In just a few more weeks people will begin coming together for what is to be
the 31st annual Rainbow Gathering of the Tribes, an event open and free to
all, and dedicated to Peace and to Healing among all people.

It is now a little over six and a half years since the bureaucracy of the US
Forest Service introduced regulations concerning such “non-commercial group
use events” and there has been a steady stream of Federal court cases
contesting these regs. Some of these cases have gained us ground by forcing
revised interpretations of sections of the regulation; others have caused
concessions concerning such important issues as individual liabilities; and
other cases are still pending their way thru the courts.

But overall, the Federal Court System has upheld the “lawfulness” of these
regs. And at the same time the Forest Service has built up an enforcement
team that is very familiar with these Gatherings, very well-equipped,
extremely well-funded, and supported by the hierarchy of their agency, and
alas, by all the recent court rulings.

What are we to do?

I have heard numerous suggestion of one form or another of “massive civil
disobedience.” But we have already been doing that. For that past half-dozen
years tens of thousands of people have congregated in open dis-approval of
these regulations. And most of these have known perfectly well that the
event had been declared illegal and an “incident” and an “emergency.” It was
in bold headlines in all the papers. We’ve already been doing massive civil
disobedience. And pretty plainly, it has worked pretty well.

In the face of our numbers of committed participants, the “incident” team
has been able only to issue numbers of incidental tickets, and to make a few
cases on the overall issue stick. Even most of those have resulted in small
fines. But now there are differences.

It’s not just that this country is in a new “homeland security” mode of
thinking. It’s not just that the defendants in recent court cases have been
given jail time. It’s not just that the Supreme Court declined to listen to
the single case that presented our issues to it. It’s not just that those in
the Forest Service who dislike this event the most are hoping to get their
chance finally to come at us with full force. It’s not just that in the past
few years there have been incidents of ticketing that for many reasons came
dangerously close to explosive situations. It’s all of these together that
shape the situation we face today.

It is also true that we present the face of a New World Culture to the eyes
of the New World Order. And it is true that there are many of us who know
that we are an alternative to the nation state system that rules the world
today. And from that position it is easy to see why we should stand firm and
not give in to these regulations at all.

But the great lesson of The Way, the Tao, is that the firm get broken and
the flexible get to grow and evolve and expand to another day.

What I am saying is this: In this instance, the wise choice for the
preservation of our culture is to deal with the regs in a way that does not
allow their enforcement nightmare to ride in and make a mess of our
Gathering. And there are forces at work that want to do just that. And we
shouldn’t give them the opportunity under color or cover of law to do it.

This doesn’t mean that we need to bow down and kiss the regulation’s toes.
It doesn’t mean that we stand up and say to each other, “Oh my, the courts
have shown us the truth about how wrong and foolish we were,” It doesn’t
mean that we cannot continue to contest the regulations in new ways. Nor
that we should give up working to change or amend them.

But we should deal with them in a way that puts us into the legal arena,
instead of the illegal arena.

How? Well for starters, it shouldn’t be on the shoulders of one or two
people to stick their necks out and take all the flak for working with the
permit system. Instead, some dozen or more individual participants, from a
variety of camps, clans and kitchens should walk into the FS HQ nearby a
potential site, ask to see the paperwork and before the bureaucracy knows
quite what’s happened, just fill in all the blanks on the forms and sign the
paperwork.

This will incur two problems.

First we will be entering a whole new realm of administrative swamps. There
will have to be endless discussions on whether we can bury compost or have
to truck it out; on whether we can park in that area or not that area; do
rainbow shuttles need to have seatbelts, or can they be vans and pickups?
and so on. But that is far better than armed agents towing cars,
confiscating waterpipe, destroying ovens and kiddie shelters and so on [ all
of which, and more, have already happened.] Sooner or later the harm is
going to get worse. And it is our job, as peacemakers, to see that it doesn’t.

The second problem is that the FS is adopting a stance of denying site
applications for a variety of “reasons.” Probably because they want to be
the ones with the power to select where this can happen. And they have done
absolutely nothing to create a “site bank” or list of protected or usable
sites for group uses — despite years and years of our appealing to them to
do so. But the law says they must offer alternative locations. And as they
do that, they begin to define areas that can at least be protected for the
future.

We are not in an easy position. It is so much easier to fly a free flag when
justice rules in your favor. The hard part is how to lose ground without
permitting the opposition to destroy your movement. All the great
liberationists of history have been outstanding examples of this. For
obvious examples: General Washington was in retreat for his entire command.
He lost every battle, while he gained strength enough ultimately to win our
Revolutionary War. Nelson Mandella spent 27 years in prison (as the entire
world bet against anything except a bloodbath outcome) while he built a
peaceful movement that became unstoppable.

We need a strategy that will avert a frightening police state scenario that
is being prepared even now. That strategy seems to me to be that a bunch of
concerned, committed individuals communicate with each other and make the
decision together to act together to deal with the paperwork, to work with
all the council processes of the gathering: C.A.L.M. council, Main circle
council, kitchen council, etc. to do the right thing and interface with the
forces of Governmental Power and deal with all the endless stuff that is
going to come up in the course of the Gathering. This is going to be an
enormous pain in the butt. But it is better than an enormous blow to the
head, an enormous police action, and an enormous war against us in the press
that will discourage all but the most already-decided from taking the road
up into the mountains to join the circle of our community.

After all, that is what we are doing, opening a circle of community to
anyone who will choose to come. There’s no need out of our self-righteous
committed nature to force a situation where any newcomers are just plain
scared off but the forces arrayed against us.

Now is not the time to stand up and defy the Powers of the State. We have to
be flexible, go over under around and thru. And not not not like knotheads
bang ourselves into a wall they are building to stop us. Better to find a
way to open the wall, and let the people and the sunlight and the circle of
community  on thru.

People have to band together, deal with the regs, as they stand now, and
have a group go on in and sign on the dotted lines. Surely there will still
be offences and difficulties, and the courts may hold that “As Applied” the
regulations vest too much power in the officers of the Forest Service, and
that therefore the regs fail the tests of constitutionality.

But right now, other choices leave us worse off, by far. It’ll be massively
difficult for any individual to take all the criticism for doing this, but a
group of individuals, working together, as a team can deal with the flak
from the no-compromisers within our own clans, and with the difficulties
that working with the permit system promises us.

One last time: working with the system is our best choice right now, for
many many reasons. Ask yourselves: What is our real mission here? Is it to
defend our rights in the face of severe governmental opposition? Or is it to
open the door to the community of souls gathering in the mountains to live
and play and pray in Peace? Of course, as in any really good question there
is truth in both sides. But the great circle of silence, the splendid forces
of community, the sharing and caring, the working together, the playing
together, these are the forces that give us our strength and our power to
overcome. Fundamentally we are not a protest movement (even tho many of us
have roots in protest movements around the world). Fundamentally we are a
positive energy alternative to the way things are, and we can’t/shouldn’
t/mustn’t let the government force us into their battle, defined by their
laws, and which they are well-equipped to win.

We need to swallow some pride, and give thanks and grace to those who stand
up together and deal with the paper dragon so the rest of us can continue to
Gather in Peace.
 
 
 

2. Coming Soon to a Jail Near You

In just a few weeks ­ according to the Chief Deputy Federal Marshall of the
Western District of Pennsylvania, the “Allegheny Three,” Joanee Freedom,
Stephen Principle and myself are going to receive our orders to report to
serve our three months sentences for violation of the Forest Service group
use regulation.

We will be the first people ever imprisoned for this new crime, and we go to
prison, not simply for having violated the regulations, but for having the
nerve, the audacity and the will to challenge them on their face in the
courts of law. Had we bowed to the ground, and pled “no contest” we would
have incurred (so said the magistrate) a fine of perhaps at most a few
hundred dollars, but for the additional “crime” of daring to challenge what
we fairly believed to be an unconstitutional regulation, we have had the
whole bookshelf thrown at us by a judge who stated that he wanted to send a
message.

And so he has sent a message: that these regs are unnecessarily harsh, and
the laws backing them up are unjustly severe, and the system backing up the
laws unjustly motivated to imprison three citizens who did the public no
harm, who even in the eyes and words of the accusers harmed not a hair of
public property, and who fundamentally did nothing but refuse to obey a
regulation which twice before had, in previous incarnations, had fallen
before similar challenges as unconstitutional.

Why now is this regulation upheld, when before such regs were struck down?
The answer lies in Who¹s In the Judge¹s Seats. Today¹s appointees are a
different breed from the judges schooled in the horrors of the McCarthy Era
and the brilliant tutelage of the Warren Court¹s eye-opening Civil Rights
Era. No, the judges we face today are from the Ollie North school of Reagan
era Big Government Is Best mentality.

And we simply have to live with the situation as it is.

There will be a time when a great unfolding of democratic ideals will once
again display itself on the grand field of human endeavors; and in those
times such efforts as our will be appreciated for what they are: efforts to
hold the line on fundamental human liberties in the face of the
encroachments by centralized bureaucracy. But for now, we must make do with
the dignity we can preserve and the strategies we can shape to pass thru
these minutes of history when restrictions of unalienable rights are
accepted.

Please don¹t bewail our small fates. There are plenty of places in our world
today where people who have spoken up far less then we have been beheaded,
shot, disappeared, their families murdered, their town burned, their
friends, relatives, supporters pursued, hunted and destroyed. So I sing you
no song of pity on our behalfs. But still, take our situation to heart,
because it is in movements like our Rainbow Gatherings that the hope of a
future world full of tolerance, understanding, and acceptance of people¹s
differences is taught, learned and spread among young and old alike, and
that, that, is the royal road toward a peaceful and prosperous world ‹ one
without the deadly divisions of class, anti-religion, state-inspired wars
and the other mayhems and madness that plague our human species.

Above all, continue to Gather, in twos-ees and three-sees, in tens of
thousands. Continue to spread the ideals of a multi-cultural caring and
sharing world. That¹s the hope and the vision. It always has been since the
dawn of human society. The hope that we people will learn to live in peace
with each other. It isn¹t going to come from the governments and the
corporations. It¹s going to come from people, young and old, learning how to
make do together, and the Gatherings are one way that people can learn and
have that experience. Civilization is going to have to make a choice between
a New World Order and a New World Culture. The future is unwritten, but I
believe that a New World Culture is in the making, thru the work of
countless hands in all the nations, the races, and the peoples of our human
family.

Sometimes there¹s nothing to do but hold hands and move ahead.

Garrick Beck (1 of the "Allegheny Three", sentenced to 90 days prison for gathering)
May, 2002
reprinted with permission