Probably the architect who west-walled the council room in glass was suggesting something about democracy, so you wondered for a minute how that impromptu pile of cozy bedding looked from inside and how long the sight would be tolerated.  Out on the west plaza meanwhile a well-bred dog concentrated on the art of warming, stretching its front legs out in such a way as to flatten its tummy across the sun-stained stone, stretching, and coughing just a little bit.

Of course, it sounds too perfect that the only other thing you heard was the quiet melody of guitar strings being finger-picked by a youngish man whose presence, style, and musicality seemed to account for the dog’s single-minded attention to relaxation.

Now at what point exactly on this fourth weekend of Occupy Austin did the Austin Police swoop down to scoop up all these sleeping bags and dump them at some pre-authorized location?  By Sunday afternoon a shoeless young woman will be trying to explain it all, pointing to her feet and saying yes, that’s why she has no shoes, because they were lost in the sleeping bag raid.

And sure enough on Sunday afternoon when you walk back around to check out the view near “democracy window” there is nothing but bare stone.

Rounding the corner to the south plaza on Friday, you saw a dozen folks sitting in various places upon the amphitheater to your upper left and another dozen people gathered in the plaza before you.  Beyond the plaza, and around the sidewalks, perhaps another dozen sat, walked, or stood.  Three dozen in all, up, down, and around.

A shirtless man with a bicycle mocked you on Friday for gaping at the scene, then turned his attention to two middle aged men with really cool bikes who were also just looking at things.

Where the east steps of the amphitheater met the plaza was an empty metal bookshelf labeled “Free Library,” not too far from a line-up of books sunning themselves on a warm block of stone.  Sitting also on the stone was a young woman deep into the art of making a sign from poster-board and magic marker.

“The police took the bookshelf, too,” explains the barefoot woman on Sunday.  “I think they called it a permanent fixture.”

On Friday also you recall making notes about the food table that was serving free lunch on the lower deck of the amphitheater.  “Mom’s Work” said a sign behind the table as food was being served by a healthy looking blonde.

“They didn’t come for the food table until midnight Saturday,” the barefoot woman explains on Sunday.  “There was a new rule about no food from 10 pm to 6 am, so we were kinda giddy about it when they didn’t come for the table at 10.  But the rule didn’t go into effect until Sunday, so that’s why they waited.”

Although the food-table arrests were not the first arrests for Occupy Austin, they were the first to be met with a unified and organized response.  As the barefoot woman was informing me on Sunday about the overnight arrests, she wondered how she was going to march barefooted from city hall to the county jail.

Thinking back on Friday, you got the impression that the occupation camp was mostly glowing on the question of police relations.  The Austin Police Chief had come to Thursday night’s General Assembly with some encouraging words and promises.  Folks were chatting Friday about how Austin was an exception to the police attacks that had rocked other occupations.

Not that police had been exactly kindly up to the fourth weekend of Occupy Austin.  For example, the “flag man” of the movement who wore a Veteran’s Administration tag around his neck and who camped out near the front sidewalk with an American flag said the cops warned him once that if he put his head down to sleep they would arrest him.  After 36 hours of sleepless occupation he walked several miles to the VA facility before he felt safe enough to close his eyes.

After the food-table take-down, the police came back.

“Oh, I don’t remember exactly what time it was, maybe between two and four in the morning,” says a trusted witness.

“One group of cops lined up at the top of the amphitheater.”

“No, there were two lines of cops at the top of the amphitheater,” says a friend.

“And they had another line of cops over there,” says the trusted witness, pointing to the sidewalk along the east side of the city hall plaza.

The cops swept southward down the amphitheater and westward across the plaza.

“It was ridiculous, because we have been moving to that side two or three times a week so that they could power-wash the plaza and amphitheater,” chimes in the friend. “Then last night they also changed the order of the power washing.  Usually they wash the amphitheater first so that it has a chance to dry first and we can go back to sleep.  But last night they washed the amphitheater last and we had the feeling they did it on purpose so that we would have wet spaces to sleep on.”

By the time the police intimidations were over with, nearly 40 people had been arrested.  They were being bailed out all day Sunday, and at 4 pm it was time to redouble the support group that was assembled at the door of the county jail.

After a brief double-check via an iPhone map, organizers led 60 marchers north, up Guadalupe, from city hall to the county jail.  Our barefooted marcher carried a sign taller than her that read: “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing’s going to get better, it’s not.” Signed by, “The Lorax.”  Next time I will see her, she will be educating a television reporter who doesn’t appear shoeless to me.

“Shame on APD, Occupiers must go free!” chant some 60 marchers as they step past prime retailers and polished tour buses.  “It’s the War Economy,” declares one protest sign as marchers pass a couple of banks.  Small cars honk friendly notes as they pass us going south.  Then as the last stragglers of the march finish crossing Fifth Street a big white gas-guzzling combo SUV pickup monstrosity lays on its horn and gas at the same time, nearly threatening to run ‘em down.

After marchers pass the John Henry Faulk city library and take a turn around Wooldridge Park, they are greeted with cheers from the branch occupation at the county jail.  The merged rally is easily 150 strong.  In this hour of triumph, the arrests themselves have energized the movement to a new plateau of solidarity and determination.

“Free Speech Dies, [The Police Chief] Lies,” chant the occupiers.  They recite the First Amendment in unison.

The Bail and Jail Magnet for the occupation announces that $400 has just been posted for two more releases, a third release is pending after that, and a supporter has donated pizza!  Boxes of pizza are stacked five high on a bench.

“This is what Democracy looks like,” chants the crowd as a lead organizer points to them.  “This is what Hypocrisy looks like,” they chant as he point to the jail house door.  All this is going out via live stream on the occupation’s trusty laptop, which has been marched up here, too.

“What happens when people violate your constitutional rights?” asks an organizer.  “Do they get arrested?”

“They get elected!” answers a backbencher, cackling.

At that point the door to the county jail opens up and out come three jail trustees in blue scrubs, walking a dog, supervised by a uniformed deputy.  The four of them take the dog to a grassy patch where he knows just what to do.

Two television crews break down and return home.  A third crew arrives with a satellite truck.  The air is swooning with the smell of hand-rolled tobacco.

Then we see our first liberation.  Out from the glass doors of the jail strides a young man of stocky build, green t-shirt, desert camo pants, black bandana tied around his neck, and topped with a broad, flat Mohawk.  He looks good to us, and you can tell we look good to him.  He saunters toward the back benches where the jail veterans are sharing stories.  Someone passes him a Coke.

Another stocky young man about this time is talking to the live stream about getting in and out of jail.  Inside, they told him there were too many people in jail.  He said he told them that’s an easy problem to fix.  Just let the folks who didn’t do anything out.

When organizers report three more arrests back at city hall, I walk south to check it out.  At Wooldridge Park, three women have set up a table to give food, socks, undershorts, and t-shirts to a line that is already 60 men long.  A man is asking for extra socks that he can give to his girlfriend.  Down 9th St. near the Hirshfeld-Moore House I catch the back end of a Zombie march.  Then it’s past the Texas Observer on 7th, under the porch at Betsy’s Bar, and down a stretch of Lavaca that stinks like puke and grease.  At an upscale hotel, valets are lining up a Prius, an Audi, and a BMW.

“Yes, two guys got arrested here about ten minutes ago,” is what I hear from several people back at city hall.  “They were fighting.  Then while they were being arrested, another guy kept talking to the cops and wouldn’t shut up, so they arrested him too.”

It’s close to 6 pm Sunday and the fourth weekend of Occupy Austin is coming to a close.  The last jail release won’t be live streamed until 9:22 pm.  Meanwhile Bob Jensen is leading a few folks to the West side of city hall for a teach-in on toxic economics.

Occupiers on the plaza are already debating the meaning of today’s arrests and planning further actions to seek divestment of the city from Bank of America.  Everybody is thinking about the next move.

For Martin the Third, time also seemed to flow spiritually from the season of his father’s death right into the economic justice movements that are springing into view across the globe inspired by Occupy Wall Street.  It was an economic justice movement that occupied Martin Luther King, Jr. the day he took his last fall.

Occupying the only memorial on the National Mall not dedicated to a President nor a war, the stone-hewn image of our beloved American prophet transfixes our national conscience upon renewed possibilities.  Tourists banned from the Washington monument due to earthquake damage will be compelled more than ever to stop looking at where we came from and go find out where we’re going.

The weather in Texas also had been holding out.  Sunny skies greeted the opening-day festival for Occupy Austin on Thursday, Oct. 6, and stayed for the sidewalk picket of Bank of America that Friday.  When the storms finally hit Austin on the second Saturday of October they broke the harshest season of heat and drought on record, pouring down their pent-up refreshments all over the first weekend of Occupy Austin.

It wasn’t an easy night for Occupy Austin organizers who showed up to the matinee edition of Sunday’s General Assembly with fatigue and desperation barely contained.  What they needed was unity right away.  But the thing about real organizing work is that you don’t get what you need when you think you need it most.  And so you learn in real time how to stretch yourself across an abyss because somehow it still seems easier than falling apart.

What was most interesting about the first stormy weekend of Occupy Austin had to do with the issue that churned this predominantly white movement nearly to early dissipation.  It was the issue of the indigenous peoples and what any real economic justice movement should do about that.

Although the Occupy Austin General Assembly had passed a resolution in support of indigenous peoples on that stormy first Saturday, it was an expensive lesson in the deep rootedness of all problems American.  And for weary organizers who showed up for Sunday’s aftermath, there was a real fear expressed that the occupation might have already seen its last hour.

So it wasn’t an easy meeting up at the City Hall amphitheatre, where the west-side railings were still wrapped in black plastic as an improv windbreak.  But eventually things worked out.  A set of Unity Principles was adopted that would keep the compass of Occupy Austin fixed upon its “true North” purpose as an action guided by the example of Occupy Wall Street.

On Columbus Day, a banking holiday in America, the indigenous movement staged a symbolic protest outside Bank of America and then rallied at the Texas Capitol against a half millennium of occupation.  On the Saturday after Columbus Day, the 9th Annual Indigenous People’s march stepped off from the Alamo, joined by folks from Occupy San Antonio.

Meanwhile city officials from Austin to New York were working out their own unity principles, and their word of the week was “sanitation.”  On Wall Street the sanitation issue became international news and city officials backed down from their ultimatum that the occupied park should be cleared for proper cleaning.  In Austin a few arrests were reported during the sanitation action, but the movement was too young and sparse to make much of an issue out of it.

As Occupy Austin entered its second week this past Friday, October 14, organizers were looking more rested, wholesome, happy, and relaxed as they mixed themselves into the festival of people that array themselves around the Guitar Cow at City Hall Plaza.  On my third visit to the occupation I still count more than one hundred participants, about forty of them beginning to look like regulars.

Folks sit up in the amphitheater, hold signs along Cesar Chavez St., mill about the stone plaza, or arrange themselves into small groups on the limited grassy area near Lavaca St.  Huddled up against the East side of the amphitheater is another tiny patch of grass that supports knee-high stone blocks. This is where some of the more “official” occupation activities take place, like a food table, an info table, or a small organizing meeting.

On the second Friday of the occupation around 5:30 pm about a dozen mostly young folks are discussing strategies of nonviolent communication.  This is a survival skill for the occupation movement as any casual visitor to a General Assembly will see.  Either this movement will be able to organize itself through group discussions or it will fall apart.

And this is worth remarking in our age of social media.  What all the Facebook, cell phone, text message, and Twitter technology has created here is an electrifying need for face-to-face solidarity.

Among the dozen participants who hold handouts at this nonviolence workshop, you don’t hear the usual questions such as what’s nonviolent communication got to do with me?  Instead you hear voices who are up to their necks in the need for this skill, and you listen to questions eager to understand how it works.

Just as I’m catching the flow of discussion about the distinction between a request and a demand, up comes a visitor to the occupation who wants to know if we are anti-corporation.

A young man who I recognize as an organizer points to the sky in a gesture that appears to signal something like hey dude that’s not what we’re here to discuss, but one of the facilitators of this workshop checks him with a glance before addressing the questioner.

“How does it make you feel when you hear the words anti-corporation?”

“It pisses me off.”

“When you think about the corporations that you are familiar with, do you think of them as addressing the kinds of problems that we are here to solve?”

No.  Clearly our questioner has a lot of corporate experience and he shares with us his mental checklist.  One by one, we listen to him tell us how none of the corporations that he knows personally could be counted on to join this movement for economic justice.  They all have something else in mind.

“Well, we’re here discussing nonviolence,” says the facilitator.

“I grew up with nonviolence,” says the questioner, a remark that sort of calls attention to his Black skin.

“Nonviolence?” says a white guy who is walking his bicycle through the occupation.  “How far are you willing to take that?”

“The question sounds vague to me,” says the second facilitator.  “Can you make it more clear?”

“I mean how would you respond if someone was doing violence to you?”

“With compassion,” answers the second facilitator introducing a longer answer that involves Gandhi and some core principles of self-protection.

Soon enough we’re back into the flow of our workshop on nonviolent communication and very pleased to have such handy examples to think about.

Out on the plaza a three-piece band is putting out a vibe.  The keyboards hit at the opening chords of “Higher Ground” and soon enough the keyboardist is singing, “People!”

It feels good to see the organizers smiling and chatting casually during this Friday evening festival.  The skin that seemed so drained last weekend has come back flush with life.  They’ve had a chance to shower and rest and eat and get to know each other a little better.

Back on stage the guitar player strikes a few hard chords and asks us to sing along if we’d like.

“Once upon a time, you dressed so fine . . .”

And suddenly it’s like people don’t walk past each other any more, but everybody checks out everybody else’s eyes just to make sure they’re sharing the feeling.  The keyboardist and bass player dig into their notes.  And everything is suddenly new all over again.

By the time I get to 2nd St, better known these days as Willie Nelson Blvd, sidewalk dining is in full buzz. At 6:30 pm the temperature is sliding down into the 70’s, and the atmosphere could not be more perfect for a gourmet pizza with salad, wine, and schmooze. This newly-developed high-rise section of downtown Austin has got to be one of the more fortunate neighborhoods in the history of the world.

At the corner of Willie Nelson and Lavaca, sidewalk tables hug the plate glass windows of a coffee shop leased out from the backside of Austin City Hall. Here behind neat Texas gardens enclosed by hefty limestone blocks the diligent organizers of Occupy Austin check their emails, their twitter accounts, and make use of old-fashioned face-to-face communications. Mostly they look relaxed, together.

“OK, it’s seven o’clock says a young man with light longish hair who has just rounded the corner from the front,” and folks fold up their laptops for the walk around the building.

At the front side of City Hall more than a hundred folks have gathered on and around a stair-stepped stone amphitheater. In a handy space at the western edge of the front row I find myself sitting next to Jimmy, a friendly veteran with a pickup truck who is going to be helping out with chores of the occupation. And standing on the other side of me is Jim, a well known Austin pastor, activist, and author. We three are among the older folks here, though probably not the oldest, and we spend our first minutes together remarking how impressed we are with the velocity and youth of this movement, barely weeks old, and already approaching world historical.

Soon enough tonight’s facilitator Josh who I first recognized by his jeans that were netcast Monday night in a poorly lit General Assembly video is introducing us to the rules of the occupation.

“I moderated last night, and I’m facilitating tonight,” explains Josh, “but I can’t do this three times in a row. Nobody can appear three times in a row for any of these things, so we need all of you to step up and do your part.”

Josh is orienting us to The Process, how we should lift our hands and wiggle our fingers to “sparkle” with signs of approval, or raise up our thumbs and index fingers together to make a triangle when we want to raise points of order, or cup our hands in the form of a “C” to seek clarification in discussion. When we don’t want something to happen we cross our forearms in an “X” that will read as a “block.” Blocks need to be cleared before the group can go forward, or, if necessary, a block can be overridden by a nine-tenths majority.

The Process seems to work pretty well for gathering a sense of things from a complex meeting filled with energy and opinions. First order of business was to hear from working groups their Magnet Reports on health care, child care, press relations, outreach, affirmative action, wifi, reading groups, jail help, union solidarity, bank actions, campus activism, beverages, flyers, development of local issues, and more.

In between reports up steps the Vibe Watcher to remind insiders who are chattering amongst themselves only a dozen feet East of the moderator that they are distracting folks from what should be the main center of attention for the moment. Which allows us to get back to the business of coordinating pickup trucks to haul trash and so forth.

The diversity of chores is daunting as the scope of the occupation unfolds before us. Just check out the list of contacts at the Occupy Austin website and see if you don’t think wow that’s a lot of stuff to do.

After a careful process of agenda construction — which takes more minutes that anyone would prefer, but what can you do about it when so many people have so much to say — the new business begins.

A lawyer talks about procedures of arrest, booking, and bonding, in the event that cops are turned loose on the occupation at some point in time. Money is gathered to print flyers. Alex Jones is mentioned as someone who has allegedly threatened to stage a counter-occupation of some kind, which most folks here are of a mind to resist by means of booing him back.

A very short mission statement is read and approved, which is pretty close to the one posted at the Austin Occupation website.

And then, shortly before I decide to step off into the night, there is a substantive discussion about police relations and whether the Austin Occupation should continue to have a police liaison. There is heartfelt disagreement about this, but the organizers appear to have a leaning on the question and so the liaison that is already in place stays in place.

The walk back is exceedingly pleasant, with signs of good life aplenty. Then, back at the corner of 5th and Colorado, there is a bus-stop bench and a brief glimpse of the life that grinds you down slowly into old threads and sullen eyes. Thirty-six hours before the occupation of Austin begins Thursday morning, you can’t help but hope that it does some good.

Then the DREAM Act came unraveled. The Senate vote was postponed for a week. The vote to vote on it fell five votes short. And Lopez, the former student-body president of Rex Putnam High School of Portland, Oregon suddenly felt the air sucked out of his hopes.

“But the failure of the Senate to pass the DREAM Act in no way changes the status of the dreamers,” insists immigrant advocate, Ralph Isenberg, who has been working on the Lopez release full time for several weeks. “This is not a time to panic. Instead, we need to make certain that our national policy of not deporting students like Hector remains intact.”

Isenberg is referring to widely publicized statements made earlier this year by President Barack Obama and federal immigration authorities promising that they would cease spending tax money on efforts to deport children who had been brought to the US as children.

I am absolutely certain that Hector Lopez will be released,” says Isenberg on the Sunday before Christmas. “He meets all the criteria for dreamers. He has lived in the US for all but a few weeks of his life. He has been an exemplary student. And if the President’s words are any good, he said dreamers are not to be deported. I have not found another case where a dreamer with Hector’s qualifications and background has been deported.

Encouraged by what he calls a “sincere tone” in his communications with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) authorities in Arizona, Isenberg has promised to meet all expenses involved in the bonding, release, transportation, and supervision of Lopez so that he can spend the holidays at home with his mother.

Isenberg says he is thankful that ICE officials conducted an interview with Lopez last Wednesday exploring claims that Lopez has a “credible fear” of being re-deported to Mexico. After two full months of life as an American exile in Mexico, Lopez came back across the border in mid-November carrying written appeals for asylum. Officials have reportedly promised a speedy evaluation of the claims in the coming week says Isenberg. Yet despite hopeful signs of sincere treatment in Arizona, Isenberg claims that the past week was stressful for Lopez.

“Hector had a very bad week,” says Isenberg. “He was shocked by the DREAM Act failing in the Senate.” And he was informed that on Human Rights Day, December 10, an immigration judge in California ruled that the Lopez deportation case could not be reopened at this time.

“Hector is starting to show signs of extreme stress that I fear could lead to depression,” wrote Isenberg in a weekend communication to ICE officials in Arizona. “I also understand the facility psychologist met with Hector. I sincerely hope Hector will be released soon and know that he will most likely suffer from post traumatic stress upon his release. He will get the love and attention he needs from his family and friends. It is imperative that we get Hector released to minimize the amount of mental trauma he has suffered and allow him to resume his position in our society.”

As for the immigration judgment coming out of California, Isenberg points to a passage in the ruling where the judge appears to be appealing to some common sense that cuts through the rigid legalism of the immigration codes.

“The Court notes that were the Government to agree to joint reopening of Respondent’s proceedings . . . [Lopez] is eligible to pursue relief in the form of suspension of deportation,” wrote the judge in his concluding remarks.

Respondent has apparently lived in the United States since his entry in 1989 . . . and therefore accrued the requisite physical presence. Respondent has presented voluminous evidence of his good character, contributions to society, and accomplishments. His affidavit also provides evidence of the hardship he has faced upon removal to Mexico.

While the Court would be amenable to granting Respondent’s Motion sua sponte so that he could pursue his application for suspension of deportation, it is prevented from doing so due to lack of jurisdiction.

As Isenberg sees it, ICE authorities in Arizona have the sua sponte discretion to release Hector Lopez immediately and return him to his American life by Christmas.

“I told Hector on the telephone this weekend not to give up,” says Isenberg. “He is still on track for being released this week. It would be cruel and unusual punishment not to release this kid.”

If he could address the US Congress when it votes on the long-lost DREAM Act, 21-year-old Hector Lopez would ask for freedom from a “106-day nightmare” that started in late August when American immigration authorities ripped him out of his tax-paying, college-going, hard-working life and deported him to Mexico.

He would happily save American taxpayers the money they are now spending on his room and board in a lockup built for migrants near Florence, Arizona.

What I’ve said the whole time is that people like us – the college dreamers – didn’t have any choice. We were brought to this country as children and now we’re your future doctors, lawyers, and neighbors. We’re the future of this country and they’re trying to kick us out. Here you have people who are willing to fight for this country and all we’re asking is permission to call this country our home for the rest of our lives.

“Congress could enable so many productive people by passing the DREAM Act,” says Lopez. “And they would be foolish not to.” With all the things that Lopez has to worry about on Tuesday night, the main thing that keeps his mind busy is how to manage the expectations of what Congress will do with the DREAM Act on Wednesday. “The DREAM Act is finally being voted on,” he says. “I’m trying not to think about it, but it’s making me a nervous wreck.”

Hope is a serious thing to contend with when you’re locked up in Arizona thinking about holiday food. If Congress passes the DREAM Act, Lopez has been advised by attorneys that he would be made a free man. The DREAM Act would make it legal for young folks like him to return to college, get back to work, and make a future in the hometowns of America.

“We could ask for my immediate release,” he says, letting his hope build up momentarily. “So I’m hoping for the best. But on the other hand, I’m trying to stay pessimistic, too.” After all, it’s the US Congress we’re talking about here. They have had good days in history. Maybe even enough good days to make up for the bad.

Whichever way the DREAM Act goes this week, Lopez has backup plans. It’s been three weeks since he crossed the border from Mexico with papers in hand requesting a hearing for “credible fear.” The hearing is usually done in two parts, says immigrant advocate Ralph Isenberg. Lopez is still waiting for part one.

“If people have to wait a long time for the hearing process to begin, that’s a problem in itself,” argues Isenberg from the office of his real estate business in Dallas. “ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) has the discretion to release Hector to his home immediately.” Alongside the effort to free Lopez, Isenberg is also working for the return of another college dreamer, Saad Nabeel, who was deported from Texas in 2009 during the first semester of his freshman year.

If Congress and ICE continue to harass Hector, Saad, and the millions of college dreamers that they typify, then Isenberg will sponsor a civil rights delegation to visit Hector on Friday.

Rev. Peter Johnson was born into a civil rights family in Plaquemine, Louisiana. He was at the Freedom Rock Baptist Church the night state troopers rode their horses right up to the pulpit. That was the night James Farmer had to be smuggled out of town alive in a coffin.

“I want to tell Hector that he is not alone,” says Rev. Johnson over speaker phone. “There are people all over the world who believe in dignity for all human beings and who have a problem with America when it sets out to destroy families.

“There is a long history of America destroying families,” says Johnson. “Under slavery, they would send the father to Georgia, the mother to Alabama, and the children to Virginia. Today America is literally destroying families. I know of cases where a mother puts her kids in school for the day. The mother is picked up by immigration and sent to Haskell (Texas) prison. And when the children get out of school their mother is gone. They are literally destroying families.”

Johnson plans to take books by Gandhi and King as gifts for Lopez. He has a Gandhi book on nonviolence and a favorite by King, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?  Destroying families is chaos, not community. Where will we go from here?

“Look here,” says Isenberg jumping into the conversation. “I’m reading the inscription in Rev. Johnson’s copy of Where Do We Go from Here? It says: ‘Peter, Read this book. There will be a test. In fact, now that I think about it, life will be a test for you, (signed) Martin.’”

“That’s right,” says Rev. Johnson, “and when Dr. King gave you a book to read you made sure you read it because you knew he was going to question you about it.  Where Do We Go from Here was a book written in preparation for the Poor People’s Campaign (of 1968).  The Poor People’s campaign was going to unite Black and White and Hispanic people so they could confront the trap of poverty and unemployment.”  It was a handbook for a movement to come.

“King specifically talked about people South of the border. He said it was America’s moral obligation to help them find a better life.” The timing of Friday’s visit to Florence, Arizona will have three dimensions of significance for Rev. Johnson. It’s nearly a month away from the annual celebration of King’s birthday. The holiday season is coming, which is “a season of forgiveness and atonement.” And finally, December 10 will be the 62nd Anniversary for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

“Fundamentally, the case of Hector Lopez is a question of human rights,” says Rev. Johnson. “America is punishing a man who was brought here only weeks after he was born. In our treatment of Hector Lopez, we need to remember the human rights values of dignity and respect for all.”

Two weeks ago you’re riding with your father in a rickshaw along a jam-packed street in Dhaka, Bangladesh when you see a few street children half naked, starving, skeletons dressed in skin. At once the rickshaws around you rustle with murmurs and shouts at the policeman beating the children on the head.

So you jump out of the rickshaw and say to the policeman, “Stop beating those children!”

You’re a foot behind the cop who turns to demand that you stop speaking English. “Speak Bangla!” commands the cop. But you can’t speak Bangla or understand what else is being said all around you as the policeman harangues you while the crowd harangues the cop.

Then thwack. That bamboo cane smacks a bruise on your arm, just below the left shoulder. There is no time to sort anything out. Your father tugs you by the arm and you run with him as fast as you can, escaping into the inexorable crowds of Dhaka.

If you are asked a question about why you did it, you reply with a question: “On what planet is it okay to beat children on the head because they are begging to stay alive?” But mostly nobody asks. You are an exile — a deportee — and you usually try to stay anonymous before the eyes that come near you.

As Ralph Isenberg tells you via cell phone from Dallas: “You may not be an American citizen yet, Saad Nabeel, but you are an American teenager.” And who expects an American teenager to sit quietly when he sees a cop beating a starving child on the head? None of the American teenagers you know.

And yet, how is it possible to make sense of all this? Even now, two weeks after the cop caned Nabeel, and after he grabbed a tourist visa and fled from Bangladesh, he hesitates to tell people in his new place of residence that he lived as an exile in Bangladesh because he was deported from America for no crime whatsoever.

“There’s so many things that don’t compute,” says Nabeel, speaking into his headset through the beat-up Sony Vaio that he somehow put back together after it was tossed back to him by American immigration. “I’ve been trying to put it together in my head but it doesn’t make any sense to me.”

Patiently he tries to find the right words to express what it’s like to be two or three countries away from the life he grew up with and the dreams that keep flying away.

“My dream is to go to Stanford,” he explains. “But there is no Stanford over here. And how do I get to Stanford when I have been barred from America for the next ten years.”

Friends in America know the facts of Nabeel’s case. How he was brought by his parents to America at the age of three or four. How his parents applied for asylum because of politics in Bangladesh. How asylum was denied to his family when he was six years old.

Nabeel’s parents were tenacious in their determination to stay in America. They moved from L.A. to Texas. By late 2009 they were finally within reach of approved green cards and legal residency. Then the whole game board was thrown over. One month the young Nabeel was working on becoming a straight-A freshman engineering student at the University of Texas at Arlington. The next month he was separated from his parents and locked up. For what? For nothing he did. He was ordered to sign a ten year bar, then he was deported.

Friends of Saad Nabeel don’t think the facts make any sense. “I probably feel just like everyone else does — hurt,” says Liberty High School student, Samantha Jarrell, of Frisco, Texas. “Just look at it like this, one of your best friends is in a strange country he knows nothing about and the one place he wants to return to is the same place that put him where he is. His family paid taxes. It’s not like they were out causing havoc on the streets of America.”

As Nabeel wrestles with so many dead-end traumas of life uprooted, another American college student, Hector Lopez, is working to keep hope alive. The circumstances for Lopez don’t look too good at first glance. He’s locked up by immigration authorities in Florence, AZ. But his voice over the phone is upbeat, as if this student of marketing were showing you a pair of shoes back at the Nike store where he used to work in Portland, OR.

Like Nabeel, Lopez was pursuing a college degree when he was abruptly uprooted and tossed out of the country by American immigration authorities. Like Nabeel, Lopez was brought to America at a very young age. Like Nabeel, Lopez was deported first, before the father who brought him here. Julianne Hing has covered the story nicely for Color Lines, and Lopez is looking forward to more press coverage this week.

What’s different for Lopez is that he was deported to the neighboring country of Mexico and was able to walk back up to the US border with letters and documents in hand, requesting readmission. He’s in detention awaiting his interview for a “credible fear” hearing which he doesn’t want to discuss in detail yet. Suffice it to say that Lopez feels safer in Arizona detention than he felt as an American deportee in a country far from home.

On scraps of paper in his pocket, Lopez keeps notes about his life, his memories, the things he recalls growing up as an American kid. Like in 2008, he remembers the gold-edged packet that he received from the White House inviting him to a meeting of youth leaders. There was no way he could afford the $5,000 expense at the time, so he passed on the opportunity.

“I just think it’s kind of funny,” says Lopez over the phone. “One moment I’m invited to the White House for a leadership conference and the next moment they are kicking me out of the country. Of course, looking back, I wish I would have gone to the White House back then.”

Lopez was picked up by immigration authorities on August 23 of this year, a full two weeks after President Barack Obama famously declared in a speech at the University of Texas — backed up by a report in the New York Times — that his administration was not deporting college students who had lived in America most of their lives. In Texas, the White House got downright choosy about who they weren’t going to let the President see that day, so Dallas immigrant advocate, Ralph Isenberg, was handed back the $10,000 ticket he bought for the purpose of telling the President about Saad Nabeel.

On Thanksgiving Day, 2010, Nabeel was packing to flee Bangladesh. At Facebook he scrolled through Thanksgiving pictures that he was not in. He had eaten with the Anderson family on Thanksgiving 2007. In 2008, he had gone over to Shamir’s. But in 2009, Thanksgiving Day arrived with the sound of his mother crying at a border station in New York. He would spend the next 40 days and nights detained. “Yeah, my friends knew that Thanksgiving was my one-year anniversary of going to jail.”

Nabeel has been out of Bangladesh for a week. He has joined an exiled uncle who many years ago fled Bangladesh to avoid political detention. For the time being, Nabeel is restarting his college education at a campus where 90 percent of the students are from out of country. But what should he tell them about where he is really from and all the places he can’t belong? “The main difference between me and the other students here is that they can go home, but I can’t.”

Ralph Isenberg is not giving up on the idea that Nabeel can and should be allowed to come home to America. Meanwhile, he is also helping Lopez. “These two kids are showing all of us what the American Dream is all about,” says Isenberg. The sooner that Nabeel and Lopez can resume their college educations in America the better for everyone he says.

“Maybe it’s because I’m only a teenager, but I like to believe in people,” says Saad’s friend Samantha. “I like to believe that when given the chance people will do the right thing. I don’t know much about how revising immigration errors goes, but whoever has the power to remove this bar should review Saad’s case and bring him home. He isn’t asking for anything more than to return to his real home in the United States. To me, at least, it doesn’t sound like that’s requesting too much.”

Is it too much to ask the President of the United States to do what he promised before the election? To stop throwing good kids and their families out of America? Surely the teenage test that Samantha applies to her friend Saad also applies to Hector. Surely by the time Human Rights Day arrives on December 10 it wouldn’t be too much to ask what Hector Lopez hopes for. To be home in America with his family for the holidays.

On what planet is it okay to pretend that you haven’t got the power to help teenagers dream free?

Thanks to Nabeel’s energetic internet campaign seeking return to his American homeland, the young man’s deportation has been covered by reporters in Texas, Germany, and India. His open letter to President Barack Obama was recently published at The Huffington Post.

Pinak Joshi is one of Nabeel’s best friends and was able to take calls during some of the cruelest days of detention last year. Joshi is a sophomore in molecular biology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he is already doing independent experimentation on prostate cancer.

“Although I’m proud of all that I do, it is a very strenuous weight to hold at the age of 19,” says Joshi via email. “What happened to Saad showed me that this is a privileged kind of stress. Being a sophomore in college has changed how I look at the world. Thanks to my research experience and coursework, I’m more thorough with my responsibilities and I’m able to think about complex problems analytically.”

“Saad is missing out on all that,” says Joshi. “He’s missing out on the ridiculous volume of math problems he would get as an engineer. He’s missing the laughs, the good times, and the beauty that is in the struggle of leading a scholarly life. He’s missing out on making new friends and building a network that could help him in the future. Most of all, he has been denied the opportunity to pursue his dreams.”

At the College Station campus of Texas A&M University, another close friend of Nabeel, sophomore engineering student, Chris Anderson, finds himself already caught up in three-day bouts of homework and tests.

“Being a sophomore in college is more than just a title of what age I am,” says Anderson, “it means that I was able to make it through a whole year on my own. Being able to manage a tough engineering curriculum while still having time to do other activities has helped teach me how to prioritize and manage my time better. If I hadn’t had these skills coming into my sophomore year, then I would be behind and struggling in my classes.”

“When Saad’s first semester of his Freshman year of college was disrupted he lost not only his grades which he spent so much time and effort to keep up, but he also lost the whole Freshman experience and the ability to prove himself as an independent person,” says Anderson. “College is about more than just getting a degree, it’s about learning to grow as a person and getting that life experience, but because our government decided to deport him and interrupt his education he is missing a year of his life that he will never get back.”

In Bangladesh, Nabeel struggles with living conditions quite different from the college apartments that he enjoyed last year while attending the University of Texas, Arlington on full scholarship for engineering.

“It is very hot and humid here,” says Nabeel in a draft script that he is preparing for an update to his YouTube page. “The temperature is constantly above 100 degrees outside. The apartment I live in has no air conditioning. To make matters worse, the electricity stays off for upwards of 9 hours a day. Then there is the pollution. The air can make you sick here and some days I can barely get out of bed. I have also suffered several bouts of food poisoning. I hope you can better understand why I am so anxious to get home. Bangladesh is not home but rather a nightmare that I hope soon ends.”

To get his American dream back on track, Nabeel has been working with Dallas businessman and immigration advocate Ralph Isenberg. After a recent review of Nabeel’s case, Isenberg is arguing that US immigration authorities contradicted themselves when they first separated Nabeel from his mother and then failed to treat him as an unaccompanied minor.

On Isenberg’s reading, immigration law defines minors as younger than 21. Therefore, when Nabeel, at age 18, was separated from his mother, immigration authorities should have transferred him to Health and Human Services (HHS), where he would have been entitled to education and legal representation, both denied to him under supervision of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

“Saad’s detention was unlawful and ICE knew it,” says Isenberg via telephone. “Immigration law defines a minor as 21 years old or less. And there are two types of minors, accompanied and unaccompanied. Saad coming to America at age three was clearly an accompanied minor the whole time.”

ICE authorities in New York separated Nabeel from his mother on the day before Thanksgiving, 2009. ICE then detained the 18-year-old in an adult facility and refused the young man’s requests to communicate with his parents who were both under ICE detention. ICE could have allowed communication between the young man and his parents. They could have transferred the younger Nabeel to detention with his father in Haskell, Texas. Or they could have released the 18-year-old to the care of his uncle in New York.

At no point during their 15-year immigration saga in America were the Nabeel family “illegal,” explains the younger Nabeel in his upcoming YouTube video. They arrived with visas in 1994 and were very close to finalizing Green Cards in 2009. It was not the application of immigration law that forced the family to Bangladesh in 2010, but the misapplication of law by authorities who misused their powers.

“There is no gray area in the law,” explains Isenberg. “Unaccompanied minors must be handed over to HHS. ICE knew it, but refused to do that. They took a minor and put him into an adult detention facility without protections of law that minors are entitled to. There are halfway houses for unaccompanied minors. HHS has definitive responsibilities to provide education and social services. Saad was denied all that.

“When Saad asked for help he was called a security risk. ICE not only could have but should have paroled Saad to his uncle,” says Isenberg. “I dare say had that happened he would have never been deported. ICE broke the law by ignoring Saad’s request for political asylum while detained. They broke the law, put him in jail, threw away the key, put him on the plane, and there was no due process whatsoever.”

On a sweltering day in late August Nabeel received an email with a link to the just-released Taylor Swift video. When he clicked on the link he was informed that the video was not available for viewing in the Bangladesh region.

“It sucks,” he emailed, “because I had tickets to her concert twice but couldn’t go because my parents said, ‘we don’t know if immigration will extend our time that long’.” The family were living lawfully and obediently according to the directions that ICE had communicated. What else could keep the young Nabeel from twice buying his Taylor Swift tickets in advance?

Of course, eight hours after the first email a second one arrived from the computer-savvy Nabeel. In all caps it read “just watched it, greatest music video ever!” How do you get to be more of an American kid than that?

Greg Moses: And then you were deported? How did the deportation take place?

Saad Nabeel: Yes I was deported. They took me out of the room. Forced me to sign papers stating I had a 10-year bar from returning to the USA. “If you do not sign what we give you, you will be criminally charged and kept in jail.” I signed the papers. They stripped me in front of another officer once again to see if I had something concealed then gave me the 42-day-old clothes I wore when I entered the facility.

I was then taken by an officer out to a van that my mother was in. We flew from the Buffalo Airport to Chicago O’Hare, then to LAX–my hometown … didn’t think that was how I would visit it–then from there to Bangkok, Thailand. In Thailand my mother and I were kept in a cell with no air conditioning, which was literally crawling with cockroaches and spiders.

GM: Did your mother tell you how she had lived for 42 days at the Chautauqua County Jail? How long were you two kept in Thailand?

SN: She was devastated as expected. It’s difficult to describe the feeling honestly. It’s like walking to the gallows. She told me she was transferred three times, denied hot water, and kept behind bars. We were in Thailand for over three hours or so.

GM: Then you were finally transported to Bangladesh for a reunion with your father? What was that like?

SN: Father was still in Haskell, Texas, at the Rolling Plains Prison. He came in February. My mom’s brother–uncle to me—made special arrangements with Bangladeshi immigration because if he did not, we would have been detained for three days.

GM: Wait. So your father was still in Texas? You and your mother were deported before he was deported? And yet his status was the primary interest for immigration? Everything sounds completely mixed up to me.

SN: Yeah that’s completely correct. Trust me, I’m just as confused as you are.

GM: For the record maybe we should make a note here that this section of the interview is transpiring on the day that the White House disinvited your Dallas advocate Ralph Isenberg from a fundraiser that he paid $10,000 to attend. We live in confusing times.

SN: It was to make it so the NY Times article was not contradicted by my case.

GM: Yes, the Times was reporting that students like you were not being deported. There you were, a bona fide national contradiction. I’m sure we’ll come to Ralph in good time. Meanwhile, you and your mother were getting settled in Bangladesh. How did you find a place? What did you have with you? Who did you know there?

SN: My mom has family here. We stayed with her brother for a week or so. Then they found an apartment across the street from his. I arrived with a bag of clothes in a duffel bag. That’s all.

GM: And you hadn’t seen Bangladesh since you were two or three? You had jet lag and culture shock? What do you recall about that first week?

SN: I had no memory of this place at all. It was and still is a different planet. I don’t even know the language, so 90 percent of the signs on the street were and are alien to me. Culture shock–there’s really no way to describe the feelings I had because I knew “I can’t go home.” The first week, I started getting sick, vomiting, depression, tirades against my mother, etc.

GM: And then your father joined you? What do you recall about that reunion?

SN: It wasn’t one that I’m proud of. All my life I knew how to control my anger. But when you lose your entire life in front of your eyes, you don’t care anymore about control.

GM: But what could your father have done differently? As I understand the situation from talking to Ralph, your father was very close to getting permanent residency.

SN: I don’t know what he could have done. All I know is that there was probably a way to avoid all of this.

GM: When did you begin campaigning for your return to the USA? How did that begin?

SN: I began in March I believe. My youtube video has the date on there (March 18, 2010). It began after I recovered mentally a bit and regained some of what made me “The Saad” back home. Everyone knows the The Saad back home, and they know that when he sets his mind to something, he makes it happen. It’s egotistical but it’s what keeps me afloat.

GM: When do you first recall being called “The Saad”? Was it connected to a specific achievement?

SN: I first started calling myself The Saad in 2007 during my junior year of high school. It caught on, as much as everyone hated saying it because it added to my ego, haha. Teachers started calling me that at one point.

GM: What about “The Official Group: Bring Saad Nabeel Back Home to America”? The first signature at the petition is dated March 26, 2010. And there is a Facebook page. How did all that come into existence?

SN: I started the Facebook Page a long time ago. I was the one who created the Official Group. I made it as a central hub for people to learn about my situation. I would stay up all night spreading around my initial deportation video and group link. Very long nights. But the PR paid off eventually when the Dallas Morning News came knocking.

GM: Yes, I see an excellent, comprehensive story on April 5, 2010 by Morning News reporter Jessica Meyers. She describes you as “a Taco Bell aficionado and Taylor Swift fanatic.” Did she contact you via Facebook? The story is sympathetic to the unfairness of your status but not very optimistic about the chances of reversing it.

SN: My friends and I have been living off of Taco Bell for years now. We used to say “Taco Bell’s our second home. It’s the hand that feeds. Don’t insult it. Don’t bite the hand that feeds.”

Ah yes, I am completely and utterly in love with Taylor Swift, no arguing that. The salutatorian of my graduating class mentioned me in her speech during our graduation ceremony because of how much I loved Taylor Swift. The Dallas Morning News contacted me by Facebook first.

GM: But before the Morning News published their story, you were contacted by WFAA reporter Steve Stoler? He interviewed you via Skype for a March 22 report. And that was a few days before the online petition was posted (or the domain name created). So the Dallas media must have seen something compelling in your story.

Stoler presented supportive on-camera comments from your Liberty High School friends who called your treatment “unfair.” And you say, “I really hope that someone in the government has a heart.” Heart and fairness? What’s wrong with asking for that?

SN: Yes, Steve contacted me on Facebook as well. What’s wrong with heart and fairness? I have no idea. I still can’t accept the fact that I’m stuck in Asia right now.

GM: Speaking about heart and fairness, how did you get to know Ralph Isenberg?

SN: After the Dallas Morning News article was published, Ralph contacted Jessica Meyers who wrote my article and she contacted me.

GM: So you’ve been working with Ralph since about mid-April, 2010? What has that been like? What has Ralph been able to offer in the way of resources and strategy?

SN: Yes since mid-April. Working with him has been good. He has more information to share than any immigration attorney will ever tell you no matter how much you pay them. Actually he’s more knowledgeable than most attorneys.

GM: And he helped you try to return to college this year? What was your experience of that?

SN: Yes, he and I worked on me returning home as fast as possible to attend SMU. Dr. Charles Baker from SMU contacted the Dallas Morning News at the same time as Ralph did and so I introduced them.

GM: So the three of you worked on the SMU option? What was that experience like for you?

SN: Well it gave me hope that people hadn’t given up on me. I finally felt like I could go home.

GM: How did the process play out over time? What things were you doing to qualify for admission to SMU and secure passport permissions to return to America for college?

SN: Dr. Baker would scan up the necessary documents for SMU, email them over, have me sign them, and then send them back. I qualified for SMU thanks to my ACT score. Passport permission was not given to me. I was denied my visa because my passport had an “ineligibility” on it. The US Consulate told me to come back January 5, 2020.

GM: So you visited the US Consulate in Bangladesh? When was that? Did you have to fill out forms? Was there a meeting or an interview? Did they know that you had been accepted at SMU?

SN: I believe it was a day or two before June 30, when the Dallas Morning News pumped out a short article about it. At the consulate, I did not have to fill out any forms. It was an interview. There was a man behind a glass screen and I was on the opposite side. They knew everything. I gave them all the paperwork, letters from SMU, etc. They didn’t care. They took one look at it and rejected me based on my passport. I don’t understand how difficult it is for the government to just fix a simple mistake THEY made on my case …

GM: And what mistake was that?

SN: The ten-year bar that I was never supposed to have by law.

GM: Why were you never supposed to have a ten-year bar?

SN: A ten-year bar is only placed on someone who overstayed in the USA unlawfully for over 360 days starting at the age of 18. I was under ICE supervision since the age of 17 so I was never overstaying unlawfully. It was always with the permission of ICE. A three-year bar is only placed on someone who has overstayed unlawfully for over 180 days. The only overstaying I did was from November 24 to January 4 because I was detained. I was still 18 years old when I departed the USA.

GM: And while you were detained you never got to consult a lawyer? But before they deported you, they said you had to sign the ten-year bar? It sounds like you were forced into an impossible situation. How do you take back a signature you should never have been forced to sign?

SN: No, I was not able to consult a lawyer nor given the ability to ask for one because they told me “if you refuse to sign any papers we give you, you will be criminally charged and kept in jail.”

GM: Your case has attracted recent coverage from important international press such as the German magazine der Spiegel and the Calcutta newspaper The Telegraph. Your Official Group at Facebook in mid-August has about 5,000 friends who like it. What are the chances that The Saad will be able to high-jump over his ten-year bar?

The Saad: Everyone knows The Saad as someone who gets things done. A lot of people expect me home soon and even have things planned out for it. But what the public doesn’t know is that, even The Saad has his doubts about himself. We grow up in America knowing that “justice will prevail” so that’s what I hope happens. Someone will recognize this mistake and fix it.

Greg Moses: OK, so let’s focus for a minute on your experience of the events that unfolded. How did you first become aware that the situation was dire? How were you notified, and by whom? What did they say? What went through your mind?

Saad Nabeel: I first became aware of the situation on Nov. 3 when my mom called me at my apartment telling me that my father had been taken by ICE. Things didn’t really function in my head. She told me the only choices we had were to go to Canada and try to seek refuge there or to go to Bangladesh, a third-world country. I had no idea what to say about any of this. Losing my life in a heartbeat isn’t exactly something that’s easy.

GM: Nov. 3, 2009 was a Tuesday. By that time you would have completed your mid-term assessments? How were your grades at that point?

SN: Actually, mid-term exams were about to start. I had an Electrical Engineering lab exam in the morning so I was up studying all day. My grades were good in my opinion. I put a lot of effort into my work.

GM: So what did you think about your options at that point? Canada or Bangladesh?

SN: I didn’t want either one. I wanted to stay where I was at. I wanted to stay home. But I couldn’t let my mother go alone to Canada. I had to go with her. She’s my mother.

GM: So you traveled with your mother from Dallas to the Canada border?

SN: We flew to NYC. Then my uncle drove us to the border.

GM: Was that your father’s brother? Was he someone you had known well? What was that trip like? What was going through your head? Which border station did you approach?

SN: It was my father’s brother. We used to live with him when we first moved to the USA. But we had not seen each other in years. The trip was long and tiring. The only thing in my head was, “Am I really leaving everything behind?” We approached the Buffalo border.

GM: And this was still early November, 2009? As you were approaching the border at Buffalo, what was the weather like? What time of day? Did you just try to drive through, or did you park the car and approach the border station on foot?

SN: It was towards mid-November since it took us a while to prepare clothes, food, and other items for the trip. It was very cold the entire time. Snow on the ground everywhere we went. When we got to the border, we worked with an organization that helps immigrants who are out of status and have only Canada left as a choice. We filed paperwork with them, camped out at a one-room motel for over a week. I would sleep on the floor, my mom on the bed.

GM: As November wore on, were you able to keep in touch with friends? What were you saying to them? What were they saying to you?

SN: The motel had internet, so that’s how I was able to communicate to my friends. I was telling them that I had to move to Canada. Only my closest friends knew the real deal. They helped me pack my belongings in Texas. They were all bummed out.

GM: Do you want to talk a little about the organization that was helping you with the process? Besides filing papers and waiting for an answer, was there anything else for you and your mother to do?

SN: The name of it was Vive La Casa. They have a website. All my mother and I had to do was wait for the call to go to Canada, meet with her relative (in this case her uncle), and convince the border authority that their relationship was legitimate.

GM: Her uncle?

SN: Yes. You need a relative to go into Canada. She was fortunate enough to have one. Although I use the term “fortunate” very loosely seeing as I’m not exactly in the best shape.

GM: At Vive la Casa, they would call your mother’s uncle an “anchor relative”? So if we continue to use terms very loosely you had some “hope” that your passage to Canada would be approved?

SN: I do not know the terminology, honestly. That’s probably correct though. You are also safe to assume that I had little to no hope that we would enter Canada. Why? Because I was never able to get over the shock of leaving behind everything in my life because of immigration, for the second time–the first was the move from LA.

GM: So what happened next?

SN: To make the depressing story short: we got the call that we had to go get interviewed at the border. We went there and met up with my mom’s uncle. All three of us were separated from each other into different rooms and drilled with questions. Hours upon hours later, Canadian immigration said, “we do not believe you two–my mother and her uncle–have a relationship. Sorry, but we are sending you back to US immigration.”

GM: By that time it was very late in the day? Were you able to communicate with anyone?

SN: I had been awake all night and they finally rejected us around 4pm when the office closed. After that we were sent back to US immigration and locked in a room until one in the morning or so. I was able to call one friend. That’s it.

GM: So there you were, locked into a room with your mother for eight hours, and the Canada option was closed? What kind of room was it? What were you expecting next? How was your mother holding up?

SN: It was a room with a few seats, a TV, and a glass wall looking out at the other side of the building we were housed in. A lot of people were there. There was a counter at the top of the room. Behind it is where the police officers and ICE agents were. I only expected to be taken to jail. That’s what they told us when we got there. My mother was in tears the whole time.

GM: It sounds miserable. Two week prior to that you had been in Texas studying for your electrical engineering midterms. Now you were a thousand miles away in New York, waiting to go to jail.

SN: Yeah that’s my life. While everyone goes to college, I go to jail.

GM: And that’s where they took you next? To jail?

SN: Yeah. Handcuffed mother and me and took us to separate facilities.

GM: Did you have a clear idea of why you were being jailed? I mean it seems that you were doing everything according to established procedures. Were you given any kind of hearing or any chance to get a lawyer before they handcuffed you?

SN: No I had no idea what was going on. All I knew was that ICE was okay with us living in Texas. We did not get the right to a lawyer.

GM: Did you get the impression that ICE was treating you as your mother’s child, under her supervision? Or were they treating you as an adult with full rights and privileges to be informed about what was going on with options of your own?

SN: I never had to report to ICE. Only my parents had to. I thought I was still under parental supervision.

GM: Where did they take you? What did they tell you? How were you handled?

SN: They didn’t tell me much. Not much conversation other than, “we’re taking you to Batavia. Your mom is going to Chautauqua County Jail.” We were handled like luggage.

GM: So they took you to the Buffalo Federal Detention Center at Batavia, New York? That’s about a one-hour drive from the city of Buffalo. Were you cuffed the whole time? Am I correct to imagine that you were pretty numb from the shock of it all?

SN: Yeah, I was cuffed the whole time. I had not eaten or slept in 36 or so hours. It was 4:30 a.m. when I was finally stuck into the room I was to live in for the next 42 days.

GM: Do you recall the date? I see that the Batavia detention center has three diamond-shaped pods. Did you have a sense of your location within the facility?

SN: It was the day before Thanksgiving. No, I had no sense of location when I was inside.

GM: Were you alone in your cell? What was the typical day like?

SN: I was with 60 men in the room. A typical day was spent by doing nothing. Later on I made friends with a few people there and we played cards for five hours at a time to kill the day. I kept a 20-page journal of what was in my mind.

GM: There were 60 beds in one room? Do you want to share a passage from that journal?

SN: Yes, the room had two floors with 30 people on each floor. I was prisoner number 301. The journal is a madman’s journal. It’s full of random mood swings and trauma.

GM: Were you able to communicate with your mother, your friends, or an attorney?

SN: I was not able to talk to my mother or father. I was able to contact a few of my friends.

GM: What was that like? Not being able to talk to your parents? Did your friends help to keep your spirits up?

SN: It made me worry about them. I knew my father could take care of himself. But my mother had never even imagined she would experience torture like this. My friends tried their best to keep my spirits up. They told me time and again to not blame my parents for what was happening.

GM: So you were kept in jail through the holidays? Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year?

SN: Yes.

PART ONE: AN AMERICAN KID

Greg Moses: Where were you born and when did you arrive in the USA?

Saad Nabeel: I was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh in 1991. I moved to the USA in 1994, when I was three years old.

GM: And that was in California?

SN: Yes I moved to Los Angeles, California.

GM:Do you recall those first impressions of LA? What was it like?

SN: Well it was my home. That’s all I knew since I have no memory of anything earlier than LA. I loved my home.

GM:What was it about your home that you loved?

SN: I loved everything. Being able to play with my friends, go to school and have fun, go to all the cool places in LA with my parents. What I loved most about my home was that it was a place I knew that I was safe. It was a place I always knew would be there at the end of the day, no matter what happened.

GM:But that changed?

SN: Yeah it changed when I was about to graduate from the 5th grade. Immigration forced my father to choose between returning back to Bangladesh and getting persecuted by rival political groups, or moving away from California and awaiting the approval of his green card that his brother had applied to get him.

GM:And that’s when your family brought you to Texas?

SN: Yes, in 2002, a few weeks before graduating from elementary school.

GM:So you arrived in Texas just in time for summer. What was it like for you?

SN: Well I was in a place where I knew no one. I had just left my entire life behind and everyone I knew in it. Much like what it feels for me now in Bangladesh.

GM:And then you started Middle School. What was that like for you?

SN: I started the 6th grade in Allen, Texas. A school named Reed Elementary is where I went. Middle School began in Allen when you started 7th grade, so I was stuck in elementary for another year. Reed was interesting to say the least. Going to school in Texas is where I experienced my first taste of racism. People made racist jokes on a daily basis about me, in front of other peers.

GM:So you found it difficult to make friends at first?

SN: Yeah, at first. But I quickly made friends, though the racial slurs kept on at a steady pace with the kids who were strangers.

GM:So let’s talk about the friends for a minute and how your final year of elementary school ended.

SN: Well elementary school ended decently I’d say. I was good friends with most other students. Everyone generally liked me. After 6th grade we moved to our home in Frisco, Texas.

GM:And that’s where you stayed until college?

SN: Yes sir.

GM:What was it like making friends in Frisco? What was the Middle School like for you?

SN: It wasn’t difficult making friends in Frisco, probably because the initial shock of leaving my life behind in California had eased away. Wester Middle School was fun. Eighth grade was the best because it was easy and I knew everyone. Going to Six Flags at the end of the year with my class was also great.

GM:As you were busy growing up, how involved were you with your family’s immigration status? Given the upsetting nature of your family’s move from California, how much did it weigh on your mind that you might have to leave the United States?

SN: Well I was not involved. I was told it was being taken care of since we almost always had lawyers doing some sort of work for us. I didn’t have time to be involved with immigration, because I knew nothing about it. I thought I was just a regular kid like everyone else I knew. It never occurred to me that I would have to leave America since it was my home. I was told we would eventually have our green cards.

GM:So let’s talk about High School next. Did you go to the same High School as most of your Middle School friends? What interests did you develop there?

SN: Yeah, I went to high school with all of my middle school class (at least for freshman year that is). I developed a keen interest in computers and everything about them. I learned everything I could about them. Other than that, hanging out with friends, going to the movies, going on dates were all the norm.

GM:And you started your own company at that time? Tell us about that.

SN: Yeah that’s when I started Easy PC (for lack of a better name). I figured “why not use my skills for a job?” I found cheap website hosting, made a site, and went around trying to advertise. Got a few flyers up in classrooms of teachers I had. Made an honest buck or two.

GM:All in all, an all-American story. Then you went off to college?

SN: Yeah, I applied for scholarships and was pleasantly surprised to receive enough funding to get a full ride for the University of Texas at Arlington. My years of hard work in high school finally paid off.

GM:Did you move to campus housing or commute from home?

SN: I moved to the on-campus apartments. Centennial Court was the name.

GM:I looked it up online. Seems like a perfect place to live out your college years. What was that first month like in September 2009?

SN: It was awesome. For the first time in my life, I was living alone. I had great roommates and we always had awesome times together. Classes weren’t so hard since we had just begun. Everything was going right in my life.

GM:And then came the turning point? What was your first notice that things had changed for you?

SN: I’d say the first indication was when my parents called to say that they were going to report to ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) in the morning, just as they did every month, except that day, they didn’t call me to tell me how it went.

GM:Is that the infamous ICE office on Stemmons Freeway?

SN: Yes it’s the one on Stemmons.

GM:How were you notified that this visit to ICE had turned out so differently?

SN: Honestly I wasn’t aware of the implications of the situation until my father was detained, and he was detained before the date that ICE allowed him on his papers. I was honestly caught up in loads of school work.

“Well, let’s face it,” says John McWhorter of the Manhattan Institute speaking Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union with Candy Crowley, “when people say that they are supposed to be in a national conversation on race, they do not mean an exchange of the kind that we are having right now. What they mean is a conversion.

Nobody puts it in so many words,” says McWhorter, “but the way that conversation is supposed to go is that white America is supposed to realize that the civil rights revolution wasn’t enough, that structural racism, et cetera, still remains prevalent, and that there is still more admitting that needs to be done and probably some sort of second civil rights revolution.

“That is the basis for what the supposed national conversation about race would be,” says McWhorter. “And I don’t think that white people are interested anymore. I don’t think that most black people are interested anymore. And I don’t think it corresponds to modern reality.”

In its inception the Tea Party was a movement by “water carrying” mortgage holders against their own “loser neighbors” who were nothing but “water drinkers.” There was a slippery slope from the philosophy of mortgage relief and public health assistance straight down into the universal poverty of Castro’s Communist Cuba. Don’t forget that Obama had already been in office for several weeks.

Now what provoked so much fear from Chicago in the midst of a historic financial crash, as Washington and Wall Street hinted that they might have to appease the mortgage crisis? And how does our understanding of this fear relate to that thing we call the real world? The fear that ignited the Tea Party was founded upon a perception that with the Obama years we were about to experience a national lack of discipline.

From the floor of the CBT, their neighbors’ lack of mortgage discipline was intuitively extended across the crashed economy as its primary cause. Finally, the force opposed to this looming lack of discipline was named “capitalism” which was melded at gut level into the sovereign meaning of the Fourth of July. In capitalism there would be national discipline. Public options on the other hand would only bring ruin.

Soon enough the Tea Party Express was traveling across the country denouncing the kind of laxity that accompanies people who are sick, poor, and barely making rent. And where was the discipline to be found? In “free market capitalism”, of course, to which all contributors to CNBC are apparently obliged to swear loyalty oaths on videos that are played nightly on the Kudlow report.

So it’s capitalism, is it? Let’s see. What does Black history have to say about the discipline of capitalism’s free market? What would a former slave have to say to Your Tea Party on any given Fourth of July? To make the claim that Fourth of July Capitalism is tantamount to moral discipline is already to expose a mind frame that is willfully negligent of Black history.

What about the moral discipline that faced down capitalism’s addiction to slave labor? The moral discipline that faced down the business district of Birmingham, Alabama? The moral discipline that organized poor farmers, white and black, so that they could learn how to keep themselves from getting plowed under by capitalism’s advance over land? The moral discipline of farm aid, food aid, rent control, Medicare, Medicaid, public schools, state universities, land grant colleges, head start programs, legal aid services.

What about the moral discipline with which A. Philip Randolph organized Black railroad attendants so that decent wages would be paid? What about the moral discipline with which James Farmer, Jr. desegregated private transportation systems? And what about the moral discipline of today’s hotel and motel workers who are standing up for livable wages as they are asked to take responsibility for all that wonderful service that capitalist and administration elites expect to receive?

Now the point I want to make after all this recollection is actually not to be confused with anti-capitalism, because after thinking about the question for twenty years I’m not sure what the essence of capitalism comes down to. But what I do want to say is that when a movement picks up the term capitalism as the full meaning of moral discipline, then what they are calling “capitalist” I am definitely against.

What Shirley Sherrod witnessed in the relationship between a poor, white farmer and a semi-wealthy white lawyer is what more people who work at the CBT need to get out and see first hand. Because if the Tea Party had been built upon experience like that, then there would be much less to worry about in terms of complicity with structural racism in the real world.

I suppose that anybody who swears by “free market capitalism” and who knows history intends to signify something in the term “capitalism” that is different from anything we have quite yet seen. They are appealing to an ideal of discipline and fairness that a “free market” would make manifest if it were allowed to exist in pure form.

But the problem with “pro-capitalist” movements is that they practically—which is to say structurally—support the existing corruptions of capitalist institutions which have nothing to do with discipline or fairness. Ask any business student what they imagine they would do if some small risk of cheating had some larger likelihood of reward. In capitalism as a lived experience, there is an expectation that because others are out to cheat you, you may hold your own buyers accountable if they do not beware.

If pro-capitalist movements practically and structurally empower further expectations of unfair actualities such as predatory mortgage lending, and if they willfully talk about history as if the unfairness of capitalism means nothing so long as we’re thinking about the mere case of Black History, then we have in a Tea Party movement what many white folks recognize intuitively as a mob to keep your distance from.

McWhorter may be correct to divide the Black community between those who are interested in the conversion of structural racism and those who are not. But he is wrong to ignore the divisions in the white community that continue to mark the Tea Party as a splinter movement from which progressive whites tend to keep their distance. The latest poll shows Harry Reid’s appeal is rising, which in Nevada means that the Tea Party Express is not a train most white folks want to ride.

In the televised hugs between Sherrod and the white farmer she saved, we see what a real Tea Party movement would look like. It would be a movement where the unfairness of capitalism is recognized across the racial divides and where struggles of moral discipline remain in tearful embrace. It is not altogether an anti-capitalist movement unless you first allow the term capitalism to be defined by the Tea Party in their supremacist way. A pure anti-capitalist movement would never attempt to save the farm for the farmer. In the hug between Sherrod and her beloved white farmer, at last, the theories of Thomas Jefferson outlive his practice.

Look again at the Global Dow. On April 15, 2010 the Tea Party movement had a hundred pro-capitalist rallies announcing to the world what would be their effective definition of capitalism here on out. Investors, who are only human after all, have been taking their money out of that capitalist system ever since.

Do we need a conversion? If you accept a deeper moral realism along the lines professed by Martin Luther King, Jr., then we know that the contradictions of class and race domination shall never have the strength to live on their own. They are contradictory to the plain meaning of what a “free market” means to a liberated mind. Therefore, if there is a Tea Party that is not playing games with minstrelized concepts, or that does not put profound conclusions in the take-out bin, and who is therefore truly interested in discipline and fairness for all, then yes, of course, a conversion is still needed.

The plain history of our July 4 system is a story of moral discipline breathing new life into the Constitution generation after generation. Any movement that claims—as did the Tea Party movement of 2009—that the economic survivors of that year were the only ones who actually deserved to survive have revealed only their supremacist foundations. Their conversion is therefore necessary, morally and historically. Nor will there be any national progress unless those conversions are evangelized, over and over again.

McWhorter was careful not to include all Black people in his review of those who are no longer interested in a national conversion. If structural racism does not correspond to modern reality, what is McWhorter’s account for why CNN needs him on camera this week? Or why Latino activists are stretched between Phoenix and Washington this week trying to push back an anti-civil rights stampede?

This month’s national conversation—not conversion—has to do with two swift responses to NAACP President Ben Jealous, who raised the question: is Tea Party racism structural or accidental? In reply, the National Tea Party Federation “flatly rejected” the charges made by Jealous, inferring that he was the one guilty of racism. Then two prominent Tea Party activists retaliated against the NAACP.

In the first case of retaliation, a prominent Tea Party organizer put out a minstrel-style parody of Jealous. In the second case, a prominent Tea Party propagandist found video from an obscure NAACP address in Georgia, sliced the message up, and provoked reflexive national denunciations of a Black woman who had actually said something quite profound. Meanwhile, the National Tea Party Federation, three days after flatly rejecting any knowledge of racism in its ranks whatsoever, announced that it had just expelled the cross-country Tea Party Express for refusing in turn to expel a minstrel wannabe.

What the Tea Party has proven in this July heat wave is that its members share an impulse to fight back against the NAACP through mockery, deceit, and denial. To put the case more plainly, the Tea Party movement has amply answered the question that Ben Jealous posed. Its racism cannot pass for accidental.

According to McWhorter, however, white people should never have been expected to take interest in manifesting their anti-racist conversion because the structure of racism is no longer a significant part of modern reality. And so we wonder, does McWhorter’s reading of modern reality include this kind of white intransigence.

Notice the way that McWhorter uses the term “white people” in the development of an analysis that purports to deny structural racism. If “white people” and “most black people” have joined together to disavow the need for conversations that would lead to structural conversion, how is this alliance of interest to be understood? Is it structural?

In his CNN appearance, McWhorter conceptualized racism as “skin color animus” or what used to be called prejudice. Of course, prejudice would seem to have very little explanatory power in describing the way Shirley Sherrod was treated by the Obama administration or by Jealous when she was denounced and forced into retirement on the basis of a three-minute video clip.

This leaves us to ask whether the actions of the Tea Party, the Obama administration, and the NAACP leadership could be coherently illuminated by some recognition that racism in the real world is structural.

Sherrod herself was caught in the act of trying to accentuate the reality of economic class conflict. She tried to explain to her NAACP audience how the salience of economic class came to play a more effective role in her understanding of the real world. Yet she insisted at the same time that her understanding of economic class inequality did not overturn or negate her appreciation of racism in that same real world.

Even many people who recognize the structural racism of the Tea Party movement want to sympathize with its apparent defense of common folk against the elite powers of Wall Street and Washington. But historians of the movement may not want to forget how the Tea Party movement was sparked into visibility by a ruckus that was televised from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade (CBT).

“Are you listening, Mr. Obama?” shouted the eminently charismatic Rick Santelli over the groans of CBT floor traders in Feb. 2009, as the daytime audience of the Capitalism Knows Best Channel (CNBC) was galvanized into a pro-capitalist protest against “public options” for housing and health care.

At the level of pure concept there is no reason why the contemporary crisis of labor paralysis cannot be directly addressed at the speed of light by bit torrents of micro investments lightning-flashed to entrepreneurs looking for a little startup help organized around heartland exchanges in places like Omaha. And there are probably a few folks in Omaha who could rack a server for this kind of thing by Labor Day.

The problem with the capitalists who are on strike now is that they are living under an antiquated paradigm of exotic genius, channelled communication, and crony networks. Their secret hero is John Galt of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” who privately invented the secret to prosperity but refused to share it with the workers who would be needed to make it so.

The appropriate answer to this calculating heart of striking capitalists is to say, but John Galt you are not. Just because you own the vaults where you have stashed the fruits of labor past does not mean you own the future. As San Francisco economist, Henry George, argued, capital does not pay wages. Wages are produced by labor.

I’m no economist, but anyone can see that it is a bad deal for any community when the needs of the community are no longer being produced by the community itself. A capital strike is a way of saying that a part of the community has the power to shut down the wherewithal of the whole. A capital strike withholds the tools to make value with, leaving labor out to rot.

Nor am I a labor historian, but usually when workers go on strike you can find some leadership who represents workers’ demands. In a capital strike on the other hand, as Ayn Rand instructed us, the workers can spend the rest of their puny little lives asking questions like, “who is John Galt?” or “where did he hide his demands?”

If there is a capital strike afoot as internet chatter suggests, then there ought to be a way of publicly discovering the strikers’ motives and forcing the issues into arbitration. Profits, like any other form of private property, are distributed by legal conventions that ultimately rest upon the consent of the governed. Profits are handed over to capitalists because there is an implied social contract that expects the profits to be converted into new tools of value creation. If capitalists are going to break the cycle deliberately, and withhold next year’s tools, then it is time for some kind of renegotiation.

I think that the value of negative social mood might lie in the way it determines us to revisit all the things we used to trust. Either employers are going to come out and level with the workers they are striking against, or the struck workers are going to have to find new ways of creating employers they can trust.

The dot com boom brought us not only the tools to more rapidly reconfigure our networks. It also generated a cooperative model of open source productivity energized by genuine engagement from folks who have organized themselves to build value. The open source consortium is neither anti-corporate nor pro-corporate. It is a way of organizing community needs while parsing consensual divisions of labor between use value and exchange value.

In the emerging Facebook world order, where all ideas can be YouTubed and PayPalled, there is no reason for all us little tugboats in the harbor to waste our engines pushing against the hull of some delusional USS Ahab. It ain’t hardly American to wait for anybody’s high up permission to get along as best we can. The Constitution is ours only if we keep it. It will sink with Ahab only if we let it go.

“Labor coop seeks entrepreneurs and engineers,” says a notice that is not yet found via Google search. “Meet us down at the national bank.”

Naturally the racist framing of the past month was drawn and squared by Rush Limbaugh who charged that the President had only his race to offer as the reason for his political success. Limbaugh forgets how much the Obama factor was empowered by a widespread social yearning to get out of the frame that Limbaugh, Fox News, and Bush had locked us into. Perhaps Obama’s Black heritage lent some credibility to the hope that he could lead us out of that cave instead of right back into its depths.

Limbaugh’s ability to profit commercially from racism as “entertainment value” probably had some mentoring influence upon Mark Williams. When NAACP President, Benjamin Jealous, dared the Tea Party to repudiate its racism, Williams decided to try a little minstrel style mockery which, come to think of it, pretty much connects Williams to the commercial history of American radio as well. The main mistake Williams made according to the culture code of contemporary social reality is that he forgot to go into show biz before he acted out.

Williams is guilty of what up North people call “stupid” racism, because right up until he put on his blackface the Tea Party had been playing its racism “smart”. Of course, nobody should be taken in by the Tea Party’s rehab. Their economic model is practically racist as was the Reaganomics upon which it is built.

Now is the time for the NAACP to step into the opportunity that it created and offer some workable disaster relief plan that even the President can’t evade. It’s been at least a decade since we’ve seen any real vision with half a chance of winning anything but a ballot count on election day. And, of course, odds could be better this time around.

Progressives have pretty much stranded themselves in the shallow waters of the Democratic Party, exactly where the ballast of the NAACP is lodged. Just as we can’t afford to be fooled by the Tea Party’s vapid denials of racism, neither can we afford to believe that the NAACP has this week made a significant dent in the racist structure of the economic crisis or the racist paralysis that prevents all progressive advance.

Whether, or how much, progressives can afford to waste on another round of Congressional balloteering is a dandy question. But it would be too cynical to bet the movement on the iron weight of the system’s internal contradictions crashing. Yes, that crash is upon us. And as it continues to thunder down, the NAACP could stake ground for that other tent city, the one where those of us who have never trusted the Tea Party can gather for some badly needed refreshment.

I just want to say that based upon my observation of a few dozen glowing faces this past weekend at the convention of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) many of whom qualify as name droppable because you have heard of them and from them during this despicable first decade of the 21st Century — I just want to report that resistance is the health of the people.

Resistance is something altogether different from snitching. Snitching only makes you old and cranky. It troubles your sleep. You know it’s wrong. That’s why people do it on the sly, undercover, anonymously, no return address requested. The fascists of Utah even snitched on children. They went that far. No doubt the noses of all those snitches will grow narrower and crookeder the better to enable them to sniff around corners without showing their faces.

Resistance, on the other hand, is something you organize to get done in the street while the sun is up. It gives you a feeling of satisfactory tired, keeps your skin flushed with good chemistry, helps you know you done good even if nothing ever comes of it. Yes, even if you want to put it down, resistance, you can walk away unashamed. You make friends you’ll never stop loving.

All I want to report to you about the IVAW convention 2010 is all I paid attention to — the glow of time going backward, getting younger again, people with real sparkles in their eyes and purpose in their faces. Handshakes of verve and gusto. Energy that will outlast any empire, believe it.

Snitches, on the other hand, you forget them as soon as you can. Every fascist state needs them. Informants. Provocateurs. Troublemakers. The living eyes, ears, and hands of an unseeing, unhearing, unfeeling state service. It will be interesting to see where the Tea Party types come down on the matter of the Utah roundup list. As if Paul Revere snuck around in disguise so that he could send secret messages to the King. As if Paul Revere would ask to live in a country where you needed papers!

Look, it’s no use explaining. Either you’re with the snitches or you’re with the resistance. Either you’re a paper-carrying empire-building wannabe, or you’re working with free people on the problem of freedom in this life, because as in the case of the IVAW you’ve seen enough of what empire comes to when it starts to stirring the people’s pot.

Randolph Bourne said during the early 20th Century that war is the health of the state. Now in the early 21st Century we say resistance is the health of the people. Health of the state or health of the people? For the love of Mary you don’t want to get your soul caught on the slide with the snitches!

As a Neo-Pythagorean of the Prechterite variety, I also like to think about why depressions are absolutely structured into the iron laws of history. And increasingly the answer comes out for me in a form that is American Transcendentalist, or American Hindoo if you will. Great destructions are necessary because we puffed things up that have no business being jumbo sized.

Meanwhile, little bitty precious things we have left in the sun to dry out, yes like raisins. And so we make it necessary to line up against each other and take the whole system down. Try not to forget this, Arjuna: reality cannot suffer. Your true self shall never change.

Here’s the methodology that I’m rehearsing for the descent. It’s called the quadruple negation. Along one of its diagonal cuts it sounds like this: neither anti-communist nor anti-capitalist. Neither anti-Keynesian nor anti-Friedmanite. And where I think this leaves me is with third-eye thinkers like Henry George or G.K. Chesterton who held out for concepts of economic justice connected to the ambiguities of common experience.

I can’t be anti-Marxist, because everywhere the dialectic of alienation grows new teeth. But neither can I be anti-Capitalist because so many worthy dreams take the shape of profits well-earned and unobstructed. Emerson’s royalties, for example, or his lecture fees.

Along another diagonal cut, I’m pretty sure I can’t be anti-gigantistic, because without the giants we make ourselves into there is something sublime that would go missing. Call it Cameronism if you will, with its blockbusters, superstars, and hedge fund financiers. Neither anti-big nor anti-small.

But comes a time as Thoreau sez when the friction invents the machine and what you smell is value turned wrong side out, like when the Gulf of Mexico gets monstrously transmogrified into the Gulf of Oil. Or when the machineries of state get so busy with foreign wars that the Commander in Chief is advised that the Department of Defense cannot lead a defense against an all-out assault upon our shores.

Anyway, here it comes. A period is upon us plainly announced in terms that Egyptologists call intermediate, when Parish Presidents and County Judges shall rise in unison to grip the handles of things not done on the ground for the people on the land.

Neither anti-federalist nor anti-state, neither anti-tax nor anti-profit. America as she stands is definitely not anti-war. What will she have to go through before she also decides not to be anti-peace? Still yourself, Arjuna, before the true fight.

The terms of battle are simple. We need to plug the hole, contain the oil, extract the oil from the water, and swiftly remove the oil that makes it onto beaches and wetlands. Count ‘em. Four things.

As far as plugging the hole goes, there was no news from the President’s lips. He avoided using the word August.

For containment and removal, the President directed our attention to future oil. He said we could soon expect to see 90 percent of the future oil captured at the point of the gusher. He didn’t say 90 percent of what.

In terms of the oil that’s already out there, the President illuminated nothing. He didn’t say how much he thought there was or how much capacity we have to extract it. He repeated what we already know: millions of gallons of oily water have been extracted from the Gulf, millions of boom-feet have been deployed. He said nothing to convince us that the effort even halfway matches up to the challenge. He didn’t show any maps or aerial photos.

Either the President does not understand the urgency of the battle against the oil at sea or he thinks that we won’t notice how he left that part ill defined. But we’ve had eight weeks to notice. The single most important difference that the President can make is the difference in the battle against the oil at sea. Yet this is what he does not clarify, not even speaking prime time from the Oval Office.

As for removal and cleanup of oil at shore, this has been the President’s favorite issue all along, like when he called the cameras closer to him at Grand Isle while he picked up a tiny little tar ball from the beach.

“And sadly,” said the President, “no matter how effective our response is, there will be more oil and more damage before this siege is done.” Therefore, he has meetings scheduled, commissions appointed, and make no mistake about it, he – the President of the United States – has ordered plans to be drawn up!

All by himself and speaking from behind the most powerful desk in the world on Tuesday night, the President of the United States imploded his Presidency. Finally, the only people who make any sense any more are those who said from the very beginning that this man would not stand and deliver.

CNN could have nailed the coverage. They had all the necessary assets in place, including the Carvilles, David Gergen, Anderson Cooper, Billy Nungesser, and a room full of “real people.” But everything was underplayed, chiefly because the people who are most likely to feel the truth are also the people most in need of whatever the President still has to offer.

Nungesser and the Carvilles restrained themselves. The “real people” were given only about a minute to convey their shrewd grasp of the hopelessness they were left in. Nothing will ever be the same again. Didn’t the President confirm that? Quick as they appeared from the Gulf the “real people” were gone. As a sheen of timidity darkened the production values at CNN, you could find yourself clicking to the Palin-O’Reilly channel for a timidity-free zone.

Twenty minutes before the President’s address I got an email from the Plaquemines Parish news service about the latest effects of the BP-led assault on the Gulf Coast.

“As you can see in the pictures,” said the text of the email, “plastic bags containing snare boom were recklessly placed without consideration for the natural wildlife” on Queen Bess Island where the Plaquemines Parish Inland Waterways Strike Force recently discovered broken eggs and crushed chicks of the precious Brown Pelicans.

“They (the Brown Pelicans) already have the oil affecting their population during their reproduction time. Now we have the so-called clean-up crews stomping eggs,” said Nungesser. “The lack of urgency and general disregard for Louisiana’s wetlands and wildlife is enough to make you sick.”

We should not be timid about it. We should visualize a series of booms in concentric rings that contain the spill, with skimmers at work within each ring, sucking up the oil. Industry websites claim that extracted oil can then be mixed with chemicals and reused for fuel.

The effort might also be helped by supertankers “that come in empty, with the huge valves and huge pumps that they have to suck the oil off the surface of the sea so it stops drifting into the wetlands”, says former president of Shell Oil John Hofmeister in a recent interview with the BBC.

As part of this winnable war, dispersants must be stopped.

Our winning hope for this war is nicely exemplified by the Coast Guard Cutter Walnut, which just left Hawaii for her 6,000-mile journey to the Gulf.

“The Walnut is 225-feet long, has a crew of about 50 people, and boasts state-of-the-art communications equipment and oil skimming capabilities,” reports Minna Sugimoto for Hawaii News Now. “Designed after the Exxon Valdez disaster in 1989, the Walnut comes equipped with a boom and pump oil collection system.”

“The skimmer sucks the oil in and pumps it into a bladder,” says Jeffrey Randall, U.S. Coast Guard commanding officer. “That bladder is then filled up, transferred to another vessel that takes it away.”

“Coast Guard officials say the crew goes through annual spill response training, but this will be the first time it’ll actually put oil in the equipment,” Sugimoto reports.

As early as April 29, the Los Angeles Times was reporting the Navy’s mobilization of booms and skimmers and the “opening (of) two of its bases in Mississippi and Florida as staging areas.” WLOX- Biloxi reporter Steve Phillips filed an eyewitness account of the activity from the Gulfport Seabee base.

Vice Adm. Kevin McCoy is commander of the US Navy’s Naval Sea Systems Command’s (NAVSEA) which includes the Supervisor of Salvage and Diving (SUPSALV). Within these commands we find initial offerings of equipment, expertise, and training that will be required to defend the Gulf of Mexico against the oil spill invasion.

“A team of NAVSEA professionals are working around the clock to protect the sensitive coast lined with oil booms and perform open-ocean skimming at the source,” says Vice Adm. McCoy at a web page posted by the Naval News Service (NNS).

“NAVSEA’s Chief Engineer for Underwater Salvage (Capt. Patrick Keenan) has been an integral member of BP’s Engineering Command Cell that has assembled the best and brightest minds from around the world to try to stop the leak,” said Vice Adm. McCoy.

“With a single phone call from the U.S. Coast Guard, 66,000 feet of open ocean boom and nine self-contained skimming systems, and the professionals to install and operate them, were dispatched (representing the initial shipment). That’s your Navy — a 24-hour Navy, incredibly ready and trained to respond to a wide variety of national taskings,” boasts Vice Adm. McCoy.

While the Coast Guard and Navy probably do not have enough booms and skimmers on hand to supply the war for the salvation of the Gulf Coast, they do appear to have sufficient knowledge to gather and organize the inventories and people needed. Surely there are enough booms and skimmers in the world that can be air-transported quickly and organized effectively.

Meanwhile, activists and biologists are converging on a consensus that toxic dispersants must be stopped.

“The use of dispersants is a crime on top of a crime, sanctioned by a federal agency, Lisa Jackson, and the EPA,” writes Elizabeth Cook at New Orleans IndyMedia. “It is the rape of the Gulf of Mexico, its sea creatures, and the people who depend on this ecosystem for a living.“

“Diluting the evidence, this (dispersant) solution was designed only for public relations, even as it made the situation much worse,” argues Linh Dinh at Dissident Voice. “Imagine Agent Orange in the water. Thousands of people are already sick, with millions more to come.”

With enough booms to contain the spill, and enough skimmers to extract the oil from the water, there would appear to be no need to add the risk of toxic dispersants to the already toxic spill.

When on Sunday’s “State of the Nation” program, CNN’s Candy Crowley asked Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen to describe the military response to the Gulf oil spill, the answer she got was a textbook case of incoherence.

Within the space of 141 words the Chair of the Joint Chiefs zig-zagged between “a support role” that simply responded to BP requests on the one hand to “doing everything we can … with every capability that we have” on the other. His confusing ambivalence was perhaps best expressed in the sentence: “And as best I’ve been able to understand, the technical lead for this in our country really is the industry.”

While it may be true that the deep-water attempt to stop the oil spill belongs primarily to industry engineers (although, along with Dr. John, we may protest why this has to be the case) there is ample evidence that the military is perfectly qualified to take command of pollution control.

Remember Dunkirk or the Berlin Airlift? There are times in military history when impossible missions have been accomplished through mobilized determination. We should not give up hope that the war to the save the Gulf of Mexico can go down in history as one of those remarkable efforts.

Kirk James Murphy, MD, argues in the firedoglake blog that the sand-barrier plan to block the oil slick on the Louisiana coast is being pushed to completion by interests who would rather be rid of the marshlands than save them.

Is our grief over the deathwatch at the Gulf Coast being crassly manipulated for the purposes of real estate development? Dr. Murphy’s blog-post quotes at length a May 8 report by Josh Wingrove of the News and Mail, pointing out that the barrier-island plan has been three years in the making.

What wrenched our hearts out this week was the CNN presentation of Anderson Cooper’s visit to a dead marshland, recently killed off by a gooey assault of crude oil. Not even the bugs had survived, we were shown. Nungesser pleaded for immediate action. James Carville bore witness to the fact that nothing was being done anywhere in sight.

Jindal and Nungesser have been arguing that barrier berms would stop oil from reaching more marshland. And their arguments make obvious sense under the circumstances.

The danger in the dredging plan, argues Dr. Murphy, is that the dredged material would be drawn from polluted shipping channels and washed ashore during the volatile hurricane season coming soon. The oil will not be stopped, yet the toxic damage will be multiplied.

There is money involved, of course. And already by Thursday evening Nungesser was on CNN demanding more.

The CNN media campaign this week has the shocking effects that we remember from oil wars past. And the effects are especially felt among those of us who, like Louisiana Congressman, Charlie Melancon, find it difficult not to cry at the sight of our dying Gulf. And there is no doubt that our shock is being played like a football on its way to one goal line or the other.

But why does Dr. Murphy opine that the berms probably won’t survive the hurricane season, while he argues that they would dry out the marshes? And what good are wetlands anyway once they have been covered by bubbling crude?

Dr. Murphy’s argument would place our shocked grief in alliance with the Corps of Engineers, who apparently resisted the berm idea until CNN tossed Nungesser a lateral pass this week. Given the velocities of these shock tactics, there is never very much time to decide things. And maybe the velocity alone is enough to raise suspicion. Except…

Except in this case there actually is an enemy attacking the marshlands, and Nungesser appeared to be making his arguments in the company of lots of people. The image of Nungesser in a crowded room makes it more difficult to believe that his plan runs counter to the interests of people who live along the marshlands and who are working up a campaign of self-defense. But this is the way shock psychology would work with the power of images.

It’s also curious that the Corps of Engineers is not more forthcoming for the cameras. Nungesser does make a point when he asks: where’s the plan? And compared with the images of oily death in the marshes, it would seem that the risk of drying wetlands is less inhumane to the doomed creatures of the Gulf. Once upon a time I walked to work through those coastal marshlands on my way to an offshore drilling job. On the Gulf Coast, from Corpus Christi to New Orleans, there is no such thing as a non-toxic option.

Marshland protection is one of at least three scientific issues that are being fought on the fly during this oil spill. Thursday evening brings news of an “oil plume” that is about 1,000 yards deep and six miles wide drifting in the direction of Mobile Bay, Alabama. Reports say the plume is a toxic cocktail of dispersants and oil. Is it better or worse than an oil slick? Oil slicks either repel life or kill it. Plumes, apparently, allow life but at the cost of a living toxicity that will work its way up the food chain. Cancer clinics for everyone.

When CNN flashes pictures of the oil operation, there is a ship spraying cascades of fluids onto the water. Is this the dispersant? Here and there we see comments from scientists saying that nobody knows if the dispersant is such a good idea. Is it better or worse than a slick of thick crude? LIke Nungesser’s berms, dispersants also raise questions of money trails.

The third scientific issue, of course, is how to plug the hole. Speaking on Larry King Live, the legendary oilman, T. Boone Pickens, says either you get lucky or you drill a relief well. August is the frequently cited expectation for when the relief well will be completed.

“We’ve been here 38 days,” said Pickens, “and we’ll probably be here 38 days more.” If Pickens is right, will it be possible to stop the oil from washing ashore?

They say the first stage of grief is denial, and I don’t want to believe that any of this is happening. What Congressman Melancon did in public yesterday, we have been doing in our homes this week all along the Gulf Coast. You cannot love the Gulf Coast, witness this shocking trauma, and control your tears at the same time.

But now on top of it all we have to watch out for the ways that our tears are being maneuvered into contracting strategies that may have no other uses beyond profiteering. I’m not convinced that there are worse things than a raw oil slick, not even if they are barrier berms or 6-mile plumes of noxious crap. But if it is the best thing for all God’s creatures on the Gulf Coast to just stand aside and accept the sacrifice that oil slicks bring once they are imminent, then it’s time we started moving from Denial to Acceptance at some improbable speed.

AP says 333 birds have been found dead along the Gulf Coast with no oil on them. Well, the birds I know are telling me what their fellows died from. The lead weight of grief. As if the oil companies hadn’t wrecked every other week this century. As if this must be nothing but the century of dirty oil. Suddenly the oil wars have come home to roost and there is nothing to do about it except what everybody else has done who gets smacked by this dark force of history. You just stand there and cry.

It’s like shock and awe bounced back off the dark side of the moon. All the wealth and brains and power of the mighty American empire sucked into a vacuum of arrogant corruption and relayed back to earth in the form of a blob that will not be stopped until the death of it all finally sinks in. You call this stinking mess democracy?

“I would be betting the plan is to let us die,” says St. Bernard Parish President Craig Taffaro. And Plaquemine Parish President Billy Nungesser tells a wicked little story about what happens when your messenger comes back from the Washington, D.C. headquarters of the US Army Corps of Engineers. The grassroots people were ready to defend their shores, Nungesser says to CNN’s Campbell Brown, but the Corps of Engineers was not. The American people expected to see ships and uniforms lining the shores with resources and action, but the Coast Guard did not. Everyone who loves the waters and sands and skies and breezes of the Gulf of Mexico expected a moral equivalent of war to be mobilized by the White House, but the President of the United States did not.

A boot heel on the neck of BP? Is this how Democrats have come to brag about what real power feels like? The US Navy has a fleet of nuclear submarines that can erase all human life from the planet in 90 seconds or less but only BP can be trusted to lead the world when the water gets that deep? And even in this emergency the only thing that Constitutional authorities know how to do is look for some neck to stand on? No wonder even the birds have had enough of this nonsense. If it’s necks that count for power these days, I can tell you, even the birds are ready to go.

No doubt a lot of good folks feel they have to behave properly in front of the television cameras, but thank god for Billy Nungesser cussing right in the Governor’s face. I know he spoke for me. Even the vaunted James Carville is stupefied at the obscenities of neglect that are killing our dearly beloved Gulf of Mexico. If the plan is not to kill the Gulf, why did the President spend the weekend at West Point– ideological home base of The Corps? If the plan is not to let it die, why wasn’t West Point spending the weekend with Nungesser and Taffaro? I paid my taxes so that West Point could keep its frigging graduation schedule? Somebody ought to go up there to Newburgh, New York and take pictures of all the new cars on the West Point campus this week.

If Plaquemine and St. Bernard Parishes secede from the union this week, you can count me in. The world is badly in need of a moral equivalent of a President. And today, the Parish Presidents of the Gulf Coast are working for me.

Thursday night on the Capitalism Knows Best Channel (CNBC) Larry Kudlow said one thing that made sense. What if we stop wasting time on the blame game and start getting busy with solutions. Not that I’m taking my bets off the short table, mind you, but I’d feel a whole lot less hysterical these days if I thought someone actually knew how to get “the system” to create more jobs than it destroys.

The catastrophe of our economic atrophy since the market top of 2007 was too easily sketched in Thursday’s New York Times by a life-long worker whose skills had finally been displaced by the revolution in desktop computing.

Today’s economy, said the worker, only favors special-needs groups like minorities and veterans and the disabled. I don’t think the worker said a thing about how capitalism really works, except that someone had sold her some worthless training recently, along with one more goddam loan that she can’t pay back.

So where do jobs really come from and where should we really be looking — if not at minorities, veterans, and the disabled?

The worser the world gets the fewer words will be acceptable to boil down the process of job creation, and the less time we’ll have to block the hip shots aimed toward the usual suspects that fascism loves to detain. Imagine blaming the hardest working immigrants on the planet earth for the fact that we have no jobs! Yet look who the police are coming for in Arizona. I guess if you’re caught standing at the curb looking for a job, it must be your fault you didn’t find one quicker.

“Too complicated for television” is what my news director used to tell me when I’d turn in a tape that played for three minutes and fifty-four seconds. If we don’t get the real jobs story down to fifteen seconds or less, a lot of innocent people are going to tear each other apart.

Under these emergency circumstances we have two quick choices. There is supply and demand. Or there is labor and need. These are not the same things by a long shot.

The longer that “free market capitalism” — recently valued at $49 trillion dollars globally by the World Federation of Exchanges — fails to solve the problem of supply and demand the sooner we’re going to have to get serious about a public option where labor meets needs.

In either case it’s a national disaster to have one million people willing to work while the private and public sectors are both paralyzed before them. The wise labor economist, Ray Marshall, said somewhere recently that a day of unspent labor is a day you never get back. And if you are working all day only looking for work, soon enough you are scarred for life.

An economy of needs can be organized if unmet needs are matched with unused labor. There may be no profit in the deal –no supply or demand — but useless lives can be made useful and the swift transformation can get us all focused on solving some real problems rather than playing blame.

Now here’s what can be done. The world’s most wealthy holders of sovereign debt (yes, the White House knows who they are) can accept a restructured payment plan. The present-day savings of the sovereign debt service can be funneled into emergency public service programs. Did you know there are children on the playgrounds of public schools who have no one to watch them? Out of a million unemployed people, how many could be quickly certified for that?

What? Are there not a million playgrounds? What? Are some workers not suitable for children? How about reshelving books at the city library? How about scooping buckets of oil from the Gulf of Mexico? One million workers paid $30,000 per year each would cost $30 billion, a fraction of the financial bailout called TARP.

Now I want you to stop me when you see “free-market capitalism” hiring away these “public option” workers onto paths of so-called prosperity, but until then, as I say, there is so little time. Soon enough the fascists will be cramming new detention centers full of immigrants and calling it sovereignty or some such nonsense as that.

Instead of passively undergoing creative destruction we can demand creative engagement, and we can demand it quickly from the people who have the power to deliver it. Meanwhile, decency demands that we stop the nonsense of blaming minorities, veterans, and disabled people for suddenly becoming folks the rest of us have the time to think about, again.