PORT ANGELES – Journalist Amy Goodman said she faced strenuous questioning from Canadian border guards last week — but when she arrived in Port Angeles on Friday, she reported that a U.S. Customs agent greeted her with “I read your column every week!”
Then there was the crowd awaiting her at the Port Angeles Library: They were adoring, and bookended her speech with two standing ovations.
The “Democracy Now!” host and best-selling author, whose column appears Thursdays in the Peninsula Daily News, unleashed what she called a “double-speed” speech here, in her 10th Pacific Northwest engagement since last Monday.
She’d just appeared in Victoria, and took the MV Coho across to address a capacity crowd of 100, plus a clutch of others hovering outside the library’s Raymond Carver Room.
With two more talks to give Friday — 3:30 p.m. on Bainbridge Island and at 7 p.m. at Town Hall in Seattle – Goodman made the seconds count.
‘Grass-roots activism’
She touched on her belief in grass-roots activism — “what made this country great” — on her lengthy detention last Wednesday just inside the Canadian border, and on her ongoing drive to go where the “corporate media” do not.
Burning through her speech, she read snippets from the columns collected in her new book, Breaking the Sound Barrier, which hails her heroes, from folksinger Pete Seeger to on-the-ground activists such as University of Utah student Tim DeChristopher, who she said foiled a public-lands grab by oil and gas companies.
Her words sparked flashes of applause — and laughter when she described her conversation with Canadian border officials.
Goodman recounted the story of her trip to the Vancouver public library, where she was to speak last Wednesday. Border guards detained her for more than an hour in a hangarlike building, where she said they searched her car and her computer.
“They wanted to see my notes for my speech,” she said, and repeatedly asked exactly what Goodman was going to talk about.
She’d planned to discuss her book, global warming, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the global economic meltdown, as well as Tommy Douglas, who’s known as the father of universal health care in Canada.
“You’re not talking about the [2010] Olympics,” in Vancouver, a guard instructed her, she said.
“I wasn’t planning to,” Goodman said she replied.
The Globe and Mail of Toronto’s British Columbia edition reported that Canadian Border Services Agency Pacific region spokeswoman Faith St. John declined to discuss the specifics of Goodman’s case. St. John said only that border guards are entitled to question people until they’re satisfied that they “meet all requirements of coming into Canada.”
Asked whether the Winter Games have led to any new questions of would-be entrants to Canada, St. John flatly said “no,” the newspaper reported.
St. John told Canwest News Service that there are many reasons that a person may be detained while coming into Canada. “It’s not an accusation of a wrongdoing,” she was quoted as saying.
Death of mother
After describing her detention at the border, Goodman peeled back her tough-journalist shell. In an exquisitely personal story, she remembered her mother, Dorrie Goodman, who died just last month, and brought some in the audience to tears.
During the five weeks Dorrie spent at Mount Sinai Hospital before she succumbed to cancer, her daughter asked other family members to write to her: not get-well cards but real letters about experiences they had shared.
As those flowed in, Goodman read them aloud, and Dorrie reveled in the memories they carried.
“My mother was radiant,” Goodman said, “as she was her whole life.”
Other loved ones came to the hospital to sing and play music, and Dorrie’s granddaughter Ariel wrote her a poetic letter thanking her for her life lessons on kindness.
Dorrie had explored the world, visiting Iran, Turkey, Cambodia and Laos. And when she was blocked at one point from traveling through Israel and Palestine, she stepped forward and told the guards in classical Hebrew, “You will part the way.”
“They did,” said Goodman.
“I tried that at the Canadian border,” she added, to laughter.
After her experience at the border Wednesday, Goodman said she is curious about what Canadian officials are so adamant she not talk about, and plans to look into it.
Left her shaken
The questioning at the border left Goodman shaken and feeling that all too easily, the freedom of the press –and the public’s right to know — can be violated by those with power.
If journalists feel threatened, if they can’t move freely, then the people are going to be less informed, Goodman said. And in this, as in any other point in history, information means power.
When the public has access to good reporting, reporting of the voices otherwise shut out of the national discussion, they’re better equipped to demand positive change, Goodman said. She believes the majority of Americans want universal health care, to start, instead of more trillions poured into war.
“Americans are a compassionate people. They would say no,” to continued carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan, she added.
The media must provide food for the global “kitchen table,” Goodman said, where everyone must have a seat. That food comes from reporting from everywhere and everyone: protesters in the streets, soldiers on the battlefields, the powerful ones inside convention halls and capitols.
With her journalism, Goodman vowed to bring out the stories of those who challenge their leaders. “Democracy is a messy thing. It’s our job to cover it all,” she said.
“Dissent is what will save us,” Goodman added. “That is the American way, much more than war.”
________
Reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
