My Adventures at NCOR

[durutti]

The National Conference on Organized Resistance (NCOR) is an annual convention for progressive and radical activists held at American University. Mostly, it involves a bunch of workshops, a bunch of films, and a bunch of infoshops and socialist groups peddling books and such. It used to be called the National Conference on Civil Disobedience. They showed it on C-SPAN at least one previous year.

I really wanted to go last year, but it scheduled for the same weekend as anti-war convergence in Pittsburgh, so I didn't. I really wanted to go this year, and I did.

My aunt lives just outside DC, so I tried to arrange to stay with her over the weekend. She never got back to me. So I looked to POG, a group with which I'm tangentially involved.

After much emailed confusion, I finally secured a ride. We agreed to meet at her house at 4:00 p.m.

Well, a ride from Pittsburgh to DC, anyway. Getting from Greensburg to Pittsburgh was another matter.

I wanted to use one of two family cars. Unfortunately, one was broken -- meaning that my parents had to use the remaining one. So much for that plan.

So I called friends, offering to pay for a ride to Pittsburgh. Only one was willing to drive. We'll call him Pippin. We arranged to meet somewhere on the UPG campus at 4:00 p.m.

At around 1:00 p.m. the next day, I realized something: I'd told Pippin the wrong time. I had to be there *by* 4:00. Shit.

The idiots at UPG long ago removed all the pay phones, figuring that everyone had a cell phone (I don't). So I could only make local calls. I called my mom at work, and got her to call Pippin and tell him about my mistake. I told her I'd call her back in 45 minutes, after my Bible as Literature class.

Turns out Pippin couldn't make it after all -- no matter what time he had to pick me up. So I ran around campus, offering everyone I know (and some I don't know) money to drive me to Pittsburgh.

I found someone. We easily get to my ride's house at about 3:00. I give him $5.00 for gas and head in.

My ride -- we'll call her Dr. Dependable -- was elated that I'd arrived early. We could leave early and beat the snow. Her boyfriend -- we'll call him Viking -- would be driving half the time. Dr. Dependable is a Ph.D. candidate. She's in her late 20s, but looks like she could be in high school. Viking is a bearded union organizer.

The drive down to DC was nice. We listened to Dead Prez and The Roots and talked about music and school and politics. We arrived in DC at around 7:00 p.m. Our other POG friends were a few hours behind us.

Viking used to live in DC. We stayed with some of his friends, who live right next to the Howard University campus.

The guy who owned the house (one of them, at least) was the first that I met. I think his name was Steve. He was kinda tall. He was a law student at GWU, affiliated with the National Lawyers Guild. There were already a bunch of other people there, many of them obviously just friends and not in DC for the conference, and some of them immensely annoying -- but I remain congenial.

Then they broke out the alcohol. Yuengling and some beers with names I can't remember.

I don't identify with the straight-edge movement, and I'm hardly a "pure" straight-edger. I don't use any illegal drugs. But I do drink caffeinated beverages. I'm not vegan. I'm sexually abstinent only because I'm too pathetic an individual to have any kind of a steady relationship, let alone have sex. And I do occasionally drink alcohol. But only occasionally. I never drink beer or wine. and I only rarely drink liquor.

I react to being around drugs and alcohol with a mixture of fascination and revulsion. Sometimes, drunk and stoned people entertain me. And I like to be around friends, whether they're sober or not. On the other hand, I find myself tempted to partake, and I find it difficult to connect with people who are in a different state of consciousness than myself. And of course, alcohol is, as someone else on pittpunk pointed out, a "social lubricant". Being around people who are so uninhibited when I'm always so uptight can be disconcerting.

Anyway. They found me some scotch to drink. I got modestly buzzed. They poured me another glass, which I put on the floor. Bad move -- it quickly got kicked over by someone passing through.

The folks who were behind us were supposed to be bringing some whiskey. So we called them. I turned out that they'd hit a bad snow storm that we'd just missed. So much for Jack Daniels. I went to bed.

"Bed" consisted of a carpeted floor, a blanket, and backpack used as a pillow. It would turn out to be a much better bed than any I'd encounter the rest of the weekend.

We drove to AU early the next morning. I paid my $10 to register and headed off to "Searching for the New Super Memes: Inventing Irresistable Ideas". Then I got bored and went to "Was the Campaign of Civil Disobedience Against the Iraq War Successful?"

I then attended "I'm Anti-Authoritarian and I Don't Vote (or Should I)?", an excellent workshop that almost everyone from Pittsburgh attended. During the Q&A session, the panelists were angrily denounced as "class traitors" by members of the Spartacist League who read off some rehearsed bit (obviously written by someone else) about how the Democrats are an "obstacle" to build the One True Workers' Vanguard Party in the form of (surprise surprise) the Spartacist League.

Lunch consisted of some bread, chips, pretzels, and there awful imitation meat sandwiches. Mine was so bad that I had to run to the bathroom to spit it up.

The organizers -- who were easily recognized by their red NCOR T-shirts, which they were also selling for $10 -- had a habit of standing on tables an clapping to get people's attention. They seemed like they should have been in an exercise video -- inhumanly cheery yet stand-offish.

After lunch, I attended "A Field Guide to Marxist Social Theory". It was taught by two AU professors who were interrupted angrily by the Sparts with every point they tried to make.

After walking around and checking out all the tables, I met up with the Pittsburgh folks, to see what everyone was doing. Most of them were going to this "Radical Intimacy" workshop -- the kind of thing I'd be embarassed to be seen at.

So I went to the Sparts' workshop to heckle them. I learned that they supporters of NAMBLA and advocated defending the "workers' states" of China, Vietnam, North Korea, and Cuba. They are, in short, a nutty cult, much like the LaRoucheites.

The workshop ran pretty long. By the time it ended, the place had gotten a lot more quiet. And when I got to the lobby, no one from Pittsburgh was there.

I searched every room in the place. No luck. I waited for two or three hours. It was futile.

So there I was, at American University at Washington, DC, with no idea how to get back to where I was supposed to be staying and no way to contact anyone from Pittsburgh. I'd been abandoned.

You're probably thinking that someone eventually came to my rescue and all was well.

No.

I was left to wander the streets of the nation's capital 'til the wee hours of the morning, when I found a church that I could stay at. Unfortunately, the church had no heat, and I had no pillow or blanket, so I didn't sleep that night.

Interestingly, this isn't the first time I've had to do wander around cold, cold Washington, DC for hours. When I was arrested there last September, I didn't get out of jail until 5:00 a.m., leaving me with no place to go.

I took the metro back to AU the next day. When I got there, I gorged myself on croissants. I saw some Pittsburgh folks, but not my ride. Even though it was no one from Pittsburgh's fault *but* my ride, I think I generalized my anger, and gave them the silent treatment for most of the rest of the day.

One Pittsburgher -- call her May -- came up and hugged me, saying that they were "so worried" about me. I smiled and said it was no big deal. I wanted to say that that's not much of a consolation. I also considered finding Dr. Dependable's/Viking's car and slashing their tires.

Those two ran into me about halfway through lunch. I got hugs and the predictable bullshit about "feeling so bad". I smiled and nodded. I wanted to strangle them both.

We went to a few more workshops (I saw Ian MacKaye and Robin Hahnel, a pretty well-known leftist economist) and headed home.

The roads got so bad that we decided to rent a hotel room for the night. They dropped me off at my grandparents' house in Ligonier this morning.

I realize that it was a confusing situation, with many people traveling in many different cars, and that it was easy to lose track of people. I'm sure it was just an honest mistake. But this is a seriously emotionally scarring experience. A big part of a working relationship among political activists is trust. I don't know if I'll ever trust these people again.

Other conclusions this conference has helped me come to:

1. Punk is the single worst thing to ever happen to activism in the United States. It inhibits our ability to build popular movements by alienating working people.

2. I hate the word "activist". It implies that everyone else is passive.

3. The Sparts really are as crazy as people make them out to be.

4. Too many "activists" are contemptuous of working people and either oblivious to or in denial of their own privilege.

5. PETA is stupid.

All in all, though, I enjoyed the event, and plan on returning next year.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

1. The Sparticist Youth League? Are they still around?

They go back at least 30 years, and it was rumored back then that they were a government front group of disruptors. Look at what they espouse:NAMBLA? It's as if they're trying to be the middle class nightmare vision of radical activists.

Your report shores up my longstanding suspicion that they're government infiltrators and disruptors.

[NightTrain]

2. As one who was born and raised working class...

...I wholeheartedly concur with this statement:

<<4. Too many "activists" are contemptuous of working people and either oblivious to or in denial of their own privilege.>>

I once heard a college-aged activist say, "Well, we don't really need the working people, anyway. What has the working class ever contributed to the progressive cause?"

I got in the kid's face and replied, "Ever heard of labor unions?"