The INVISIBLE CHILDREN Protest 4/29 San Diego

(The Embedded report from San Diego, one of 130 Global Night Commutes of 4/29/06)

After awaking at 1:30PM on Sunday afternoon, April 30, I realize why you don’t usually see any old f**ks like me at protest movements. Still the feeling in these tired old bones is one of hope, rather than just fatigue as I glance down at the ‘I love Uganda’, tagged on the back of my left hand by either Serena or Heather, the hooties, I mean hotties, in our little group who are from L.A. They are both models and aspiring actresses, and the homemade white T-shirts that they have made for the demonstration tonight will get noticed more than just for the very attractive bodies they are stretched over. Sure, the girls are hot, but more than that, they are committed to this cause, the ‘Invisible Children’ of Northern Uganda.

A couple of years ago, three guys sitting around together in a garage got the idea of going to Sudan to film the genocide. They had heard Collin Powell talking about the situation there. So after kissing their moms ‘good-bye’, Jason, Bobby, and Laren grabbed their cameras, their sense of adventure, their nut sacks, and bid farewell to the world’s fifth largest, ie.,robust economy, the STATE of CALIFORNIA (thanks, Gray Davis), and their hometown of San Diego . From completing two documentaries, ‘docs’, myself back in the day, I know that heady feeling you have when you pick up your loaded camera and go off to ‘find the story’ you want to bring back to the public. Shooting a ‘doc’ is so different and pure from making a movie, in the raw sense that nothing is made up, scripted, or fake. Jason, Bobby, and Laren did indeed find the ’story’ they were looking for, thanks to an African woman named Jolly Okot. The ‘doc’ is titled ‘Invisible Children’ and the review is posted elsewhere on this page. I saw the movie on April 27th, finding out only then that a staged demonstration was being planned for the 29th of April in 130 cities across the U.S.A. and in countries from Canada to Ireland. The protest consists of sleeping outdoors in the city mimicking for one night, what thousands of unsupervised children do every night, rain or shine, in city centers located in Northern Uganda.

Northern Uganda has been called the worst humanitarian crisis in the world today because of a lack of media and world attention. The story doesn’t have the big, busted blonde, the black welfare recipient, or the Mexican walking through the desert, ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ quality. It has the Katrina/Louisiana urgency to it because they have no oil and they are not ‘white’ or Muslim. And this story has been going on for almost 20 years. Because of this crisis, 1.7 Million people have been forcibly displaced and every day 130 people die due to violence in a dustbowl of a country at the other end of the ‘world economy’ list. It is an unseen war, unseen by everyone, even the President of Uganda, but it’s not unseen to the thousands of children who have been brutalized and traumatized for a generation. The abductions of the children, who are turned into forced conscripts, is carried out by adult rebels, ironically called the Lord’s Resistance Army, who move about the country with impunity, and automatic weapons. It is a show of God’s sense of Cosmic balance, that this story, and the filming of it is being brought to light by three young ‘white’ men, three young ‘wise’ men, you realize, as you stare around at the thousands of mostly (99young people, neatly organized and milling around this night in Balboa Park. The air is cool, and soft, billowy clouds are drifting in from the ocean. The night temp will not dip below 60. The original staging point was moved from Horton Square, as the sign-up numbers “started going through the roof.” NBC may have been a little edgy about having to cover such a ‘hard news’ demonstration taking place right outside their magnificent and gleaming building also. Looking around, this scene could be from the Oregon Hemp Fest or the Annual University of Michigan’s Smoke-In, except for two things. There is no entertainment/speaker and no smell of ‘Otto’s jacket’ (The Simpsons) in the air. And you can bet that NBC wouldn’t be covering those gatherings either, which promote ‘medical’ marijuana, the ‘unseen war’ in America being fought by the infirmed.

“At 4PM there was almost no one here, except for my crew and me,” says Noah, the manager/crew chief of the San Diego Balboa Park site, himself an African though not from Uganda. Wearing a lime green T-shirt (’we’re here to help’ - front, ‘Invisible Children Official Posse’ - back) and giving orders through a coiled wire headset to other green shirted ‘helpers’, he tells me that he has never been to Uganda himself, he just knows the organizers, either Jason, Lauren, or Bobby, probably now all three. You get the feeling that all these people are part of one large extended family united by a single desperate despair and driven by a single determination to eliminate said dispair. It is their core passion that has spread out like a ripple of social consciousness and ignited the night’s outpouring of touched souls to hope, to dare change status quo. Having been through the Civil Rights, Renter’s Rights, Women’s Rights, and Voter Registration demonstrations and protests of the 60’s and 70’s, let me say that not one protest in the past was as organized or thought out any better than tonight’s event, and most, if truth be told, not as well. Maybe it’s all the technology, cell phones and computers, or even the pink T-Mobile Sidekick that Heather is constantly checking or texting on, but the flow of this event made an old ‘radical’ proud.

Weighing into the sea of people and sleeping bags, I had a sudden flashback and said to my partner, a musician named Eddie (bass player for the band Chapter 14), “this looks like the infield (at the Kentucky Derby),” just as Serena shouted out, “there, in the middle. We should be in the middle.” Finding a mound of high ground devoid of people, overlooking the view to the Porta-Potties, it is there we staked our claim, spreading out our sleeping bags in a star pattern with all heads (intelligence) pointing to the center. It makes perfect Karma that my ride to the Sleep-In (I ride a bicycle everywhere to protest this war over petroleum and the innocent blood shed on sides), is a musician. I first heard of ‘Invisble Children’ from the band ON BEING HUMAN at a show they did at Madlins for FVE. I remember seeing the passion they had in their eyes toward this project and wondering why. Now I shared the same fire-in-the-eyes passion for total strangers I would perhaps never see. Strangers who are children, because I am a father, with children.

Upon returning to the ‘campsite’ from a look around, Heather promptly showed off a two-way she had come into possession of. She and Serena had been ‘deputized’ into being security in our section due to the high ground advantage, or the hotness of the two L.A. models, who looked more like calendar girls than Paris Hilton. While we waited for the two huge light balls to be rigged up for the first of several photo shoots, in a direct line west of us (damn, Serena had a good eye), I found out why Paris and Nicole really stopped being ‘best buds’. I also found out that a small sampling of campers were going to be walking ‘downtown’ for a special shoot a bit later. Amid the sounds of hundreds of voices surrounding our little group of 7 or 8 people, stout political dialogue was the order of the day. Another time when I returned to the circle, I found three Sudanese dudes sitting and partaking in the discussions, sharing their unique perspective with us on the nature of things in the world, and why. Again from the benefit of the girls being there.

After the balls were lit and hovering over us, and the pictures taken, we set out to do our art and letter writing projects. That’s right Sports Fans, a real activist event has the participants do something other than share a $$plate dinner. We wrote two letters, one to President Bush and one to our Washington rep. I chose Sen. Barbara Boxer over Diane Feinstein since this night had nothing to do with Chinese trade. Put simply, the stated goals of tonight’s ’sleep-in’, called the GLOBAL NIGHT COMMUTE, or GNC (’sleep-in’ is soo 60’s) is for President Bush and the United States Government to press the U.N. and Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni to do everything in their power to end the conflict between the rebels and the government, and to protect the citizens (the Acholi tribe) of Northern Uganda. The second goal is to ensure adequate humanitian assistance to the ‘Invisible Children’ in the IDP (Internally Displaced Persons) camps that hold upwards of two Million people, and the ‘invisible children’ who commute to sleep in town centers, who are featured in the film. After all, they are not penguins.

To their credit, after filming the ‘invisible children’, the filmmakers showed the ‘rough cut’ to their college buddies and began to become part of the story, a truly noble outgrowth of the documentary project. An organization began to take shape. Today, roughly 300 children are regularly attending Catholic school in Uganda and approximately 150 workers there and here seek to bring more ‘invisible children’ to light each day. Directing the photo shoots and at the center of a bevy of photographers is Jesse, a long time friend of Bobby’s, “since high school”. “This is just amazing,” he says with a wide smile as he surveys the park full of people, “and people think all Americans are apathetic. The guys at El Cajon (the San Diego office of IC) are overjoyed at this turnout.” I find out that two organizers are in Washington and one, Jason, is in Chicago, with Oprah Winfrey, someone slightly more famous than I, but equally effected by the ‘rough cut’ footage, and that her show has brought the GNC to national attention. Footage from tonight will be used in a movie to show the folks back home (in Uganda) that Americans do care. The affluence that we have as the present ‘holy’ Roman Empire has not turned us all into uncompassionate dunderheads dazed from the SUV fill-up bill topping a hundred bucks.

It is sometime after Midnight that we get the ‘curtain call’ at our ‘campsite’ and fall-in over on the sidewalk that borders the large city park with 800 others and begin to make the mile-and-a-half trek to downtown and the Horton Square, the original GNC site. The word is that we are going to ‘film’ the original plan of having people sleep in the heart of the square, shoot another couple of group photos, and the ‘commute’ walk. However it isn’t the use of ‘fill’ to round out the planned movie theme that shatters the bubble of social change I’ve been immersed in since Thursday night’s film showing. It is the trek through the urban glass jungle of shops, bars, offices, and hotels, all opulent in comparison to the ‘Invisible Children’ homeland of Uganda. Adding to the effect are the well dressed urbanites who are part of this city’s landscape, and who, on any other Saturday night would go unnoticed, but on this night, stand out like citizens from some futuristic time in stark contrast to the dusty, brown kids in hand-me-down T-shirts, crammed together for a night’s sleep. It is a palatable division between the world’s fifth and 190th economy. Even the war torn areas like Iraq and Israel, where the bombers and gunmen drive Mercedes, are Paradise to someplace where all the people have to drive there is their feet. To the credit of the inhabitants of our Emerald City, one well dressed cosmopolitan leaves his friends and steps over to chat, his curiosity having gotten the better of him.

The ‘commute walk’ is filmed first, as green and pink shirted ‘posse’ members corral us and keep us away from the passing cars and in accordance with traffic signal safety. Did I mention that this whole event was organized like you wouldn’t believe!?? Next to be shot are more group photos, this time with the city as a backdrop instead of the park. After that, it’s time to rest in our sleeping bags and blankets as our last shot is set-up. It is sometime after 2:30AM in the morning before Jesse gives us the signal filming is about to commence, so get ready. Then, just like that, the shoot is over, and true to the Hollywood mantra, the ‘cast’ is fed at the ‘wrap’. A chance to change the world AND eat hot (New York style) pizza, no wonder everyone wants to come to America. Of course, it wouldn’t have been a perfect night without some sign that we were pissing on the Devil’s shoes. As we started on the return trek back to the park, sometime after 3AM, a couple of yahoos in a ‘fast and furious’ CRX smoked their tires, yelling for us to watch out, as they sped through a green light past us. We weren’t worried, feeling safe in the presence of our ‘Commute Posse’. A few blocks later some drunk yelled from his cab window, “You can’t help those kids. You can’t help them.” It would be the last devilish negative thing that we would hear. For one night, at least, we had experienced what children 8-14 years old experience every night, except, for our cell phones, being clean before we came to the park, our cars to take us back to our ‘American’ lifestyle with a hot shower, a tasty meal, fresh clothes in a stable secure environment, and indoor plumbing. In the morning, we could ‘open our eyes and not be blind’. But we hadn’t been pretending to be blind this night, we had closed our eyes and slept outside for one night to open the eyes of the world to an unseen war, an obscene war, affecting thousands of kids thousands of miles away. By lying down, we had joined the ‘invisible’ children of Northern Uganda for just one night. We all prayed that God was watching and recording our purposeful sacrifice because, to be honest, you’d think that 5000 people in one spot, for whatever reason, would attract the attention of the mass media. There was no major or minor TV channel, public or cable, PBS, newspaper, or radio station, public or pirate. For one night, in full view, we in San Diego, joined the children of Northern Uganda and became ‘invisible’, except to Po-Po, who leapfrogged ahead to block intersections off so we could pass en mass. ‘To Protect And Serve’, True that, SDPD.

Moving back along the same route like a cat, we stepped pass sleeping commuter after sleeping commuter while snaking our way back to our ‘campsite’. As I crawled into my sleeping bag and fell into a tired sleep, a thought crossed my mind. Earlier Chad, another green shirted leader, told me that Jacob, the ‘boy who cried’ from the ‘doc’, was in Chicago, watching this GNC happen, and asked one of the filmmakers there, “Why are you all doing this?” I don’t know what his answer was, but for me, if any of you visit my myspace (/ptrothschild) profile and read the people I’d ‘like to meet’, you will see The Rolling Stones on the list. If that fantasy ever does come true, I can say to Mick, Keith, Charlie, and Ron, that truly on the night of April 29th and the morning of April 30th, at a park in San Diego, I got some ‘Satisfaction’. - PT ROTHSCHILD

roll credits - queue the soundtrack: Talking Heads ‘Life During Wartime’ (Stop Making Sense - 1984)