Are these the droids I’m looking for?
When I decided to venture out on Saturday afternoon to cover the “March of the Clones” in downtown Washington, I never thought failing to find the protest would be my first problem. I was worried about arrests not a lack of action. Approaching the circle, however, I was seeing little in the way of Star Wars or weed. Maybe I’d gotten the date wrong?
Then I reached Connecticut Avenue and found them: a group of about fifteen people, one pot plant, and one papier-mâché sculpture of “Han Obama” frozen in carbonite. This was DCMJ’s protest, hoping to, as their website says, remind President Obama “that he can be a Force of Good and end the failed war on drugs NOW.”
DCMJ, which describes itself as “a community for cannabis users, growers, and their families,” is one of the groups that successfully managed to decriminalize cannabis possession in the District of Columbia in 2014. Now their goal is to remove cannabis from federal controlled substance restrictions. Their website urged people to “to bring cannabis cuttings that weigh under an two ounces to create a sea of green to show President Obama that cannabis is a harmless plant not worthy of being in the Controlled Substances Act.”
To me it seemed more a sea of stereotypes than of green. My first instinct is to say that all pot protests look the same. A standard cast of characters has been leading American protests since Woodstock. Several are present. The emcee is a man wearing a rainbow colored marijuana flag like a cape, who looks like he hasn’t had a haircut since the Reagan administration.
Then there is Rachel Ramone, a thin woman wearing American-flag pants and a flowing white blouse, her hair cascading over her shoulders in waves who takes the to the microphone to talk about how her father was exposed to Agent Orange a year before she was born, which left her with unnamed lifelong health problems that only cannabis can help.
“It’s medicine,” she insists. And for this medicine, the government wanted to take her babies away from her until she got clean. It’s a long and involved story of tyranny and injustice and seems to be only partially relevant, but she came down from Massachusetts to urge people to support legalization ballot initiatives.
A few skinny pale guys in their early twenties have drifted away from the protest group and are eating pizza on the sidewalk. Unidentifiable Star Wars soundtrack music wafts over everything. I meet one man who had come hoping to sell to the protestors. He is disappointed, because everyone has brought their own.
The speakers’ arguments sound like a mishmash of catchphrases, word soup assembled without any larger argument. Pot is good because it’s medicine and it’s natural and organic. And President Obama was part of the “Choom Gang” in high school. And Malia Obama was photographed both with a bong and wearing a shirt that read ‘Smoking kills.’
It becomes more and more apparent that conducting even a casual interview with someone who has been smoking weed poses unique problems. One side effect of cannabis is short term memory problems: The people I am talking to start sentences and lose their way somewhere in the middle of them.
Fairly frequently, the speeches paused to allow more people to gather in to take their picture by the pot plant, the banner, and the Han Obama sculpture. The event organizers are obviously stalling for time. The rally started at 2 and wanted to light up at 4:20 outside the White House. The walk isn’t that long. Finally they make the decision to move out. Everyone is encouraged to take clippings from the large pot plant sitting on Han Obama’s wagon and to join the march.
We aren’t a large enough group to try anything radical like blocking traffic. Instead, the group dons the white plastic stormtrooper helmets courteously provided by the event organizers and starts to make its way along the sidewalk down Connecticut Avenue.
It feels more like an ill-conceived homecoming float and the entire affair somehow manages to look more ridiculous than the 90s themed pub crawl I encountered walking back from the White House an hour later. After a few blocks, I realized that another woman was following as I was, trying not to get too close. It turns out her boyfriend, wearing a red and white Hawaiian shirt with a pot leaf pattern, was one of the marchers. She seemed a bit embarrassed.
“I think it should be legal, but this isn’t really my thing,” she says.
Attempting to maintain a following distance which allowed observation without implying commitment or belonging, I wound up in the odd position of explaining to the parents of curious children and one shopkeeper what exactly was going on. “Dank memes” notwithstanding, the connection between Star Wars and weed was lost on them as much as it was on me.
Trying to keep a banner, a wagon and a group together when everyone is slightly high is a challenge. Pretty soon it’s spread out along half a block. Straggling down the sidewalk while the Star Wars imperial march blares and stopping to wait at the crosswalks, the group makes its way towards the White House. I admittedly have had limited experience with protests in general, but this is the most law-abiding event of civil disobedience I have ever encountered.
Throughout the march, the protest keeps running into cops, who, to a man, do not care. There was a police car across the street from the protest in Dupont Circle. On one street corner, an officer on a bike even waits behind us for the light to change. He says nothing.
Because of D.C.’s local laws, the group only risks arrest by federal authorities on federal property, namely, the Secret Service. When the group passes the Executive Office Building, the agents on duty watch us pass with an air that this has all happened before. It seems hard to be civilly disobedient when no one appears to care.
Then the group reaches Lafayette Park, in front of the White House.
On a Saturday afternoon in September, the sidewalk in front of the White House is cluttered with the last summer tourists, teenagers wandering around with their friends in small groups, and Americans exercising their First Amendment rights. They are almost certainly crazy.
When the imperial weed wagon comes to a halt, it’s directly in front of the man who has sat on the sidewalk protesting…something…for over twenty years. To the left, a middle-aged man stands in front of a large black signboard covered in pictures of the human fetus at each week of development. And to the right, a woman with her own private microphone is campaigning for a woman I have never heard of to become president. For all I know, she was the candidate herself.
Clowns to the left of me, tokers to the right? Here I am, stuck in the middle.
Even after walking down Connecticut Avenue, we have way too much time to kill. Two protestors stand holding their banner unfurled while the music blares on and they try the open mic thing again. When they urge more female voices to speak about the benefits of weed, a young black woman steps up and spends the next two and a half minutes screaming about how the term marijuana was racist cultural appropriation and it should be called cannabis.
(For what it’s worth, the claim that marijuana derives from the Central American word mallihuan, or “prisoner,” has been discredited by linguists.)
We wait. A lot of people come up to have their picture taken with the sign. None of them have actually participated in the rally or the march. I guess a picture is rebellious enough? DCMJ doesn’t seem to mind. Cannabis has become something blasé. When an elderly man with a cane cuts through the crowd smoking a cigarette, he seems like the most counter-culture one there.
I try asking some nearby officers if the group is likely to actually get arrested. They tell me that as long as they are on the street, the group is in the District of Columbia and nothing will happen. And when three Secret Service agents do arrive they stand aside and observe, apparently under orders not to do anything as long as the protectors were peaceful.
Which they were. They were also cowardly. One tweeted a picture later boasting that he was within five feet of federal property with his pot clipping. Meaning he was within five feet of breaking the law. As they say, close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.
Civil disobedience implies some risk to the participants. They are, after all, acting in violation of a civil statute. During the civil rights movement, people were at the very least arrested and imprisoned, if not beaten back by police with fire hoses and dogs.
This? This is a photo-op. It was all summed up by the man I watched craning his neck and angling his phone as he tried to get face, joint, and sign into the same shot.
