> A boot camp for rebellion
>
> These spring breakers aren't working on their tans;
> they're gathered along the Peace River to learn how best
> to stage a protest.
>
> By CRAIG PITTMAN
>
> A9 St. Petersburg Times, published March 14, 2000
>
> ARCADIA -- The portly tourist stopped the golf cart on the campground's
> sandy road, puffed on his cigar and swiveled his head back and forth, amazed.
>
> To his left, college students swarmed over 60-foot-high scaffolding,
> learning
> how to scale buildings and hang protest banners. To his right, another group
> practiced chanting and locking their arms together so police could not pull
> them apart.
>
> Atop the scaffold fluttered a flag depicting a pair of mechanical gears
> jammed
> by a big monkey wrench, and the words "The Ruckus Society."
> http://www.ruckus.org/index.html
> The portly man eyed the flag, puffed out a nimbus of smoke and asked
> a passer-by, "What's a ruckus?"
>
> A ruckus is what happened in Seattle last fall, when thousands
> of activists trained and coordinated by the Ruckus
> Society disrupted the World Trade Organization meeting.
> Now the Ruckus Society is training the next generation of
> protesters to take on everyone from the World Bank to General
> Motors to both political conventions.
>
> "We're the nation's boot camp for civil disobedience," said Lou
> Niles of San Diego, at 53 the oldest member of the group and
> a ramrod-straight retired Army officer who became a paramedic
> to atone for what he did in Vietnam.
>
> On a bluff overlooking the Peace River near Arcadia, the Ruckus
> Society this week is staging its first Alternative Spring Break. To the
> nation's
> college students, Ruckus organizers said: Instead of joining the drunken
> throngs getting a nasty sunburn on the beaches of Fort Lauderdale, why not
> attend a wilderness camp for free training in political theater?
>
> "We wanted to be the alter ego of the vacuous bacchanal," explained camp
> director John Sellers, 33, of Berkeley, Calif., a former Greenpeace
>activist.
> Among his Ruckus stunts, Sellers is best known for helping actor Woody
> Harrelson hang a Save the Redwoods banner on the Golden Gate Bridge.
>
> The camp -- sponsored by the Rainforest Action Network, http://www.ran.org/
> the student group
> Free the Planet and the anti-global warming group Ozone Action
> http://www.ozone.org/
> -- attracted 80 participants who paid their way to the Peace River
Campground.
>
> "I heard this was the place to be," said Sarah Austin, 21, who with four
> fellow
> American University students spent 19 hours driving a rattletrap van from
> Washington, D.C. Austin had altered a Santa Claus shirt to say, "I Believe
>in
> Sabotage!" and plans to be part of the World Bank protest next month.
>
> Other participants hailed from Georgia, North Carolina, Texas, Kentucky,
> Ohio, New York and Canada. Most were, like her, young, painfully earnest and
> pale as a blank sheet of paper.
>
> On Sunday morning, about the time the good burghers of Arcadia were getting
> dressed for church, the campers stood in a circle and called out their names
> and causes: the AIDS awareness group Act Up!, United Students Against
> Sweatshops, http://www.umich.edu/~sole/usas/index.html
> the Houston Animal Rights Team.
>
> One woman said she was representing "a community of witches and pagans."
> She stood near a bearded man whose T-shirt said, "Live like Jesus."
>
> Standing quietly among the tattooed multitude was a graying man clad in
> black: Bill Carey of the United Steelworkers of America http://www.uswa.org/
> in Gary, Ind., whose union wants to learn how to raise a Ruckus.
>
> "This is sort of a natural growth for us," he said.
>
> Unions and environmental groups are discovering that, thanks to corporate
> mergers, they increasingly share a common enemy, he said. Steelworkers
> battling a company over labor issues have learned that it shares ownership
> with
> a company cutting down redwoods.
>
> Because Ruckus camps focus on tactics, not polemics, its sleeping bags are
> often occupied by strange bedfellows. Past camps put anti-gun-control
> libertarians with anti-hunting activists and paired abortion rights and
> anti-abortion protesters.
>
> Ruckus organizers trace their lineage back to the Boston Tea Party, women's
> suffragists and the civil rights movement. During training Sunday, the
> Ruckus
> instructors touched on the teachings of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.,
> then hurried along to more practical concerns like dealing with the media.
>
> They staged a role-playing exercise with students playing protesters,
> police,
> reporters and corporate executives. A melee ensued, with panicky "police"
> swinging clubs, hissing as if they were spraying tear gas and dragging a
> woman out screaming. One faux protester, Peter Tsolkas of Clearwater,
> suffered a real asthma attack unnoticed.
>
> "It was intense," the screamer, Charlotte Noss, said afterward. Noss, 20,
> came
> to Ruckus because she has been lobbying for the State University of New
> York at Syracuse to divest college money from polluters. Her next step may
> be
> what Ruckus calls a "direct action."
>
> "We're coming to a crunch point," Noss said. "They're not listening to us."
>
> More and more groups are turning to civil disobedience to push their agenda,
> whether it's a parade of celebrities getting arrested to protest a New York
> police
> shooting or a pair of Florida legislators staging a sit-in at the
> governor's office
> over affirmative action. Law-abiding groups are turning to Ruckus to learn
> how to stage an event with precision and panache.
>
> "What they showed us at the WTO is that this really works," said Ozone
> Action's Brandon MacGillis.
>
> During the camp's morning announcements, when everyone else in the circle
> sat on the ground, a grizzled man with a head like a doorknob dragged a
> chair
> over and slumped into it.
>
> This was Ruckus' founder, 45-year-old Mike Roselle, whose work with
> Ruckus, Greenpeace and the radical environmental group Earth First! have led
> to him being arrested more than 40 times.
>
> To conservative members of Congress and logging companies, Roselle is the
> poster boy for eco-terrorist fears. But to people like Ozone Action director
> John Passacantando, Roselle is "the environmental equivalent of the old
> blind
> guy on Kung Fu, where you try to grab the pebbles and you can't."
>
> Passacantando, a Reagan-era conservative, was won over to the cause of
> environmentalism in part by Roselle's most famous stunt. To protest acid
> rain,
> in 1987 Roselle scaled Mount Rushmore to hang a gas mask on George
> Washington. For that act he spent four months in jail, 40 days of it in
> solitary.
>
> Now Roselle is passing along his hard-won skills. Thanks to Ruckus'
> training,
> he said, "I've put more people behind bars than most district attorneys."
>
> He has put together a cadre of trainers with experience in non-violent
> protest.
> Blockade expert Cathie Berrey, 33, of Asheville, N.C. -- tear-gassed 16
> times
> in Seattle -- joked that "Ruckus is where old Greenpeacers and Earth
> Firsters
> go to retire."
>
> But some are young converts, like 23-year-old Josh "Grommitt" Rumschlag of
> Clearwater, who was literally showing students the ropes Sunday. The
> mutton-chopped Rumschlag quit St. Petersburg Junior College to become a
> full-time activist and sell radical literature. His mother is "somewhat
> supportive," he said, "but she'd be more happy if I went back to college
> and got
> a real job."
>
> The youngest Ruckus trainer was Matt Leonard, 20, of Seattle, part of the
> advance crew who built the scaffold. Many of the other occupants of the
> Peace
> River Campground last week were bull-riders and calf-ropers in town for
> Arcadia's spring rodeo. When they saw the scaffold they stopped to say
> howdy.
>
> "Are y'all set up for bungee jumping?" they asked Leonard. He explained the
> group was working on something requiring a stronger commitment than a
> 10-second dive with a long rubber band.
>
> In five years Ruckus has trained about 2,000 activists. Each camp costs
> Ruckus about $30,000 to $40,000, paid for by donors like Ted Turner.
>
> When Roselle launched Ruckus five years ago, donors were scarce.
> Foundation officials would say, "You teach people to break the law."
> Roselle
> said he prefers to think of it as teaching people to "intervene in immoral
> situations on behalf of a higher law."
>
> But in the post-Seattle glow, Ruckus is being viewed as not only legitimate
> but
> even powerful. There is talk of making Ruckus more of a gang of freelance
> samurai, providing tactical services to environmental and human rights
> organizations.
>
> "Now we're dealing with all this euphoria," Roselle grumbled. "Now people
> think they can go shut down any international meeting any time."
>
> The truth is, he said, that Ruckus' training camps tend to attract more
> media
> attention -- from the Wall Street Journal, Mademoiselle and, most recently,
> the
> New Yorker -- than the protests they spawn.
>
> Sellers joked that Ruckus "will weather this storm of approval" with its bad
> reputation intact. But Passacantando contends the climate has changed, and
> an
> American public weary of corporate greed is ready to embrace what Ruckus
> represents.
>
> "This too is what democracy looks like," Passacantando said. "It's not just
> pulling the voting lever."
>
> -- Staff researchers Caryn Baird and Cathy Wos contributed to this report.
> __________________________________________________
> No real social change has ever come about without a revolution.
> --Emma Goldman