>From the sidewalk near Seattle's Federal Building I looked up at a helicopter buzzing overhead and realized: we need one of those for ourselves. An hour earlier, phalanxes of police officers had closed in on peaceful sidewalk protestors, forcing them into the street and herding them helplessly away. I wasn't there at the time. The number 7 bus I was riding down Third Avenue had paused at a stop while more than a dozen squad cars raced by, one siren after another wailing and receding. Weekend shoppers at Westlake would not have been unreasonable in assuming that the protest a few blocks south had turned violent. I worried about it myself, and when I arrived at the eerily calm rally site I could only wonder, where's the riot?

There wasn't one, of course. There was barely even a demonstration left. In the wake of the police, a couple hundred protesters lingered in front of the Federal Building in confusion, distracted by flag-waving hecklers, wondering what to do.

It's time for us to recognize that the police have mastered their game. They no longer need the crude tools of years past, the water hoses and tear gas that reveal the brutality of repression. Instead of hurting our bodies, they have learned how to disable our image. And since our image is the most intimate part of our message that dissent exists and we are its faces they can disempower democratic assembly without swinging a single billy club.

It's breathtakingly clever, really. The sirens, the riot gear, and the officers' show of sheer numbers all combine to suggest that protest is an overwhelming threat to the public. Meanwhile, the cool efficiency with which the cops disperse or remove protesters asserts, by contrast, that protest is easily controlled, nothing more than a nuisance to the strong men of law enforcement. Police strategy operates by devious paradox, by a mutual contradiction impossible to counter with logic. We have no chance to show the Darth Vader suits that we're nonviolent, because they already have us surrounded. It's the most discouraging thing many of us have ever experienced.

This isn't just the SPD's overreaction to the memory of WTO protests. I was in New York on February 15 and I saw the same strategy at work. Block by block we were diverted by police blockades further and further from the rally site until many people gave up in frustration before ever being counted as protesters. Those of us who finally arrived found ourselves penned in blocks and forbidden to walk over the cross-street even when the block ahead thinned out.

While the technologies of repression have grown ever more refined and devious, the technologies of protest have remained unchanged for several decades. And maybe there is something healthy for us, in this high-tech age, in knowing that the only way to know what's happening downtown is to go and see it with our own eyes, to talk with people who were there. But if our knowledge is all we have to sustain us, and if our message is mangled and our existence denied in the media day after day, I think we're going to burn out soon, like protest during the last Iraq war.

I don't want to burn out. I have no illusions that we can hold back Bush's war lust or his plans for repression and domination at home. But I do want to be able to meet my own eyes in the mirror and know that I did what I could, that my own spirit was not crushed. What keeps me on the streets is a sense of personal urgency: come what may, I don't want silent complicity with the Bush regime on my conscience. The good news, I think, is that this kind of conviction, person by person, is what has been behind every social movement that has ever accomplished anything.

The thing about conviction is that you don't really know how much of it you have until push comes to shove. It happens spontaneously; and this, I suspect, is the key to really meaningful action. Early protests of the sixties were spontaneous. The Berkeley students who walked out of their classes didn't know what they were risking or what was going to happen and neither did the people in charge. That was what gave their action such power.

But since then, protest has become largely predictable. Rallies are scheduled well in advance, permits are secured, the police come out on schedule. It's all a little humdrum: it's been done. What I think we need to do is something so new that we surprise people into noticing, into thinking. Something so new that we ourselves can't even plan for it. We can only act spontaneously, out of convictions that arise in particular situations, and then watch closely to see what happens.

This sounds terribly abstract, perhaps a little mystical, and I'm afraid it flies in the face of all the good efforts at careful strategy and coalition-building that many of us are exerting. You might say that instead of a practical plan what I'm proposing is kind of a spiritual exercise, an experiment in uncertainty. And uncertainty, after all, is what the unfolding of history is about. Things are going to happen to us under the Bush regime that we can't predict and can't ward off. And perhaps paradoxically, all this uncertainty gives me a sense of urgency I've never felt before, a kind of clarity.

If that urgency is where powerful action comes from, then I'm glad the police have backed us into a corner. In the corner I'm in, there's only one thing left to do. If no one's there to listen to us but the police, I'll talk with them. What if everyone did this? What if hundreds of people asked each officer, every day, respectfully but firmly, why they don't have number badges on their riot gear? What if we all asked them what legal reason they have for blocking off a particular street? What if we asked them what they think about democracy? I know they won't answer, I know they'll tell us to stop, but what might we discover in the process? Isn't it a little interesting to realize that in enforcing the depersonalizing power of the machinery of representation, the police have stepped into what can possibly become a very personal, very human interaction? That is one thing we have the power to create right now. It's where I'm starting, anyway.

Perhaps the next weeks won't be as bad as I imagine. I hope I'm only entertaining paranoid fantasies when I wonder what blacklists I might be on already. I hope I'm wrong about what Bush has up his sleeve. And I hope I haven't seen all that we can do either. I look forward to finding out what happens next.