Dan Fishback: Losing hope from a great distance

We started dropping bombs on ourselves, and we huddled around TVs to watch. We gathered in Houston Hall to escape the noises of parties, to be together. We cried. We shook. But we had work to do.

So we got up early the next morning and surrounded the Federal Building downtown. We linked arms and sat down in front of a truck entrance. We surrounded ourselves, in our government uniforms, and gave ourselves fair warning: "You are in violation of homeland security! You have three minutes to leave!" But we knew this was coming. We stayed put.

And we crowded around ourselves, spilling into the streets, cheering ourselves on. But our cheers turned into cries of disbelief as we saw our faces pushed against the cold wet ground, as we saw our ears twisted and pinched, our necks elbowed, our bodies dragged by the handcuffs over concrete, our wrists bitten with steel. We saw ourselves do this to ourselves.

We cried out, "Stop! You're hurting them! Put her down! He has rights!" But we didn't listen. We kept on hurting and pinching and twisting and dragging. And we kept on watching and shouting and chanting and mourning... because just as our civil liberties were dead before our eyes, we were dying an ocean away. It seemed like the whole world was falling apart, like history was carving horrible shapes into its arm.

As we cried and watched ourselves thrown into vans, we saw a new crowd swoop in and sit down in front of the entrance, singing, chanting. And we started all over again. And again. And again. Over 100 of us were arrested. Hundreds more of us watched. Many of us did the arresting. One of us tried to plow through the crowd in a car.

Meanwhile, we were back at Houston Hall, providing a safe space, watching updates on TV, consoling each other, wondering how this could have happened.

Meanwhile, we were in Baghdad...

Meanwhile, we were in D.C....

Meanwhile...

By 1 p.m., we were at City Hall, where a protest was ending. We were also in jail at the Federal Building, about to be arraigned. We started walking from City Hall to the arraignment several blocks away. We used the sidewalk. But soon enough, we stepped off the curb and took over every lane of Market Street, a small crowd reclaiming our land.

"Whose street?!"

"OUR STREET!"

"Whose world?!"

"OUR WORLD!"

We watched ourselves marching and raised our fists. We whistled and called out and honked our horns.

We even ran over to join in. These were our streets. This was our country -- our abused and hijacked country -- and we were taking it back.

And when we had filled the courtroom, and we stood in front of the doors in our federal uniforms and wouldn't let any one else into the building, we decided to visit our senator, to let him know that federal officers had broken the law with excessive force that morning.

We watched ourselves enter the office lobby from our security guard post. We wouldn't let ourselves in. We explained that we had the right to see our representative, or at least leave a message. And we wouldn't let ourselves in. We demanded that our rights be honored. And we asked ourselves to step outside. We forced ourselves to leave.

In a few hours, we let ourselves out of jail, and we hugged and shook hands, and we finally made it back to Houston Hall, where we had been preparing for a vigil...

We've been there since then, 24 hours a day.

But when I got home to write this column, I looked around at my room, at all my stuff, and it seemed so alien. I barely recognized my life.

Now, it's becoming more familiar -- as I sit here, I'm settling back into my sense of separateness -- and this frightens me. As long as I could look at a cop, at a protester, at an image of Governor Bush in the Oval Office, as long as I could look at anyone and think, we, us... I was hopeful. No matter how ugly it was, I was hopeful.

But now I feel so far away. I can feel the dead bodies falling into numbers and letters, where I can manage them. We can only allow death from such distances. I sit here, alone in my room, and wonder how we can come together.

Dan Fishback is a senior American Identities major from Olney, Md.

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