A Good Kind of Chaos

By Roberto Lovato, AlterNet. Posted July 27, 2004.

Over the past weekend I attended the Boston Social Forum held at the University of Massachusetts campus. Concentrated in three hulking brown buildings dedicated to the academic fields of social and physical sciences, dialects and dialectics pressed against each other in the cacophonous and crowded hallways, classrooms, and auditoriums. There were more than 600 events at the forum, covering every imaginable political issue.

The place was chaotic in an uplifting and exhilarating way. Most of the people I spoke with recognized the challenges of promoting their wide-ranging agenda, and were remakably willing to face the underlying general difficulties of events like the Boston Social Forum (BSF).

Despite the mix of focus on issues, attendees did seem to agree on one thing, though. No image was more (un)popular than Bush's. His face appeared on posters, in art works (one great one was a collage of religious images with Bush in the center in the shape of a mandala with a caption beneath that quoted Bush saying, "Our priorities is our faith"), and on buttons ("He lied, they died").

That Bush has become as much a cultural force as a political force, as much a uniter as a disuniter, was all apparent at the BSF, where I saw children with "Stop Bush" t-shirts and babies bearing buttons with big capital W's with a line drawn through them.

Diversity at the Forum

Though many of the issues debated and discussed at the BSF involved and impacted non-whites, attendance at the BSF – like attendance at most progressive events in this country – was overwhelmingly white; this despite the fact that in Boston and in most major U.S. cities – as well as most of the world – whites are a statistical minority. This disconnect between more affluent white progressives and "people of color" did not escape the few African Americans, Latinos, Asians and Native Americans in attendance.

Barbara Salvaterra, a BSF organizer, who was born in Brazil and attended the founding World Social Forum event in Porto Alegre, sees this disconnect as one of the primary obstacles to developing the common language among U.S. progressives, "The big difference between the Porto Alegre and other World Social Forum events and the BSF is that those events came about because the efforts of the movimientos de base, the grassroots movements. The social movements are already very developed while here in the United States it seems like they're not." Salvaterre speaks three languages and has a political vocabulary with a breadth rooted in a political culture that draws hundreds of thousands, even millions to World Social Forums and other events.

In this sense and in the context of the United States, Salvaterra is a political muse. "Change has to come and end with the base. You can't just have change from above – including in our movements," Salvaterre said, adding, "you also have to celebrate more with music, dance and culture."

Adopting the language of chaos

Roberto Lovato is a Los Angeles-based writer. This article was produced under the auspices of the George Washington Williams Fellowship of the Independent Press Association.

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