A Veterans Day Story: Iraq Veterans' Emily Yates vs. the Federal Military Machine

By John Grant

When you tuck your children in at night
Don’t tell ‘em it’s for freedom that we fight
                                                                                   - Emily Yates

Story is important. It rules our lives without our really knowing it. Some stories amount to unquestioned cultural assumptions; others, we like to argue over. I often introduced the idea of story to the inmates in my prison writing class by pointing out the trial that got them where they were was a forum of dueling stories -- and their story lost. The point was for them to want to learn how to better tell their stories.

This is because stories are subject to the realities of Power. One of power’s prerogatives is the establishment of institutions that decide whose story matters and whose doesn't. Courts, judges and lawyers are the instruments of this kind of power. This court of dueling stories can sometimes become so absurd that it inspires artists like Franz Kafka whose famous novel The Trial is a black comedy about a hapless man facing a powerfully entrenched court system that feels no need to apprise him why he has been taken into custody and why he's being abused.

In the larger courts of Life, Truth and Art, there’s a long tradition of confronting this kind of abusive power of the state. I include the two-tour Iraq veteran and folk singer Emily Yates in this tradition.

Yates lives in Oakland, California, and in August 2013 she had a music gig in Philadelphia. While here, she agreed to be involved in an antiwar demonstration in the Independence Mall area focused on the bombing of Syria. She also agreed to stick around for a later marijuana legalization rally on the mall. It was a blast-furnace August day, so she was relaxing in a corner of the mall with benches under shade trees.

In an incident reported here in September 2013, uniformed and armed men identified formally as US Park Service: Law Enforcement told her and others they had to move. The others were told why, but for some reason, these law-enforcement rangers would not tell Yates why she  was being ordered to move. She reminded them it was a public park and said she was not going to move until someone told her why she had to move. She testified in her recent assault trial that she knew US Park Service rangers from parks in Oakland and these people were friendly and helpful public servants. She assumed these men were the same. Just like them, she had done eight years of uniformed “service” for her country, in her case in Iraq and elsewhere. She felt she was owed an explanation -- for no other reason than human courtesy. She was no longer in the military, and she felt she did not have to respond as if she was...

For the rest of this article by JOHN GRANT in ThisCantBeHappening!, the new independent, uncompromising, five-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/2537