Keene Activists Protest Economic Summit
NEW YORK, Feb. 03–On Saturday morning in midtown Manhattan, surrounded by an estimated 25,000 people gathered to protest the World Economic Forum summit, Keene State College student Scott Bawden rubbed his hands together, blowing into them to stay warm in the chill.
“This is incredible, there’s so many people here,” said Bawden, 22, a sociology senior and campus organizer. Wearing baggy pants, a leather jacket, and worn sneakers, with bleached-blond hair tucked into a winter knit cap, Bawden may look like a typical college student but he doesn’t sound like one.
“People want to believe the government is working for them when in essence it’s actually working for the corporations,” Bawden said.
Lisa Malloy, a Nashua native and a junior at Keene State College, agreed. “Politicians are puppets and they’re in bed with corporations,” she announces, shivering from the cold in her red fleece jacket and a flag draped over her shoulders. The “corporate American flag” designed by the anti-advertising magazine Adbusters replaces the fifty stars with the logos of Microsoft, McDonald’s, Nike and other corporate entities criticized for labor or environmental practices.
At 5 a,m. Saturday morning, Bawden, Malloy and four friends left Keene for New York City to demonstrate their opposition to the global forum. “This is our opportunity to actually get out there and question,” said Keene State senior Tiffany Karkman, who also attended the protests. “I needed a pep rally, and I needed personally to get out and put my money where my mouth is.”
Among other issues, increases in defense spending, the Enron collapse, and subsequent investigations into corporate influence on government policy have made the students critical of how the federal budget is spent. “The money isn’t going to the right places,” Karkman said.
When the students arrived they knew traffic would be congested downtown, so they parked in the Upper West Side and took the subway to Columbus Circle. In the subway station the group was approached by police officers for smoking cigarettes and fined fifty dollars apiece. “We told them we were out of town and didn’t know, but they took down all our information, they even asked us how much we weighed,” Bawden said. By the time they reached the intersection of Columbus Circle at mid-morning there were already several thousand protesters gearing up to march to the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, where the global summit was being held.
Last November the Keene students helped organize a campus-wide rally on human rights and the war in Afghanistan. The success of that effort peaked their interest in attending the New York protests. With the help of the New Hampshire American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization that has been successful in organizing youth around social problems, the students attracted both support and criticism from classmates.
By noon, the packed intersection of Fifty-Ninth Street and Eighth Avenue was abuzz with energy as demonstrators converged for a weekend of planned marches and teach-ins against the World Economic Forum, a Swiss-based group of corporate representatives and world leaders. Since 1971 the group has met annually in Davos, Switzerland but last year’s protests led organizers to relocate to New York. Flanked by shoulder-to-shoulder rows of riot police, the milling crowd of anti-corporate globalization activists had arrived through the efforts of coalitions with names like “Reclaim The Streets” and “Another World Is Possible.”
The Keene students viewed the September 11th attacks as having largely discredited those who used violence as a political means.
“Non-violence is clearly the only way to go,” Bawden said. However, the students also view those attacks as having pushed the American public further into an acceptance of government authority.
“I think September 11th forced [the American public] back into a box that we were slowly coming out of before·it forced us to ‘consume, consume, consume’ to rescue the economy,” Bawden said. “I think it’s easier for people to turn their back on environmental issues right now when their leaders are constantly telling them to reprioritize things in a corrupt way.”
The issues that are discussed on the streets of New York are also being discussed in their classrooms, the students said. “A lot of teachers are very supportive of what we do,” Malloy said.
One such teacher is Janaki Tschannerl, a resident faculty member in Keene State’s sociology department who leads open-group class discussions, in which “she has a goal but allows us to reach that goal ourselves,” Bawden explained.
Tschannerl taught in China and in American prisons, and arranges summer trips to her native India for students to see the effects of economic inequality. Bawden describes a friend’s experience on such a trip, shaking his head in astonishment. “She couldn’t believe what the conditions were like over there,” he said.
Bawden hopes to bring the spirit of the protests back to Keene, where he says “political activism needs to be upped hardcore.”
“Hopefully by coming here we’ll have something to talk about when we get back and that’ll get people more excited,” Bawden said.
“I think people in my classes are interested, even if their opinions aren’t strong enough to be here, cold and hungry,” said Keene State junior Jenna Shales, who plans to discuss her experience at the protests in class on Monday.
“The most important thing on a campus is for people to think critically,” said Karkman. “Most people walk around sporting their stereotypical Abercrombie gear·with their stereotypical mentalities,” she said, referring to the apathy many campus organizers struggle with.
But Keene students believe their political activism has met with disapproval from some local residents. Kate Schultz, a junior at Keene State College, put a sign in her window with the lyrics to a Pink Floyd song, “Mother should I trust the government?” Neighbors asked her to remove the sign “because they were offended,” Schultz said.
The violence that marred protests of major trade summits in Seattle, Washington D.C., and Quebec City were all but invisible at this weekend’s demonstrations. There were only 39 arrests on Saturday, a small number for a relatively restrained gathering due largely to a change in tactics following September 11th. Out of fear of being branded “domestic terrorists,” protesters kept a low profile and held to non-violent actions. By late afternoon, the police blockade and frigid air had succeeded in dispersing most of the protesters.
The students who spent their day to be “a face in the crowd,” as Bawden put it, expressed optimism for promoting change.
“If people want there to be a change and enough people get together then change will happen,” Bawden said. And by informing themselves and their classmates the Keene students believe that, as Malloy claims, “change is inevitable.”
Published in The Keene Sentinel, in New Hampshire
