Reflecting Back on the May Day Actions.

Joe and I got off the bus several blocks from West Potomac Park, where we would camp out that night. We had left New York University early that morning. It was Sunday, May 1, 1971, and we were in the nation's capital with the heady but impossible intent of stopping the government if it wouldn't stop the war in Vietnam.

It has been thirty years since that afternoon when thousands like us poured into Washington, D.C., camping packs and bedrolls on our backs and black gas masks dangling loosely at our sides. It often seems now that we inhabit a different planet from the one we stepped onto, from the gleaming steel steps of the bus that day.

Thirty years seems like a veritable eternity. Most of our lives have passed. Today we are more than twice the age we were on that precious spring day, ebullient with the unyielding hope and idealism of youth.

West Potomac Park, near the Mall and Lincoln Memorial, was a sea of young activists. As late afternoon and early evening vanished, the NYU contingent to the May Day demonstrations unrolled sleeping bags for the short mid-spring night that would pass as effortlessly and unnoticed as youth itself.

The next morning was filled with conflicting rumors: first, that we would be allowed to remain at the park through Sunday while various actions were taking place; the other, that the Nixon administration had ordered our expulsion, to be carried out momentarily. While a group of movement leaders negotiated nearby with park police, we hastily ate the packaged foods that had been tossed into our packs and bent in the tumble and chaos of too much gear. When a fleet of yellow school buses pulled up at a distant border of the park, we knew instinctively that Nixon was rolling up the welcome mat and that our invitation to the seat of government had worn out.

Joe and I, sensing the inevitable, had packed and secured our sleeping bags to the bottom of our pack frames and had drifted toward the north side of the park's border with the Mall. I was particularly leery of being arrested in Washington, as I had only recently hired a lawyer to defend me in a case against the army. (I had stopped going to Reserve meetings after the killings at Kent and Jackson State Universities and the invasion of Cambodia, and I envisioned the government arresting me and locking me up in the notorious brig at Fort Dix, New Jersey. As it would turn out, the appeals process had only just begun, and I was light years away from actual jeopardy.)

Almost instantaneously a mass of park police, city police, and the military appeared around the perimeter of the park. We began running toward the edge of the Mall in the direction of the Lincoln Memorial, donning our masks as canisters of gas exploded all around us, our packs slapping wildly at our sides. How we escaped apprehension I still don't know. Uniforms were everywhere as we bounded up the steps of the memorial into the spring flow of tourists. Once inside, we were shielded from the wrath of the forces that didn't dare to enter the sanctity of Lincoln's imposing silent presence and the throng of tourists.

The years have masked the length of time we spent inside the memorial. I know that I had the opportunity to look at its every facet before we deemed it safe to venture outside again. Washington appeared normal again in the mid-day sun as we searched and found remaining members of our group from NYU who hadn't been carted off to an indeterminate destination by either the police or military. One of the women in the group offered to call home, which conveniently happened to be Chevy Chase, Maryland, and the three of us were collected at a phone booth an hour later--as if following the plot of a spy novel.

Ensconced safely amid comfort and hospitality in a sprawling home in this affluent suburb, we slept in relative ease through the night, miles from the hub of the action. The next morning, following breakfast, we were returned to the area of the city from which we had made our escape the previous evening. There, we rejoined our cause.

I wonder now, how many revolutions throughout history would have turned out on a much more civil tone if the contending forces could have been transported to the luxury of the suburbs and refreshed before rejoining the fray. We knew, however, soon after finding our way to the center of the early day's activity in a cafeteria at Georgetown University, that hundreds of demonstrators had spent the night in slightly different circumstances, having been incarcerated in a makeshift jail at the Redskins practice field or at the Washington Coliseum. Eventually, 12,000 people would be arrested during the May Day actions.

The cafeteria had been a refuge for those demonstrators who hadn't been caught up in the dragnet of the previous day. Bodies were packed tightly into the huge auditorium. After several hours, Joe and I found a space at a table. To our amazement bedlam broke out there when movement leader Abbie Hoffman angrily castigated a reporter from the New York Daily News, challenging him to begin reporting fact rather than fiction about the war in Vietnam. Jerry Rubin sat beside Hoffman during the fusillade of accusations. When mid-day arrived, word passed through the cafeteria that we would have to leave.

Not having a plan of action scheduled for that day, Joe and I wandered down a residential street bordering the university. We restlessly removed our packs and sat on the steps of an apartment building about halfway down the road. Other demonstrators passed while we sat and talked.

Then with lightning speed the most incredible scene I have ever experienced transpired. A phalanx of either police or military blocked off both ends of the street. Helicopters appeared out of nowhere and hovered over different sections of the street. Chaos ensued as demonstrators began running indiscriminately in an attempt to evade the onrushing troops that began closing in on us.

Joe and I grabbed our packs and donned our gas masks and ran up the walk to the apartment building. Gas canisters exploded all around us, and the neighborhood took on the appearance of a war zone. I can't remember if it was Joe or me who grabbed for the handle on the door to the first floor of the building. To our amazement it was unlocked! We bounded into the foyer and dashed directly for the staircase in front of us as apartment doors opened and their occupants either looked at us in shock, jeered us, or screamed for us to leave. Troops entered the building just as we reached the third floor, but miraculously we were waved through an opened door that slammed shut behind us. We hid under a couch, below a window in the apartment. The young woman and man who had rescued us took turns buddy breathing beneath the couch through our masks as tear gas wafted through the opened window.

Suddenly, a tremendous vibration shook the floor of the apartment. The four of us squeezed out from under the couch to witness the most bizarre event of my life: just outside the opened window hovered a helicopter. The few moments it remained there seemed suspended in space and time, very surreal. Here was the visible power and might of the U.S. government--just outside the window where we hid from its fury--marshaled against us in our attempt to stop the brutality and death of a war half a world away. The lesson and paradox of those few moments are indelibly etched in my mind, illustrating the clash between world view, activism, and war-mongering.

Outside, somewhere on the stairs of the apartment building, we could hear knocking and doors opening and closing. We remained immobile beneath the couch with our impromptu hosts. A half hour passed before the noise from outside subsided. The woman who had rescued us was a student, as was her brother who was visiting from out of town. Reflecting back, it seems quite remarkable that they would take a chance and give even brief asylum to total strangers.

When Joe and I exited the apartment and cautiously began walking along the sidewalk of the now curiously normal street, we decided we would leave the city rather than risk the near-certainty of being arrested, given the magnitude of the forces marshaled against the demonstrators. We caught a ride at the entrance ramp of the interstate highway from two teenagers who obliged our simple sign that read "New York." The teens seemed riveted by the description of our experiences of the previous few days and decided they would purchase our gas masks as insurance against the reaction against youth they felt would surely come.

Joe headed back to the dormitory and room he unofficially shared with his friend Judy, who, showing more resolve than either Joe or I could muster, had marched and remained in Washington with a contingent of feminist protesters from NYU. I boarded a Long Island Railway train for a sedate suburb of Long Island, where I had been living with the family of a woman I was seeing.

Thirty years gives one a sense of perspective. History can be measured against the yardstick of thirty years. The war eventually ended and we got on with our lives. The reactionary society we now inhabit seems unreal when I look back on the heady optimism of those youthful days of protest. Who could have predicted the ascendancy of the radical right and the religious right, with their campaigns against women, gays, children, blacks, reproductive choice, the environment, immigrants, and First Amendment liberties? Trudging up a frozen street in January 1991 with hundreds of others in Providence, Rhode Island, to protest the impending war in the Persian Gulf, who could have guessed that militarism would combine with press self-censorship to squelch the voices of protest across the country? When the right attacks the mythical left I have to chuckle. This society now breeds a conformity so thoroughgoing that even George Orwell couldn't have envisioned in fiction.

Without a central issue around which to coalesce, the left as we knew it ceased to exist with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Nicaraguan Sandinistas. Still, there is solace in the fact that there once existed a movement within the constraints of predatory capitalism where everything was possible and the world was new.

Abbie Hoffman wrote of the period that gave birth to the May Day demonstrations of 1971, observing that the culture that the youth movement spawned, and its relative affluence, created a historic opportunity for us to actually participate in the making of democracy. Looking back across those many years, there is a sense of personal and communal satisfaction at having been on the streets during the May Day actions.

Howard Lisnoff is a counselor, activist, and freelance writer. He is designing a website that will contain his novel Class Acts: A Sixties' Love Story. He can be reached via e-mail at [e-mail].