Slut Walk™ Spokane—dangerous territory

I chug my coffee, waiting for palpitations. I’m unusually tired today. I don’t know why, I slept eight full hours.  Then the news comes on and I remember everything: I’d rather be sleeping.

My heart starts murmuring something to me: “please, no more coffee.” So I put down the cup, and listen to the news.

The world is a mess, it says. Those exact words. If only someone could sort it out. Could we not but simplify the problems we see? Reduce it somehow. Like fractions.  But we forget something all too fundamental.

Apathy.

There are those who watch the great spectacle of life unfold, and then there are those who are the great spectacle. Whatever of the spectacle left in me is now relegated to mere observer. I am a journalist.

I get off the bus on a warm but rainy June Friday.  Just three blocks down is a mass of protesters colluding by the Bloomsday runner statues. It’s not yet apparent, at this distance, that some of them are dressed like sluts—dolled up in g-strings, miniskirts, and bustiers.

This is Slut Walk. It is the direct reaction and result of one Toronto police officer’s inability to articulate carefully. These women (and men) are taking the word “slut” back, in an attempt to scrub it of any pejorative connotation.

"Women should avoid dressing like sl*ts in order not to be victimized,” Constable  Michael Sanguinetti told a York University crowd on Jan. 24, 2011. He has since apologized for the remarks, but not before setting off worldwide Slut Walks, including the smaller one here in Spokane.

By the logic of the Toronto Police Department, there should be a multitude of rapists prowling this area, hiding in trees, storefronts, and under sewer caps; but none today, only the prowling of the police, which circle and watch. There’s something very animalistic about the whole mess, something I can’t quite figure out.

I follow the elderly women in the full-body g-string. Her husband wears some kind of biker outfit fit for a kink. Taylor Malone plays emcee on the megaphone, shouting various slogans. We march.

Eventually we get to the police station, back to the park, and around. But more than the story unfolding here, I couldn’t quit thinking about the sense of unity present here in Spokane. Could this be something new? Last time there was any major protest was in 2008, when decent anarchists protested police brutality, which, curiously, ended in more police brutality.  

And around town there’s been numerous rallies and protests ranging from opposition to Cathy McMorris, to the legalization of marijuana. I don’t know why they're opposed, but I do know that they want to legalize marijuana.

I went home unfulfilled. But remembering that soon I’ll be attending Food Not Bombs: an anarchist vegan collective.  Note to self: write about protests and activist groups in and around Spokane over the summer. Even if you’re really, really poor.  (Maybe the vegans can feed me).