by Becca Shaw Glaser & Nathan Kroms Davis August 22, 2019, The Free Press
In 2018, for the first time in its 70-year history, the Maine Lobster Festival in Rockland banned “politics” from its Big Parade. Rumours spread that this was partly done because festival organizers wanted to find a way to prevent Midcoast Maine Indivisible (MCMI) from participating in the parade, without appearing to discriminate against that particular group and its aim of “grassroots resistance to the Trump agenda.” In summer 2017, the Lobster Fest denied MCMI’s parade application twice in a row — first under MCMI’s name, and then under its subcommittee, Friends of the Maine Lobster. No substantive reasons were given for denying MCMI’s participation. Then, nine months later, in April 2018, the Lobster Festival Board voted to ban all “politics” from the parade. The parade application now reads, “The Maine Lobster Festival is a non-partisan, secular and neutral private event which celebrates our community, our people and our lobsters. Because of this we will no longer be accepting political applications.”
What is political? And who gets to define it? This year’s “neutral” parade featured a tank (the British Ferret), and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), parading with an official CBP truck, SUV, and boat, emblazoned with the propaganda, “Protected by U.S. Border Patrol.”
Becca asked Lobster Festival president Celia Knight and parade organizer Jen Chapman about how the politics ban occurred. She also asked how CBP qualified under the new requirements, and, “How do you see [CBP] as celebrating lobster, our community, and our people, and how were they considered in keeping with a “neutral” entity?”
Knight said that, “That is correct that we made the decision to exclude politicians and political groups from our parade. We wish to remain a family-friendly parade, many parades around the state and country have also done this. The Maine Lobster Festival does not want to choose sides and this way we don’t have any heckling from parade-goers if they don’t like a candidate or their party marching in our parade. As for the Border Patrol, our Grand Marshal this year was “any and all veterans”; the Border Patrol participated in this as part of the Veteran section of the more than 500.”
While we can understand why the festival would want to avoid heckling, doesn’t it seem likely that the inclusion of CBP might invite heckling? It would be one thing to claim neutrality if the CBP and other veterans had marched in their personal vehicles or on foot, but they were parading down Main Street in official CBP vehicles and a tank. There is just no way that the military and CBP are not political — it is about as political as one can get — no matter what president they are working under. We need to ask where is the line between a glorification of the military, a military ticker tape parade, versus a celebration of the humanity of people who have been involved in wars? How might we recognize and celebrate veterans’ full humanity without glorifying the physical weapons of war or the execution or intent of those wars? Would Veterans for Peace have been allowed to march in the parade? And aren’t these questions the very definition of political?
We also wonder how CBP could be considered “family-friendly.” In discussions of the parade and subsequent controversy, some people have said of CBP, “Well, they’re not ICE.” It’s true that ICE gets a lot of press. But in reality, most of the viral images of kids in cages come from CBP facilities. It is CBP which has been telling women to drink out of toilets, denying children toothbrushes, packing in hundreds of men into spaces where they cannot even lay down for days at a time; and of course CBP is also ripping infants from parents, on any given day incarcerating 2,000 children. It is CBP who have been boarding Concord Trailways and Cyr Bus Lines in Maine to demand citizenship papers. It is CBP who asks Mainers to call in and report people “suspected” to not be citizens. It is CBP which executes orders and implements policies of intentional cruelty.
While it makes sense to want to feel safe, we must at the same time be vigilant about what is being done, supposedly, in “our” name. When the Lobster Festival lets CBP parade through our streets in their official vehicles, particularly while claiming to have a “no politics” policy, they are in effect helping our small city normalize and be complicit in some of the worst actions of the federal government.
There is no banning politics. Politics is about differences in power and representation. Politics is about the cleanliness or pollution in the air we breathe, the ground we walk on, the thoughts we think, even about who we love, and who we see as deserving of freedom of movement and, fundamentally, deserving of basic human rights.