The Movement and the Moment, Part IV – Movement Envy

I’m a jumble of mixed emotions watching the events at Occupy Oakland and SF unfold.

First of all, I’m not there.  A few weeks ago, I was dropping by regularly at both camps, but when all the drama came down, I was 150 miles away in beautiful Fort Bragg on a long-scheduled two-week writing retreat.  Which, BTW, has been wonderful.

My fellow writer, with whom I’m sharing this lovely retreat courtesy of some generous friends who lent us their place here, is much younger and works for a labor organization.  Her roommate was one of the people who was dragged off to Santa Rita andheld in solitary confinement on $10,000 bail the other day.  Her friends were up all night Monday waiting for the raid in Oakland, and again on Wednesday at OccupySF.  For her, the mixed feelings are about guilt that she isn’t there sharing the work and the risk.

For me, it’s pure jealousy.  Not, of course, of the people who got shot in the head with teargas canisters or the ones who spent a day or three in jail.  But of the people who got to feel that incredible power and solidarity of the actions themselves, especially what I heard and saw of Wednesday night’s march in Oakland, the vigil for the wounded activist, Scott Olson, the 3,000-person general assembly (though the report on the OO website says 1,607 people voted)  Of hearing that the planned raid on Occupy SF was called off because of the massive outpouring of support by new and seasoned activists.  Of the energy and joy that comes from having such unity of purpose, and of knowing that YOU DID IT.  Even though if I were there, a part of me would still be whispering, “They did it, not me.”

I can’t help it – I have Movement Envy.  It was supposed to be us, who got that rush of seeing everything you’ve worked for come true and then some.  I’ve worked for thirty years for this, and I didn’t get it.  Some people who started their organizing just a few short years ago, not because they were not committed but because they were not even born when I started my activist life, were the ones who lit the spark that caught.  It’s not because they were better at it than we were, which is not to take away from their genius – but trust me, we had genius too.  It’s because their timing happened to be good.

Now some of my friends will say that all the fruitless work we’ve been doing for years has laid the groundwork for this.  There are small ways that is obviously true.  The forms of direct democracy that are prevalent in the Occupy movement – facilitation and consensus and hand signals and not having identifiable (and arrestable) leaders – come out of the various anarchist and anarchofeminist movements of the seventies and eighties.  People would not now be talking about affinity groups and spokescouncils if we had not used those forms in the antinuclear movement, and we would not have used them then if the Spanish anarchists – a tragically doomed movement itself – had not developed them.

But in the larger sense, I don’t think it is really true that all the work we did has any direct relationship to the success of Occupy Wall Street and its progeny.  This movement – or these movements, hard to know which is accurate yet – grew out of the material conditions of their time, here and around the globe.  People used forms that they had learned from older movements, but if those forms had not been there, they would have used others, and if there were no models they wanted to copy, they would have invented their own.  The form didn’t create the movement; the moment did.

Two years ago, I asked, “What do you do when it’s not your moment?”  I ask that again, but with very different meaning.  What do you do when the potentially revolutionary moment comes and it’s not yours?

This movement is not about those of us who have been doing labor organizing, queer liberation, feminist, anti-militarist, international solidarity, even anti-capitalist or anarchist organizing for years.  That’s what’s driving some organizers crazy.  They have spent years crafting careful and creative and sometimes quite effective campaigns to stop foreclosures, to tax the rich, to hold banks accountable, to oppose social service cuts, to cut military spending, to defend labor – it’s all great, it’s all still important, but this movement is neither a product nor an extension of those campaigns.  This is a parallel movement, with a different class base, a very different trajectory, and a different style.  (If you doubt that, you might want to check out this blog about some conflicts that have arisen in DC, between the “Stop The Machine” protest and the Occupy DC encampment, or this one about tensions between "organizers and organized" at OWS.)  The people who have been studying and researching and planning and writing and speaking about these issues are going to be infuriated a lot of the time because people are going to be talking about their issues who know a lot less and have put in a lot less sweat and soul than they have on them.  I empathize.  I’ve been there.

I’m also highly ambivalent about the general strike that Occupy Oakland has called for Wednesday.  I don’t believe they can pull off anything like a general strike.  3,000 is a lot of people to come to a protest and meeting, but the adult population of Oakland is 300,000.  Maybe that 1% (hey – you are now the 1%! but in truth, not all of the people who attended the GA the other night were from Oakland) can actually mobilize sufficiently in a couple days to multiply itself by 20 or 30 – I’m not going to say they can’t.  What they’ve been able to do so far is pretty amazing.  You can’t achieve big if you don’t dream big.

Calling for a general strike on such short notice seems to me to trivialize the cost to most workers of taking a day off from work, when you have no union to protect you, which the vast majority of private sector workers do not.  (In 2008, the private sector unionization rate for San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose was 12.1%, which is a lot higher than I would have guessed; I know almost no one who is in a private sector union.)  I also feel like people without significant roots in the labor movement thinking they can organize a general strike in a few days is kind of disrespectful toward the people who have been organizing labor for years, and haven’t been able to do that.

Now there is no way I can stay home from work Wednesday, having just been on vacation for two weeks.  I also don’t work in Oakland, but that’s kind of a cop-out.  My coworkers can’t do it either – they need the days off for when there's no school.  We have better benefits than nearly everyone, and that means we get two days’ bereavement leave when a parent or child dies.  But they wouldn’t do it if they could, even if they knew about it.  Most of them, the five hundred or so people who work at the law firm where I word process, have never been to a protest.  The didn’t strike when the amount they have to pay for their health benefits went up by 30%.  They didn’t strike when 20% of our coworkers were laid off.  The first political action they take is not going to be giving up a precious vacation day for something that, if it is important to them at all, is important for philosophical reasons.  And less privileged workers don’t get vacation days at all.  If they don’t go to work on Wednesday, they won’t get paid, which they cannot afford, or they could even get fired, which they definitely cannot afford.

A strike is not individual workers deciding to take a day off.  A strike is a collective action based on some collective ability to insulate individuals from the consequences.  This very audacious and well-intentioned and creative movement just doesn’t have that capacity yet.  If they can get the transit workers on board – and I think their contract probably forbids it, so it’s a very tall order – so the buses and trains don’t run, then private sector workers who’ve never seen a union organizer will have a way to say that they couldn’t get to work.  Without that, what you’re asking for is, at best, a boycott.

The Great American Boycott in 2006 was organized over several weeks, and at the time they called it, they had already had half a million people march for immigration rights in Los Angeles.  And honestly, that was no general strike either.  200,000 marched in SF, but they came from all over the Bay Area.  Business was scarcely interrupted except in heavily Latino industries.

I don’t want to be a professional nay-sayer.  (You might say, well you’re doing an awfully good job of what you say you don’t want to do.)  Remember, this piece is about Movement Envy.  My experience of movements that are (maybe) very different from this one might be limiting my view of what’s possible.  So OO and OSF and ODC and OCD, go ahead and reach for those stars.  But at the same time keep in mind that many of us are still stuck down here on earth.

Throwing Down at 52

Friday was my birthday (I'm two years older than President Obama) and I decided I wanted to mix activism with celebrating.  Friday evening we had our monthly Women In Black vigil against war and occupation, so I saw a bunch of friends there and a few of us went to dinner after.  Saturday morning some other friends and I joined “Throw Down for the Town,” a community service festival in Oakland.  Throw Down is organized by Soul of the City, an initiative of the human rights nonprofit Ella Baker Center (started by Van Jones, the first casualty of Obama’s ability to be bullied by Fox News).  Soul of the City’s mission statement says, “Soul of the City places the well-being of Oakland directly in the hands of the community. We honor the important role that each person plays in creating a vibrant and thriving city.”  There were more than 15 service projects to choose from.  We chose to help clean up part of Laney College, the community college just on the other side of Lake Merritt from where I live.  We worked hard for about two hours, and then went for a lovely lunch.

The cleanup itself was kind of intense, because part of the area where we were working is a little woodsy, on the banks of a pond, and it’s obviously a place where homeless people go to relieve themselves, eat, sleep, and avoid police harassment.  I found muddy, waterlogged clothes and backpack straps, along with the usual petrified Wendy’s cups, bottles, cans, condom wrappers and toilet paper.  Fortunately, the organizers had borrowed those grabber things from the City, and they also had plenty of latex gloves.  Nonetheless, when I suggested we head to an Ethiopian restaurant, one of my friends said, “I don’t feel like eating with my hands right now.”  So we opted for Mexican instead.



Used under Creative Commons License from website
of Chris Jordan



As I picked up all that detritus, I thought, “Maybe I really should work on banning plastic food containers in Oakland.”  Plastic recycling is one of the big boondoggles of the last couple decades, because the more people feel like they can recycle it, the more of it socially conscious people feel like we can use.  And in reality, very little plastic is actually recycled.  “Recycling” sounds like it’s melted down and reshaped into more plastic food containers, but in reality, the 6-8% of the plastic we use that can be recycled at all gets converted into indoor-outdoor carpeting and polyester car seats through an extremely toxic process mainly carried out inChina.  The Berkeley Ecology Center has a greatwebsite on myths about and alternatives to plastic recycling.  A woman who was at Hedgebrook with me, Victoria Sloan Jordan, is working on a project with her husband, Chris Jordan, who is a photographer, documenting the destruction of the albatross population from eating the plastic we discard.  The photos, which you can see online, are incredible because in some of them, you can’t tell what they’re of and it looks quite beautiful, and then you realize it’s this awful devastation. 

Banning plastic would not only be good for the environment and for the health of the people who live near the plants where it’s processed.  I just finished reading a book called Girls on the Edge, by Leonard Sax, who is both a pediatrician and a psychologist.  He talks about four factors “driving the crisis of today’s girls” and one of them is “environmental toxins.”  He presented extensive evidence that plastic food, beverage and lotion containers are a major cause of early puberty in girls (a 2010 study reported in the journal Pediatrics that almost 25% of African American girls have reached a stage of breast development marking the onset of puberty by age 7, as had almost 15% of Latina girls and more than 10% of white girls.).

At the same time, campaigns such as plastic bans need to be done in a way that is sensitive to all of the other social issues accompanying our purchasing choices.  If we force McDonald’s to sell coffee in paper cups, we need to first research where those will come from and how they are produced.  A few years ago, Berkeley banned plastic shopping bags from supermarkets.  Certainly, a lot more people are using nondisposable bags, but probably a majority of people are getting groceries in paper bags.  I can’t say how many times I have walked out without putting bags in my car, or gone into a store thinking I’m only going to buy a few things, and ended up needing a paper bag.  I’m not sure how much better that is than the plastic ones.  They biodegrade, yes, but we can’t pretend that forests are not being sacrificed for our paper bags.  Ideally, we would take our groceries in baskets or carts, and if you dropped in without your cart, you would be able to borrow one, maybe for a buck deposit or something.  Or even more ideally, we would all be shopping in small stores close to home, and the shopkeepers would know us and be glad to lend us a basket or cart, confident that we’d bring it back.

We would need to ensure that McDonald’s would not raise their prices to make up for the fact that we’re “making them” switch to more environmentally friendly materials.  It shouldn’t, of course, be more expensive to use compostable paper, because it’s incredibly expensive to produce plastic, but with subsidies and corporate economies of scale, those costs are skewed.

Ultimately, all of this still relies on the premise that capitalism can be made environmentally friendly and humane, and in fact, that’s probably not the case.  I heard a radio show the other day about a project that’s promoting sustainable seafood.  One of the participants in the MarineStewardship Council’s eco-labeling program is WalMart, and with the world’s largest retail store signed on, the Marine Stewardship Council has the leverage to convince their suppliers to adopt line-only fishing and other sustainable fishing practices.  It’s great, on one hand, that WalMart has become so convinced that their customers want sustainable food that they were willing to join this effort.  On the other, I thought, well while you’re getting WalMart to sign onto the line-only fish pledge, couldn’t you get them to sign a union contract with their workers?

Neither picking up trash nor banning plastic wrapping and containers will result in a livable community.  Seeing the evidence that people are using that fairly inhospitable area (I ended up with brambles in my butt) for a bedroom and lavatory reminds me how many people very nearby are without the basics of comfort and dignity.  I started thinking, well maybe we should build some composting toilets here so people don’t have to leave used toilet paper in the grass.  On the way to lunch, we passed a long line of elderly people waiting for food from the Lake Merritt United Methodist Church food pantry.  As we were parking, a guy who asks me for fifty cents every day when I’m going to line up for the carpool to the city yelled “Got fifty cents?” at our car as we sped around the corner.  “That’s not very effective panhandling technique,” I said to my friends.

What I did like about Throw Down was that it was real.  It wasn’t giving money to some nonprofit to hire people to do something about our social problems – which is also important, don’t get me wrong.  Abel Guillen, a young man who is currently on the Community College Board and now running for State Assembly () came by to campaign.  I asked him what his top issues were, and he said, “Creating jobs.”

“That’s right,” I said, “People could be doing this for money.”  He agreed.  I asked how he proposed to fund it and his answer made my little heart go pitter-patter:

“Oil severance tax.  Single-payer health care.”

“You’re obviously my guy,” I said.

It brought us into contact with young people from our own neighborhood that I rarely interact with, and gave us ideas about how to create more community.  My neighbor, Simin, had the idea that we should get some of those garbage grabbers at the hardware store and go out on our own street once a month.  It’s not really about the garbage, she said, but that if people see you doing something, they will come and talk to you.  I was reminded of a story I was told a few years ago by a friend of a friend.  She lives on a cul-de-sac in San Francisco, where there’s no street cleaning, so she started going out with a broom and sweeping the street.  At first, her neighbors thought she was crazy.  But after a while, a couple other women came to help.  Eventually they ended up starting a community garden, even getting a small grant to reclaim a park for their kids.

I hate getting notices from Facebook that I should pick a Cause and get my “friends” to donate to it for my birthday.  No offense to any of my Facebook friends who have done that.  The idea of making our special days not just about us is great.  I just hate the mechanization of it, the notion that we can build communities of people who never set eyes on each other.  Don’t get me wrong.  Obviously, this is a blog.  In the blogging class I took recently, I stated that “finding a community of like-minded people” was my top reason for blogging.  But today’s activity made me think about the limits of virtual community, and the value of getting our hands dirty.

Become an Iron-Jawed Angel, Don't Vote for One

There’s a letter that made the rounds on email and feminist blogs a few weeks ago. It read in part:

“Last week, I went to a sparsely attended screening of HBO's new movie ‘Iron Jawed Angels.’ It is a graphic depiction of the battle [the woman suffragists] waged so that I could pull the curtain at the polling booth and have my say. I am ashamed to say I needed the reminder. … So, refresh my memory. Some women won’t vote this year because why, exactly? We have carpool duties? We have to get to work? Our vote doesn’t matter? It’s raining?”

On election day, I read something very similar on Daily Kos (I can’t find it now) invoking the spirit of the African American civil rights movement to exhort people to go out and vote.

It’s true, many people fought and died at many different times for the rights of disenfranchised groups to vote. But they didn’t fight for the vote as a symbol of equality. Voting was supposed to bring actual equality. Which is a greater betrayal of the suffragists and the martyrs of Freedom Summer? Not voting, or voting for someone who will use my vote to give more money to billionaires? Not voting, or voting for a progressive woman Speaker of the House who was willing to trade away our reproductive rights for a health care plan that delivered millions of our hard-earned dollars to the insurance industry? Not voting, or voting for the man who imprisoned eight sixty- and seventy-year-old former Black Panthers for a 36-year-old murder they didn’t commit?

Sure, I went to the polls. I mostly voted for people that had no chance to win. Sadder than that, I probably wouldn’t even have liked their policies if they did win. I did cast my second-choice vote for Oakland mayor for Jean Quan, and it looks like all those second-place votes may actually propel her over Don Perata, which would be a victory for actual democracy. Maybe it will convince other progressive cities to try ranked-choice voting which, despite dire predictions, has yet to bring down the power grid or cause a volcano to erupt in Oakland (which has no volcanoes, in case you were wondering). I voted for legalized marijuana, which we didn’t get, and for implementing California’s Clean Air Act, which we did. We voted to drop the two-thirds majority requirement for passing a state budget, but two-thirds is still needed to raise any taxes so it’s not worth much.

In the end, voting will not turn around the despair that I feel around and within me. It won’t put money back into our bankrupt community college and university system, or find jobs for the millions who have been out of work so long they’ve stopped looking. It won’t provide childcare or job training for single mothers trying to squirm their way out of poverty; it won’t provide restorative justice for survivors of sexual assault.


If anything reminds us how little the Voting Rights Act has actually done to increase racial equality, it’s the sentencing of Johannes Mehserle in Los Angeles last Friday, before the final election results in our state were even known. Mehserle is the white transit cop who killed 20-year-old Oscar Grant last New Year’s morning with one shot to the back while Oscar was pinned on the ground. On Friday he was sentenced to two years (including four months already served) for involuntary manslaughter. On Friday night, Oakland police, led by African American police chief Anthony Batts, herded protesters into a trap where 152 were arrested, ostensibly because a very few people broke a few windows. I am not condoning breaking windows of small businesses or cars. But the chief made it clear that the plan to break up the march was crafted long before a single window was broken, and executed as soon as the marchers deviated from an agreed-upon route. They didn’t arrest the few vandals, they arrested everyone they considered part of an “illegal assembly.” The story I heard from people who were there was that when the vandalism started, the crowd chanted for it to stop and it did.

Yes, we should be inspired by the suffragists and the civil rights movement. But the lesson we need to take from them is not that we must vote even if there is nothing we want to vote for, but that we can and must organize for the change we truly need.

How Oakland's Leaders Started a Riot

In April 2001, about six months into the Second Intifada, an Israeli human rights activist named Jeff Halper wrote an article called “How to start an uprising.” He explained how the Israeli government created the conditions for Palestinian unrest, which it then used to justify increased repression and oppression of Palestinian society. He described how they created a powderkeg by strangling the Palestinian economy and confining people in a virtual prison while stealing their land and portraying them in the media as the terrorists. Ariel Sharon then lit the fuse when he marched onto the Temple Mount with 1,000 soldiers, and the army (then controlled by the Labor party under Ehud Barak) added accelerant by firing a million bullets at nonviolent protesters in one week.

If Oakland’s political leaders didn’t read that article before last night’s demonstration in response to the Johannes Mehserle verdict, they should have.

Here’s how they started a mini-riot:

First they - not by themselves, of course, but as part of a system that is based on denying equal rights to Black and Brown people - created a tinderbox of high unemployment, political disenfranchisement and police harassment. Tony Pirone and Johannes Mehserle lit the match by killing Oscar Grant in cold blood and in plain view of dozens of witnesses; BART management and the DA’s office (no doubt in consultation with the mayor and other political leaders) accelerated the blaze by not charging Mehserle for weeks and keeping Pirone on the payroll for more than a year; the court helped by moving the trial to LA, where the judge allowed all the African Americans to be kicked off the jury and a number of whites with family members on the police force to be seated.

Okay, you might say that all of that was the result of long-term systemic injustice and not under the control of Mayor Dellums and police chief Batts and all the others. And you would be right, except that they have had a full year to offer African American youth in Oakland something that would make them part of the life of the city, they’ve gotten stimulus money that could have been used creatively to employ people who have never had a chance to start innovative community-based projects for health, literacy, training, entertainment – you name it – and they have not done it.

But here’s where they bear direct responsibility for dumping buckets of turpentine on an already smoldering fire.

First, they allowed, or even encouraged, the media to hype and hype and hype the threat of violence for weeks in advance of the verdict, and to film the cops practicing draconian riot-control tactics using dangerous new equipment bought with Homeland Security money. This sent a clear message to young people in the community that once again, they were guilty before they stepped out of their houses. The media whipped up the threat to white people into hysteria that led to every state office building in the Bay Area being closed down at 3:00 p.m. on Thursday. At 5:30 on Friday evening, during our Women in Black vigil near Montgomery St. BART in San Francisco, there were still cops prowling around, “just in case” of a demonstration (I’m not making that up – they told me that’s why they were there).

Next they played the nonprofits and the well meaning street peace groups off against independent activists and community people who don’t identify with those groups. The people doing the 6-8 rally were the good protesters, and everyone else were bad protesters. The nonprofits did their part by worrying so much about how to keep people from doing things that they didn’t give people anything to do with their energy. No one wanted to stand around listening to speeches for two hours. There was no march, so guess what people who wanted something active to do did? You got it – went to face off with the cops.

Then they brought literally tens of thousands of cops into downtown Oakland, armed to the teeth and packed in like sardines. They outfitted them with riot masks and face shields, giving them the look of an army of Darth Vaders. They huddled with each other, targeting people they decided were trouble. A friend of a friend was busted for no reason, on such a whim. This in itself would have likely been enough to spark some confrontations, because for young people who had just been told –again – that their lives are not valued by this society, the presence of this armed camp was a slap in the face. What I saw and filmed as I was wandering around was mostly young African American men ranting at cops who remained stone-faced and silent. Some of the young men were quite sincere in trying to explain how it feels to be in their situation. The individual cops were restrained, yes. They stayed calm and did not rise to the bait. But the mere fact that they were there was a provocation.

As soon as the permitted rally was over, they declared an unlawful assembly, announcing “Anyone who is in this area, regardless of your purpose, is in violation of section 409 of the Penal Code and is subject to arrest.” Of course, to me it sounded like “blah blah blah” but I heard it very clearly on the news. I ended up giving a ride to a guy who came out of work (he works at Earth Justice) at 9:00 p.m. only to find the BART station closed. Great way to get people to leave the area – close off their exit routes.

Whenever the police are engaged in crowd control maneuvers, there’s this thing they do that I’ve never understood. For no apparent reason, about 200 of them suddenly go running down the street, straight at the back of whatever crowd they’re (allegedly) trying to control. As I say, I have no idea what the purpose is supposed to be, but the only thing it actually accomplishes is to create panic. It also obviously pumps up the adrenaline of both cops and crowd, the exact dynamic that caused the tragic killing of Oscar Grant.

What should they have done instead? I’ll tell you. They should have kept most if not all of the cops at home, saving all those millions spent on overtime and paddy wagons and jail space for schools and summer camps and youth job programs. And any cops that were out there should have been in regular uniforms, not riot gear. If all those heavily armed robots had not been on the street, there would have been no looting and no windows broken. I can absolutely tell you that from experience, and from my limited knowledge of psychology.

Yes, there were people who came from Berkeley and San Francisco and probably Walnut Creek, and even maybe a few from Oakland who planned to loot and break windows. That’s what they do, it’s what they believe in. Some of them are even friends of mine, but in this context, they’re the disrespectful assholes who spraypainted “Oakland is our amusement park tonight” on the side of a building –NO IT’S NOT, GUYS! But even those people, or maybe especially those people, would not have bothered destroying stuff if there hadn’t been an audience or anyone to give them counterattack.

It’s true that if the cops and the City had not been out in force, if they had not been guilty of overplanning, and there had been one window broken, the media and the white pundits would never have let them hear the end of it. What the media and the pundits are not pointing out, now that it has passed with the tedium of a badly scripted play, is that all that overreaction did not prevent any looting or property damage. The businesses that wanted to avoid having their windows broken knew what to do and did it – they boarded up. I watched a Vietnamese restaurant throwing up plywood sheets over their storefront as their last customers walked out with bags of takeout. It took them about 20 minutes and doubtless saved them a thousand bucks and a lot of heartache.

Anyone who was seriously interested in looting would have known that any other street in the East Bay was a better bet for it that night than downtown Oakland. You could probably have knocked over banks in Fremont and Hayward that night and gotten away with it, since nearly every cop in Alameda County was in that ten-block area of Oakland. So the people who chose to break the windows of Footlocker and Subway in downtown Oakland did it because they wanted to provoke a reaction. If the police had not obliged them, they would have gone home and the less privileged kids who followed their example, whether lured by the appeal of new shoes or the excitement of the conflict, would not have been left to pay the price.

If Oakland's leadership, political and civil, spent as much time trying to prevent the periodic recurrences of the Rodney King-Sean Bell-Oscar Grant killings as they spend trying to prevent people's anger at injustice from overflowing in unproductive ways, we might not be doomed to keep playing out this pathetic scenario over and over again.