On May 15, 2016, myself, a few other GC students, and a few other people from the Elkhart County area drove up to Whiting, Indiana to participate in Break Free Midwest. Whiting is right outside of Chicago (as in, I could see the downtown Chicago skyline from where I was), and is also home to a giant oil refinery owned by BP. The whole rally and march was connected to a larger number of Break Free protests that were taking place all across the country over the course of the first half or so of May.
Now, if you want to learn more about the protest itself, click the link above. This is a story about my experience there, what I learned, and what I saw.
We got into Whiting around 1 p.m. CT. Whiting is a small town; there’s a small ice cream shop, a couple general stores, narrow streets -- it looks like your typical small Indiana town. Until you look near the lake. At the lake there is a massive black structure towering over the town. It’s visible from nearly everywhere, and there’s smoke and flame and huge tank-like silos filled with oil. That’s the oil refinery. From the time we entered Whiting to the time we parked, we saw state police, sheriffs, county police, city police, so many forms of law enforcement. But by the oil refinery, my friend Peter and I saw men dressed in military garb. There were armored cars, and the men were all standing in formation, holding batons. I cursed out loud, and in that moment I realized that what we were doing there was big. Protests like this one threaten the status quo that keeps people in line. We were threatening that, and if anything went wrong, things would get violent.
We parked outside the park where the rallies were, holding up hand-made signs and listening to what the speakers had to say. There were several speakers at the rally. One speaker, Claire McClinton, talked about the failure of democracy that was the situation revolving around the Flint water crisis, and how the emergency managers put in place by Governor Snyder put democracy at risk. The thing that angered me most about the things she said was that, in one school, all the teachers were fired and the school was restocked by private companies, with very little oversight. As someone whose life has largely been shaped by the teachers she has had, this infuriated me. Another speaker, Tara Houska, is the Native American Advisor for Bernie Sanders, and she talked about how a pipeline, Enbridge 5, is especially damaging to indigenous peoples within the Great Lakes region. There were other speakers, but a week out of the experience, these are the two that stuck with me the most.
After the speakers, it was time for the march itself. As we were walking to the actual starting point of the march, a man with a drum and a very loud voice was leading chants, and our little group joined right in with him. When we reached the march, my friend Sarah and I were given a large banner to carry. We carried it for awhile, starting chants and joining chants as we marched through the Whiting streets. As we went by the refinery, the chants grew.
About an hour into the march, a part of our group had to leave early, so we passed our banners along to other protesters and left the line. According to the people who stayed awhile longer, the march lasted until they reached the BP headquarters, and those who chose to practice civil disobedience went in and were arrested soon after.
Leaving the protest, I began processing how much I had learned. The BP refinery was hurting so many people around Chicago by making the area essentially poison. The fight for renewable energy and divesting from fossil fuels has never been clearer to me as it is now. We don’t have a choice anymore. We don’t divest, commit to renewable energy, or we are taking this earth down with us.
