About mid-afternoon, the motorcycles came through, an estimated 800 or so that travel up Victory Drive from the God Bless Fort Benning rally downtown and cut over to Torch Hill Road to loop by the protest site and head back.
They make a deep rumble at the Torch hill turn and then roar back to Victory, and protesters usually just watch and wave, though the annual motorcycle brigade is not a pro-protest parade.
Mike Ring knew it wasn’t. “It was the thrill of my life,” he said sarcastically after the bikes went by.
Ring came from Wall, N.J., for the protest, his fifth trip here. He’s familiar with the annual motorcycle run from the downtown rally out to the protest.
“It’s done because of this,” Ring said. “But I don’t let that kind of thing agitate me so much that I get disturbed.”
Ring is among the “prisoners of conscience,” those who have trespassed onto Fort Benning in a show of civil disobedience. Unlike others, he did no time for that 2004 crime. He got a year’s probation and a $1,000 fine.
His daughter-in-law is from El Salvador, he said. Growing up there, she walked by dead bodies on her way to school. She fled the country after being labeled a “student protester,” which marked her for arrest. Had she been arrested, she would have disappeared, he said.
That’s why he crossed the line. “I had to do it,” he said. “I really had to do it.”
He and wife Mary notice a different air about the demonstration now. “The police here are very polite,” said Mary Ring. Added her husband, “It just doesn’t seem as hostile as it used to be.”
With a forest-green beret on his head and a bowl of grits in his hand, Columbus native Bo Bartlett walked among those protesting the Fort Benning institute once called the School of the Americas and thought about what a remarkable day this is for his hometown.
Bartlett, an artist, now splits his time between Washington State and Maine, but tries to come home to Columbus every year for the annual SOA Watch protest.
This morning he had been downtown, listening to speakers at the Columbus Convention & Trade Center. “The auditoriums were full,” he said. After gathering there with the protesters to talk and sing about peace and justice, he walked over to Broadway to get a cup of coffee, and entered the God Bless Fort Benning rally, where he was surrounded by soldiers. He said there he heard someone shout, “I am a killing machine!”
“Talk about juxtaposition,” said Bartlett, who described the experience as “surreal.”
And inspiring: “This is a celebration of democracy,” he said of the city’s twin events, which invite folks either to show their appreciation to Fort Benning or protest the post’s Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. Columbus is the kind of town that can accommodate both, he said.
Later he gave a ride to some protesters en route to the Fort Benning gate, and upon learning his vocation, they wondered whether he had any paintings about the protest.
He does have one, he said, called “Swords to Plowshares,” which depicts muscular men at a forge beating swords into plowshares, with people behind them plowing fields. The setting, he said, “is a day much like this,” bright and clear.
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