04.09.07
Good Friday at Livermore Labs
Oh, how I wish I’d brought my camera. It was so picturesque.
Four of us from Berkeley Friends Church went to Lawrence Livermore Labs for the Good Friday sunrise worship service and demonstration against war.
I chose not to perform civil disobedience. I had to agree with Giuseppe Rensi (who did get arrested) that it was very like street theater. Reports from previous years had taken every trace of fear out of the prospect of arrest. Arrestees are treated with the utmost care and respect, and in recent years no one has been prosecuted. They aren’t even removed from the site. They’re kept in a holding cage until they can be processed, and are out on the street, free, within two hours.
The many many officers there, from the Livermore Police, the Alameda County Sheriff, and DOE security forces, know the drill very well. Young as they are, many of them must have performed this detail on many a Good Friday morning before this year. The demonstrators wishing to be arrested come and stand close to the line of officers (in full riot gear) blocking the gate. Another line of officers marches out and forms an arc on the other side of the CD (civil disobedience) group, isolating them from the rest of us (although we could and did still converse with our friends across the line). A third batch of uniformed men then marches the arrestees off, in small batches, to be cuffed, briefly stored, and processed.
The last group arrested consisted mostly of people from San Francisco meeting. They had stayed close together through the whole thing, and had brief impromptu worship together for part of the time they were waiting.
One group of arrestees included a woman, very probably over 80, who needed a walker. She was escorted away from the gate by three officers. Then I understood, aha!, that the great number of cops there was not a function of how dangerous we were, but of how feeble.
Indeed, we were an old group. There were some youthful faces there, but not many, and none, alas, Quaker. I’m pretty confident there was no Friend under 40 there, nearly certain there was none under 35.
Of course, Good Friday is no longer a holiday in most work places, but I doubt that explains the dearth of young Friends. The age distribution at Livermore was not radically different from that in our meetings generally.
I’m glad I went. I’m certainly glad I demonstrated, and am also glad I didn’t go through the motions of getting arrested.
One friend, hearing about the day’s events after the fact, said that all the arrestees had accomplished was to cost the taxpayers a lot of money. I disagree. Although there was no press coverage of the arrests this year, still, the community is aware of what’s happening. And those many officers are a captive audience. I find it hard to conceive that none of them, as this goes on year after year, is ever reached by the message of the religious people they arrest.
Last year, the arrests did get some air time. On the evening news, virtually all that was said about them was that they cost the taxpayers a lot of money. But even if that’s the only thing the media choose to notice about the event, still it gives us an opportunity to say:
“MONEY!? Are you kidding? I’d be happy to pay every law officer in the country a day’s overtime if it meant a chance of decreasing the vast bill we all pay to keep the war machine going.”
And for this very reason, although next year I will probably repeat my decision not to be arrested, I salute those who, for those few and peaceable minutes, bore the handcuffs.
When, all the arresting completed, the officers marched away in formation, they received a round of applause.
Yes, perhaps it was street theater.
This in no way invalidates the message we went there to deliver.