"Ask not what Kraft Macaroni and Cheese can do for you, ask what you can do for Kraft Macaroni and Cheese." These words, paraphrasing the famous words of the late President Kennedy, were written on the complimentary boxes of donkey-shaped macaroni that were given to Democratic National Convention delegates who were attending a gala at the Santa Monica Pier. The familiar blue and orange Kraft Macaroni and Cheese boxes were emblazoned with the words, "Democrats 2000."

The irony was not wasted on protestors who were standing on the pier outside the bright lights of the amusement park. After all, most of them were there to protest the corporate takeover of the democratic process in America. Protests at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia three weeks earlier had also focused on this theme.

The mainline media did not, for the most part, report the reasons behind the protests at the conventions. But I think it is important for people of faith and conscience to be aware of the issues that triggered these and other recent mass demonstrations. In spite of the glowing reports about our economy, many people are hurting. The same policies that have brought incredible wealth to a few have brought pain and suffering to many, and have damaged the environment. Many demonstrations were held during the 4 day convention in Los Angeles, drawing attention to to inequitable, unjust, and unsustainable policies supported by both major political candidates. But the overarching concern was the cooptation of our democracy and culture by transnational corporations, who make large contributions to both Democratic and Republican campaigns in order to gain access and preferential treatment regardless of which candidate is elected.

I came to Los Angeles during the Democratic National Convention as an act of faith. I came to stand with the victims of injustice and to add my voice to others who are crying out for justice. I came to witness the interactions between protestors and police, and to stand up for the rights of people to protest, since I had seen so much police violence at the mass protests in Seattle and in Washington, D.C. I came to join with others in calling our nation to repent, to turn around, to renounce policies which harm the world God loves so much.

I was impressed by the local organizing that had gone on in LA before the convention. Most of the demonstrations were organized by local people who had been working for months to get march and rally permits, court orders allowing demonstrations to be near the convention at the Staples Center, and restraining orders to prohibit further police harrassment of organizers.

As soon as I got into town, I went to the Convergence Center, an old four-story building that served as a resource center for protestors. It was full of activity, with people coming and going throughout each day and into the night. People attended nonviolence, medical, and legal trainings in rooms on the upper levels. We met in our small affinity groups in whatever space was available, and sent spokespersons from our groups to the "spokescouncil" meetings upstairs each evening to hear updates and to plan actions, using consensus for decision-making. People built giant puppets and painted colorful banners and signs. People helped cook and clean, ate meals, hosted the media, stored their backpacks, made connections, and rested. People of various ages, races, sexual orientations, and concerns worked cooperatively at the Convergence Center and shared the elation and empowerment of being in the streets together throughout the week.

During the four days of the covention, people marched and went to rallies, in spite of the sweltering heat that was reflected and intensified by high rise buildings all around. I carried several bottles of water in my backpack and greeted the occasional tree as a welcome friend.

A militarized police presence was everywhere. Helicopters hovered overhead. Hundreds of officers clad in black riot gear, armed with rifles and gas canisters, lined the streets. They ran in columns or rode on motorcycles alongside marchers. Sometimes they lined up in rows, roughly pushing people back for no apparant reason. At rallies, officers stood tensely or sat on horses, seeming to surround the people because of their numbers. Nevertheless, people were not intimidated. We sang and chanted, marched and danced, determined to exercise our freedom.

Thousands of people marched in the "Human Need, Not Corporate Greed" march on Monday, the first day of the convention. I marched with a contingent of supporters of Jubilee 2000, the international church-led movement calling for a cancellation of the debt of the world's poorest nations. We wore paper chains around our necks, binding us together, to represent the chains of debt that keep poor nations in desperate poverty. We wore signs with the names of nations and the amounts of debt they owe: ....

Other contingents of marchers focused on workers rights, poverty and homelessness, women and children left behind by welfare "reform," lack of access to health care, the need for prison reform, the death of Iraqui children due to sanctions, and other aspects of human need. Some marchers carried banners and wore t-shirts highlighting Al Gore's ownership of stock in Oxidental Petroleum, which is threatening to drill for oil in the environmentally sensitive homeland of the indigenous U'wa people of Colombia. Others marchers focused on corporate sweatshops. People from globalwarming.com wore red t-shirts which simply asked, "What's Your Plan?"

Rousing songs and chants filled the air. Giant paper mache puppets representing "Corporate Greed" pulled the strings of puppets representing Al Gore and George Bush. A contingent of Greens carried a huge Ralph Nader puppet, with signs demanding that he be allowed to enter the debates. Colorful banners, flags, and more puppets, lent a festive air to this and to other marches that were held throughout the week. Thousands of us marched to the Staples Center, where the Democratic National Convention was being held. We walked through the small entrance, lined with police, into the huge enclosure surrounded by 14 foot high chain link fencing that had been set up for protestors. There was no shade inside the enclosure, only concrete and asphalt reflecting the sun. I felt faint from the heat, but drank water and got over it. After the rally, I left with a friend and went back to the Convergence Center.

After we got arrived, word came that police had opened fire on the crowd at the Staples Center, shooting people with rubber bullets and so-called "beanbags," and that they were clubbing people with batons and using CS gas and pepper spray. We quickly cleared all the art supplies out of the downstairs area of the Convergence Center and covered food supplies so they wouldn't be contaminated by gas when people came in. We swept and put down carpet remnants, converting the whole first floor into a first aid station. Injured people started coming in, including Sophia Santiago, a young woman from my affinity group who had stayed after the rally for a concert.

According to Sophia and other people who had been there, several rowdy young people at one edge of the enclosure near the Staples Center began throwing signs and bottles over the fence. By then the crowd of thousands had dwindled to around 500. Instead of arresting or otherwise dealing with the small number of people causing the problems, the police pulled the electricity from the concert and ordered all the people to leave within 15 minutes. Several people said they were trying to find their friends before leaving. Others said that the only exit was blocked by police - that there seemed to be no way out. Everyone said that within a few minutes the police opened fire indiscriminately on the crowd with rubber bullets and beanbags, coming up behind people on horseback and clubbing people's heads with batons. They kept it up even after people had left the enclosure, pursuing people on motorcycle and horseback, chasing them up streets and sidewalks as they fled. Sophia showed me the bruises on the backs of her legs from rubber bullets which police had shot at her after she had left the enclosure. A homeless activist was hospitalized with cardiac arrest after police "beanbag" (actually a metal bag of pellets) hit him in the chest. Children were also among crowd members who were hit. The ACLU has initiated a class action suit for members of the media, who were also brutalized during this incident. Fortunately, the police did not use this kind of indiscriminate violence against protestors during the rest of the week.

On Wednesday morning, I joined in a march against police brutality. Police brutality was one of the issues that had brought me to LA. I had witnessed unprovoked police brutality against peaceful protestors both in Seattle during the WTO protests last November and in Washington DC during the protests against the IMF and World Bank in April. Independent media reports coming from demonstrations at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia told similar stories. Monday night's violent police action against protestors in LA seemed to continued the pattern of cracking down on protestors and attempting to suppress dissent.

Of course, these incidents of police violence are not happening in a vacuum. People of color in this country experience abuse on the streets and in jail every day. Politicians of both parties promote ever tougher approaches to crime. The jail and prison population in this country has doubled in the past five years - there are now over 2 million Americans behind bars. Over 75% of people in jails and prison in this country are people of color. One out of three African American young men are now involved with the criminal justice system. Women are the fastest growing segment of the prison population; over 80% of them have children. The privatization of prisons has created a growing prison-industrial complex. Many companies now use prison labor to keep down labor costs and raise profits, including Victoria's Secret, JC Pennys, Microsoft, and TWA. Prisoners make from eleven to twenty-three cents an hour.

Local residents welcomed us as we marched through mostly Latino Rampart District, coming out of their homes and places of work to wave at us. At the end of the march, 38 of us knelt on the steps and pavement in front of the notorious Rampart Police Station, listing our demands for justice. We were arrested and taken to the LA County Jail.

We spent the next week in jail, together with other protestors. Several women had been arrested at a supporting the U'Wa people of Colombia. One woman had been arrested at a Critical Mass bike ride which was meant to highlight the need for alternatives to the automobile. The police had surrounded the bicyclists on motorcycles, arrested them, and confiscated their bikes. There were 23 of us in all, and a similar number of men.

We were denied books, paper and pens, Bibles, and chapel services. We went through strip searches, lock-downs, chains, 12-hour stints in holding cells, harrassment by guards, group meetings, personal sharing, lying on cold concrete floors watching dopey sitcoms, cheering at the high points of a movie about a labor organizer, "Norma Rae." I feel privileged to have been in jail with such amazing women, strong and courageous, with spiritual depth and insight. The time we spent together was bonding experience that I will never forget.

Nor will I forget the women in the general population, who we spent long hours with in crowded holding cells. Many of them were in for petty crimes - crimes related to poverty or drugs. Some were in for more serious crimes. Many were separated from their children, who they could only see through glass and talk with by telephone. I witnessed overcrowding, unsanitary conditions, chilly rooms, cruel and demeaning words from guards, poor food (including some that was rotten), inadequate medical care. We listened as the women told us about their families, their histories, their medical conditions, their analysis of issues related to the criminal justice system in this country. We laughed and cried with each other. They taught us their songs and we taught them ours, and we sang old gospel hymns together.

Most of the protestors, both men and women, practiced jail solidarity. We refused to give our names until our lawyers and the District Attorney worked out a plea bargain that covered all of us. The purpose of this was to ensure that no one would be singled out for harsher penalties, and that all of us would be released together. We fasted, to protest the deplorable conditions to which the prisoners in the general population are subjected on an ongoing basis. After a week in jail, we were told that we would be released. We pled guilty to an infraction; our penalty was time served.

As we sat in rows in a lobby area in the police station, singing as we waited to be released, we went up one at a time to sign our names and to show our I.D. One of the Catholic Workers, a small woman with long dark hair, was called up before me. Tears filled my eyes as I watched her standing there calm and straight, steadily facing the twenty or so police officers behind the counter. Integrity seemed to radiate out from her very being.

According to the Hebrew prophets, societies are measured not by the material wealth of the rich, but by how they treat their most vulnerable members. I do not see progressive improvement in the lives of the most vulnerable people in our country today, or in the lives of vulnerable people in other countries who are affected by our policies. The poor are growing poorer and the rich richer, and environmental degradation is spreading.

This is not just happening by accident. As Ezra Earl Jones says in Quest for Quality in the Local Church, "The system is designed for the results it is getting." There are powerful vested interests who benefit from the current economic and political system, including transnational corporations and banks, the wealthy few, and those who are in positions of power. Both major political parties support this system and derive benefits from it. But this very system, with its carefully woven fabric of order and wealth on the surface, has an underside which is tangled, tattered, and stained with human misery and environmental destruction.

The service of baptism in the United Methodist Church includes this question: "Do you claim the freedom and power God gives you to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they may present themselves?" When we are baptized, and each time we go through a service reaffirming our baptism, we say "I do" to that vow. Faithfulness to God in this critical time must include claiming the freedom and power God gives us to resist what we understand to be evil, injustice, and oppression in the forms in which we see them presenting themselves in our day. And I am convinced that God will be with us as we seek to be a part of the change that is required.

What is needed is already happening: a global movement of people concerned about injustice is coming together and finding common ground and a common purpose: the end of corporate control of the wealth of the earth and the building of a common future for humanity based upon justice, peace, and the integrity of creation. People are rising up, calling authorities to account. The question is, where will the churches be in this struggle? "As a bee seeks nectar from all kinds of flowers Seek teachings everywhere. Like a deer that finds a quiet place to graze Seek seclusion to digest all that you have gathered. Like a mad one beyond all limits go where you please and live like a lion completely free of all fear."

Dzogchen Tantra