RNC Letter in Villager

To The Villager:

³The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against
forgetting.² Those are the words of Milan Kundera, a Czech writer who was
exiled from his country while it was behind the iron curtain. In the wake
of the Republican National Convention, St. Paul should listen to him.

We have a lot to remember here in our city, where the sacred mounds of
ancient people share river bluffs with Victorian mansions and the twin
domes of church and state. Families have lived here for generations,
leaving their French, German, and Irish names. It is a storied place.

I remember Chris Coleman¹s heart-tugging recollections when he was
campaigning for mayor. They were about his boyhood in St. Paul, For that
matter, I remember his father, who, in the 1960s and 1970s, was the most
powerful politician in the Minnesota legislature. Chris may feel a
certain sense of entitlement, but I have no reason to doubt that he loves
this place, just as many of us do.

But now a lot of us have other memories, too. We remember long ranks of
black-clad, faceless troopers, tall iron fences shutting in peaceful
protesters, clouds of tear gas, screams of pain and fear, doors being
kicked in, sirens wailing, bridges closed. We remember a week when St.
Paul yielded to becoming a military zone, where a bicycle and a bandana
were enough to get one detained and perhaps beaten. If anyone doubts it,
let them see the film ³Terrorizing Dissent,² put together by journalists
who were on the streets and not ³embedded² in police cars.

And now our mayor and council want us to forget. The streets were cleaned
up immediately. The fences disappeared as if by magic. And Chris writes
to his shell-shocked constituents: ³On a national and international
stage, our city shone in the spotlight, and Saint Paul stands to reap the
rewards for years to come.²

Sure. But I and many others will have a hard time forgetting the
experience of being an occupied city. On my window sill there sits a
memento -- a broken set of plastic handcuffs that I picked up from dozens
scattered across the floor of the RNC Welcoming Committee's convergence
center at 627 S. Smith Ave. The place was relatively quiet when I got
there on the day after the sheriff¹s men had broken in and terrorized 50
people. I noticed on the wall a warning that the occupants had agreed to
keep the space sober and smoke-free. Quite a bunch of rowdies, I
concluded. The real damage from the week was not broken windows or a
couple of vandalized vehicles. It was the destruction of our sense of
freedom and of trust in our own city officers.

No, Chris, we still have questions, and we won¹t easily give up the
struggle of memory against forgetting -- not next week, not next month,
not next year. The wound is deep, and for better or worse it has become a
part of Minnesota¹s history as this 150th year of statehood comes to a
close.



-- Rhoda Gilman