Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
While I'm planning security for the IMF demonstrations, my husband is getting thrown in jail. He better not ask me for bail.
Apr 24, 2000 | Last Monday morning I walked into my office at the U.S. Department of the Interior and found an urgent phone message stuck to my computer screen. The president of the board of Ozone Action, the anti-climate-change environmental group my husband founded and runs, had called. "Urgent, please call back," the message read. "Everything's OK."
I found out minutes later that my husband was the first person to be arrested in last week's World Bank/International Monetary Fund action, locked into metal handcuffs as he finished a speech and stepped off the roof of a Budget van parked in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue and 19th Street in Washington.
I didn't have time to get mad, not yet. I was running to a meeting where I had to decide what extraordinary security precautions the Interior Department would take against the threat of thousands of angry protesters descending on the World Bank, two blocks away. My job was to make the decisions that would safeguard our historic building and protect our employees from ... my husband.
"Are you OK?" said the board chairman in response to my sputtering reaction. "Do you want me to call you back with updates during the day?"
"There's only one thing I need to know," I seethed. "Will he be home for dinner?" Slam the phone. Run to the security briefing.
Globalization is starting to get me down. In December I was jostled and gassed in the streets of Seattle during the World Trade Organization meeting. I was a delegate, head of the Interior Department's lonely delegation of two. In my two days there I missed almost every meeting and found myself trapped in intersections by chanting students wearing balaclavas or dressed as giant ears of corn and sea turtles. As I boarded the plane at Sea-Tac, I vowed not to put myself in that situation again.
Now, I was in that same situation. Only different. Instead of looking around, trying to find someone in charge to help me, I was the one in charge. Instead of trying to avoid the demonstrators, I was sleeping with a demonstrator.
I don't know why my first reaction to my husband's arrest was pure anger. I know he did it because he believes the World Bank funds projects that contribute to the changing of the Earth's climate, which is an enormous and scary global problem. I believe that civil disobedience is a grand American tradition, practiced by heroes such as Sam Adams, Henry Thoreau and John Lewis. Growing up in the '70s I obsessed over the '60s counterculture and anti-war movement. Mark Rudd and Abbie Hoffman were my cultural icons. I read James Michener's "Kent State: What Happened and Why" twice and wished I was 10 years older so I could have been part of it all.
Maybe I got mad because I also believe that when you are a parent, getting arrested is just not something you do, for any reason, unless you can't help it. If you are in jail, even for a few hours to make a political statement, something -- anything -- could happen. Your daughter could get sick at day care and the teacher could call you to pick her up and you wouldn't be able to because you are, ahem, in jail. And that's just for starters.
Could the jerry-rigged, Rube Goldberg life of a dual-earner household continue with incarceration as part of the deal? I didn't think so. Having my husband in jail kicked up an ill wind that threatened to blow down the house of cards we built to get the family through each day.
And then there was the annoying fact that while I was attending meetings with a very concerned security staff trying to keep order, my husband was the first one who was seriously out of order. Wouldn't the staff here assume that it would be more difficult for me to make good decisions when my husband's judgment, not to mention his behavior, was highly suspect? This had the makings of a serious perception problem in a town ruled by perception. Talk about "off message."
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