news story / By Heidi Walters

The Anti-DNC

A handful of locals go to Denver to protest war, global warming, the two-party system and other insults

(Aug. 21, 2008)  About two months ago, Jake Green packed up his belongings and said goodbye to Arcata. He’d lived there two years. It was time to move on — first stop, Denver. While in Arcata, Green was active with Redwood Curtain Antifascist Action. In Denver, he planned to join with Unconventional Denver to prepare for the Democratic National Convention in mid-August.

It was going to be big: Other groups would be there besides Un-D, including one started by another group of Denver activists called Recreate ’68, which, according to a lengthy explanation on the group’s website, is not intended to recreate the 1968 DNC in Chicago — in which Mayor Richard Daley threw protesters out of parks and police assaulted peaceful protesters, journalists and even nearby residents — but to recreate “the spirit of mass political participation of the ’60s. To recreate the spirit that will once again force this country to live up to its own professed principles of democracy, equality and human rights.”

“Some of the problems we face now are eerily reminiscent of 1968: most obviously, a costly, unpopular and illegal war,” says R68’s website. “Others are unique for our time: a faltering economy, a shrinking middle class, a health care crisis, global warming. But one things is true now as it was then: neither of the two major parties is seriously addressing the needs and desires of the majority of the American people, because both are captive to the corporate interests that finance their campaigns.”

Green, in the network of groups joining forces, was going to be part of that action.

Meanwhile, as of this Monday, Eureka-based activist Jack Nounnan was still preparing for his own trip to the Denver DNC, with two other activists. Probably they’d leave Tuesday, he said.

Now, you might think Green, Nounnan and the other two are but drops in a flood of activists inundating Denver from our neck of the woods alone. We grow activists the way summer rains grow mushrooms.

Alas, such is not the case. Despite fits of organizing by different local activist outfits throughout the summer, in the end the Humboldt County contingent of protesters making the trip to Denver comprises only seven or eight people, said Nounnan on Monday. It’s not like the anti-WTO action in 1999, when about 150 locals joined tens of thousands of protesters in Seattle streets.

“I think people have gotten disillusioned,” Nounnan said. “You can’t accumulate people in the street like in the ’60s, because they’re disillusioned, because they’re spoiled, because consumption has made people want more security, more comfort.”

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