10:30 PM, Saturday night, Tom Bradley International. One of the first protests of the new era. It isn’t much — four, maybe five hundred collected along barriers through which new arrivals enter into America. Hastily made homemade signs, ACLU 11 x 17 prints. Chants morph every few minutes: “Let Them Go,” “Show Me What America Looks Like, This Is What America Looks Like.” It doesn’t take much, just a lull in the action and a decent diaphragm. Everyone in attendance is eager to follow a leader. The crowd responds well to simplicity. “No Ban, No Wall, We Won’t Stop Until You Free Them All” dies an ignominious death, to be replaced with the decidedly catchier “Free Them All.”
A woman alone, drinking at the bar next to the Pinkberry kiosk, has just stepped up on her chair, then the bar itself, chanting “TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP!” The bartender, tired, tells her to cut it out. A dashing young cop strides over quickly, gotta keep the peace. She hops readily into his arms and resumes drinking, embarrassed.
A woman in vaguely Middle Eastern garb emerges, eliciting huge cheers. Who knows who this is, if she was held, whether she hails from Yemen or Saudi Arabia or France. But she pumps her fists and the crowd claps and hollers and feels good. Then a black man and his young daughter — more celebration. They may have just returned from vacation in Taipei.
There is an attorney, older, harried, in a standard issue California suit, speaking with cops, then on his cellphone, apparently trying to gain access to those being held. The police presence is tangible, tangibly chill; mostly white, mostly male, unantagonistic. One gets the sense that each is simply “following orders,” that they would “really like to do something,” but their “hands are tied.” And that is how this whole whole thing has gone, right up to the top. As they do in the economy, Reaganomics fail in the chain of command; nothing trickles down.
Who knows what victory looks like tonight. Who knows how many of these people are here as protestors, how many are simply tired and bored, waiting on a loved one from Seoul or Oaxaca. This isn’t New York or Chicago, or even Boston. History will not be made at the Los Angeles International Airport this evening. Nonetheless, one is heartened. It must count for something that this many people, on a perfectly fine Saturday night following the first classic California day of the year — seventy degrees and sunny, not a cloud in the sky––would make their way to far end of the traffic loop at LAX, a notoriously difficult environment for the pedestrian to negotiate.
And for each one here, another ten, fifty, five hundred via Twitter/Instagram/Snapchat feeds. Here is where social media looks most virtuous. Americans finally have a chance to practice what they preached about Egypt and Libya and Syria a half-decade ago, before bad situations became worse. The non-human conditions for a sustainable protest movement have never been better: an enormous collection of offended parties concentrated in every urban area in the country, united not behind an idea or a candidate, but in opposition, in indignation; the ability to communicate instantly, via any medium; no legitimate counter-protest group whatsoever (Trump voters are a rare breed in the city, quiet and spineless and ashamed). This generation lacks a taste for collective action, of course. Things have been too fine for too many for too long; Berkeley students do not want to end war, they want to line their pockets. But it takes time to strengthen an atrophied muscle. You have to go to the gym.
And the crowd goes wild. The attorney (according to Twitter it is Mike Feuer), the classically disheveled hero of the underclass, has been escorted into the bowels of the terminal. To where, to what end — who knows.
There is something uncanny about this round of protest, especially in Los Angeles. The airport, the city’s largest, most taken-for-granted public space; a place ruled by banality and the panoptic apparatus of the Los Angeles Police Department. Not the kind of place conducive to a protest, and certainly on a Saturday night. And yet it makes a certain kind of sense. The airport is corporate and blunt, but people are brought together here, and split apart. Emotions run high; it is quite literally a place for friends and lovers. Why not collective action? Demonstrations succeed in New York due to the design of the city; the train facilitates movement to parks and squares, which offer large groups visible sites at which to gather. Los Angeles is lacking in public transit because we all have private automobiles. There are no public parks because there are so many private backyards. Or so the truisms go. As for protests — they aren’t much fun in private. Perhaps the city’s civic awakening goes hand in hand with this generation’s political awakening.
An excitable young man eating a donut drops his sign, which reads “End The Ban On My People,” on the restricted side of the barrier. A cop picks it up and hands it back, eliciting a smattering of applause from protestors. So there is still progress to be made.
The man to my right announces to the crowd: his grandmother is back there along with thirty others. They are stuck but they are fine, they have vending machines. Now the crowd strikes up a new chant modeled on a young woman’s sign: “Free Her Grandpa.” It is midnight. Feuer has yet to return from his hero’s journey. Protestors at the barrier are chastised by other protestors for “banging.” “They’ll kick us out,” they say. Proper etiquette is paramount. Remember: when they go low, we go high. That’s the key to our continued success.
A thirty year-old in a suit announces the hashtag: #beyondLAX. They want Garcetti here. A new chant: “Where’s Our Mayor.” Where is our duly elected, properly credentialed leader? We need a professional. He will solve our problems, salve our wounds. I wonder what Hillary Clinton is doing right this second.
A woman in a head scarf emerges, child slung around her shoulder, tote bag in her hand. She is small, exhausted; the child is half her size. Her husband runs to embrace her. She looks too tired to cry.
The protestors sense the authenticity of the moment. Husband and wife, reunited at last; the arc of the moral universe, etc. They wave to the crowd and ride off into the sunset to thunderous applause, a standing ovation. We all got what we came for, a true Hollywood ending. For two.
