While the week since my last post has provided us with countless powerful images that will surely be included in the pictorial journals to chronicle this time in our American history, the most moving things this week came to me in decibels, not pixels.  There are rare and beautiful occasions in which closing your eyes is the best way to see something.  At times, experiencing a slow, meditative listen reveals more about a moment than any number of whirling, glittering, or profound optical accounts.

The first thing to strike me this week was a deafening silence in California.  In an incident instantly famous and propelled by its pictorial images, the pepper-spraying of University of California at Davis students earned national (and probably international) attention, and it prompted Chancellor Linda Katehi to hold a press conference that she attempted to keep secret from the student body.  Her attempts failed, and chanting students surrounded the building.  After refusing to leave the building for several hours, she finally emerged to hundreds of students assembled in a seated corridor that followed her path from the building to her vehicle and reached the edge of the parking lot.  As Katehi walked, the students sent a message more powerful than anything they ever could have vocalized.  They said nothing.  The only sounds that could be heard for the entire length of the Chancellor’s walk were clicks, some from the Chancellor’s shoes and the rest of camera shutters.   The tapping of high heels, something I adored hearing as a child (who later blossomed into a women with 12 too many pairs of shoes), registered in my ears as a penetrating reminder of Katehi’s failure to protect her students, and of the feelings of disappointment and anger those students certainly felt mounting with each noisy step.  The subtle snaps of permanent images documenting the shame at Davis seemed the flitter across the soundscape, snippy flicks of tattle-tail pictures noting Katehi’s miserable expression and the stern looks on the young adults she was entrusted with.  But as I closed my eyes to listen more closely, it became the hum that gave me goose bumps.  Like the common chord sung by a busy casino, silence has – when recorded – its own pervasive tone that can rattle the ears as thoroughly as any crash of thunder or clash of armies.  This blast of soundlessness present at a blaring volume at UC Davis spoke volumes about the dignity and resolve of the students and the failures of a misguided and politically inept woman charged with responsibilities greater than her skill.

On the other side of the nation, the very next day, protest and patriotism was expressed in an opposite decibel and with danceable rhythm as Occupy activists and supporters came out en masse to serenade one of the movement’s greatest heroes: the beautifully blundering Mayor Michael Bloomberg.  In the most delightful form of harassment a true dub-head like me could ever imagine, Occupy Wall Street organized a 24 hour drum circle across the street from the mayor’s house.  People from all walks of life brought instruments from all genres of music.  Everything from bongos and tubas to whistles and pot lids played in ever-changing, flawlessly improvised musical chant hour after hour.  As I listened, closing my eyes to the distracting temptation of examining the expressions of passing pedestrians or my desire to read every sign to be carried through these historical days, I heard the variations of patterns, the changes in tempo and design, the accents of higher pitched instruments, and the reverberations of bass pounding like the feet of these determined marchers who have only just begun.  What I felt, aside the urge to romp barefoot around my living room in honor of those drummers (and tubists and whistlers and pot lid-ists), was optimism, peace, spirit, determination, and at times even a little jazz interpretation of subtle rage.  It was beautiful and brave and abounding with the type of energy that will propel us forward into our mission and into our future which seemed to me, with eyes closed, far brighter than it had just a couple short months ago.

The sound of chaos and ignorance rose up in a clatter in Manchester, New Hampshire on Tuesday, less than a day after the day long symphony in New York.  President Barack Obama, who has remained unbelievably silent about the police brutality and inter-city conspiracies carried out against the movement, spoke at a high school there.  Just a few lines into his speech, a group of Occupy activists began a “mic check” which called the president out on the number of peaceful protesters who have been jailed while the white-collar criminals of America’s financial elite remain at large.  The president who appeared to have gracious intent regarding the interruption never got a chance to hear what he was willing to hear because the cheerleaders began to out shout the activists.  In pathetic irony, symbolic of the obliviousness that holds back the misinformed and unguided, the cheerleaders were shouting, “Let’s get fired up!”  The crowd, confused at the growing volume of these synonymous but somehow conflicting messages, or perhaps just feeling left out, threw their empty hats into the circle and begin chanting, “Obama!  Obama!”  Finally, after a few moments of what sounded like a choral round gone berserk, the room erupted into a cheer and slowly grew silent again so the president could speak.  While I can understand the frustration of those who do not understand or agree with the movement having their school’s honored guest interrupted by the irritating fly-buzz of a pressing political crisis which has given rise to the oppression of constitutional rights and brutalization of unarmed American citizens, what I find striking about this event was the mindlessness of the crowd’s response.  I could, with my eyes closed, almost see the chubby, pink-blazered coach leaning over and prompting the cheerleaders.  I could feel the shaky excitement in the chests and throats of the cheerleaders as they emboldened themselves, the burning pride that filled them, taking them by surprise, and giving them a giggly feeling that needed to be suppressed to continue their roars.  Sadly, however, this pride, this liberation, this feeling of doing something important falls short of offering them any real vision and direction, and in fact probably worked counter to that which would’ve benefitted them most: listening.  Those girls would likely giggle in the locker room, preparing to return to class, and through the entire rest of the day about how they “showed those stupid protesters.”  The cheerleaders, perhaps, are only following in suit as the community that is rearing these young ladies also failed to make the mental adjustment between their moment and this moment.  As the adults in the room erupted into their own chanting, all I could think, “What an awful clamor of unharmonious dissent from freedom into hospitable ignorance.”

That very evening, I moved from reflecting on this stew of sound, all mixed up in stark representation of the debacle that has become American society, I heard a single sound that pierced my conscious with shocking realization.  I recently spent some time reading over the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act during the weekend.  In case you are not familiar with it, the bill – which I am dubbing the McCarthy Act – was voted down in 2007, but rumors are that the bill might be revived in the near future.  It would allow Congress to form a Commission of 10 individuals appointed by various members of government (some of them appointees themselves) with what appears to be unlimited staff, budget, access, and reach to investigate the “adopting or promoting an extremist belief system for the… use, planned use, or threatened use, of force or violence… by a group or individual to promote the group or individual’s political, religious, or social beliefs.”  The first startling thing about this bill is the incredible ambiguity of words like “force” and “extremist,” which are never defined in the bill.  The next thing that disturbs me is that the bill basically designs and legalizes a witch hunt to find, investigate, and incarcerate people that could be deemed dangerous to the current power of government without any concrete justification for their guilt beyond what they believe.  Finally, it perturbed me that “violence” is set apart from “force” in all definitions throughout the bill, which would indicate that non-violent provocateurs would be criminalized unilaterally with violent ones.  This got me thinking, “Am I a non-violent provocateur who could be criminalized by this bill or one similar to it?  Me?  A former teacher turned stay-at-home mom who literally spends most of her day baking cookies and crafting with my toddler?”  Knowing that this bill is out there, waiting to be resuscitated by some corporate owned politician who feels compelled to quell the revolution, had me on the edge of my proverbial seat all weekend.  Then came the sound that shook me.  As I tried to unwind after a typical toddler day, my young son and I ventured out into yard to hear our neighbor practice the bagpipes.  As we stepped carefully across the damp lawn, drawn to the piper like the mice of an old tale, my mind slowly relaxing to the aching beauty of Amazing Grace, I heard in the not-so-far-away distance a police siren.  For a split second, I panicked, clenching my fist closed and squeezing my eyes shut.  The thought occurred to me that at some point the screaming of a siren, which I just got comfortable with after years of healing from the trauma of September 11^th, might be directed at me, and not for something horrible which I am frankly incapable of doing but for what I am doing at this very moment.  As a writer, the clicking of the keyboard is my version of singing.  It is my release, my breath, the outpouring of all that keeps me awake at night – the thundering, rapturous chords of relentless thought.  However, with the passing of one piece of legislation, the desperation act of a federal government quivering at the thought of a future in which their power is limited by the people they represent and their financial wellspring is choked off from the open floodgate it is today to a reasonable dribble, that welcomed clicking could turn into the slamming of a closing cell door.  I could become a criminal simply for what I believe and what I want for my country and my son.  I shuttered, snuggled my son closer to me, and let myself drift from the thought.

There has been so much noise this week.  There have been so many messages, some conveyed in voice, some in music, and some in total silence.  It brings me to a place the Occupy movement seems to lead me to over and over, a place in which I feel inspired and emboldened, courageous despite my fear, hopeful despite my concern.  I reflect on all that this movement has given me – me, the stay-at-home mom who bakes and crafts and taps away on her keyboard in the hope that I might make some noise of my own.  For now, I settle in and melt away to the awkward, droning lullaby of the Battle Hymn of the Republic as played by my neighbor who stands in the middle of his yard, the porch light spilling over him – a beautiful visual but a moment I chose to experience with eyes closed.