in the airport, as everywhere else in our beloved democracy, can be regulated as to “time, place and manner.” Some airports take that regulation to the nth extreme. San Francisco International (SFO) publishes several pages of restrictions – you have to apply for a permit and display it on your body at all times, no more than two people can engage in free speech in the same booth at the same time (apparently, they believe that some people might think an orgy is a free speech activity), you have to sign in, etc. etc. Oakland takes a more laid-back approach to this, as to many (though certainly not all) things. Carwil and I both called to find out if we needed a permit, and both of us were referred by a very nice young woman to someone or something called “Landside Operations,” where we left messages that were not returned. The nice young woman mentioned in her message to me that the permit rules were being rewritten “as we speak,” which I of course found amusing since we were not actually speaking.
For right now, the rules seem to consist of this – you show up, and you do what you want, as long as you are doing it in the vicinity of the nice plastic table they generously provide under the sign proclaiming, “The literature on this table does not necessarily express the views of the airport,” or something like that. Actually we don’t know if you have to do your thing under that sign, because we didn’t try it anywhere else. We considered it, but though we hate to be so law-abiding, the table is so nicely placed on the busy corridor that everyone who flying on any airline other than Southwest has to go through, whether they are coming or going, that to do our thing somewhere else would seem like cutting off our nose to spite our face.
I am not making light of the many harrowing tales since 9/11 of racial profiling at airports, people being kicked off planes for the books they are reading, five-year-olds being strip searched. (Though Rebecca did mention that recently she was carrying on something she had bought at a store called Bombay. The name of the store was prominently printed on the box and it wrapped around, so the front of the box said, “BOMB.” And she is here to tell the tale.) I personally know people who have been detained and told they are not allowed to fly, or taken off and interrogated when they returned from pleasure trips to Europe. But I also know many people who believe they cannot wear a t-shirt or a button in an airport.
One goal of this outreach/action was to break through this self-censorship. As Carwil put it, airports are the places where the culture of fear that has swept the country in the last years is most visible. By showing that even there, you do have the right to speak out against the abuses our government is perpetrating, we hope to embolden people, when they get back to Miami or Seattle, Chicago or New Mexico, to speak and act with a little more confidence.
Our right to self-expression is not the only thing citizens of our fine country are clueless about. Carwil reported that several people asked, “Are they supposed to be Americans being tortured in Iraq?” [In response I mentioned that a study had shown that more Americans believe the Palestinians are occupying Israeli land than vice versa. He hadn’t heard about it, so I went to look it up. Actually, it turns out that in that case, it’s the Brits that are confused – a study of Britons who get their news from TV found that 71% had no idea who the occupier was, 11% believed it was the Palestinians and 9% the Israelis. (Quoted in “Ignorance Is Strength,” http://www.medialens.org/alerts/02/020418_de_MiddleEast_Glasgow.html) I could not find any actual measure of that particular awareness here in the States (I found several things which alluded to the misconception, but I suspect they were making the same mistake I did), but I doubt that if there were one, it would come out any better.]
We only got two negative comments – one guy threw the literature back at Carwil, and near the end, I sensed some people stop and stare, and then the man said, “Attention seekers.”
Right. I want attention, so I go to Oakland airport and stand around with a bag on my head?
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