Philosophy In The Park

ACROSS THE street from the White House lies Lafayette Park. Two worlds are joined and separated by Pennsylvania Avenue.

On the south side in a mansion at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. lives Ronald Reagan.Across the street, without address or visible means of support. Lives a man known as Thomas. He began his vigil here on June 3, 1981, and was there yesterday, three years later, his beard bushy, his hair held in a tail by an elastic band.

Mr. Reagan lives well housed AND well fed. The crumbs from his table would feed Thomas for a week. Thomas lives under the stars, exposed to rain and snow,summer and winter, without tent or sleeping bag. He feeds like the pigeons in the park, on what comes along. Sometimes he forages in a dumpster.

Mr. Reagan, across the street, issues moral messages against abortion and an evil empire, for freedom, the market and school prayer.

Thomas tends his messages night and day. They line the sidewalk facing the White House. signs OF all sizes and shapes, in various colors, with drawings of a mushroom cloud or skulls. Angled, side by side, they stand like a moral Maginot Line resisting the White House.

On Strike Till Bombs Are Dropped, Join Us,says one message. Another: Dear Uncle Sam, I Like You But I Hate Your Bombs. Let God's Children Go. Love, Thomas. And another: Mother Earth Loves You. Love Her Back Ban The Bomb. The messages go on, extending along the sidewalk by the edge of the park.

Yesterday I stopped to chat with Thomas, as I have done before. He Is not a fanatic with burning eye and stabbing finger, a fevered Savonarola of Lafayette Park. No, he is soft spoken, intelligent, affable, natural, with gentle blue-grey eyes behind black horn-rimmed glasses, a man wlth the determination of an Ezekiel, the message of a Jonah, the disposition of a St. Frances of Assisi. Talking with him in the sunshine, I thought of the Hebrew prophets, the medieval monks - all people of uncompmmising conviction. unqualified Consistency.

Abandoned money

Now 37, he went to school to the eighth grade, but: has read Plato and discusses Socrates. He was a businessman, but day had a kind ot vfsian. "Two ideas came to my mind: in order to be free, one must own nothing. And time is money." For him, time money meant that to save his time -- that is life -- he had to abandon money.

"Love of money is the root of all evil." He takes literally that biblical saying. He decided to live without money, went to one of the poorest parts of the world, walked, penniless, from Casablanca to Morocco to Cairo, not begging, eating what people gave him or what he found. He concluded that money -- evil -- Is not necessary for life.

One day, he concluded that states oppress people, Including his own country, the United States of America, so he threw his pass into the Thames in London and chose to a stateless person. But the world of states resisted. He spent a year in an Egyptian prison, was seized by the Israelis and expelled from the country. He was in jail in England and then deported to the United States. He protests that he is held In this country against his will.

He set up his vigil in front of the White House ta communicate the wisdom he has learned. His occupation, now, is to be a philosopher. He speaks to the world by his signs, by conversations with passersby. He has gathered a little community of half a dozen people who. like him. are homeless for a cause, and live in Lafayette Park. He speaks, above all, by his example, his life of renunciation.

The police harass him and he has been arrested innumerable times, his signs confiscated ar broken. He comes back, defends his right to free expression in the courts, makes more signs clings to his turf. He sleeps little, by snatches: if the police catch him in deep sleep they can charge him with camping. He insists he is not camping, but exercising his right "to speak out against the forms of political and technical insanity which presently threaten all life on Earth."

Like Ezekiel he stands at the gate, prophets prophesying,speaking to Pharaoh, saying let my People go.

Inaugural Articles - 1997 - 1993 - 1989 - 1985 - 1981 -

January 1997

In case you're looking for us (White House Peace Vigil - Peace Park anti-nuclear vigil - and friends) our signs have been moved across Lafayette Park to H Street, as has happened every four years since the vigil began in June, 1981.

Meanwhile a dozen large mobile homes rest on the grass of the southern half of Lafayette Park for the construction crews' comfort. Police patrol regularly, in part to make sure no homeless people crawl under the empty trailers in the icy dark of night. The bricks where office workers and tourists usually walk have been torn up, and huge - ugly - three-story bleachers rise in the space where our vigil normally stands, along the north side of Pennsylvania Avenue, so the press -- for one afternoon -- may stay warm and dry and near bathrooms while President Clinton has his second inaugural parade. The bathrooms on the north side of the park are locked, though construction workers again (as in past years) have for their use several porta-johns which are locked at night. Fences of every variety are intricately laid out to block demonstrators into the northeast corner of the park during the Big Event.

Ronald Reagan tried to have a second inaugural parade but it was so cold Inauguration Day 1985, the president had to call it off, and the quarter-million-dollar bleachers went unused. We were shivering and dancing in the northeast quadrant of the park, giving credit to God for a good sense of humor.

The vigil began five months after Reagan's first inauguration. At that time, people were allowed to demonstrate on the White House sidewalk. After a campaign by the Washington Times in 1983, new regulations were written banishing the vigil to Lafayette Park. During the wee hours of the morning, when tourists weren't about, police hovered and often arrested the vigilers. Department of Interior lawyers wrote a "camping" regulation which was used to criminalize (see CCNV case, U.S. Supreme Court, 1984) what was formerly protected behavior (see Abney case, U.S. Court of Appeals, 1976).

Since there are private citizens who insist on paying for this desecration of Lafayette Park every four years (via the Inaugural Committee), we're stuck with the bleachers again this year. So I'm writing President Clinton asking him, as I asked President Reagan in 1985, at least to leave the bleachers up for the rest of the winter, for homeless people to get out of the cold, wet, snowy, icy streets. I'm not asking for us -- we will remain at our signs with the minimal amount of protection necessary to survive. We are asking on behalf of the homeless sleeping on the DC streets (in spite of police harassment) ... still, after all these years.

Ellen Thomas
PEACE PARK ANTINUCLEAR VIGIL
PO Box 27217, Washington, DC 20038 USA
202-462-0757
prop1@prop1.org