Barbara Parramore, mother of AlterNet editor Lynn Parramore.
November 6, 2013
|
Dissent is once again a criminal act in America. People who object
to right-wing lunacy used to be called “communists” and treated as
enemies of the state. Now “anarchist” is the label of choice used to
harass those who disagree.
Just ask my 81-year-old mom. In the
state of North Carolina, she is a suspected anarchist for wanting
children to go to decent schools.
A new era of protest
America
has gone through plenty of protests that have made us stronger and
better, from the Revolutionary era and the abolitionists to the sit-down
strikes and the lunch-counter civil rights demonstrations.
Now
we’ve entered a new distinctive era of protest — the pushback against
economic inequality, stagnant wages, attacks on public programs, and
two-tiered justice that’s popped up in Wisconsin, the Occupy Movement,
and, most recently, North Carolina’s Moral Mondays, a
progressive charge against a wave of knuckle-dragging GOP legislation that seeks to turn the state into a Mid-Atlantic Mississippi.
Protests
inevitably fire the energy of those who are allergic to change. Many
Americans are old enough to recall the Second Red Scare, which blew
across the country like poison gas in the 1950s and had everybody from
Martin Luther King to Burl Ives branded a communist. Hundreds were
locked behind bars and thousands lost their jobs. Blacklists spread not
only through Hollywood, but also through schools and universities. If
you were a union activist, you were labeled a communist. Gay? Definitely
a communist. Feminist? Ditto. Arthur Miller compared the hysteria to
the Salem witch trials in his play,
The Crucible.
Now
when those in power want to question someone’s patriotism or values, the
term “anarchist” comes in handy. The fear of anarchists in the U.S.
goes way back to 1870s, when businessmen, religious leaders and
editorial writers tried to stoke opposition to dissident railroad
workers and again to laborers fighting for an 8-hour-day during the
Haymarket affair in the mid-1880s. The same dirty, reckless tactics are
deployed now as they were then: Fear-mongering, bending the law, and the
red-baiter’s favorite tactic of all, spying.
When everyone’s a suspect, no one is safe from accusations. Not the student, not the pastor, not the teacher.
Meet the new face of anarchy
My
81-year-old mother, Barbara Parramore, is a former Sunday school
teacher who served in North Carolina’s public education system for half a
century as a teacher, elementary school principal, and professor of
education at N.C. State University. She is the author of many books for
young learners, like the
Children's Dictionary of Occupations (a subversive tract if there ever was one).
Since
her retirement, Mom has been engaged in such radical activities as
raising money for a 4-H museum, volunteering with the Carolina Ballet,
and sharing her modest savings with her alma mater to set up a
scholarship.
According to North Carolina police, she is a suspected anarchist. For real.
Let
me explain. A citizen who cares about her community, Mom follows the
news closely. Lately she’s been shaken to see rabid right-wingers doing
their level best to handicap the next generation of Tarheels. They have
declared a war on the poor, women, young people, African Americans, and
anybody else who does not share their mean-spirited objectives.
Some
might mistake Mom for a southern belle, with her charming manners and
conservative attire. But she is actually a steel magnolia. When Mom saw
her life’s work as an educator jeopardized, she joined her Baptist
pastor and other concerned North Carolinians to protest at the State
Capitol as part of the Moral Monday campaign. On an afternoon in May,
she joined hundreds of other peaceful citizens at the Legislative
Building in Raleigh to call attention to the constant attacks on the
most vulnerable. Later that evening, she was handcuffed and taken to
jail. She expressed her reasons for risking arrest in an
essay published on AlterNet and elsewhere:
“I
was born in 1932 and am a child of the Great Depression and World War
II. My oldest brother went into the army in January 1942 and I knew many
older brothers of my friends who did not survive. Part of my DNA is
being concerned about family and neighbors and helping each other
whenever we could….Back then, neighbors and citizens knew how to care
about each other, which brings me to my concern about what is happening
right now to families and communities around the state. The list of
bills proposed by one or both houses of the North Carolina General
Assembly in spring of 2013 is long. Too many of these proposals appear
to be poorly thought out. As a citizen who has never missed the
opportunity to vote in local, state and national elections, I now have
the feeling that my voice is not being considered. Participating in a
protest is my way of letting members of the General Assembly know that
there are other voices that they need to hear.”
Mom described
herself as “most concerned about the bills affecting the public schools
and opportunities of post-secondary education.”
In the feverish
imagination of North Carolina police, Mom could be a terrorist fomenting
violent revolution. (It’s true that she shot a squirrel in her yard
with a pellet gun, but that was an isolated incident).
As the
Charlotte Observer reported,
when the first trial of the hundreds of North Carolinians arrested
during the peaceful Moral Monday demonstrations commenced, the chief of
the General Assembly police admitted that protesters were spied upon,
“and that his department ‘collected intelligence’ on the ‘anarchists’
among them.’”
When Mom learned that the police were sent to the
church meeting where she and others had gathered before the protest, she
was bewildered: “If we had known they were there, we would have been
glad to talk to them, welcome them in.” I am quite certain that Mom
would have gotten them a snack.
But the police went to church
undercover, presumably collecting tidbits about the praying, singing and
other signs of subversive activity.
It appears that “anarchist”
became the preferred term of denigration in North Carolina because plain
old “outsider” slander wouldn’t stick. When Governor Pat McCrory tried
to pretend that the Moral Monday protesters were outside agitators, the
facts quickly proved him wrong. What’s a scaremongerer to do? The
communist label had gotten kind of tired since the Cold War ended (the
same types of folks used to call my late father, a history professor, a
communist because he advocated desegregation).
But “anarchist” has
a nice ring to it. Most ordinary people have little idea of what it
means, vaguely associating the term with revolution and chaos, even
though the more accurate face of anarchy would be that of someone like
Professor David Graeber, the American anthropologist associated with the
peaceful Occupy protests who likes to talk about cooperation and mutual
respect among citizens.
Never mind reality. Anarchist is now the
term for any person with the temerity to suggest that the poor deserve
compassion, that all children deserve decent schools, and that a
widening gulf between haves and have-nots is not good for the country.
Mom
would probably be comfortable with the label “Democrat” or “Christian”
or even “uppity female.” But I doubt that the term “anarchist” ever
crossed her mind.
Lynn Parramore is an
AlterNet senior editor. She is cofounder of Recessionwire, founding
editor of New Deal 2.0, and author of 'Reading the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt
in Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture.' She received her Ph.d in
English and Cultural Theory from NYU, where she has taught essay writing
and semiotics. She is the Director of AlterNet's New Economic Dialogue
Project. Follow her on Twitter @LynnParramore.
