Tripping the Outlet

To encapsulate urban America’s divisions and tensions and unities, one need look no further than the grocery store. There are so many, sometimes so close, yet always so far. You must choose where to shop. Whole Paycheck? Trader Joe’s? The Safeway in the Hills? The Safeway on San Pablo? Grocery Outlet?

The Outlet thrives under adversity. Paycheck thrives under disparity.

Since years before the deluge, I shopped at the Outlet. I used to lock up my bike and slink through the dirty aisles with head hung low, embarrassed not only by my bank account, but the discrimination of other white people too.

One must dress down to shop at the Outlet.

One waits in line and finds oneself surrounded by dirty folk, poor folk, black folk, Asians and Mexicans and who-knows-whats. Maybe they recognize you and remember your halting, paltry efforts to relate to them, you among the legions who are taking their neighborhoods from beneath their feet in a parallel universe of protected prosperity.

The Outlet’s customers are the first line of defense. They do not want you there, they tell you.

The employees have no choice but to want you there, or so you have been told. And yet eventually they leer at you too. They turn their carts suddenly in front of you. They answer your questions with words bored and surly. Their attitudes sour, and you cannot take it personally because then that makes it worse, worse and worse every week, so that sometimes you don’t want to go back. They don’t want me there, fuck them! But where else can I go? I’m unemployed too, you want to tell them. I grew up here too, you want to tell them. They do not care. You are a meal ticket. You do not receive food stamps. You are their overlords’ target, not theirs.

But the more you come back, the more they seem to seek you out. They bother you, yell at you, and ask derisively if you want cash back even after you have already pressed the “No” button.

Once a cashier at the Outlet became impatient with my arrangement of foods on the conveyer belt and took it into his own hands to rearrange them, and rudely force the plastic divider into my groceries’ hindparts. He was not smiling, but the dirty black couple behind me were.

I had cash. Nervously fished my wallet out my pocket and held it conspicuously in my right hand while I waited for him to ask for money.

“You don’t get the fruits in the same bag,” he said.

“Oh sorry.”

“Put your fruits in different bags.”

“Oh man, damn, I didn’t mean to, they were all mixed up or somethin’, haha!”

In the line next to ours they started yelling about “Cash,” and this was because I had raised my voice and tried to be friendly to them. You raise your voice and they raise theirs. They wish to make me unwelcome. They compel themselves to anger. I’d felt the same way when I got a hamburger at IHOP, where some miserable family pounced upon my every motion, and the fat mother with a baby in the neighboring booth asked the waiter pointedly for “Hot Chocolate” and her eyes squirmed unpredictably at me while she breathed audibly through her piggish snout.

Like I do at the Outlet, I glowered and lowered my head. These people don’t know me. They don’t know anything about me.

But maybe it’s also because they like something about me, I begin to understand. They want to see what will make me tick, because I don’t look like an ordinary white person.

They want me to think about them, to psychoanalyze they and their motivations and consider them the forces that must be reckoned with. There’s something unfair about that, because I love Oakland but these people do not make it easy.

And I gracelessly leave Grocery Outlet stuffing foods into my backpack, and when I reach my bicycle I am relieved that the front tire is still there and that the homeless person sitting on the curb does not ask for money. Instead he pointedly ignores my presence.

They yell at me but they want me there. They are getting to know me, but I would rather be ignored. They are invading my privacy, they are studying my habits and they are talking about me. They want me to run their gauntlet. I will do no such thing.

It is time for me to find a new grocery store. The Outlet’s usefulness has run its course. I will find a new and more hospitable grocery. This is my resolution — that is, until the reality of yawning price differences dawns anew, at which point it becomes clear that progressively more miserable returns to the Outlet are as inevitable as they ever were.

Knocking at the Door

It was the California take on the shotgun shack: a squat, adobe-style bungalo partitioned from the sidewalk by a ratty fence and a cement lawn.

The door opened before he had knocked three times, which meant Mr. Julius had been right there waiting for it.

“What can I do for you, officer?” he asked, smiling wide.

“Are you Hanover Julius? The owner of this property?” Officer Jefferson asked.

Mr. Julius nodded.

“A woman placed a 9-1-1 call from this address.”

Hanover Julius held the door open with one hand, barring Jefferson’s view. His smile withered. His eyes lowered to Officer Jefferson’s shoes.

“Do you have a wife, Mr. Julius?”

Mr. Julius did not answer.

“Are there any women living here, Mr. Julius?”

“Ain’t nobody here but me.”

“Do you mind if I take a look around?”

“There is no emergency here, Officer.”

“I am obliged to search the premises, sir.”

“Look, this just ain’t none of your business.”

“You are legally obliged to let us onto the premises, Mr. Julius.”

Mr. Julius did not let go of the door. His other hand was behind his back. Officer Jefferson’s hand strayed to the plastic, rubber-gripped handle of his taser, holstered to his belt. He reminded himself how rarely his instincts failed him.

“Officer, just leave me be. Leave us be. This is my house. I’m not gonna say please.”

“Open the door, Mr. Julius.”

“I won’t.”

“You are refusing the orders of a peace officer.”

“I am.”

“You hurt your wife, didn’t you?”

“It ain’t your damn business.”

Officer Jefferson clicked on the mic attached to his collar, and radioed for backup. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Hanover Julius make a sudden movement. He might have been closing the door, or swinging the hand behind his back forward.

Officer Jefferson raised his taser and pulled the trigger. Hanover Julius reeled back into the house and fell to the floor, taking a coatrack loaded with hats and coats along with him.

Officer Jefferson stopped in the doorway. He found himself confused, at the ringing in his ears and the smell of gunpowder in the air. He began to wonder whether he had seen all of this before, or, alternatively, whether he had seen it coming.

The Lakeview Elementary Sit-In, Part 1: They’ve Done It Right

If this is to be one of the last of my Occupy hurrahs, as seems increasingly likely, at least on any kind of scale approaching grandeur, than it is a good one. The sit-in at Lakeview Elementary, one of four schools closed by the Oakland school board, is a perfect example of the impact Occupy has had on our local culture, the resilience of Oakland’s people and the merit of resistance, and, no matter how it turns out, it should be remembered as a prototype for what we should watch for in the years to come, the pockets of resistance that will spring up, which will need support. There might not be any such thing as an Occupy 2.0. At its best, there never really was such a thing as an Occupy 1.0. As soon as there became a “we”, rather than a “99%”, the way was lost. We can thank the repression of the government and the police forces, though we shouldn’t blame or hate them — they were only doing what they were supposed to do. Those of us who came together, and those of us who drift apart, should take to heart the lessons we learned. We should remember. It’s a good thing that so many of us were young. Our expertise will surely come in handy again, later in our lifetimes. This was an extremely important battle that we waged, and we never really did have a chance of winning, we all knew this.  When the time comes, we’ll still be here. And now we know that there are a lot of us, just waiting for something to happen.

Something like the Lakeview Sit-In. The People’s School for Public Education, staffed as it is by professional teachers, by parents, by enthusiastic volunteers, has been, in my opinion and from my perspective, an unqualified success. I’d been interested in the pending school closures as an issue for a while, because, in my rhetorical-political-Occupy mind, I thought of them as a perfect opportunity for a coincidental cross-section of labor, community, and Occupy-style protest. I’d remembered that the decision to close Lakeview Elementary’s had lead to flyering and speak-out campaigns months earlier. One of the multi-thousand person marches back in November had been organized around this issue. It had seemed such a strange and forgetful shock to remember that I hadn’t heard hardly anything about it since. While we were busy Fucking the Police (erm, for lack of a better term) and arguing about diversity of tactics, a real, painful and absolutely tangible injustice was playing out underneath our noses. How did we miss that?

Well, as it turns out, we didn’t. That is, if “we” were to include the full breadth indeed of the “99%,” and would therefore include the Occupy Oakland Education Committee, Occupy Education California, the Liberate Education folks, and Joel Velasquez, the Lakeview parent leading the charge at Lakeview Elementary. In the weeks prior to the sit-in, based on the OO Ed meetings I’d attended I was a bit dubious — I wasn’t sure that one parent would be enough. But, apparently, it was. Coupled with parents and students and like-minded teachers, that was all it took. Joel has been the forefront of the action, and he is a good one — good looking and well spoken, and when his kids take the mic they match these qualities with their sheer adorableness. Behind him are a few veteran left wing education figures such as Jack Gerson and Bob Mandel, and a few stunningly beautiful female teachers, including Feyi Ajayi-Dopemu. All of them have presence and charisma and deep knowledge of the issues both local and systemic. Underlining their arguments, literally right behind them on the steps of Lakeview, now draped in protest banners and alive with children and arts and crafts, is one of the most demonstrable failures of American society — the abandonment of public education, the gutting of urban school systems, the consistent and almost willful neglect of minority children. Concerning the Oakland school systems deep fiscal difficulties, the closure of the 5 schools (the 4 schools now, after Lazear’s application to become a privatized charter was accepted), seems just about one of the most clumsy and ham-handed solutions imaginable. At a dinner party a few weeks ago I actually got a chance to meet one of the school board members who voted for this closure, Jemoke Hodges. Ironically enough, her husband is a Lakeview alumnus. This was a source of tension between them — she became very defensive when I brought the issue up, and a few days later I noticed in a picture of one of the daily rallies, her husband, sitting on the steps, looking away from the cameras. According to what she told me at the party, her line of reasoning, that is, why they chose these 5 particular schools, consisted of their poor academics, and the fact that many of the students served lived in neighborhoods far removed from the school site — both of which rang to me as convenient excuses rather than thoroughly thought-out reasoning, given OUSD’s aggressive drive to charterization, the high levels of gentrification in the neighborhoods surrounding the schools in question, and the city of Oakland’s generally liberal and wrong-headed use of its limited funds. The former site of Lakeview Elementary will be the new home of OUSD’s administrative offices. Santa Fe has been auctioned off to Emeryville. At a town hall meeting about a month ago, the influential Coach Tapscott leveled the charge that the city wanted the buildings, literally wanted the brick and mortar real estate in order to make money off of them. Seems true enough. Of course, given the diminished population of children and families, Oakland probably does have too many schools — but it seems extremely unfair, and even suspicious which schools end up slated for closure. Rather than displace 1,300 kids at the stroke of a pen, why not roll back the “small schools” that were more recently opened? Could it be because they are charters? My elementary alma matter, Oakland Arts Magnets, was closed several years ago, ostensibly because of a re-orientation of priorities from the arts and music, which were used to buttress our education in maths and sciences and English, and in my opinion gave us all a pretty well-rounded education, given the perpetually high demands we inflicted on our over-worked teachers. What it comes down to is a question of priorities. Who are the indispensable ones, in the eyes of city leaders. Obviously, they are not the children of Oakland.

The sit-in itself started off quietly, relatively speaking. Arriving at the school at 4:30 on Friday, it seemed a scene familiar from my own childhood, the last hours of a school before summer break, when for some reason a slight surfeit of teachers and and children and attached adults seem to linger around as if reluctant to leave. In typical Occupy style, they held a barbecue in the back yard. The parents and teachers on the OO Ed committee set up their tents and began painting and dropping banners. The media was there in force, though when I watched it later that evening, the tone of this coverage had almost more a resigned than hopeful quality, as if this action were a slight poeticism rather than a militant resistance. When evening fell, Occupiers set up a sound system on the sidewalk, and engaged Grand Avenue in a manic dance party, booming Michael Jackson, the Coup and 2pac out into the up-scale Grand Lake District, catching a surfeit of supportive honks and quizzical looks, and even a slight degree of fear. When Occupiers are out in force, they are something to see. There’s anger and militancy even in their dancing. There’s the sense of fight in the very air, and potency to the very standing in the place you are standing. I am going to miss this feeling so much. I am going to miss them so very much. I wonder when we’ll all see each other again. Because I am certain that we will. We must.

The teachers though wouldn’t want the Occupiers to commandeer the event, and they packed up the sound system after about an hour and a half. Then, they told most of us to go home. This was a teacher-led action. This was a community-led action. Only those “directly affected” were to participate to the fullest extent. Lakeview Elementary was not to become an Oscar Grant Plaza. Not even a 19^th and Telegraph. No, there was something in the very air telling all of us so. I would go back to this school again and again over the coming week, perhaps in the hope of influencing them otherwise. This was a real fight they had here, and I wanted to be a part of it. I believe that I was willing to get arrested for it. Why? It wasn’t even my fight. Maybe in part because it was Occupy’s fight. It was a part of the fight, a small, real example of the sickness in the system, one of the many reasons for the pain in my beloved Oakland. Thusly, I wanted more participation probably than my back-story justifies. But what fight could I make my own? I have no idea.

Searching for Occupy 2.0: Here’s to the Fights Worth Fighting

It is probably facetious to say outright that Occupy is dead. At the same time, there’s truth in the statement. Since May 1^st, generally seen as a disappointment if not an overtly spectacular one, it seems indisputable here in Oakland that things have changed. The Oscar Grant Plaza Gazette, which served an important role as a running catalogue of Occupy Oakland actions and events and related writings since the first camp’s inception, has officially packed it in, stating that in manic effort at self-preservation, “Occupy Oakland as such is on a slow and sure downslide as we fail to become less insular and self-referential and remain largely irrelevant to local struggles.” Bay of Rage, which seems to function as something of an intellectual voice for the anarchists and black bloccers, published an article entitled “Occupy Oakland is dead. Long live the Oakland Commune” (pretty well demonstrating the eternal elusiveness of any definitive statements regarding this movement). A working group has formed in effort to plan a re-thinking of the General Assemblies, whose attendance has dwindled and all but flattened in the weeks following May Day. My own prediction had been that Occupy Oakland, whose popular support within the city by many accounts has all but evaporated, would become increasingly irrelevant, but activists who had already connected, and the many virtually autonomous working groups which formed beneath the OO umbrella, would branch out to find their own battles to wage. Meanwhile, the state, with their ruthless persecution of the (honestly quite cooperative) Gill Tract Occupy farmers serving as a perfect example, has proven that they have no intention at all of pulling back the pressure. Many Occupiers these days are beginning to look a little worn, a little dispirited, in stark contrast to the energy and enthusiasm of only a few months ago. Indeed, many could be forgiven for declaring the American Occupy Movement dead, or at the very least on terminal life support.

And yet, while in many senses they would be right, they also couldn’t be more wrong. Occupy 1.0 is dead. The camps are dead, and they’re not coming back. But the new word buzz word now, repeated over and over on list serve e-mails and the endless underground journalism articles shared through them, is Occupy 2.0. Occupy, phase 2. While the first incarnation of Occupy Oakland may be dead, its spirit is very much alive. And, after-all, what more was there to begin with? Of the several list serves to which I subscribe, Labor Solidarity, Occupy the Hood (now called ROOTS), Brooms Collective, Occupy Education, none have shown any discernible drop in activity. Even Occupy Oakland, which (forgive me) I now almost exclusively identify with endless police skirmishes, still shows signs of potency and danger. This is perhaps best evidenced by the immediate and truly inspiring reaction to the shamelessly extra-judicial arrest of Christopher, an active, well-known and well-loved OO member, who was charged with assaulting a police officer with a deadly weapon (which turned out to be no more than his own voice projected through a megaphone). Chris and others had attended a townhall meeting called for OPD officials to address the Alan Blueford shooting. It was a meeting which fast turned riotous, and the anger and shouting followed Chief Jordan and his entourage out of the hall when they left and into their cruisers. Chris was one of those leading the charge. Perhaps 30 minutes later Chris was followed and quite literally kidnapped by OPD Officers. This time they went too far. This was made evident that very evening, when the weekly Fuck the Police march drew numbers greater than it ever had before, and (somewhat uncharacteristically) remained peaceful. NLG Lawyers were out in force at Chris’ hearing the next day. And, sure enough, Chris’ bail was lowered and the charges drastically reduced. All of this within 24 hours of his arrest. Maybe it’s wishful thinking to detect a little fear in the immediacy of the city’s response. Had more peaceful protests continued, and Chris’ situation not remedied, the city at large might have learned a little more about the repression going on in downtown Oakland everyday, right under their noses, might have learned why those FTP marches have managed on for so long after all. It hasn’t happened in a vacuum, that’s for sure.

But FTP marches cannot define the movement. If they do, then, in my opinion, the state will have effectively won. Our message will have been subdued and many of the very people who should be joining us will instead bear the worst of a fight that isn’t theres. Right now, I think of the FTP marches, the vandalism and the police provocation, as last desperate attempts to cling to Occupy 1.0. So then, what is Occupy 2.0? Where do we find it? What will it look like?

To a large degree, it will look like what was already there. Just more so. Here I can only speak for Oakland. Oakland is what I know and I have never been to an Occupy elsewhere (except Berkeley, and I wouldn’t go back). Oakland has a long history of activism, and groups such as Just Cause, ACCE and Ella Baker have deep roots here. The “community organizer” title here is not an empty abstraction, and now, since Occupy, there are just a lot more them. With the camps disappeared, we have been forced to get away from our comfort zones. We have been forced out of our shell, to engage in the hard work of alliance building, to consider the issues that people face on the day to day, those problems that need fixing, that many have been working towards fixing for generations. Oftentimes we can provide numbers and energy to fights that are already being waged. Other times we can create self-functioning organizations ourselves.

Such is the case for Occupy Education, and possibly the newly formed Workers’ Assemblies. Occupy Education in California is a mammoth list serve of teachers and educators, some employed and some not, some members of the union, some temporary hires and Teach for America alums. Some of them are just parents, and some of them, like myself, are unaffiliated with any of them. I’ll be attending my first GA for this group on Saturday. I attended a Townhall meeting at Lakeview Elementary, one of five Oakland public schools slated to close in a few weeks (all of which attended by primarily poor, primarily minority students). Then I attended an Occupy Oakland Education meeting the next week. These are groups that are not bound by the typical union/non-union strictures, and they lack leadership. They are Occupy, but at the same time they are specialized. Education and school closures, specifically the closure of Lakeview Elementary, is one fight I’m particularly interested in, because in my opinion it represents a wrong that cuts across many issues, and typifies a place where labor, community and Occupy-style protest could coincide and reinforce one another. When the building re-opens in the fall, it will be an OUSD administrative building. What better target could there be?

There’s Occupy AC Transit, which today has one simple and attainable demand, arrived at through months of planning and dealings with drivers and riders: that is, to make bus transfers multi-use. As people grow poorer, they won’t be able to afford cars. And yet public transit has never been a viable option either, and since I started riding BART and bus to school about fifteen years ago, prices have almost doubled. Piecemeal, five cents here, ten cents there, year after year. Service hasn’t improved, if anything it’s worsened. Well, how about 40 of us taking over a bus and refusing to pay? How about drivers taking us to our stops anyway? Yeah, there’s an issue that people could get behind, that people are already behind.

So, is Occupy dead? Absolutely. Are we still Occupying? You bet. At this point, the damage has already been done. People have woken up, and they have realized that they are strong. Politicians everywhere would do well to take note. Even if our GA’s don’t draw numbers, and our movement has disappeared from the headlines, expect continuing civil unrest throughout the country as people realize their ability to stand up for their lives and their rights.

Long live the Oakland Commune!

Oakland’s Occupy Brooms Collective, Week Three: Community Organizing 101

Occupy Brooms and the San Pablo Corridor Coalition after a hard day's work.

One thing I’ve found, as I’ve worked on launching the Occupy Oakland Brooms Collective, is that a degree of community organizing has been necessarily part and parcel of the process. I’ve also found that, in this case, it’s surprisingly easy. All you need is a little persistence and a little effrontery. A little self-righteousness, and I guess you have to enjoy it too. It probably doesn’t hurt if you believe what you’re saying (though that doesn’t seem to stop many politicians). We just finished our third week cleaning up trash down at St. Andrew’s Plaza, a nasty little park on San Pablo Avenue, just south of the Emeryville Border. It’s one of those parks in front of which most regular people would be very unhappy to get a flat tire. During most days and nights it’s teeming with drug use, drug traffic and prostitution, and it helps to make the whole neighborhood around it un-safe. Every time we go out we get smiles and appreciation, and a little bemusement. But not once yet outright hostility, though that’s probably only a matter of time (and our affect on the drug dealers’ profit margins).

To get going at St. Andrew’s, we plugged into a group called the San Pablo Corridor Coalition, which has been going down to that park every Saturday for the last three years. They get their equipment from the City, which supposedly has a near-limitless volunteer tool supply depot (and which actually makes it very easy to access and use them). The SPCC people were more than happy to have Occupy Oakland on board, and each week so far we’ve brought about five to eight Occupiers down to the park, in addition to the SPCC’s usual near-equivalent amount. This is a perfect example of the ease of community organizing, at least when it comes to Occupy Oakland. Most of the time it seems like 90% of the work’s already been done for us, and all it takes is speaking with the right people and calling the right phone numbers. After that, the Occupy Oakland name pretty much speaks for itself. For good or ill. Everybody pays attention when OO comes to town, and in most cases everybody knows that the media won’t be far behind. I guess after that it’s just up to us not to embarrass ourselves.

Which, sad to say, is going to be a growing concern going forward. Nobody should be arrested on an OO Brooms action, in my opinion, and nobody should have to get in shouting matches. We are there to do a good, and to demonstrate our ability to do a good. Providing services for free, inclusively and with community involvement, should be radical enough. But it seems like every day something else happens with OO that needs to be explained or defended. In-fighting of the worst kind (which, thank the Gods, did not receive any kind of mainstream media attention). A few days ago a woman was harassed, assaulted, and robbed at a protest outside of a Wells Fargo branch on Piedmont Avenue, because she spoke up about her grievances about OO and our tactics. She was surrounded and punched and her wallet was taken from her purse, and a Barack Obama pin from her shirt. Three protesters were arrested and charged with robbery and committing a hate crime, because they made derogatory remarks about her perceived sexuality. Right now the story is number two on the Oakland Tribune’s most read stories section on its website. An absolute gift to OO’s enemies, that is impossible to refute, but can only be acknowledged. [Note: After writing this piece, I have since spoken to OO’ers who say that the hate crime charges are hugely trumped up and the robbery charges fraudulent — while the former sounds plausible to me I remain skeptical about the latter — according to one of the protesters’ lawyers, they only used the sexually derogatory term after the woman had used a racial slur against them]. There is a real fury in some elements of Occupy Oakland that is absolutely unpredictable and uncontrollable. While it’s terrible, and can be genuinely frightening, I can’t help but find it a little beautiful as well, at least in its purity, in its inability to be anything but what it is. In a lot of ways, and for a lot of people, Oakland is a very ugly place. Any movement that honestly represents it will necessarily be a little ugly itself.

So far the Occupy Brooms people are generally of a less confrontational bent. It’s hard to find occasion to get in hand to hand confrontation when you’re sweeping up a street. Thank God. But if we are to have a real impact, we will have to bring in more people, and we will have to start taking more risks. And it may be difficult to keep things from spinning off the rails.

A lot of our members are really excited about establishing a community garden, for instance. Okay, this doesn’t sound so bad. There are already dozens of community gardens around the city, and a lot of them are largely volunteer-staffed. But then the first thing a lot of people are going to ask is “can we set up tents?” My own answer would be a resounding “No!” A community garden. A COMMUNITY garden, will be, well, in the community, with neighbors with families and children. They should not be forced to live with the fear of tear gas or unruly rallies going on into the night. But I believe these issues can be worked out as we go. I don’t think it will be too hard to make people respect a few ground rules, to make this action a little different. And one of the benefits of community gardens, is that everybody likes working in them. And another good thing, apparently there are about 15 vacant lots in West Oakland, which would be ideal for the purpose. They have been effectively abandoned by their owners, and the city would be only too happy to have somebody take it off their hands. One of them is right next door to the home of Alex, a SPCC board member who has been instrumental in getting us to work at St. Andrew’s and other nearby cleaning sites. The space is in the heart of West Oakland. It’s residential, and it’s quiet. There will be plenty of people to serve, and we would help to bring the whole area up just a little. If we do it right, it would be perfect. There are planning meetings upcoming. Further developments forthcoming.

Me, I’m just glad that my group’s getting off the ground. I love it. I really do. I enjoy debate and I enjoy coming up with ideas. I enjoy convincing people that I’m right, and I enjoy finding common ground in a productive fashion. But what I’m really looking forward to is trying my hand at our first big action, which we just today decided to implement. March 31^st is Cesar Chavez Day, where, traditionally, there are speak-outs and education seminars, and children in public schools everywhere learn about the life of the famed labor leader. Perfect. We intend to do the full court OO press. Print flyers, generate a GA proposal, hold specialized meetings, and organize logistics. Get it on the OO events calendar. Past the surely endless discussions, the controversies, the generating of statements and press releases, the politicking and the arguing, deciding which projects to embark upon may be our hardest task. Because there is no lack of work to be done, and that’s to put it mildly. There are no city-employed litter pickers in the city. There is no lack of pollution, anywhere. Alex has 20 potted trees in his back yard that we can plant. We can clean up St. Andrew’s, like we always do. We can get some people to work establishing the community garden. And we can see what else comes forward. Tomorrow I’m meeting with some people from the Western Service Worker’s Association. They apparently canvass neighborhoods on a regular basis. Pastor Rainey, at the church down the street from St. Andrew’s, might have some ideas as well. We’ll need to find connections in the communities to move forward, people who live nearby who can take the lead and tell us where to go. Somehow, based on my experiences so far, I don’t think that this is going to be very hard.

Occupy Oakland’s Shifting Winds, and My Transition from Attendee, to Organizer — Coming Soon: the Occupy Oakland Brooms Collective

Since January 28^th, with the mass arrests, the street battles with the police, and the vandalism of City Hall, there seems to have been something of a wind change within Occupy Oakland. While no one is going so far as to apologize for taking the action, those of us within the Move-In Committee do seem a little bit chastened. Despite the threat for retaliatory action, proclaimed in a press release from which many have since distanced themselves, we will not be attempting another action in the same vein. In a quiet, and somewhat dejected meeting earlier today, we agreed to suspend the committee until further notice. Or until somebody comes up with a better idea.

OO has long been criticized for its tactics, its unashamed radicalism, and its militancy. Its refusal to accommodate the police in any form, or to take any statement by the mayor or the city council or the mainstream media, local and national, at face value. But the internal criticism finally became to strong to ignore, perhaps best evidenced by the formation of a Non-Violence Caucus, which meets weekly to discuss non-violent resistance. People with signs proclaiming “stop the vandalism” began to appear at our GA’s. And then there’s Stand For Oakland, an anti-OO group that held its first rally last weekend, counter to an OO rally occurring at the same time — police in riot gear, not to miss a chance to posture in front of the heavy media coverage, stormed our rally and confiscated our sound equipment, a first — we have used this equipment at each one of our GA’s, unlicensed, for as long as I have been attending.

I for one, particularly after my arrest on January 28^th, which I strongly believe to have been unjust, have grown less and less patient with the constant argument surrounding “diversity of tactics.” It has become harder and harder for me to see property damage as violence. I have found myself agreeing, more and more vociferously, with the sentiment that the police are the only ones committing any real acts of violence. This despite the article by Chris Hedges, a well-respected intellectual ally of the Occupy movement, calling the Black Bloc a “Cancer in Occupy.” Among other things, Hedges posits that the anarchists who make up the Black Bloc are against all “liberals” who do not think like them, and are in it only for thrills and infantilistic re-masculanisation. Problematic, writes one rebuttal, because the Black Bloc, like Occupy, is not a monolithic organization, with leaders and edicts and due-paying members, but rather a collection of people who engage in certain tactics, in their case, targeted property destruction and physical resistance to the police. Their politics, like their movement and tactics, vary with each and every person who chooses to dress in black and wear a black bandana across his or her face. The “Fuck the Police” marches still taking place every Saturday are not associated with the Black Bloc in any way, and are, in my increasingly radical opinion, useful in highlighting the real and justified anger within OO at the OPD, whose repression is consistent, direct, and effective, and is not likely to let up until Occupy Oakland has been subdued and crushed.

And yet, despite mine and my comrades anger and frustration, there has been an increase in soul searching, in recognizing the necessity of engaging a community that does in fact seem to be losing patience with us, within which many wonder how we could have expected any different on January 28^th. I for one am glad that we took the action. I am glad I participated. Maybe I’m even glad that I got arrested. I got to witness what we were up against first hand. Now I know. And since that weekend, the energy in OO has indeed returned, for people on both sides of the diversity of tactics vs. non-violence debate. It’s back to that old feeling, just after the General Strike in November 2^nd — again, events and actions and meetings are moving so fast and constant that if you miss a day you miss a world. There seems a greater awareness of the many differing opinions about us in this city, which we claim as our own, yet with which many of us are so unfamiliar. And while many Oaklanders may support our philosophy, far fewer will involve themselves or their families in actions that carry the risk of harm or arrest or tear-gas. Not to say that they don’t appreciate those of us who will.

It has come time for Occupy Oakland to become a welcoming movement. A place that offers support, and requests it. This does not mean we have to lose our radicalism, we just have to compliment it. I believe that there are a few ways that we could go about doing so, and one potentially important one is through regularly scheduling a series of simple, worthwhile community service projects: neighborhood clean-ups, tutoring services, the offering of free food and basic medical care. In this spirit, and because nobody else was doing it, I decided to spearhead the formation of the Occupy Brooms Collective. Still little more than an idea and an e-mail list, my personal vision, which I will surely have to sacrifice if or when our ranks increase, is of a regularly scheduled series of small scale actions in which Occupy Oakland members, wearing recognizable light blue Occupy vests (light blue being the unofficial “color” of the movement), participate in street cleaning and neighborhood beautification projects throughout the city, in conjunction with supporters, community organizations, and area residents. This can allow us a positive outlet for our energy, and it will force us away from Oscar Grant Plaza. It will take many OO’ers out into a city that could greatly benefit from our presence, and whose support could benefit us in return. It will force us to engage with community members and it will force us to argue with them. We will see that it really isn’t as simple as us vs. the 1%. We will give OO a human face, and we will counter-act the media narrative characterizing us as nihilistic hooligans and thrill seekers. After all, there’s nothing more thrilling than sweeping a sidewalk.

I’ve announced my plan at a few GA’s, collected some e-mails, and started the discussion. The first dilemma: should we request funds from the GA, which is notoriously stingy, or rely on donations and spare parts alone? We shall see. Hopefully we’ll have our first action this weekend, and then another the weekend after that. As a part of my organizing efforts, I’ll have to step up my participation: in addition to the GA’s, I’ll begin attending meetings of Occupy the Hood, and the Community Outreach Collective, two very interesting groups engaging in some very interesting efforts. And of course, I’ll continue to write about all of it as I go.

Occupy Oakland Rises Up, Part 2

Night and Day in Santa Rita

Since I was near the edge of the sidewalk, and closest to the riot lines, I was one of the first to be arrested. There were over 330 people behind me, cornered in front of the YMCA. Shortly after they put the zip ties on me, sat me down on the pavement and put my backpack on my legs, there was a melee in the crowd, and I saw a vague blur of a red-sweatered protester pulled forward and dog-piled by dark blue and plastic helmets. I saw flying black-gloved fists, and I never saw the offending person clearly.

The crying, at least, had pretty much stopped. I had gone out of my way to be civil, to show that I was no threat. I’d never been arrested before, and I had not come to Move-In Day expecting to be arrested. I knew that it was a risk, and I knew that some people surely would, but I mostly believed that those who are arrested are at least partly complicit in the event. Me I had too many things to worry about. The draw that Occupy Oakland exercises over me is strong, and it grows stronger all the time. But I have yet to completely turn my back on the professional world. For the last eight or nine months, I’ve more or less been living as a kind of freelance writer, but I have been looking for full-time work. In fact, just before this action, I might have landed one. My first day was on Monday. Therefore I trusted my own good judgment enough to listen to my instincts when it seemed like shit was getting crazy, to remove myself before I became a party to them. If people started breaking things, I would move away. If people started fighting the police, I would disassociate myself. When the march got too small, I would leave. I would not participate in a fuck the police march. I would go through the action content in the knowledge that I had done nothing wrong.

Which is why I was so fucking angry that, despite all I’d done to stay on the right side, to not do anything worse than anybody else, I was one of the first to be arrested. The OPD had just attempted to put down an entire demonstration, indiscriminately. That was not fucking right. No matter what some of my comrades had done in the past.

So, caught somewhere between fear, shock, and self-righteousness, as the police went about their business, I followed their instructions to the letter, but I couldn’t help but bait them. I could see that they weren’t going to be cruel with me. They could tell I wasn’t one of the “bad ones.” Oh man how sweet it would have been to oh so subtlely prove them wrong. Yes, I have an address, and a bank account, and a fledgling career. But I was not one of them. I was one of the Occupiers. They would not get any sympathy from me. The fire was coming into my eyes. Yeah, I was pissed off. I was really fucking pissed off. Where did they get the right? It was strange to feel so personal an anger at the state. It’s foreign to those like myself, who spent their lives looking on the police as protectors, if problematic ones. I am white, and I am not poor. I grew up in Oakland. I saw what they did to others, but, at least most of the time, I’ve found myself safe in the assurance that it was people like me who their system had been built to protect and serve. Now, the dynamic had shifted. Now, indeed, they were the adversaries, and that’s how they saw me — or, at least, that’s how they saw the movement with which I so closely identify. They were arresting me for no reason that I could easily figure. I was experiencing now what so many down at the plaza had been experiencing every day, and, I suppose, what so many black and brown and poor and homeless people do too. It was not a good feeling. It’s alienating, it’s infuriating, and it’s very scary. Because now, there’s nobody you can call. When the police are the wrongdoers, you can’t exactly call the police on them. You wonder if it’s too late, if you have crossed a line and if there’s no turning back. Or you wonder where exactly that line is, and just how far you will be allowed to push it. You know one thing for sure: you do not want to be told what to do, to be told that what you feel or think is wrong, to be told to be something other than who you are. But that’s just what they were doing. So when the officer “assigned” to me (each arrestee had an officer or two who followed them through processing, right there on the sidewalk on laptops set up on folded out plastic tables) appeared to be friendly, to wish to distance herself from the faceless images of Occupy police brutality we see on the television, I was a little less than accommodating. I did not miss a chance to bait her. I even got her to give me candy out of my backpack (I discovered somewhere in the process that they had to do what you say in terms of your personal property. She followed many a useless directive during our time together).

It took about an hour and a half for them to finish filling out the paperwork, to take my picture, to throw my backpack into a big armored truck, and to load me onto the prisoner transfer bus. There were two more waiting on the block. By the end of the night, they would end up putting an AC Transit commuter bus to use for the same purpose. Everything inside the bus was metal. The bench, the gratings, the plates covering the windows, so that we could see out, but nobody outside could see in. The zip ties on my wrist were tight, but not too tight. I didn’t lose circulation, as I’ve heard others did, but I had to keep shifting my weight forward and back. It was getting cold, so I closed the window. Had to stand up to do so.

The crowd in front of the YMCA was still thick and chanting. At one point they started singing “YMCA”.

The bus was divided into three sections by metal grating. They filled all three sections with protesters, to per metal bench. There wasn’t much talking on the bus. There was some, but it was limited, it was subdued, shocked and angry. When the bus driver came on, he told us to “keep quiet. We’re going to North County, but if you do anything to piss me off, I’m taking this bus all the way out to Santa Rita.” This shut us up. I’m not sure that many of us knew what he meant. I know I didn’t, though the name Santa Rita rang an associate bell — one of those awful places, like San Quentin or Sing Sing, a societal black hole where I wouldn’t last a day beyond the protection of a locked cell door. None of us wanted to go there. The guard knew it. Otherwise he probably would have been “Mic checked” until his head exploded. Instead, we talked among ourselves, quietly. One of the girls in the back started singing. This was surprisingly comforting. I suppose we were all scared. But after we found out that North County was only in downtown Oakland, and our bus had long since gotten on Interstate 580, it was clear that the bus driver had lied to us. Indeed, we soon saw the signs for Dublin, and, not long after, we passed through a checkpoint, and another stone sign, proclaiming this to be Santa Rita, a sprawling tan pink cement complex, surrounded by doubled cyclone fences ringed with concertina barbed wire. Floodlights spaced at intervals, recalling government camps and Guantanamo Bay. But I couldn’t see much out the windows. I was hunched forward because of the zip ties and the position of my arms.

The driver pulled to a stop, and unapologetically informed us that we’d arrived at Santa Rita. He warned us that “This is a large jail, and it’s more beurocratic than North County, so this is gonna take a while.” A few minutes later they started taking us off, reading our names out from a clipboard, lining us up against the side of the bus, and then marching us ten at a time into the jail, a timeless world of buzzing white fluorescent lights that run 24 hours a day. Even from the beginning, with the driver’s casually coercive lie, there was a palpable difference in the air around Santa Rita. A deadening sense of oppression for oppression’s sake. Unlike the OPD officers, who, after they’d subdued us, retained a veneer of amiability or at least cordial professionalism, Santa Rita’s prison guards showed no care whatsoever towards pretenses of civility. They made us move fast, and they made it clear in their eyes that they didn’t want to see an attitude, of any kind. They insulted us, and they would not be rushed. There was the feeling that punishment could arrive swift and arbitrary and unexpected. That they would be doing us a favor to do their jobs right.

Lined up now against a dirty white cement hallway, one of them clipped the zip tie off my wrists. He took my wallet and filled out a property sheet. They told us to follow blue lines on the ground and they told us not to talk. They marched us into a holding cell, me and about 10 other young men, the genders of course kept separate. We sat down and looked at each other, with a sort of embarrassment. One of us said, a little uselessly: “We should all be aware that it’s possible that our conversations are being recorded.” We nodded sagely. Though of course the truth was that no one here had any idea what was happening, or what to expect. We didn’t know if we were charged, and we might not even really have been clear what “Being charged” meant. We had seen people beaten, and rumors circulated that some of those that had been caught at the YMCA were being accused of burglary. The OPD officers had assured us off-handedly that we would get home before they would. But we had also heard stories of Occupiers detained for days. We knew that there would be no love for us here. We’d been arrested on a Saturday, and we assured each other that they could only hold you 24 hours without charge, but those are 24 business hours, so we could well be here until midnight on Monday, if the Santa Rita prison guards so decided. It wouldn’t turn out that way. As it turned out, all of the protesters arrested at the Y were ferried to Santa Rita, and together we occupied (for lack of a better word) nearly their entire temporary holding facilities. The cell I was in first was positioned just to the right of the entrance. All night, a steady parade of protesters, young people, middle aged people, men and women, were lined up one by one and frisked. They handed over their belts and their jewelry and the laces from their shoes, then they were taken out of sight. One after the other. Very few of them I recognized. Sometimes they waved at us when they caught me and my cellmates looking. More often than not they just looked embarrassed.

I was in Santa Rita for about 20 hours altogether. I got some sleep. When there were only 11 of us to a cell, we could all comfortably (relatively) stretch out on the cement floor or the small cement aperture bench that ringed the walls. We could close our eyes, use our clothes or our shoes or our arms for pillows, and wrap ourselves as tightly as possible against the relative chill. The guards gave us “lunch” for dinner and for breakfast, two sheets of bologna and two squares of wheat bread, with a cup, an orange, and two or three quarter-sized cream cookies. They did not answer any of our questions, except when they wanted to increase our confusion. One of the female guards assured us repeatedly that we were going to be here for a long time, and once or twice ominously told us to get ready to “go to jail.” As the neighboring cells filled with Occupiers, we could sometimes hear them chanting, calling for medical help or their phone call or just in plain frustration. Some of the long-term prisoners were tasked with mopping the hallway floors. They peered threateningly in through the wire-hatched windows, muttering and shaking their heads (except for one, who seemed in a good mood and who I’ve heard a lot of Occupiers since speak about favorably, if only as precious proof that the prisoners were “down” with us too).

Me, my best memories were of my first group of cellmates. We were together I believe for the longest period of time, though time was a pretty meaningless concept in there, where there is no clocks or sunlight. Them I could take. We shared with each other our stories of arrest and our feelings of indignation. We realized our collective solidarity, how here and now, we all truly were in exactly the same boat. We understood each other’s stresses, and we explained them to each other.

But when they started cycling us in and out of the cells in groups, apparently at random, this increased my stress a bit. First they took us out to have our mug shots taken (second time that night, first by the OPD), and to print and attach plastic identification bracelets to our wrists, with our picture and our name and a string of nonsensical numbers. In my picture, I stare back at the camera with wide and angry eyes and wild hair. The sort of picture that would be perfectly at home on the 6 o’clock news. Just another as if unintentional reduction, a de-humanization. We all become no more important than the bracelet on our wrists, recognizable, and lumped in with all the others who have been deemed enemies of society.

They took us back to our room after that. We’d been in four hours at least, and we’d only just been fully processed. It was clear our long night was far from over. We watched out the cell window as similar groups of our comrades were brought through the same procedures. Each time we heard the jingling keys on the guards hips as they walked towards us, we all perked up a little bit. Hope that we would be released, that we would receive some unexpected kindness. We were always disappointed.

Every now and then our fellows down the hall would break out into the uniform chants that Occupiers everywhere are famous for. The one we heard several times was: “We need help! We need help!” Apparently this was for a prisoner who had fallen ill. Once the rumor was it was for diabetic medicine. Once for HIV medication. Both times they were reportedly denied treatment. Since we weren’t prisoners charged with any specific crime, we were not allowed access to the Santa Rita medics. Our comrades would just have to wait.

Some time later, a group of us was taken out again, about six of us as I remember, and we were taken to a different holding cell, more crowded than the last, and with mostly unfamiliar faces. We tried to keep the smiles and good cheers going, but it had grown more difficult. I found it harder to stomach these new cellmates, to keep the solidarity full and frontmost. We’d already said all there was to say in our previous group, and these guys had probably done the same, yet our new group hadn’t gone through the experience of saying it to each other. So we were in the same boat, but we had no familiarity. When minor annoyances or irritations reared their head, it was that much harder to just keep on talking, because everything had already been said. I can see how Malcolm X and Mumia call being in prison reductive: the longer I stayed, the more I felt the ruthless imperative to me and myself and myself alone. I wanted somewhere to sit, so I had to make a little room on the concrete bench. I was forced to entertain the possibility that I would be here for a while. That maybe I would be shuffled out of this cell again. Maybe even cast down with the real lawbreakers, the long-timers, where I would be forced to adapt as best I could, where I would really have to see how tough or broken I could be.

This new group of about 15 of us was inexplicably taken out and returned to the cell I’d just vacated, T-11. This was good, because T-11 had a more interesting vantage point, and it was larger. But just a few hours later, the door opened again, and 11 more protesters were funneled inside, many of them my fellows from the original cell. 26 of us now in a 10 X 10 room, with a single toilet. At first I was glad to see them, but this didn’t last long. Except for the cement bench on the walls, it was now standing room only, though some did gamely attempt to stretch out on the floor in the midst of the shuffling feet. Now more than ever, it was me and me alone. I couldn’t hold a conversation. I kept wondering how many more I would have. I lowered my head and pulled up my hood. I tried to clear my mind. Sometimes I drifted off to sleep. I have no idea for how long.

My only consistent diversion was the bracelet on my wrist. The familiar face there looking back at me. My face. But not me. A person who looked like me, but seemed to lack the compassion and good nature that I usually strive for. There was something different about my eyes, which people tell me are intense under normal circumstances. Now there was a paranoia in them and a wariness. A strong element of distrust and anger. I was changed, I could see it. And yet I had done nothing wrong. My anger was justified, and in this case my very country, the government, the state, the police, and the Santa Rita prison guards, were the focus. It’s a strange thing to feel a personal anger towards your own country. In this way, Santa Rita was a radicalizing experience.

Some time later (because remember time was meaningless), we heard the jingling keys again. A guard appeared, bearing a clipboard. He opened the door to the cell opposite ours, and selected about 8 girls and lined them up along the wall. We checked. They were already wearing bracelets. He took them off, following the blue line on the floor. We waited, and we waited, and we waited, but the girls didn’t come back. We knew that speculation was pointless, but it was also inevitable. The girls could have been taken to a different cell, they could have been taken to general population, or they could have been taken to Bagram airbase for all we knew. They could have been subjected to yet another bureaucratic hoop to jump through. Or, they could have been taken out. And, as luck would have it, the next jingling key steps of the guards ended at the door of our cell. All 26 of us looked up as he opened the door, and we took a step back. I was in the back of the room, sitting on the bench, so I couldn’t see him. He started reading out names. Told them to line up on the wall. He read about eight names, and mine was the last one on the list: “Aentael Palohny!” he called out. Of course I wouldn’t correct his pronunciation. In fact I thanked him, twice, as I walked out. Then I hated myself for doing so.

Indeed, it soon became clear that we had been chosen. We were going home. They marched us out to another room, this one separated by yet another set of metal bars, from an evidence locker, a desk with a guard at work behind it, phones and papers on the desk, and drawers and boxes and office machinery behind him. One by one, he called us up, and gave us back our stuff. Our shoelaces and our belts and whatever we’d had in our pockets. He didn’t miss an opportunity to speak down to us, but here we could actually hold our heads a little higher. When it was my turn, and he saw that I was from Oakland, he asked me if I was born there and I said yes, and he said, funny, cause one of the officers wrote down that you were from elsewhere. In response I said: “Well, then one of the officers was wrong.” The guard frowned, and gave me back my wallet, my shoelaces, and my belt. When I sat down on the floor and started to lace up my shoes, he yelled: “Hey!” he said, “Take it outside, okay.” I stood up, and I tried to follow his orders sarcastically, but I was also afraid. I also wondered for a moment, if I refused his orders, or if he perceived that I was, would I end up right back where I had just come from. And I didn’t want that. I didn’t want that.

I went out the front door and I laced up my shoes, then I walked ascended a staircase, and found the front doors of Santa Rita. And there was a crowd of supporters waiting outside. They were cheering and applauding, and the sun was shining and the air felt so good, so good, and I smiled, and it was a real smile and it felt good. I thanked them, and oh man, did I mean it. Entered back into the real world, where, in fact, time had continued to move, where people had been thinking about us, even in our seclusion. Solidarity. Fuel to the fire. These motherfuckers didn’t know what they had started by doing what they had done.

Occupy Oakland Update: Foreclosure Defense, Occupy the Courts, and Move-In Day

Gayla Newsome in Front of her Re-Occupied Home

Here are a few updates on my experiences in Occupy Oakland, which seems to suck me in deeper every time I attend. It’s hard to resist, at least for me. While it’s huge and vast and intimidating, it is also remarkably self-empowering. With the force of passion and numbers, there is the real sense that you can make a difference. You can feel it in the air. Also, I personally tend to have a lot of opinions about politics and Oakland, and I tend to like to talk about them. Now that Occupy is here, it seems disingenuous of me to talk so much without at least trying to put my money where my mouth is. So, here are the updates:

When last I wrote, I told about OO’s Foreclosure Defense Subcommittee, and canvassing in West Oakland. Since my writing, the homeowner in question, one Gayla Newsome, back into her home following a massive rally in a nearby park, and, together with a rotating shift of Occupiers and ACCE members, held the place down for several weeks. A few days after the move in, three police officers, a realtor, and a locksmith showed up at her front door. The Occupier who was there on shift refused to grant them entry, telling them that he was there lawfully (which is true: at the behest of ACCE, the foreclosure defense experts, Gayla formally leased the property to an ally in the fight, who then can grant permission to anyone to stay there — the leaser must now be evicted for the property to be forcibly, legally vacated). 30 Occupiers showed up within the hour and crowded the entryway. Phone calls went out to the Oakland Police Department, to the legal defense team, and to city council. A few hours later, the police and the locksmith and realtor left. The next day, OO Foreclosure Defense held a rally at 51^st and Broadway, at the Chase branch where Gayla’s mortgage was held. Miraculously enough, this resulted in Gayla sitting down with the branch manager, who went on to admit that her eviction had not been lawfully executed. In effect, the eviction was called off. Today, the shifts at her home are winding down. Believe it or not, victory. An actual and demonstrable good. I hope there will be more like it (though for some reason I haven’t heard back from the subcommittee organizers or the ACCE people — according to an Occupier I know who spends more time at the plaza, in fact there have been about 5 other successful actions like this, but the homeowners wanted to avoid the publicity).

Now on to Occupy Oakland Courts. Here is a group spearheaded by my cousin, Geza, who got the idea based on the national Move to Amend initiative to nullify corporate personhood, an outgrowth of that strange and hugely unpopular decision brought by the Supreme Court two years ago in the Citizens United case. There is a national day of action on January 20^th, the same day that Occupy San Francisco plans on shutting down the city’s financial district (this seems to be coincidence, or rather the financial district action resulted from the MTA national day of action, and the true motivation was forgotten, which, interestingly enough, is in parallel with Occupy Wall Street’s original genesis as well, also planned in part as a protest against corporate personhood). We are holding a rally in front of Oakland’s Federal Building at 14^th and Clay, with street theater and talking points, before crossing the bay to join the others in San Francisco. While I personally believe that local issues should usually be Occupy’s focus, here is an exception, if only because the polls are so vociferously disapproving of the Supreme Court’s wholly undemocratic decision, that influences our democracy so thoroughly. If Occupys around the country can get behind Move to Amend, show their anger about this case, something might well come of it. Hope to see people there at 14^th and Clay on January 20^th.

The Henry J Kaiser Convention Center — Could It Be?

And then there is the understatedly titled Move-In Day. A few weeks ago, a proposal passed at the GA (by a very slim margin, just barely above the 90% threshold) to seize and Occupy a large building, whose location is known only to a few select and trusted members due to obvious and justifiable fears of police infiltration. This is perhaps one of the most radical actions Occupy Oakland will be taking yet, right up there with the port shutdowns, and as such, it has been hugely controversial. I myself at first was inclined not to vote for it. If you ask me, except for a few holdouts such as the 24-hour vigil-holders who remain at the plaza (they have to stay awake all night, but they’re still there), the camps and the Occupations are pretty much over with. The police know what to do now, and it has become clear that no one is going to hold them to account for whatever brutal actions they end up taking to achieve their goals. Trying to take and hold a building, on the face of it, seems the most surefire of lost causes. And yet, swayed by the infectious and romantic and somewhat hopeless support this proposal seemed to have, I ended up voting for it, and now I have joined the Messaging Subcommittee, under the Media/Outreach Subcommittee, and we are holding by-daily meetings. The issue is as contentious as it is electrifying. I now believe that, potentially, even if this particular building gets shut down, this could in fact end up as a whole new direction for Occupy Oakland, and a chance to get the rest of the city behind us with still more force. I will explain more in a later post, cause this one’s getting a little too long. Stay tuned. And rest assured, that even without the camps, Occupy Oakland, for one, is still very much alive and kicking.