My first thousand words

Chapter One

The line up to throw a shoe at George Bush’s head was mercifully short. I’d been to enough of these earnest – and increasingly smaller – anti-war demonstrations that the injection of an attempt at humour with the shoes and the George Bush dummy was welcome. Although I had spent the better part of an hour disdainfully making fun of the activists who had put the little display together, I had become bored enough by the repetitive speeches to decide to give the shoe toss a whirl.

Just before George Bush had launched his invasion of Iraq, the demonstrations in Toronto had been massive, some of the largest I had seen in a long time. Nothing can compare to the inspiration of seeing 80,000 people marching together to try and stop injustice, shouting “this is what democracy looks like!” I had joined in with all the rest, and felt powerful, like I was doing something important that would change everything.

But after we failed to stop the war, the marches got smaller and smaller, until it had become what it was today. A bi-annual gathering of the same 500 people, with representatives from the various Trotskyist sects handing out angry leaflets about workers’ power. And here I was, standing in a small lineup waiting for my turn to launch a Birkenstock at a paper mache George Bush. If this is what democracy looks like, I was beginning to sympathize with America’s many “enemies of democracy.”

“Hi, Mary Kate, are you ready for the long march to nowhere?”

Mohammed had sidled up to join me in line, a look of smug superiority on his face. Mohammed and I had known each other for years, dating back to our turbulent years as high school student radicals. Back then, we’d been drawn together by our permanent outsider status – him because he was the only Brown face in an almost all-white school, and me because of my head gear and “baby fat.” Somehow we’d both managed to understand that the disgust with which our fellow students greeted us was less about our supposed unattractiveness and more about some serious social problems of racism and misogeny. That realization had made the taunts a little easier to bear, and inspired us to organize bake sales to raise money for the revolutionaries in El Salvador, and sit-ins to protest the prom. None of this made us any more popular with our fellow students, but throwing a pail of dog poop at the prom King and Queen sure was fun.

Now, almost twenty years later, Mohammed was still Brown, and I was still fat, and racism and misogyny still needed fighting. At least my braces were gone. But Mohammed and I had found a community of like-minded people. We had spent the last four months with the “Coalition for Peace”, trying to organize a campaign to get Canadian troops out of Afghanistan. We were both on the coalition’s research committee, looking into the involvement of Canadian corporations in the war. When the coalition started mobilizing for this latest anti-war demonstration, we had tried to convince the organizers to consider staging the rally at SecuriCorp headquarters. We had recently learned that SecuriCorp was involved in providing private security services in Afghanistan. With its headquarters right at the corner of Queen and Bay, it would have been a perfect target to raise awareness about the connection between Canadian corporations and the war abroad. But we had been overruled, and the march was once-again planned to make its way through downtown Toronto from City Hall to the US Consulate – a building a mere 500 metres from our starting point, but which would take us at least an hour to march to. Hence, the “long march to nowhere.”

“I’ll be ready in a second, just let me take my turn,” I told Mohammed. I had reached the end of the line. A fresh-faced white kid with dreadlocks handed me the shoe. White kids with dreadlocks tend to enrage me, and I fought the impulse to beat the guy senseless with the shoe. I closed my eyes, thought about all those dead civilians in Iraq and tried to focus my energies on hitting George Bush squarely between the eyes. I drew back my arm, opened my eyes and let loose with all the energy I could muster. “Alright!”, I yelled, as the shoe hit its target, but then watched in horror as it ricocheted off George Bush’s face and hit Jack Layton in the side of the head as he innocently walked by. Jack Layton is the leader of the New Democratic Party, Canada’s somewhat left-wing party. “Sorry!”, I yelled, but Jack did not appear to accept my apology, just walked away muttering under his breath and rubbing his head.

Things like that are always happening to me. In the meantime, Mohammed was laughing so hard I feared he would wet his pants.

I pulled together my tattered dignity, and lined up with everyone else to start the march.