Mickey Z
Cool Observer
Sunday, December 26, 2004
DC Activist on the Ledge for Homeless
The following Washington Post article was sent to me by Tom Wheeler, editor of Alternative Press Review (http://www.altpr.org)
I met Jamie Loughner, the subject of the article, at the Arlington event on Oct. 16...and I post this in solidarity with her passion and dedication:
A Protester’s Precarious But Firm Stand
Activist Goes Out on a Ledge For New Homeless Shelter
By David Montgomery
Friday, December 24, 2004
She lies curled up, fetal, vulnerable: like a homeless person hugging the marble of a grand doorway on Pennsylvania Avenue NW. Except her doorway is a ledge 50 feet in the air.
The ledge, three or four feet wide, is part of the old Beaux-Arts facade at the rear of the Wilson Building, the District’s city hall. That this facade is now enclosed in a modern, soaring atrium after a recent renovation only makes this week’s unfolding spectacle that much more strange. Context has been wrenched. Outside is inside, powerlessness seizes power.
This is Jamie, hospitalized after a 2001 hunger strike.
To read the the complete article, please click on “more” below.
You take the elevator to the fourth floor (the police have unplugged the button to the fifth floor during this siege), climb the stairs another flight, and there she is, as high as a pigeon. To one side of her perch is the mayor’s office, to the other are the D.C. Council’s digs.
She is Jamie Loughner, 40, an activist for the homeless who was once homeless herself. She won’t come down. She won’t eat, either. She has taken the traditions of the hunger striker, the flagpole sitter and the tree sitter and blended them into a new form of protest that has the authorities baffled and fuming.
They, in turn, have upped the ante: They are refusing her requests for water.
The Wilson Building is almost deserted for Christmas, the season of no-room-at-the-inn and turkey dinners in soup kitchens. The atrium resounds with the wheezing sound of air pumps filling the giant moon-bounce-like pillow on the ground floor, in case Loughner falls or jumps.
The few remaining office workers peek periodically at the exotic creature roosting without permission. She has urinated and defecated on the ledge “no less than two times,” says Gerald M. Wilson, chief of the D.C. Protective Services police, who doesn’t sound happy about it. He says his officers are afraid to just grab her because if she recoils, she could fall.
For now, the grim figure on the ledge has Wilson’s officers—plus Metropolitan Police officers and city firefighters—at bay. They are digging in to spend Christmas Eve keeping vigil on Loughner. And she plans to be on duty for the holidays and beyond.
This all began Tuesday morning around 10. Two of Loughner’s accomplices in a group called Mayday DC hoisted her onto the ledge. The accomplices were promptly arrested. Loughner had with her a Pepsi and a cell phone with a dying battery. She guzzled the Pepsi and took calls from reporters.
“I’m here to stay until they get shelter in Southwest” Washington, she said in a brief interview that morning, before her cell phone died. She noted that she had once fasted for 30 days to save D.C. General Hospital.
So that’s what this is about: the Randall School homeless shelter at I and Half streets SW that the D.C. Council voted this week to sell to the Corcoran Museum for $6.2 million. Mayday DC, which considers housing a human right, has about 10 active members. Several have been arrested in recent weeks during protests at the shuttered shelter and the Wilson Building. Loughner vowed to fast on the ledge until a new shelter is established in the same neighborhood.
Spokeswomen for the mayor and the Department of Human Services yesterday repeated the city’s stance that a new and better 150-bed shelter was just opened on the campus of St. Elizabeths Hospital in Southeast Washington, nearly three miles away, and that the vast majority of the 170 men at the Southwest shelter had relocated there. They said the city also is working with churches in Southwest to find some new beds there.
But the activists maintain that city planners are trying to push the homeless farther and farther away from downtown—out of sight, out of mind—and that many will find it difficult moving so far from familiar territory.
On her ledge yesterday, Loughner looks wan, with cropped blond hair, dark slacks and sweat shirt, hiking boots. She is alone with the police. None of her activist friends are around. They can’t risk another arrest, they have jobs, they have scattered for the holidays.
Hours pass.
Curled up, the hunger striker appears to be sleeping. But she can’t sleep. She sits up.
“Every time I drift off to sleep, I dream I’m falling,” she says. “Or the ledge under me is cracking. So I wake up.”
She has this quick chat yesterday afternoon, talking down to a reporter standing in a fourth-floor corridor open to the atrium. A sergeant with Protective Services interrupts. He says communicating with the hunger striker is forbidden and he ejects the reporter from the building. Chief Wilson later says such conversations might distract Loughner and cause her to fall.
Late in the day a fellow activist manages to throw a briefcase containing water, orange juice, a book and a pair of socks to Loughner, according to a Mayday DC spokeswoman.
Loughner became a radical suddenly, painfully. She was a homemaker, a volunteer for H. Ross Perot’s presidential candidacy and an organizer of Renaissance festivals in small-town West Virginia in the mid-1990s when her husband, a metal worker, was convicted of raping their 5-year-old daughter. There was conflicting testimony and no physical evidence, according to trial transcripts. He was sentenced to 50 years in prison. Loughner’s stout declarations of his innocence were viewed by a judge as evidence that she was an unfit parent who was undermining her daughter, and all three of their children were taken from her.
She moved to Washington several years ago and became active in anti-corporate-globalization protests and anarchist circles. Housing for the poor became her main cause. Her nickname is “Bork,” a character in a science fiction novel about a Moon colony revolting against Earth rule.
Hunger striking is a performance art with a lineage that includes Gandhi, Bobby Sands of the Irish Republican Army and Randall Robinson on behalf of Haitian political refugees. The late Mitch Snyder fasted for weeks in 1984 until the federal government blinked and funded $14 million in renovations to a major homeless shelter at Second and D streets NW in Washington.
“You use your body as a prayer for intervention,” says Carol Fennelly, Snyder’s former partner, who now runs a prisoner family program called Hope House. “We always called that equalizing the dialogue. On the other side of the table is money, power, the police. On our side we have our freedom, our health and our lives, and we have to put all of that on the table if we hope to equalize the dialogue.”
Jim Graham was one of the D.C. Council members who was in the 12 to 1 majority voting to sell the shelter building, after Mayor Anthony Williams decided to close the run-down facility. Graham has supported some of Loughner’s previous activism, but not this time.
“I’m sympathetic to Jamie, but on this issue I just don’t know what she’s proving,” Graham says. “I think it’s a radical move. At Christmas, it’s meant to get maximum public attention, which it will. This is the nature of Jamie. She’s a true believer.”
Copyright © 2005-2007 Mickey Z.
