Bright pink Not Dead Yet T-shirts already filled the wide sidewalk in front of the Embassy Suites when I arrived the morning of Day 1 of the protests. My first assignment was to engage conference attendees who were looking for conversation. I met Janis Landis, vice president of Final Exit Network, the American host group, on two of her forays into the protest site.
Landis, a trim older white woman, told me that she understood our position but that we did not understand theirs. She defended FEN’s assistance in the suicide of Arizonan Jana Van Voorhis, basically saying that Van Voorhis ‘s psychological suffering was real enough to warrant the organization’s assistance. (Jana Van Voorhis, a mentally ill woman without serious physical illness, was helped in killing herself by FEN volunteers, as documented by the PBS Frontline episode “The Suicide Plan”.)
Before I came to Chicago, I submitted an op-ed piece to the Chicago Tribune detailing some of the horror stories out of Europe. I decided to use the piece as my speech during the opening program, especially since by then I didn’t expect the Tribune to publish it. Afterwards, a tall affable white man dressed in the jacket and slacks of the academic elite came over and asked me for a copy of my speech. ”I liked what I could hear of it,” he said. He told me that his name was Lewis Cohen and he was writing an article for the Atlantic Monthly, and also working on a book about assisted suicide. He told me he was a Massachusetts palliative care doctor who pushed for the assisted suicide referendum question in 2012, and congratulated us for our victory.
I found a clip of Cohen from 2012, in which he said of the Massachusetts assisted suicide bill, “This is something that gives people confidence.” Against the evidence and disabled people’s own experience, Cohen said that doctors are able to predict someone’s death. He did agree with me – and even started his tape recorder, when I talked about the class makeup of the early and current death proponents: white, wealthy, well-educated, secular, and relatively fit. These people, I said, approach life as a buffet table of choices, in which they are in control and can predict outcomes. For the rest of us, life is immediate and chaotic, with daily struggles to get our needs met uppermost in our minds. I suspect that Cohen is one of the disturbingly large group which understands and accepts many of our criticisms, but supports assisted suicide anyway as a boon to himself and his class. I would think being a public advocate for legalized assisted suicide would put your qualifications for easing people’s pain into question.
(Editor’s note: Conference attendee Thaddeus Pope tweeted a picture of conference attendees at a presentation – they appeared to be all white – and Pope made note of the lack of diversity in his tweet.)
The rest of Thursday went by with lots of great chanting, and on Friday we were bolstered by the arrival of a bus of ADAPT activists coming from their Little Rock action. Not Dead Yet troubadour Elaine Kolb brought musical instruments to the protest, so I got to whack a cowbell with a stick in my mouth and hum into a kazoo that I don’t think many people could hear, as the chanting was very loud!
In the afternoon, I got to be part of a small delegation to the Tribune building, where we didn’t have much luck getting the attention of a distracted lunch-eating radio staffer. The Tribune had run a puff piece on the conference, essentially a pro-assisted suicide press release with first paragraph. We asked why we were getting no coverage, and I gave her a copy of my op-ed submission. We left doubting that we would ever hear back or see a reporter on site.
A plan was hatched on Friday to block enough doors of the hotel so that conference attendees leaving for their gala dinner ½ mile away would have to pass by chanting protesters. I was part of the group that blocked one end of the driveway and then the doors connecting the hotel to the valet parking area. I was nervous but everyone else seemed matter of fact, including Granny, an African-American scooter user in her 80’s and a long time Rochester ADAPT activist. Three angry guys forced open the door that I was next to, bending Rochester ADAPT activist David’s cane, but they were not part of the conference. After they got through, I belatedly parked my 550 pounds of wheelchair in front of the door edge. We kept the doors blocked for a while longer, until the police negotiated that door to be opened. Once reunited with the other protesters, we learned that the partygoers did have to walk the gauntlet of Not Dead Yet protesters.
The intense experience of group action, the police, and all the comings and goings of our leadership as it improvised tactics on the fly, made me think of what Texas member Heiwa Salovitz had told me the day before, that these protests are a “good bonding experience.” Obviously, we’re not there to bond. But, here and now, in the early part of the 21st Century, most of us maintain our communication and connectedness with others through social media. Being together for days, short on sleep, voices shot – all toward a common goal – we all connect in a way that doesn’t happen anywhere else.
That night, we learned about the plan to shut down all four elevators simultaneously as the conference delegates went to breakfast. I joined Diane Coleman in the atrium lobby of the Embassy Suites the next morning at 7:15 AM to watch. At 7:40 AM, everyone in the lobby tipped their heads up towards the protest chant echoing down the hollow atrium from the 17th floor. Hotel guests emerged from their rooms to watch as staff and guests were bewildered. We got to see the dropping of the Not Dead Yet banner from an upper floor, even though it was quickly snatched down from below.
No elevator moved for almost an hour – we shut down the hotel! (We were told that we were a fire hazard, but promised to get out of the way if there was an actual fire.) I eased over to the stairs, and watched conference attendees sputtering and muttering out of the stairwell, some complaining that “It’s not fair.” Just as the full impact of what we had done was occurring to people, Richard Côte – leading American death advocate and author of a bowdlerized “history” of the Death Movement – walked by Diane and said “Good turnout!” A Final Exit Network member came over and started leaning over Diane’s shoulder looking at her cell phone screen, meanwhile spouting nonsense about how the group does not target non-terminal disabled people, which is belied by their website.
A hotel official came over and told Diane that she would have to leave the hotel because she was not a guest. Diane calmly said that she was invited by one of the hotel’s guests (NDY Board member Carrie Lucas), explained to him that many different people and disability groups were participating, and offered to call up the leadership team to discuss how to resolve immediate situation. That was not satisfactory. She also agreed to leave, but only as the last person out. When the police did get the elevators going again, escorting protesters out one by one, the chanting started up in the lobby and continued on the street outside, “We don’t need your suicide; Not Dead Yet keeps us alive!” We rejoined the ongoing vigil, and the civil disobedience concluded with our message delivered.
