My plane from Europe had brought your loyal and humble narrator to North Carolina and from there I had driven to Virginia (where my Mother lives) to spend the Thanksgiving Holiday with her. All along the country drive I was dismayed by the many Confederate flags I saw in the yards of homes along the way. I found this utterly revolting. This was in sharp contrast to my recent stay in Deutschland where I learned that any and all substances dealing with Nazis are completely banned and possession or display of such items is a jailable offense. Now before you say, "Yeah, but the Confederation weren't as bad as the Nazis..." Oh, no? They both took another race of people (millions of each), and enslaved, raped and killed them. That's enough similarities to call them equally evil in my book (literally). Now the people who disgustingly display said Confederate Flags would have you believe that they are merely celebrating their (twisted) heritage. Heritage of what? That they fought to keep in place a government and economic system wherein the enslavement of other human beings was their main tenet? These idiots will wrongly tell you that the Civil War was not about slavery but about states' rights. Yeah, the states' rights to OWN SLAVES! When these insensitive, uneducated morons hoist these "Stars and Bars" banners of shame they might as well be hanging an image of an African American in slave clothes and chains.
I finally made my way to the Old Dominion (state motto: Sic Semper Tyrannis) and while I was there I had the idea that I would like to check out the local Occupy chapter closest to my Mother's house, Occupy Charlottesville. I was surprised to learn that Charlottesville even had an Occupy chapter. That right there is proof that the Occupy movement is far reaching and really touching a rich vein of discontent in the minds of Americans everywhere, even in small, rural cities like this one. Charlottesville is essentially a small, college town (it's home to the Thomas Jefferson designed University of Virginia) but that's about it. It's other main claim to fame is that it's the place where the Dave Matthews Band came from. Now, full disclosure, I really hate the music of the Dave Matthews Band (yes, even their big hit, that slow "Crash," song). I can't get over the fact that their singer's speaking voice is completely different from his put-on, dishonest singing voice which to me sounds EXACTLY like that guy from the old School House Rock video, "Conjunction Junction." To me the sound of the Dave Matthews Band mirrors the quintessential essence of Charlottesville, bland, vanilla, slightly country, completely safe, unoriginal and not challenging or stand out worthy in any way (however very nicely and cleanly produced with competent musicianship).
Regardless of how I felt about favorite sons DMB, I figured I would go to Occupy Charlottesville the Friday after Thanksgiving. Before I left for the demonstration in this area of South central Virginia, I checked out the Occupy Charlottesville website. There were various pics of small crowds of protesters doing their thing. Well, it certainly looked like an Occupy chapter, just redux. Their website advertised a potluck Thanksgiving that they were going to throw at the encampment and I found that impressive. The holidays, plus the cold weather. plus the midnight camp eviction/raids were making for a triple whammy when it came to getting this movement through the Winter. I also read on their website that they had a scheduled march the next day at 4:00 p.m. with a General Assembly meeting at 6:00 p.m. It was going to take me about an hour to get there from my Mother's place in Stuart's Draft.
It was time for a new sign.
I googled "Occupy Wall Street signs" and surfed around looking for ideas or inspiration because as Martin Gore wrote, "I'm always willing to learn if you've got something to teach." I was dismayed by some of the jokey ones like "Bring Back Crystal Pepsi!" and "I'm so angry I made a sign!" Carrying a sign like this might get you a part time chuckle but make no mistake you're being a full-time dick. And you're not helping. It's easy to be dismissive, it's easy to mock. But you know what's really difficult? Being earnest. Actually, standing for something. Believing in something so fervently that you would subject yourself to what Shakespeare referred to (in Hamlet) as to suffer 'the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.' And believe me, Dear Reader (as I try to oh so clearly illustrate in these journal pages), this description from Ol' Willie the Shake is exactly correct because something always, always happens at these things. Truth is indeed stranger than fiction and to wit: you couldn't make this shit up.
Anyway, in making my new sign, it occurred to me that this would be the PERFECT place to do something with a Biblical angle to it. In Stuarts Draft, you couldn't drive a half of a mile without seeing a small, wooden placard attached to a house's street mailbox which warned of fire and damnation and gave all the soundbite religion a passing motorist could read in the two or three seconds it encouraged them to take their eyes off the road to Think God. I made a quick jaunt to the local Rite Aid and within minutes I was home and full on into arts and crafts for revolutionaries mode.
On one side, I wrote a direct quote from the Bible, Mark 10:25 which read: "In fact, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven."
This quote, which is directly attributed to Jesus Christ, is found also in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. However, I didn't know if this would be strong enough, or if it was going to be too wordy. But what motivated me to go there because something that has always angered me about the right wing (who are CLEARLY about protecting the wealth of the rich) was the way they continuously tried to co-opt Jesus for their own nefarious purposes. I was sick and tired of the right wing dressing themselves in the guise of doing the work of Jesus but were actually just hypocrites who twist Christ and His Message into evil propaganda for the rich. I think very few religions which profess to be Christian these days actually follow Christ's teachings. (If we actually lived by what He actually said, the Catholic Church 's great wealth would've been translated into food, shelter and clothes for the poor of the world a long, long time ago. But that's just one example). Jesus himself was a very poor rabbi who was about helping the sick and the downtrodden and in addition to that scripture about the camel and the eye of the needle, according to the Good Book, Jesus also said things like "Blessed are the poor in spirit for THEIRS is the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 5:3), and "If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me," (Matthew 19:21) and “No-one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and Money.”(Matthew 6:24) There were even more anti-rich, pro-poor quotes in the Bible that I will leave up to you, Dear Reader, to research further. However, for me, through all of these sacred verses, one simple message came forth:
Jesus hated the rich.
Boom! There it was. I had quotes directly attributed to Jesus himself from the Bible, the Holiest book in all of Christendom, that provided indisputable proof to support this assertion that Jesus' held a severe bias against the wealthy. So that's what I decided I would put on the other side of my sign opposite Mark 10:25 just in case I felt the urge to ratchet things up a notch while I was protesting. If anyone challenged me on its veracity, I could simply flip the sign over to Jesus' actual quote from the Bible and shut them up real quick like.
When I explained to my own dear Mother what I was doing and why, she asked if she could help and assisted me in coloring the giant letters in solid black with a Sharpee. While we were finishing up, my Mother's sister, my Aunt Barbara came by for a visit. My elderly Aunt, who was in her 60's, was a somewhat heavyset woman with shortish, blonde hair. She took pride in being a devout Christian and upon reading my sign text, she took offense immediately. She wasn't politically inclined so she really didn't have a horse in this race one way or the other, or at least not in her mind. All she could see was that I was professing that her God (and mine) "hated" something. And she didn't like that at all. Not one bit.
"My God doesn't hate!" She protested. "That sign offends me! And it's going to offend others who read it! And people are going to challenge you on that around there. These people are very religious!"
"You ARE in the Bible Belt," my Mother warned (though she still continued to color in the sign). No matter how much I tried to debate and explain and quote Jesus' actual passages from the Bible, my Aunt just couldn't get it. Of course Jesus hates, I thought. He hates sin. And what about those moneychangers in the Temple that he raged on? What about child killers and child molesters? I don't think they'd make his Christmas list either (of course to Jesus a Christmas list would be a birthday list, no?).
"Did God create hell?" I asked my Aunt.
"Yes, but people put THEMSELVES in hell by not coming to Him," she asserted.
"But if I create a stove and I tell you not to go into that stove and you climb in anyway and I make no move to stop you but I instead let you burn in there forever as Christ does with those in hell, then how do you think I feel about those people who have been sent to what is the equivalent of the Incinerator of the Universe to burn for all eternity? Is this an act of love? No, it means that I hate them!"
"No, God doesn't hate!" she insisted.
"We're splitting hairs here," I said. "If I'm not only burning you like trash but I'm letting you suffer through this immolation ad infinitum (when I could stop it) is it really that far off to say that I hate you?" I asked.
"YOU can't stop it. YOU'RE not God!" She countered.
"I'm speaking in metaphor. I don't mean me, I mean God. And that's a dodge. Besides, whatever your interpretation of Jesus there are other more extremist protestant groups, the ones that speak in tongues and play with snakes that think that even you are going to hell. I've got you and you know it," I laughed.
"You DON'T have me. My God doesn't hate!" she cemented. And that's all she could repeat (even though I'm quite sure underneath she knew she couldn't present a counterargument beyond this surface detail of semantics). But this debate in and of itself was a lesson to be learned. I think it may be true that people in this area might not be mentally sophisticated enough to get past the "Jesus Hates" bit party of my sign to even read what came after that. They would only see the first two words and not even consider the context or whether or not the point I was making was valid no matter what followed next, just like my dear Ol' Auntie here.
But then again, too fucking bad. I wasn't there to gently massage anyone into awareness. It was time to wake people the fuck up. To me, what I had written on my sign was a truthful statement. If it had to be put in the strongest way possible to shock people into getting the attention necessary to maybe start people thinking in a different way, then so be it. My job holding my sign for all to see is not to give everyone the entire answer to everything as they drive by, but in that few second window of opportunity, to implant seeds of thought in their minds in hopes that these ideas will take root with them and that these folks will then carry it further, like branches bearing fruit which fall with seeds of their own and so on and so on. And also my job is to influence passersby simply by the fact that they saw somebody who gave a shit enough to actually give their time and energy to do something like this. That's not something people really do these days, or even remember that they CAN do. And I am an ardent believer in the idea that one man can make a difference. After all, it was just one guy in Tunisia, a simple food cart vendor, who got so sick of being hassled by the corrupt cops that he set himself on fire in protest which ignited across the entire Middle East and eventually became the catalyst of this year's historic Arab Spring of reform.
"I don't like that sign," my Aunt finished.
"You don't have to. That's the beauty of free speech in our free country," I smiled as I collected my necessities for my trip and made my way out the door.
"Make sure you take your jacket, it gets cold at night," my Mother admonished (like a typical Mom). I grabbed it even though it was an unseasonably warm day for November with the temperature in the mid 70's, why would I need it? (Later, after I decided to leave it in my truck and night would fall, I would wish I had heeded my Mother's warning.)
As I got into my truck, I grabbed my hand sanitizer and had a slight laugh about how important cleanliness is to me and how I'd made sure that I always had this particular brand with me not just every time I've been to an Occupy chapter but pretty much any time I had ventured out doors these days. Just for laughs, I wrote a little mini commercial for the product and posted it on my Facebook page:
drove to Charlottesville I started going over the short two or three minute speech I'd given in New York and D.C. in my head just to see if I could still remember it and in case there was such a forum or opportunity. What a beautiful day it was. The drive East from Stuarts Draft to Charlottesville is one of the more scenic drives I've seen in this country, green, rolling mountains as far as thee eye can see (kinda similar to German vistas actually). When I finally got to Charlottesville I had to drive around a bit looking for parking, finally, up on a hill, Occupy Charlottesville, my destination, came into view. I parked my truck in the garage about two blocks away on Market and (as I mentioned earlier) stupidly decided to leave my jacket in the truck (but it was practically hot out!). Anyway, I also left my um, green medicine in there, too. I didn't know what the situation was at this Occupy chapter and I didn't want to take the risk.
As I approached Lee Park, I could see lots of tents up on this hilltop above the streets. Professionally printed protest signs were planted all around the park's edge like the kind you'd expect to see for a "this person or that for city council" type thing stuck into your neighbor's yard. In the center, much like McPherson Square in Washington, there was a statue of a historical Civil War figure. But whereas the D.C. park had respectfully featured a hero of the Northern side of that historic conflict, the righteous blue that had fought for the abolishment of slavery and the preservation of our Union, here, conversely (and sadly) that hadn't been the choice of honorees. No, quixotically, here in Charlottesville, the wrong headed powers that be had misguidedly picked a military commander whom, though he may have been a tactical genius, was still a monster who killed thousands and thousands of American soldiers who had sought to stop his side from continuing their practice of enslaving their fellow mankind. So unfortunately, here in the middle of Occupy Charlottesville, there stood a statue to the Confederate General Robert E. Lee, hence this place's name, Lee Park.
Now to be fair, I have this same association-with-slavery-problem with Thomas Jefferson and the our other Founding Fathers. When I see their faces on our money, it's like the comedian Dave Chappelle said, "All I see is slave holder trading cards." I understand that it's probably a fallacy to try to judge people of that earlier era through our 21st century sensibilities but these were very intelligent, very scholarly men who should've known better and in some cases (as evidenced by their letters) did know better and still went along with it. So why do I give Thomas Jefferson a pass and not Robert E. Lee? Well, first of all I don't give Thomas Jefferson a pass. I find the fact that he kept one of his own illegitimate children that he had with his slave Sally Hemmings as a slave until he grew to adulthood is probably one of the most loathsome things I have ever heard. But. Beyond Thomas Jefferson, the slave owner, there is the Thomas Jefferson who is nearly unmatched in his revolutionary prose, the one who is the Shakespeare of anti-despotism. His words are necessary and as timeless as they are timely and for someone like myself who carries an intense admiration for master wordsmiths, the beauty of his rhetoric, his breathtaking color, his factual basis, and the emotional connection of his words (despite the centuries passed) allows for me to separate his duality and both admire and loathe the man simultaneously. And, (and this is a big "AND"), Thomas Jefferson lived a full hundred years before Robert E. Lee, meaning Lee and his generation had all of that time to get their perspectives correct as others were doing in the North and elsewhere (see abolitionist John Brown). It was greed and contempt that spurred the South to commit the most vile atrocities upon their fellow human beings and Lee fought for the South, Lee led them, and if Lee had won we would've had two separate countries, one that enslaved their fellow man and one that did not. He would've been with the one that did.
Even more disgusting, from an aerial view, the walkways through Lee Park crisscrossed at his statue forming a giant, block-sized "X" which I'm sure was intended to suggest the crossed stars and bars of his Confederate flag. Fuck the Confederacy, fuck anyone who would still fly it's flag, and yes, by all means, fuck Robert E. Lee. This area designated to his memory is now a place where people walk their dogs, so I think it is a fitting end for this park that mistakenly seeks to 'honor' this morally askew, evil man that his legacy (at least in this regard) is today a patch of poorly maintained grass where people bring their animals to shit. Ptooey!
As I walked North into the park, to my left was their Information Tent, with a sign out front announcing it as such and a boombox blaring a black woman's voice loudly. I caught a little bit of the voice wasy saying and could tell she was talking about various lefty issues. You could have amplification here? That right there was a major difference from the New York and D.C. chapters. This gave me hope. Over to the opposite side of my path, on the right, there was a couch with a tarp over top of it where some older people were seated talking. I got the feeling that they lived there in the park. Hardly anyone else was to be seen on that side besides a few people out dog walking. Further out, to my left there was the main thrust of tents, the community. I saw a small population rustling about over in that area and during my entire visit and I only ever saw a few of them from this section ever venture out of that safety zone. It wasn't too hard to figure out that these were the local homeless.
The first actual Occupier here at Charlottesville that I encountered was a young, white guy with a black and white shemagh scarf around his neck that was festooned with skulls. He wore a beard, glasses and his hair had both dreads and parts that were shaved. The rest of his clothes were army surplus store chic with large combat boots on his feet. I introduced myself and asked if he knew about the march that was supposed to be taking place that day because it was nearly 4:00 p.m. already and I couldn't see anything organizing if there was anything. He took me to the Information Tent and said that he would go round up some people. As I entered the tent I heard him scream, "MIC CHECK!" outside to the park and in response I think that maybe one girl emerged from what appeared to be the 'food tent' which was just up the hill beyond the couches on the right (or Eastern side) of the park and that was the extent of the response he got.
I entered the tent and I had to bow my head because it had a really low ceiling. Inside was a long table with stacks of different colored paper, lefty fliers of different hues and sizes. Seated inside on the opposite edge of the table was a young, African American woman who looked to be in her early to mid-twenties with an average build. She was wearing a yellow fedora and white rimmed sunglasses (even though she was inside) like the kind worn by the lead singer of LMFAO and a Red Hot Chili Peppers shirt, jeans and no shoes. We introduced ourselves, I told her my name and that I had been at both Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Washington, D.C. and explained that I was there for the holiday weekend visiting my Mother and thought I'd come by to give my support to the Charlottesville chapter. She said her name was Ashley and I was just asking her about the scheduled march that I'd seen on the website when another guy came in rather quickly. This new guy was tall and skinny, with a bleach blond mohawk (and the rest of his head shaved). He wore glasses and had facial scruff but not what you'd call a full beard. He was dressed much in the same manner as the first guy I had met in the park. This must've been the heighth of Occupy Charlottesville fashion. We shook hands and introduced ourselves as well. I immediately reached for my sanitizing cream for my hands. That's not a slight on them but more a bust on my own OCD germaphobia. I asked again about the march and Ashley looked puzzled as she embarrassedly explained that they were unaware of any scheduled march and therefore didn't have anything organized. When I told her that I had seen it on the website, Ashley became annoyed and said that people weren't keeping the site up to date and the tall, skinny blond mohawk guy agreed.
We discussed a myriad of topics like the recent spate of police brutality against the Occupy movement in the last two months and what had become of the victims. For example, Scot Olsen, a military veteran and active protester in the Oakland chapter had been one of the first wounded in this Second American Revolution when he had had his skull cracked open by a tear gas canister shot by riot police at a local Occupy protest. As a result, though Scot was mercifully still alive he had suffered permanent brain damage and now had some difficulty forming words and sentences. We also discussed the recent point-black-in-your-face-down-your-throat repeated pepper spraying of the UC Davis students by some campus cops. We also discussed the Jennifer Fox case of a pregnant protester who had been punched in the stomach and pepper sprayed by police in an Occupy Seattle demonstration and had as a result of the police brutality against her, sadly miscarried and lost her baby. These patriots of the cause had suffered permanent brain damage and the loss of an unborn child just for exercising their Constitutionally protected right to assemble.
Ashley hadn't heard about this Jennifer Fox case (I guessed that it was a bit difficult getting up to date news when you were living in a tent in a cold park for an extended period of time). It seemed that, as a woman, Ashley had found the news of Jennifer Fox's miscarriage particularly upsetting. We then discussed our surprise that all of this had happened in only the last two months and we all shared concern over what dire consequences might occur should this violence against protesters by police continue to escalate. If the existing algorithm was to be carried out, it was only a matter of time, a statistical certainty that someone somewhere involved with the Occupy movement was going to meet a fatal end at the hands of the police. I told her of my "First Martyr Theory," that historically, when the powers that be started killing those who would challenge their status quo, this had a way of not scaring demonstrators away (as those with the power intended) but rather it galvanized the resistance and also served as a powerfully effective recruiting tool to proselytize new members to the rebel cause.
Hitler knew this. When his first attempt to take power failed and his men were shot to death, the blood of the dead had splattered on their early Swastika flag. Years later, Hitler would name this flag the "Blood Flag" and touch it to all other Nazi flags at yearly Nuremberg rallies to consecrate them with the blood of the martyrs. Now, I am in no way mentioning that in support of that devil at all but rather to illustrate a point about how powerful the beneficial side effects of martyrdom can be for a rebellion, albeit at the heaviest of costs.
I further mentioned to Ashley that as students of history, we know that whenever a grassroots, populist uprising begins taking casualties from those whose grip they are fighting to be free, the upswell of extreme emotion which is born from these sacrifices gives birth to a militant wing of the resistance who vows to strike back. We have seen this in the last one hundred years with both Ireland (I.R.A.) and Spain (E.T.A.). Now granted those were both separatist movements but the result is the same, if one side begins to kill another, how long before justice demands that reciprocity occurs? Now I mentioned this to Ashley as more of a historical warning than any kind of proposal of action, but she lit up as if a light bulb had suddenly appeared shining above her head and said,
"Sometimes I think that's what NEEDS to happen because otherwise nothing is ever going to change." While I can sympathize with her, I told her she should be careful speaking so freely in that manner. Now I know how odd that sounds, me telling people to watch what they are saying in a supposedly free society but if you want trouble quickly from the authorities, start talking openly about how much you'd like to see a militant wing of Occupy. I quickly corrected her and told her that Jesus and Gandhi taught us that as soon as you fight back, you lose.
I then asked her about their particular chapter there in Lee Park. I asked how many people lived there. She said that there were probably about 30 to 50 people who actually lived in the park (this was the contingent I mentioned earlier who camped their en masse but few of whom I ever saw take part in any activities having to do with Occupy whatsoever). She also said that their general assembly meetings sometimes numbered in the 1-200 range. She was very proud that their chapter had just gone to a city council meeting and the city council had remarked that it was the largest meeting held ever as a result and that the Occupiers had persuaded the council to grant them the permit extension necessary to stay in the park. I asked her if the police ever hassled anyone at there at the park and she said,
"No, there is a large homeless population here and we're sort of taking up for them because basically there's only two shelters in Charlottesville and they both really suck and so this has given them a decent place to stay but sometimes the police have had to come in because somebody is too drunk or something." Speaking of which, as I had now taken a seat opposite Ashley at the information table and was subsequently much closer to her while she spoke, in these close confines of the inner tent space, I suddenly smelled the strong, distinct aroma of alcohol. I could've sworn it was also coming from the tall, skinny, blond mohawk guy who was now endlessly shuffling, rearranging and collating paperwork underneath the other end of the table. Somebody in this tent had been drinking heavily and it sure wasn't me. I didn't know if it was her or him, but I kinda got the feeling it was both. Now, I am certainly no saint and my green medicine usage has been clearly documented in this blog and in some way I CAN understand them hitting the bottle a little here and there because they are actually living at the park. I think any of us could certainly sympathize with the human need for a little nip or two to fight the cold (even though you are actually releasing more body heat when you drink, not warming up) and just to fight the boredom and stress of living in that less than comfortable environment twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. But what kinda stuck in my craw was that these two particular Occupiers were in the Information Tent. This tent was the front lines of representation of what they (and we) were doing. That meant that while here, they were the face of Occupy Charlottesville and should any curious folks, any fence-sitters or would-be recruits-seeking-information inquire therein, these newbies like me, would've smelled the rotgut everywhere. And let's just say that these types of transgressions not only undermined the cause and it's credibility, but it also played directly into the hands of the right wingers who would love nothing more (and do so as often as they can) than to paint this movement as just a bunch of lazy, substance abusing wackos.
I let it go.
I then asked Ashley if any local businesses were complaining about them as they had in Zuccotti Park in Manhattan to which she replied, "No, the only complaints we've had are the local homeowners who say we're an eyesore. And I had this one little, old lady stick her head in here once and yell at me because she said she didn't have anyplace to walk her dog." To this, the tall, skinny, blond mohawk guy scoffed,
"Like there isn't room everywhere. People walk their dogs through here all the time," he countered. He was right. There were so few Occupiers here that that it meant there was plenty of space in the park if you wanted to walk your canine and in my visit I saw a lot of people doing just that without any problem at all.
And so then I asked where everyone was using the bathrooms because that had been the main complaint of the local businesses around Occupy Wall Street in Lower Manhattan. "We have some port-o-potties that have been donated to us," Ashley answered. Wow, THAT was different about this place, too. The other Occupy chapters hadn't been allowed this basic necessity because the cities had pronounced them to be unlawful and in doing so had gone so far as to risk public health hazards in order to try to deter Occupiers from taking up residence. But not here. I was very surprised at this.
"The police haven't tried to take them away?" I asked incredulously.
"No, the police here...we know them, they know us... we haven't had any real problems. They don't want any incidents here like Oakland or New York." That an Occupy chapter would be this chummy with their local authorities bothered me a bit. It's called a protest not a "Kumbaya Cop Singalong ."
"Do you have electricity here?" I asked.
"Yeah, we have juice. I'm trying to get those bikes here that make your own electricity so we can make our own," she said. That was a cool idea, I thought. That would strike another thing off the list that the right wingers always used to complain about the encampments plus it would mean at least some of the park occupants would be getting some actual exercise. I pressed further.
"Do you have a medic tent?" I asked thinking about the lone sentinel in my experience at the Occupy chapter in D.C.
"We haven't really needed one," said the tall, skinny, blond mohawk guy. "We have a first aid kit."
"We need band aids," Ashley added. No medic tent, just a first aid kit that was needing more band aids. Hmmmm. Well, I guess that's all you do need when your protest is so innocuous that the police are on friendly terms with you. That may change when Charlottesville's finest eventually come to evict and give them a dose of pepper spray, a few knocks with the batons, and a whole lot of too-tight-plastic-handcuff-twisties (See also Occupy New York, Occupy Oakland, Occupy Seattle, etc.) Occupy Charlottesville might soon wish that they would have put a little more preparation in their medical care resources.
"What about the press?" I asked. "Do they come around?" In answer, Ashley rolled her eyes in exasperation. At least I think she rolled her eyes as she was still wearing her stylish sunglasses. I really couldn't see, but she moved the rest of her head as if she had just rolled her eyes.
"Hey," she said to the tall, skinny blond mohawk guy who suddenly stopped foraging and sat up straight and still like one of those prairie dogs you see on a nature program. "Did you see what happened when that guy from Channel 29 stopped by?" she asked him.
"No, I heard he was here though," replied that tall, skinny, blond mohawk guy. Ashley turned to me and said,
"The press, particularly this one guy always comes here and tries to trip us up," she explained. "Like yesterday, our food tent had been blown over by the wind and we were all trying to set it back up and this reporter was asking everyone, 'What do you think of Thanksgiving?' and we were just like, 'I don't know, we're just trying to get our tent back up.'" I nodded in agreement. I was glad that they hadn't allowed themselves to be caught in that obviously loaded question. That reporter was trying to get them to say something stupid against Thanksgiving and thus making the movement look not only bad in a general sense but also removed from any connection to normal society (which just isn't the case).
I shared with Ashley and the tall, skinny, blond mohawk guy that I wrote an Occupy blog and did an Occupy YouTube channel as well and that I would probably be writing about my experiences there. He asked me how to find it and I wrote both web addressed down on a piece of paper for him. "So is there not going to be a march today I asked?" Just then a very large, African American man who looked to be in his early twenties entered the tent and sat down next to Ashley on the opposite side of the table from me. He was carrying a black backpack and was dressed in what I guessed to have been school clothes, a nice, clean button down shirt and slacks.
"There's a march today?" he asked and I noticed that he had food in the corners of his mouth from where he had been eating what looked like must've been a powdered donut (or a few). It was around this time that I also took note that the first Occupier I'd met there, the bespectacled, shemagh scarf wearing, army surplus guy had never returned from his supposed to attempt to round up marchers.
"Hey," Ashley said to the tall, skinny, blond mohawk guy who had returned to his paper shuffling but perked up yet again with more rapt, prairie dog attention upon hearing her call. "Can you go see if anybody wants to go on a march?" she asked.
"I'll go do a Mic Check," he answered and out the open flap of the tent he zipped. Great, ANOTHER mic check, thought I.
"Are you any good at drawing?" the large black student asked in me in an almost child-like manner. The slow cadence of his speech and the gentle tone of his voice reminded me of a black version of Lenny, the ill-fated character from the play, Of Mice and Men and I was beginning to wonder if he, like Lenny wasn't a mentally challenged individual.
"I'm not bad," I said. Actually, I'd spent nearly my entire childhood drawing my own comic books and so I did know my way around a pencil and drawing pad a little bit but I didn't really know where this was going. Suddenly he pulled out a sheet of paper and put it on the table in front of me.
"I want this to match on both sides." I looked down and saw a drawing of a cartoon cop holding a nightstick at the ready which had been pencilled very precisely and without any sketching. He flipped the paper over to show me that it was blank on the other side. I looked at it for a second,
"You want the same thing on both sides, you say?" He nodded in response. "Why don't you just trace it?" I asked him holding it up so that you could see that it was see through.
"Do you wanna do it?" he asked me. Not really, I thought, but his request had all the innocence of a kindergarten student asking a teacher's aid to help make a Christmas card for his family. It may have been mean to refuse but by then it was already close to 4:15 and there wasn't going to be much daylight left if I wanted to do any protesting. So I gently slid his paper back across the table to him, smiled and said,
"I think this may be beyond my abilities. Just go ahead and trace it," I encouraged. Honestly? I couldn't stop looking at the doughnut leftovers on his face. I know that's awful to say but it was really grossing me out.
"We've had trouble getting people to do things like march," Ashley said. "Which kinda upsets me because I think we need to be more organized politically. Like I said, we have a lot of homeless people here and some of them are involved and some of them just do their own thing. And we have a lot of punk squatters here, too." Punk squatters? Punk squatting is when a group of homeless people break into an abandoned building and make it their home. I had heard this term before (I'd seen the actress Rosario Dawson on a late night TV talk show and she had mentioned that she had grown up in a 'squat' or something like that definition) but I had never heard this term used in relation to the Occupy movement. I'd only ever thought of it applying when it came to a building and not a park but now that I thought about, I guessed the same principals were in play.
"It definitely seems like you guys are more locally centric than the other Occupy chapters I've been to," I said. "And that's great, I mean you can be whatever you want. But the others seem to have had a more national or even global focus. You guys are a protest locally just by virtue of being camped here in the park but I think there's room for everything, this, what you've already got going on, AND more activist things like marching and civil disobedience. It's not just about having a free campground to stay, in fact it looks like the current trend is for Occupy chapters to be chased out of the parks by midnite raids from the cops. We may have to move forward without the camps," I said.
"Sometimes I don't even think we should have encampments. I do think that we, as citizens are guaranteed by the supreme law of the land, the U.S. Constitution, our right to assemble but when the rights of others are impeded by that assembly, like say, when people want to use a public park space and they can't because it is currently unavailable due to a fucking tent being on it, I go back and forth as to what is the correct thing. Is it the right to assemble or the right of someone else to use that park space? I am in support of helping the homeless, that problem does need to be addressed. But we can't hang the entire success of this movement on whether or not people get to camp for free without end in public parks that are paid for BY everyone FOR everyone. So yeah, I would almost like to see there be no encampments and instead, I think there should be two days a week (a week day and a weekend day, like say Friday and Saturday) that are specific and designated, weekly rally times to keep the movement going THAT way, instead of permanent, around the clock occupation. Let's model ourselves after the Arab Spring. The multitudes in Tahrir Square didn't grow from constant campers. It was the opposite. They came from their mosques, where their local Iman would preach and lead them in weekly prayers and then after their services they would all head to Tahrir Square to protest. This weekly, regularly scheduled meeting time turned out to be a very successful equation which steadily grew Egyptian numbers and yes, EVENTUALLY grew to the point where it led to the organic growth of encampments. But that was at the culmination of the protest, when they already had overwhelming support in numbers of citizenry, not at the beginning. This Egyptian way of doing things had been successful to the point where they not only removed a long standing dictator but they also just recently celebrated their first free elections in decades. So,yeah, this permanent encampment thing isn't the only way to go about this, and I'd almost like to see them gone. We'd almost be stronger without them," I said.
Ashley suddenly got very serious and almost angry and started shaking her head 'no.'
"I don't want that. I LIVE here," she said firmly. I was starting to feel like she was mistakenly thinking that it was ME who was threatening her residence and not the Mayor Bloombergs of the country. I felt like I was merely pointing out the truth of events that were currently going on in the other Occupy chapters around the country and other revolutions around the world. My personal opinion is that the homeless should have SOMEWHERE to go in this cold so why can't they stay in a tent in a public park? I was just pointing out that it's difficult to attack the one percent of the wealthy, our true enemies, when the actions in these encampments (and even the encampments themselves) can be distracting and used as propaganda by the right wing to try to undermine or derail us and take the attention off of the real issues But I knew I wasn't going to convince anyone of that in this tent.
"I'm gonna go see if he got anybody together," I said and slowly backed myself away through the opening, glad to be out of range of the sudden tension which I couldn't believe was now happening. Then it hit me: I bet Ashley had reacted like that because she herself didn't have anywhere else to go. And my mentioning that all of this- the camp and everything in it- could not only be gone (and perhaps should be) but the reality was that if current events were any indication, it was really only a matter of time before the Charlottesville police followed suit with the rest of the country and came to Lee Park serving eviction notices during a night time raid. Ashley had just gotten her own bit of info at the Information Tent and it had splashed her in the face unpleasantly like a full glass of ice water. She didn't like that. Not one bit.
This is the danger of what I see as a two pronged revolution. As I see it, this revolution is "U" shaped. One prong of the "U" is the intellectuals - the bleeding hearts and artists - who keep up on things to the point where they are at the vanguard of what is happening politically, economically and socially in our country and are protesting (even though we have jobs, cars and homes) because we see the dire consequences of our country's future if we DON'T speak up now. Because eventually the richest one percent will control ALL the wealth and that's when they will finally reveal their master stroke and drop the facade of our democracy all together. Why should they share wealth and power? And as for the second prong of the "U" shaped rebellion I see that as representing the homeless who have made up at least half (if not more) of each Occupy encampment I have been to. I consider them also to be at the forefront vanguard of what is going on because while the intellectuals may see the horror of injustice and corruption, these homeless are actually living it every day. What then does the bottom, curved part of the "U" represent? To me, that's the learning curve. That bottom part of the "U" represents the general masses who have haven't yet fully felt the attack and breadth of what's really going on in these desperate economic times, this corporate raiding of our National Treasury by the super rich. But that's why movement has had and will have staying power. The reason why is simple: because the injustices haven't gone away. You can't remove the effect if the cause remains. Twenty-three million Americans still can't find jobs. Seventeen million American children still go to bed hungry. You won't see a grassroots uprising (whether it's called Occupy or not) go away while these unconscionable statistics continue or grow worse.
Anyway, I stepped outside the tent and felt the warm sun kiss my face. As soon as I cleared the entrance, a young mustachioed, black guy dressed in business attire complete with dress pants, shirt and tie (and an overcoat over the whole thing) walked up to me. He pulled out one of his earphones and remarked,
"Hey! I like that sign!" I had completely forgotten it was in my hand. I looked down and saw the side with the Bible quote facing him. I was glad. I wasn't really trying to be a balls out provocateur at that particular moment. I took out my phone and took a few pics of Occupy Charlottesville then posted one on Facebook. Things were quiet in the park besides that boombox still blasting the leftist diatribe that was going out full volume to no one in particular (and to no one listening). This was a well intentioned but wholly ineffective outreach attempt. It was then that I realized something was missing and what a wonderful, wonderful absence it was! There was no drum circle! No group of non-drummers cacophonously clanging their audio chaos! Hallelujah and thank God for small mercies! Now don't get me wrong. I love, love, love me some powerful percussion. Have you ever seen the Japanese Taiko drummers? That shit is fucking EPIC! I could watch that all day from three feet away. Now THAT would be an effective addition to the protests but rhythm-less bashing and banging like I'd been subjected to at Zuccotti Park? Gah. That's nothing but percussive, masturbatory ear poison in my opinion. That said, I did think that this sonic void should've been filled with something else, like say, some actual activism. The kind performed by live people and not some disembodied female voice echoing out from speakers like some ethereal, left wing Big Sister. The longer the time distance that existed since Zuccotti Park in New York was in full uproar the more I found myself missing it. Occupy Wall Street in it's heyday had both sides represented to the nth degree, the encampment AND the activism. There existed in each Occupy chapter I'd encountered so far a constant struggle, a push/pull between both of these, a symbiotic relationship. It was sad to see that here in Occupy Charlottesville, much like Occupy D.C. when I first arrived there, the activist side of these places were barely registering a pulse other than, "yeah, we're here." The difficult truth of the matter is that most people who are participating in Occupy for activist/demonstrating reasons generally aren't the ones who are camping in the parks full time, and conversely, the people who are doing the camping weren't the ones really doing all that much actionable activism (again, other than by virtue of existing). I thought that for some of the campers the only time they engaged in actionable activism was when they were being evicted/arrested by the police. I'm not trying to take anything away from the power of those actions but that's an endgame gambit. How about before then? These two factions don't really like each other much either. In fact, I had seen on The Daily Show that in its last days even Occupy Wall Street's Zuccotti Park had become divided between the Northern Section (see intellectual activists) and the South side (see camper-activist-drum-circle-types). The bright side is that at least all of these people in both groups have been coming together at all and at times, like the mass rallies, these factions really combine in the tens of thousands. As this ran through my mind, the tent flap opened and out stepped Ashley who lit up a cigarette.
"He's not back yet," I said.
"He's probably still trying to get more people together," Ashley explained (though I heard no Mic Check nor saw nary a soul rousing). I wondered why she had followed me out? Just a smoke? Her demeanor had changed, almost flirtatious. And to be honest she wasn't unattractive for someone who had been sleeping in a tent in a public park for awhile. Suddenly one of the guys who was sitting over on the couch to the East side of the park came running over to us. He was a short guy in early thirties, of average build, dressed in jeans, demin jacket with a t-shirt underneath and a baseball hat on his head which covered his black hair parted to the side, his clean shaven face and his very light, blue eyes (which were bloodshot around the edges). He stood there listening to us intently. Another guy with long dreadlocks and a full beard came up to us and offered us some of his bag of popcorn. Ashley took some but I declined because I didnt' have anything to wash it down and eating popcorn with a dry throat is no fun. But this generous gesture from a complete stranger to a fellow Occupier was not lost upon me. It was comradery.
"Hey, Man," the little drunk guy with light blue eyes finally spoke up and when he did I could immediately smell the heavy alcohol funk on his breath. I shook his hand and then directly after reached for my Gold Bond sanitizer. (Someone is going to see me doing this one day and take offense not realizing that it's a habit that is so deep in me that I can't not do it.) "I was in the Marines, man," he said. "I was in the Middle East."
Umm, OK.
Now who knows if this was true or not? But it's one of those things that you don't want to doubt in case it is true and you accidentally dishonor their service. In any event, it was a rather odd thing to for him to say so quickly and without previous context. I knew that if I didn't act fast I was going to get drawn into a discussion where politeness would hold me captive witness to his various "military" anecdotes...and I was still losing daylight.
"Can you take a picture?" I asked Ashley, handing her my phone.
"Sure," she said and I showed her which buttons to push.
"Which ones?" she asked for clarification and the little, drunk guy with light blue eyes answered her,
"I don't know, I wasn't listening. I was looking at your tits."
There was a long, uncomfortable silence after his sexist, inappropriate comment. I could tell Ashley was equal parts offended and embarrassed. Truth be told, Ashley was blessed in that department so despite how untoward his comment was, at least he was an honest pig. She just ignored him and I repeated my camera instructions to her. I walked and stood a few feet away from the tent entrance with the statue of General Lee and some of the tents behind me and made sure that I had my Bible quote side of my sign showing . After she took the pic, I walked back towards them. The black woman's voice blaring from the boombox suddenly seemed to be extra loud.
"Is that you?" I asked her. Ashley took a second and blew out a huge cloud of smoke to the sky as she started to dance around like she was very pleased with herself. Did this dance mean that it was? Wow, I was impressed because the recording sounded like it seemed to be coming from a pre-recorded radio interview so I thought that was great that she had achieved some sort of speaker status here on that level.
"It IS you?" I repeated. Ashley, still dancing, drew again on her cigarette but shook her head slowly 'no.'
"Then why did you start dancing when I asked you? I thought you were saying yes," I laughed.
"It's a woman who was talking against the oil pipeline. We all went to D.C. to fight the against the Canadian oil pipeline. In fact, I wanna wear my pipeline vest!" And with that she was off in a flash (presumably to go and get her "pipeline vest," whatever the hell that was). As she left, another young, white woman of average height and build, with short, curly, black hair, and glasses walked towards us. She was also sporting the army surplus/punk fashion look that seemed almost de rigeur here at Lee Park and in her arms, this new Occupier carried a laptop bag. She came up and gave the little drunk guy with light blue eyes a hug then she introduced herself to me.
"Hi, are we marching?" She asked. I got the impression that she was just now arriving at the park so I figured that she was here now because she had seen the notice on the website as well.
"I'm not," the little drunk guy responded. "Ashley said that somebody went to go find some people though," he added. We all got to talking and I mentioned that I had been at both Occupy Wall Street and Occupy D.C.
"Oh, yeah? How are they doing?" She asked, excitedly.
"Well, the D.C. camp is still going strong but the cops kicked everybody out of Zuccotti Park in NYC, roughed a lot of people up in the process," I explained.
"Cops are dicks," said the little drunk guy with light blue eyes. "They've hassled me. I've even had'em steal from me," he complained.
"They haven't evicted everybody from D.C.?" she asked me.
"No, in fact I didn't see ANY cops there. The worst thing there were people yelling at me to "Get a job!" while I was protesting.
"There are no jobs," she laughed, shaking her head in disbelief.
"Oh, there's jobs, they've just been shipped to China," I said.
"Now see, that's where I differ," she countered, "I'm for people's rights globally and I'm not against Chinese people having jobs. I mean, I am all for my country first but..." She trailed off after having effectively argued herself onto both sides of the issue. This is the problem I have with the left because sometimes you can take it too far. You can be extremely well intentioned and still be wrong. Saying you are glad that American companies are giving jobs to the Chinese when unemployment rates domestically are so high? Sorry, that dog don't hunt, sister. The American businesses there pay their Chinese employees less than a dollar an hour and they work them 60 hours a week with no agency like OSHA looking out for their workplace health and safety. The Chinese workers hate it themselves. Did you know that for all of the Occupy and Tea Party protests in the U.S., that they dwarf in comparison to the number of demonstrations that happen all the time in China? Why isn't it the ultimate shame of non-patriotism for the richest corporations in the world (see Apple) to manufacture their products in inhumane sweatshops in foreign countries instead of making their products here in the U.S. and giving American workers a middle class wage with benefits that these wealthiest of companies could easily afford ? Capitalism and bottomline profits trump patriotism and people? I was just about to tell this to the young woman, when the tall, skinny, blond mohawk guy returned and met us at the mouth of the Information Tent.
Alone.
"OK, basically, I couldn't get anybody," he admitted. Great, thought I. I just drove for an hour and not only was there to be no march but it was nearly 4:20 p.m. The Autumn sun was setting and I had wasted most of my daylight protest time. I had been there nearly an hour just mainly shooting the shit. Just then Ashley came running back to us. Over top of her black, Red Hot Chili Peppers shirt she was now wearing a hideously orange vest like those worn by construction workers on road sites. The back of the vest had something that had been professionally printed about protesting the pipeline on it. I remembered I had seen protesters wearing these in some of their Occupy Charlottesville website photos. This must've been what they all wore on their trip to D.C. The thought flashed through my head that unless these had been donated, then surely the resources could've been put to better use than matching ugly, fluorescent orange construction vests.
"So no march?" I asked, defeatedly.
"No, sorry," said the tall, skinny, blond mohawk guy.
"We're going to be having a general assembly tonight at 6," said the bespectacled, young, white woman with short, curly, brown hair. Are you going to be here tomorrow?" She asked me.
"I could be. I don't know yet," I smiled and slightly shrugged.
"We can propose a march at the General Assembly tonight for tomorrow," she offered. The others agreed that would be a good idea.
"I'm gonna bring some points up, too," said Ashley. "I'm gonna have some things I wanna say," she said rather ominously. "It's time we got more focused. I'm sick of this shit." I didn't know what she meant by that but I was taken aback by the sudden infusion of her negativity and decided I needed a change of scenery.
"Well, I'm going to take my sign and go do what I came here to do, " I said determined not to let the cancelling of the march deter me. "We're permitted to protest from anywhere in the park right?" I asked the group of four.
"We can protest anywhere in the park. We usually go down there on the sidewalk," Ashley explained, motioning towards the South side of the park next to Market Street where I had come in.
"I'll see you all at 6," I smiled and started down the pathway. The bespectacled, young, white woman with short, curly, brown hair walked off with me and I thought for a second that she might be coming to protest with me.
"I'm going to find someplace to plug in and get some work done," she said removing her laptop from her bag as she walked away. This left me, Dear Reader, just as I'd been in D.C., as the lone nut standing in front of a busy, traffic-congested street with multitudes of Occupy signs and tents behind me.
I stood there for about an hour and a half, leaning against a three foot wall next to the the entrance steps which climbed upwards into the hilltop park. In that time I was showing the side of my sign that had the Bible passage. Why wasn't I displaying the "Jesus Hates the Rich" side first? Was my Aunt's objection/warning intimidating me? Who knows? In my mind I told myself that my Aunt was probably right in her assumption that all people around here would read is the "Jesus Hates" part and then it wouldn't matter what it said after that, they just wouldn't get it. I wasn't upset. I mean I liked the other side just as fine, too.. In fact, the Bible quote was check and mate around these parts. This way, I could get my anti-rich point across AND I wouldn't be getting flipped off (as I had been at Occupy D.C. ). After all, how could they give the finger to the Bible?
From where I stood I could see the sun finish its red golden arc, a rolling ball of molten, yellow fire dripping between the historic, Charlottesville skyline and descending into the chilly evening of Westerly whites, then greys, then blues, deep, dark blues. During this time lapse, stop-motion sunset, I put on my Rage Against the Machine playlist and once again let their heavy, rebel/rap/rock provide the perfect protest soundtrack for me in that time.
Across the street I noticed that there was a bus stop and seated there were three African American males, two were older men probably in their fifties and a third in his late twenties. The older men, dressed warmly in black leather jackets and hats like you used to see cabbies wear, were studying me intently. The younger guy was seated on the bench at the bus stop listening to music, he looked up but then went back to his phone in his lap. I was wondering what the three of them must've been thinking of this whole protest thing. Surely the older gentlemen recognized this movement for its civil rights antecedents. On some level, I could sense that maybe they WERE connecting, not only to what my sign was saying, or to what this movement was about, but maybe to some forgotten power within themselves as well? I remembered that I had felt this same way when this demographic saw me from their buses in D.C. As for the younger guy? I wasn't really registering to him. Why? Well, society just doesn't really teach us to engage each other anymore. Today, it's all about exactly what this younger guy was doing- keep your head down, talk on your phone, text somebody. Today, we are trained/taught to ignore each other. Strangers are dangerous. (This may be true but I think the inverse is equally so: everyone you think of as "normal" is only normal until you get to know them.) In any event, it could also be that his apathy was because he just didn't believe or wasn't aware of the class warfare being waged by the top one percent. Like so many other citizens, he didn't think that this movement applied to him. He wasn't conscious of how the effects of the current political/economic criminality by the world's richest men were coming eventually for him and everybody else, too, (if they hadn't already).
The traffic between us was pretty steady because it was rush hour, or what passed for rush hour in this tiny, country town. Also, it turned out that I happened to be there, completely by accident, on a popular night of the year. Tonight was some sort of local, tree lighting/town Christmas caroling, "Grand Illumination" thing going on a block South from where I stood. There was probably about fifty or so cars going by a minute. Some of these cars would slow down so that the passengers could to read my sign's quote and it was funny to me to hear their Southern twang as they read it aloud with the windows down. Other drivers going by gave me a quick once over, then looked up behind me at the tents and surrounding signs that announced that this was the block of Occupy Charlottesville. I got several horn beeps and thumbs up, mainly from women but a few guys, too.
But then it happened.
Just as it was getting dusk, an elderly, white couple in a van (why is it always a van?) drove past and the old guy behind the wheel gave me the finger. I didn't get the sense that he had even read my sign, he just saw me as part of the movement and registered his um, disapproval. Then, almost immediately, it happened AGAIN by another old, white guy.
Do you know what's funny? It occurred to me that while many passersby who were people of color have signaled their support, all the people who have given me a negative reaction have all been white. Take that for what you will but I think that it does say something. My concentration was broken when, wouldn't ya know it, a THIRD, old, white man gave crooked a boney, finger at me, the middle one!
The last rays of daylight were fading fast making my sign's full Bible verse hard to read. But not the other side. You wanna play like that, Charlottesville? OK, I tried to be nice. Would I dare to show the side of the sign which had the possibly offensive message? Would I risk it? Well, as it turned out, I had just been pissed off enough by getting the finger three times in a row to do just that. They flipped me off, I flipped my sign.
JESUS HATES THE RICH.
Take THAT, middle finger flippers! Now I admit I got a little nervous suddenly remembering all of the earlier admonishments of my Mother and my Aunt. "You're in the Bible Belt!" "Someone is gonna confront you!" "You're gonna upset people!" For about a minute I was really on edge about it, ready for any contingency, but when nothing happened, I breathed a sigh of relief and then felt silly that I had ever let those overreactions get into my head like that. People were still reading my sign as they went by but nobody was driving up on the curb to try to ram me off the sidewalk like they would've predicted.
But then I spoke to soon.
Across from me I saw two large, older white men dressed in what looked like to be overalls. With their silver hair, beards and big physiques, they looked like those Civil War re-enactor zealots. When they noticed me, I saw them read my sign, discuss it between themselves and then make a bee line directly for me. Well, THAT didn't take long, I thought. Here it comes... They crossed the street and stood in front of me.
"Hey, man. We was in the service," said the first silver haired hillbilly. When he spoke I could see that he only had a few teeth in his head. The second silver haired hillbilly nodded excitedly in agreement and he too smiled a wide, toothless grin. Immediately, I again smelled the strong scent of alcohol. These were two of the local homeless population who stayed at the park and they weren't looking for a fight, they were just coming home. Why do these crazy homeless people all want to tell me about their military service as soon as they meet me? It reminded me of the lyrics to the Ramones song, "53rd and 3rd," "If you think you can/well come on, man/I was a green beret in Vietnam." Is this a popular psychosis among the homeless?
"Yeah, we live here," he declared. "The cops never used to hassle us but then when the niggers started coming here that's when the cops started giving us a hard time." Great, thought I, racist, homeless people with delusions of military grandeur. I didn't even know whom they were referring to as I hadn't seen a single homeless African American anywhere. Had they all been in their tents? Or was he referring to the Occupiers in general? I wasn't really interested in continuing this conversation so I just sort of nodded and eventually the two, large, silver-haired, homeless hillbillies lost interest, climbed the steps next to me into the park and thankfully disappeared.
Then I saw my first cop.
He slowwwllly rolled by me and gave me the once over. I remembered in my head what Ashley had said about how cozy they were with the local authorities. I was thinking that he probably didn't recognize me from the others he knew and I was therefore an "x factor." Plus the instigating nature of my sign's wordage probably marked me as something of a wild card for this low key locale. This wouldn't have been that remarkable except that within sixty seconds I saw another black and white unit coast by me with an entirely different officer at the wheel. Within another sixty seconds there was yet another, again completely different. Now keep in mind I hadn't seen a single officer during my entire participation at Occupy D.C. nor had I seen any for the entire hour I had been standing here earlier. But within about ten minutes of flipping my sign to the risque side, I suddenly had at least three of them swimming around like sharks beckoned by freshly-chummed waters. This was getting interesting but I didn't let it phase me. I was clean. Fuck'em.
It was getting near six o'clock anyway which meant that it was almost time for the General Assembly meeting. I had seen some people start to enter the park that looked like they may be involved with the movement and perhaps they were just arriving here after their jobs. That's another misconception about the Occupy movement: that we're all unemployed. According to polls, most Occupiers are actually employed either full or part time. It's just that those without jobs tend to be more visible because they are at the camps ALL the time. It's been my experience that oddly enough, it's the people who aren't at the camps full-time who tend to be the ones who are more informed policy-wise. You would think that those living at the camps would have all the time they needed to completely know forwards and backwards the system's faults, injustices and reasons why they were actually living the effects of all that firsthand. But I guess because it was their daily life, there was a palpable burn out factor which to some meant (as mentioned earlier with the alcohol in the Information Tent) their need to escape through personal poison. There's only so much hardship the human mind can endure before it desired a release through one way or another, perhaps less healthy way.
I checked my phone for the time. It was 6:10. Oh, shit. Had I missed the beginning of the meeting? I turned around and was surprised to find that the bespectacled, young, white woman with short, curly, brown hair was sitting kind of behind me. That was kinda strange. How long had she been there? I took comfort in imagining that maybe it had been awhile because that meant that with another Occupier in view, I wouldn't have looked like such the lone nut. I took off my earphones.
"Hello, again," I smiled, "Did you find 'somplace to plug in'"? I asked her.
"I just went across the street to the library," she smiled back.
"Are you going to the General Assembly meeting?" I started to walk by her to the steps and she hopped up to accompany me.
"Oh, what time is it?" She inquired catching up to me at the top of the steps.
"A little after 6." We walked up to the base of the statue of General Lee and there I saw about ten to fifteen people standing in a circle around an above ground fire pit, someplace to burn wood that wasn't touching the Earth and had a metal, grated lid over top of it. As we neared the circle, the white guy in his early twenties with a full beard and long, brown dread locks who had earlier offered me popcorn began to gather kindling to start the fire. The tall, skinny, blond mohawk guy was helping him as it was nearly fully dark out. There was something very primal about humans coming together to make a fire and gathering around it.
Butwaitafuckingminute.
You were allowed to have public fires in this park, too?? OK, so let me get this straight. At Occupy Charlottesville they got free camping, free electricity, free food, free on-site sanitation, no hassle from the cops AND they got to build a fire? They didn't know how good they had it! These were better conditions than I had during my trips in the Boy Scouts back in the 80's! (With these available comforts, this chapter should've been teaming with protesters.)
The group at the General Assembly was a pretty ragtag, hodgepodge of folks. There was only three people of color at the meeting, Ashley and the large student I'd met in the Information Tent counted for two and a third African American was a hip hop dressed guy in his mid-twenties with a goatee and long dreads under a doo rag. Other attendees included a tall, older white guy wearing a black beret with his long, graying, curly hair hanging out under the sides of the hat. He had a soul patch growing under his lower lip while the rest of his get up suggested an eighties rocker style like say, that of Todd Rundgren. Put it this way, a glittery rock scarf would've fit well with this guy's sports jacket and jeans outfit. There was another white guy who appeared to be in his mid-forties, he was built like a basketball player, sported a black goatee and his hair was dark curly locks which poked out from under his low hung, black knit cap. He spoke in a thick New York accent which seemed entirely out of place for this neck of the woods. Another older, grizzled, white guy with white hair poking out from under his dark blue, knit hat spoke with a British accent! What was going on here? I was from somewhere else as well. Weren't there any native Charlottesvillians representin'? There were a few people there with their dogs including the glasses and shemagh scarf squatterpunk I'd met when I'd first entered the park and a younger, white guy who had a sort of scruffy, younger Matt Damon look about him. This scruffy Matt Damon kid had his two dogs, a pit bull puppy and a smaller mutt. The little drunk guy with light blue eyes was there as well and was talking incessantly (but not saying a whole lot). There were a lot of new women here as well including one with long, black, curly hair divided down the center who dressed in a faux leather jacket and jeans which gave her a real nouveau, hippy chick vibe about her. I got the sense that she was one of the regulars there, maybe even somebody who was in somewhat of a leadership role.
As soon as me and the bespectacled, young, white woman with short, curly, brown hair positioned ourselves within the circle, Ashley (who had ditched her LMFAO sunglasses and was now wearing a trenchcoat of sorts) walked by us, cigarette in hand, with the tall, skinny, blond mohawk guy. There was something definitely different about Ashley's demeanor this time. Something had definitely changed in the hour and half since I'd last seen her. OK, I will just come out and say it, she seemed to be piss drunk. I was wondering the same about her companion.
"You know what I really hate?" She asked him loud enough for all to hear. "I hate when the weekend warriors who don't live here come here and try to tell us what to do." Was she referring to me? Was she referring to our earlier conversation?
"I know what you mean," he agreed. "I even have a gesture that I have when I refer to them." He then gave this grand impersonation of someone starting in a low physical, crouched, position and then pompously shooting skyward with an upraised index finger while imultaneously saying, "IN MY OPINION...!" Ashley found this endlessly hilarious and together they laughed uproariously.
The nouveau, hippy chick suddenly spoke up, "OK, we're gonna get started..." So, she WAS one of the movers and shakers here, I thought. We were just about to get going when at that precise second, up came the horrible tumult from elsewhere in the park of two dogs locked in a deadly combat barking loudly and scarily. The dog owners (who were all around us exercising their pets during our meeting) suddenly scrambled to break apart their attacking animals. I heard an older white woman and a group of three large, black men in their late twenties argue as they separated their battling pets and began hurling expletives at each other. Those in our Occupy meeting who had brought their dogs were desperately clutching them to their bodies so that their own pets wouldn't run towards the commotion (as dogs are wont to do). Dogs are the original creatures who invented the idea of standing around a scuffle and yelling, "Fight! Fight!" (except, y'know, in dogbark). What a distraction. I guess these were the growing pains of holding the beginning stages of a revolution in a local place for bow wows.
The nouveau, hippy chick began again.
"OK, let's get started. Since there's so few people here, do we even want to have a G.A.? Or do we want to have a small one or do we just want to talk or what because if we're not I have to go" she announced.
"I want a G.A.!" Ashley said, rather insistently. "I have something I want to say."
"OK, do we have any announcements?" asked the nouveau, hippy chick.
The guy with the English accent raised his hand and gave the news that Ashley had shared with me earlier about their meeting with the City Council having gone so well and that they had been granted a permit to be in the park. As he spoke people started spontaneously doing a "spirit fingers" thing whereupon they raised their hands towards the speaker and quickly twirled their fingers. WTF? I had heard about this but this was my first experience as to what was called in the Occupy movement as a "heat check" (and I thought it was really silly). If you liked what the speaker was saying, you did this kinda twiddled finger motion towards them and if you didn't like something, you were supposed to hold your hands downward (think of those old Palmolive commercials where "Madge" would have her clients dipping their hands into tiny bowls of the blue liquid) then you wiggled your downturned fingers almost spider-like. I found this equally silly. What was wrong with the old fashioned method of "All in favor raise your hand!"? It seemed just as effective and we didn't all look like we were gay dancers in an open-air-in-the-round-community-theatre-version of "A Chorus Line." When the British accented, older guy finished recounting the city council rout, a rousing round of applause arose from the riffraff, myself included. As our cheers faded, the Charlottesville locals a block over, the ones who had come to see the lighting of their Christmas Tree were now breaking into their Christmas Caroling. This created quite a poignant, backdrop soundtrack contrast to what WE were doing.
After a few more minor announcements were made, I could see that being such a small group meant that they all knew each other very well. That being the case, I also realized that it must be pretty obvious to all involved that this was my first attendance at a General Assembly there. So I decided to introduce myself. When it seemed like everyone was done speaking, I raised my hand. Simultaneously, off in the distance, the Charlottesville Christmas carolers began singing, "Walking in a Winter Wonderland." And just then the nouveau, hippy chick called on me. I stuttered,
"Oh, Hi. Umm, I'm new to this chapter. I've protested at both Occupy Wall Street and Occupy D.C. and I'm... I'm ... sorry, the contrast of being in this camp while the carolers over there are singing "Walking in a Winter Wonderland" just sort of distracted me," I chuckled. The nouveau, hippy chick laughed with me in acknowledgment. "Um, anyway," I continued, "I'm here visiting my Mother for the holiday and I thought I'd come over and lend my support to you guys. And I just want to say that I am glad that you guys are here and doing your thing to represent the Occupy movement for Charlottesville." To this, I received a response of "thank you" and "welcome!" which I thought were genuine and very nice, indeed. Then we moved on to the next point of business which I think they called "proposals." But first, there were votes to see if we would go into this next section, then there were more votes as to which proposals would be discussed, then there were even more votes taken as to which order they would BE discussed. Gah! It was unbelievable how much verbal red tape a group of only fifteen could get tied up in. Finally after much hoo-ha and ha-hoo, it was decided that Ashley would get the first opportunity to speak her mind. She seemed really annoyed.
"I think we should be in stack," she said as she stood up on a box that was sitting next to the pit. (The guy with the beard and dreads was still trying to get the fire going to little avail.) The group took yet another vote and agreed to be in "stack" which I deduced to mean that if you were speaking you were to stand up on the box which meant that you had the floor (or were "in stack"). To me, this sounded straight out of William Golding's LORD OF THE FLIES (the conch), but I let it pass.
"First of all," Ashley began, "I want to say that whoever has been trying the boyscout method of getting this fire going.... big fail," she laughed. That was a rude way to begin. However, it was starting to get cold. The bearded guy with dreads had given up and there was barely a smoulder. I was kinda wishing that he had gotten that fire going myself (or at the very least I had heeded my Mother's warning and brought my jacket from the truck).
"Okay, I wanna say that I think it's time we got serious," Ashley continued. "I'm fucking sick of this shit. We need to form a political party or something. I mean what are we doing here?" She continued in this vein of vagaries for about five minutes and as she went on... and on... and on... the people in the circle started rolling their hands over and over in a quick fashion. This, I surmised, was the General Assembly signal for "keep it moving" or "wrap it up." This also seemed to rile Ashley up even more and suddenly her voice turned to a harsh edge as she decried what she saw as a "lack of progress." Again, she didn't seem to have any specifics in mind, just a general grousing. If I'm honest what it really sounded like was when you were at a bar with friends and one of your friends had too much to drink and got mad at somebody and kept harping on it and wouldn't let it go despite how many times everyone tried to get them to drop it and move on.
It's not that people weren't taking her seriously, it's just that they understood the point she was making, and remaking, and remaking and they wanted to retort. Eventually she begrudgingly relinquished "stack" and some other members in turn hopped up and expressed their questions at to what the platform should be if such a party like Ashley was proposing was formed. The British guy jumped up and said that he would like to hear from me a bit about how they were handling things at the the other Occupy chapters that I'd been to. I began to speak and then was corrected that I wasn't in "stack." So, unfortunately, I had to go and stand up on the box which I felt pretty silly doing because everyone could hear and see me just fine from where I had been standing.
"Well, I can tell you that the issue of whether or not to try to get everyone together under one banner is a challenge that all Occupy chapters everywhere are addressing. The right wingers have always had the advantage in that they are able to get all of their members in lockstep while we lefties are such independent spirits that it's like trying to herd cats," I joked. To this, the nouveau, hippy chick and a few others burst out laughing and it was nice because it broke the tension of all the anger that Ashley had spewed over everyone a moment before. Ashley, of course, didn't seem to be finding anything very humorous at all. She was pacing like a caged tiger, aggressively sucking and blowing on her newly lit cigarette. "It's been my experience," I continued, "that the only two topics that everyone can get completely behind is to get corporate money out of our politics, and to protest wealth disparity." To this everyone gave me their positive-spirit finger-"heat check" which I can tell you was a very strange experience. To be speaking and then suddenly people started wiggling their fingers at you made things very disconcerting. After a few more people spoke, there was more verbal red tape, mainly on the procedural matters to decide the procedural matters rather than what was at hand: brainstorming platform ideas. Was this what Ashley was raging against? Did she have a point? It was finally suggested by the nouveau, hippy chick (who I later came to understand was acting as the "Facilitator," not a leader per se but someone who essentially ran the meeting) that since the group was so small and because there were regulars absent whom she felt would have had a great interest in lending their opinion on this matter, that perhaps it would be best to table the topic until the next day's much larger General Assembly. It was agreed upon with a near unanimous heat check display of twinkling digits much to the great dismay of Ashley who then began interrupting people as they spoke and became generally disruptive. Several group members then tried to admonish her gently so that the meeting could wrap up. Ashley jumped back up onto the box in full fight mode.
"Wait! We're not going to talk about it? Who decided that? What's procedure for not talking about a topic? I want to talk about assembly procedure!" Ashley objected.
"Well, that's fine but that's something we would also need more people here to discuss," answered the nouveau hippy chick.
"Says who?" Ashley asked angrily. "Who says we need a certain number of people here to discuss General Assembly?! I'm here every day! I fucking live here! I'm really sick of the weekend warriors!" To this, I swear to God it seemed like she was yelling it straight at me and my mind immediately went to that moment back in the tent when I had mentioned to her that I was here for the weekend holiday to visit my Mother.
Whatever.
Even if she WAS trying to throw a shot at me all I could do was feel sorry for her in that moment to tell you the truth. Why? Because now that she was trying to erroneously assert that the people who lived in the park full time were somehow more involved and therefore important in the cause than the "weekend warriors," well... say hello to George Orwell's ANIMAL FARM! The quintessential quote in that seminal, prescient novel is that political corruption stems from the conceit that, "All animals are equal (But some animals are more equal than others)." To me that was, in so many words, what Ashley had just said. Seeing how poorly this General Assembly was going made it very easy for me to now realize how Zuccotti Park had become segregated between the activist intellectuals and the activist campers. When Ashley reached full tilt rage (keep in mind we were only a group of about fifteen Occupiers tops), other regulars made attempts at calming her down. At some point it seemed like every person there was trying to talk her out of her state. This was very uncomfortable. It wasn't right that she had drunkenly disrupted what very good intentioned people were doing for her and their country there. If she really felt wronged she would have plenty of opportunity to redress her grievances the next day at the larger General Assembly. The nouveau, hippy chick walked over to her and plaintively begged her,
"Ashley, may I speak privately with you, please?"
"No! This is bullshit!" Ashley snapped and jerked her arm away from the outstretched hand of the nouveau, hippy chick.
"Why don't we all just leave and then she won't have anyone to speak to?!" declared the bespectacled, young, white woman with short, curly, brown hair. Finally Ashley got fed up and stepped down but not without a final, parting shot.
"Oh, I see, this group is a bunch of white supremacists!"
Wow. Talk about going overboard...
Her last remark really stung the group. There was a deafening silence for a couple of seconds. It was completely out of line. This group of people were some of the least Ku Klux Klan-esque people in the country. Not to mention that there were two other African American people there in the circle to whom she was now yelling her crazy, racist accusations. Were they 'white supremacists' as well? (They would have to be blind.)
The guy with the English accent called after her angrily as she walked away in a tizzy, "Now, Ashley, that's incredibly unfair! Some of us here have spent our entire lives fighting against that sort of thing!"
It was at this time I was aware that my right tricep was being gently massaged. I looked over to find the friendly face of the nouveau, hippy chick. "I'm really sorry about this," she said, embarrassedly. "We've had issues with people and alcohol."
"I kinda figured that was it," I replied. Ashley was still grumbling around the circle as she literally huffed and puffed on a new cigarette. The little, drunk guy with light blue eyes was trying to console her. I turned to the nouveau, hippy chick. "Don't be sorry," I assured her. Suddenly the little drunk guy with the light blue eyes spoke up,
"Guys!" he said firmly, "I just want to say that Ashley is upset and I think it's really important that we listen to what she has to say..." To this, the tall, skinny, blond mohawk guy with glasses wiggled his fingers skyward in approval. Oh no, I thought, not this again. Ashley immediately climbed back on "the stack."
"I want to know why is that when people want to say something they stick around and when someone else is talking people start to walk away and not pay attention!" Just then another loud barking was heard throughout the park. Somewhere, unseen on the other side of the General Lee statue, some canines were killing each other, or at least that's what it sounded like. The parallel was not lost on me that what was happening on the other side of this statue seemed to be matching exactly what was happening on this side as well.
"Does anyone want to talk about this new point?" asked the nouveau, hippy chick Facilitator. There were no spirit fingers only downward turned hands wiggling, signifying negatively.
"Forget it! Whatever!" said Ashley as she stomped away once more.
"Do we have any proposals for action?" continued the nouveau, hippy chick. By now, another male Occupier, a little fireplug built guy with a really full beard started to work on the fizzled fire and in within a minute, it was roaring. It felt good to stand next to because it had gotten downright cold with the nightfall (Yeah, Ma, I know, I know).
The English accented guy stood back up on the box and said, "Our revolutionary brothers and sisters in Egypt have asked for a show of solidarity around the world. They lost another 25 lives in their protests today. It's just awful over there. And I thought we could do something where we make signs or a banner maybe write something in English and Arabic." There were happy finger twiddles all around to that. I raised my hand to speak and once I was called on I said,
"May I suggest that you make it in support of either the entire Arab Spring or also include Syria because the death toll in Syria has risen to over 3500." More fingers twiddled in my direction like lung cillia. The motion was passed that the show of support would entail both Egypt AND Syria or for the Arab Spring uprising in the Middle East. I raised my hand again.
"Can we do a march?" I requested.
"Tonight?" asked the nouveau, hippy chick.
"No, it's night time already and I don't think anyone would hear us over top the singing," I explained. Plus, I wasn't really trying to ruin anyone's Christmas tradition. Now this may sound odd coming from the guy who had "Jesus Hates The Rich" written in large letters on a sign, but I would maintain there's a difference. For example, recently, there was the Occupy Wal Mart idea that came around for Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving which is traditionally the busiest shopping day of the year. And what the occupiers had in mind was for everyone to go into a Wal Mart, grab a cart, fill it with merchandise, and then leave it parked somewhere (in order to take the merchandise out of commission to be sold) and of course, not buy anything. I didn't agree with this action either. Most people go to Wal Mart because they are so poor that it really does make the difference to them whether they save a dollar or not. I am by no means a fan of Wal Mart. All of their merchandise is made in China or elsewhere under horrid conditions (that I described earlier in this blog), each purchase at a Wal Mart ultimately takes away American jobs (and they treat their store employees horribly) but I just don't think that keeping Grandma from having her favorite Hungry Jack Biscuits is the way to go about changing things.
Anyway, we decided that both the action to show solidarity for Egypt and Syria and the march were actions to be tabled and brought up at the next day's General Assembly at 2:00 p.m. As the meeting wound down, people were coming up to me left and right and apologizing for the implosion of the meeting into a chaotic mess.
"Is there anything else?" the nouveau, hippy chick asked loudly.
"Can we have a drum circle tomorrow?' asked a young, white guy who was dressed (you guessed it) in Army surplus chic but with one difference. He was wearing a headband and inside this headband he had tucked his pan flute so that it rested on the side of this face. You heard me, his pan flute was on the side of his face.
"Yes! If people bringing their instruments! We will definitely have a drum circle!" smiled the nouveau, hippy chick. Drum circle? Fuuuuuuccckk.
"I'd like to hear something from our new friend from the other Occupy chapters (meaning me), if he'd like to speak," requested the older fella with the English accent. I shrugged, "OK."
"So that will end the meeting and if you'd like to say something go right ahead. I have to go..." she said and clapped her hands together in a "that's it" kinda fashion and then slipped away into the darkness. I started to speak when I was encouraged by a few voices to go up on the stack again. I again felt kinda silly going back up there being that the meeting was officially over and this was to be informal and also because the only thing I could think about at that time was probably that same thing that was on everybody else's mind: how terribly the meeting had went. So I tried to say something comforting,
"Um, thanks, I just wanted to say, you know, as far as all the fighting goes. Don't worry about it, heated debate is the soul of any democracy. It's great that you guys are here because it becomes a protest in and of itself just by virtue of being here, but I would suggest that you not get too hung up on creating a mini-utopia here in Lee Park. People have been trying for many a millennia to create a perfect society and haven't figured it out yet. The soul purpose of meetings here should just be the logistics of keeping the protest going. Everything else is secondary. Keep it simple and always remember, we aren't the enemy. The enemy is the one percent. And they would love nothing more than to see us implode from infighting and then we've done their work for them," I said. I saw a lot of hands go up in twiddling approval. (I could never get used to that, I thought.)
I got back down off the stack and moved back to my place closer to the fire. I started talking to a group of guys there and the large, African American student from the Information Tent had moved over to us. We were standing at the foot of the statue of Robert E. Lee and I brought up the unpleasantness of our protest taking place here and I went off on my anti-Lee, anti-Confederate flag spiel when out of nowhere the most unlikely person suddenly spoke in the Confederate defense. Would you believe it? Of all people, it was the large, African American student.
"Yeah, I used to feel that way against the Confederate Flag but then I had a lot of friends at school that had them and I used to be like, "What's up with that?!" But then I understood it. I even got two of them put on my school ring," he said.
"WHAT??"
This did NOT make sense to me at all. He gave me the usual defenses of it being about the heritage and state's rights and all that but after I gave my rebuttals (as given earlier in this blog) he seemed to agree with me but had just somehow made peace with it all.
"Honestly," I continued, "the only way I could understand you wearing Confederate flags is kinda like how the homosexual community now refer to themselves as "queer" and "dyke" and use the pink triangle that Hitler marked them for death with in the concentration camps as their own because by adopting or co-opting the hurtful symbol or term they take away it's power."
"Yeah, that could be it, too," he agreed and seemed grateful to have been given a plausible reason to repeat to others who would (rightfully) question his puzzling ring decision in the future.
I took a new place by the fire and me and the guy with the English accent were discussing capitalism. I told him the poker game/capitalism analogy (when you lose all your chips in poker, you have to borrow money to stay in the game which is why so many Americans are up to their eyes in debts and when one person wins all of THOSE chips, the game is over). "I'm not saying you're not allowed to be rich but you just can't be so rich that like the poker game, you break the game for everybody else," I finished.
"Ahhhh!" Came a female voice from behind me like she had just discovered something. I turned around and saw that there was another short haired, white girl there in her early twenties. She was cute in a the kinda way like as if a fifteen year old boy suddenly became a girl. Think Justin Bieber in reverse.
"That part about being aloud to be rich but not so rich you fuck it up for everybody else. That's sounds good to me," she said, "Hi, I'm Chelsea." We shook hands. I noticed that she was purposefully keeping her back to the fire. My own posterior had grown numb from the cold so I joined her.
"That looks like a pretty good technique right about now," I smiled and stood next to her with our fannies facing the flames.
"You were in Zuccotti? I was up there for about a week," she shared.
"Oh, right on. Were you there when they kicked everybody out?" I asked.
"No, she replied. "How'd you like it up there?"
"It was crazy. Each Occupy chapter I've been to has been it's own animal. Zuccotti had both activism and encampment in full overdrive, you guys are more local and camp-centric. D.C. is probably somewhere in between."
"Sorry about the meeting," she said.
"No worries. It's great that you guys are so tolerant but if someone is being disruptive and disrespectful to the majority of the group, you need to have a way to ask that person to leave." She nodded in agreement.
"We've had to ask people to leave before," the older, long-haired beret wearing white rocker guy suddenly chimed in. "We had a guy who was here since the beginning and he was a military vet and he was well informed but every time the press came they were either coming to him or he was going to them and we had to tell him that he couldn't just speak for the whole group whenever he wanted. And he ended up leaving."
"You're always going to have that attention whore element," I added. "Not to mention the kids who call themselves anarchists but they think that all that entails is wearing all black clothes and smashing Starbucks' windows," I laughed.
"I don't think they're THAT bad," came yet another voice in a very thick, New York accent. It was the white guy who was built like a basketball player, the one with his black, knit hat pulled low and a black goatee.
"Anarchists?" I asked incredulously. "Anarchy means chaos because there isn't any law and order. Have they thought of how that life would be like because someone killed their Mom or raped their sister because you're going to have to empty the prisons if there's no laws?"
"That's not what that means," he said. "That's just one definition of it. Anarchy as a government just means that it's a non-hierarchical society, it's a series of small areas that rule themselves," he explained. Honestly, this was the first I had ever heard of this. The media, our schools, hell, even my punk rock always taught me one definition of anarchy. I have since looked it up and the web defines anarchy as 1) A state of disorder due to absence or nonrecognition of authority and 2) Absence of government and absolute freedom of the individual, regarded as a political ideal.
So we were both right. So I thought to myself, OK, if total lawlessness isn't what anarchism is, that what would total lawlessness be called? That's when I came across nihilism. The web defines nihilism as: The rejection of all religious and moral principles, often in the belief that life is meaningless.
Voila!
OK, well I guess I stood corrected. I guarantee you however that most Americans wouldn't be able to tell you the difference between anarchy and anarchism and most probably think as I did. (That meant that part of my speech needed to be changed because I guess then what I'm really wanting to say there is that we are not "nihilists.") This made me immediately think of that ginger bastard in NYC who had corrected me when I was speechifying there and who had proudly announced himself an "anarchist" to me. I thought about going back and editing those past entries, but, hey, this webjournal is about my experiences with the various Occupy chapters and I'm going to learn, change and evolve as this progresses I'm sure. (At least I hope.) I just consider myself a person somewhat aware when it comes to politics and sometimes something like that comes around and humbles me (in a healthy way) and I realize just how much I still have to learn. (And yes, I will change "anarchists" to "nihilists" in my stump speech.)
But waitaminute.
Just because I wasn't completely aware of all of the tenets of anarchism doesn't mean that anarchism is a better form of government.
"OK, so I get it, it doesn't mean all out lawlessness, it means equality without hierarchy (meaning there is no federal government, just a series of small, self-controlled, city-states) but has there ever been a successful anarchist country? " I asked.
He explained that there had been attempts here and there by areas in Europe, South America and even in Africa but he admitted that the maximum number of these communities were only about 800,000 people.
"I think that 800,000 people is about the critical mass of a country system like that. After all the U.S. has nearly 250 million! How could you have a non-hierarchical government with those numbers? At that size, I still believe that Democratic Socialism is the best working model. He agreed and we achieved a debate detente.
Though I was really enjoying learning these new things what really surprised me was from whom I was learning them and under what setting. I mean, to tell you the truth, I thought this guy with the New York accent seemed like he may have actually been one of the homeless staying at the park (though he was one of the few who were involved). So here I was picking the brain of a homeless guy for gaps in my own knowledge. Interesting. I immediately flashed back in my mind to that day in Zuccotti park when I had stood next to that homeless guy who held the Glass-Steagall sign and I remember doubting as to whether he knew anything about the message of his own sign or whether or not he had just picked up somebody else's handiwork. That may still have been the case but this educational encounter with this anarchist homeless guy had opened my eyes a bit. Keep your mind open because, you never know where you could learn something new.
You see, Dear Reader, if this were a movie, this is what you would call my character arc. How have I, your loyal and humble narrator, changed over the course of this story? It's all about the journey, right?
"Hey man, do you want to borrow a jacket for awhile?" Another Occupier who saw me struggling to stay warm asked me as he literally tried to give me the jacket off his back. I was touched. This was another version of a "loving cup" like I'd been offered by a fellow Occupier in NYC when he had heard my voice grow hoarse from speaking out for our shared cause. This, like even the simple offer of popcorn I'd received earlier was another symbol of acceptance, another recognition of solidarity. That was groovy. I could appreciate that, but I was thinking it was time for me to be getting back.
"Thanks, man," I smiled, "But I think I'm gonna get going actually." I was just about to leave on that high note, determined to return the next day when suddenly I heard,
"Your sign is kind of alienating," said another Occupier guy. I looked down and noticed that the side reading, "Jesus Hates The Rich" was showing.
"I admit its provocative," I said. Not that I had asked his opinion. This sparked a similar discussion that I had had with my Aunt hours before between us. I was surprised that I was having it again. My Aunt had been correct in her prediction, someone had indeed challenged me on it, but it hadn't turned out to be a conservative passerby. Nope, of all things, it turned out to be a fellow Occupier. This kinda sucked. In New York, this sign would've been one of the tamer things on display, here in countrytown, it was edgy to the max. This was absolutely like herding cats, I thought. I was glad when our conversation on the matter (my second of the day) was suddenly interrupted.
"Hey man, I was in the service," spoke the little drunk guy with light blue eyes.
"Yeah, man, you told me earlier," I answered.
"I'm one of the homeless that lives here," he replied. "I like being involved. I'd like to be even more involved but I like getting drunk more," he smiled at me and laughed.
Riiigghht. And on THAT note... Talk about a hard cold slap of reality to knock you out of your cloud of idealism. I REALLY didn't want to get any colder while being a captive audience for his inebriated profundities so I laughed the kind of laugh you use when you are trying to placate someone and not be rude but at the same time but it's your tiny getaway gateway to politely excuse yourself. Then I said, loud enough for all who were left to hear,
"Guys, it was great meeting you all. Thank you for warmly welcoming me into your group. I'll see you guys tomorrow. General Assembly is 2 o'clock, right?" Different voices answered in the affirmative in unison. Some shook my hand and others waved their good-byes.
As I drove back, I mulled over all that had transpired that day and my impressions of Occupy Charlottesville. I admit I was put off by how small it was, how much of it was made up of inebriated homeless who by most count were uninterested in the movement, but most of all, I was really disappointed by the incendiary degree of infighting at their General Assembly. This, in miniature, showed the problems of a pure democracy, one non-representative. When a single person has the ability to completely interrupt the will of the majority and be outlandishly rude about it and there is no process in place to remove said interruption, the entire noble endeavor's fragility is revealed in the simplicity and speed of it's collapse. I had read about these kind of unpleasant events happening at some of the General Assembly meetings of Occupy Wall Street. I'd even written about it (the issue with the drum circle wanting $5000 from the Occupy Wall Street donation fund for a missing instrument), but mercifully, I hadn't encountered it firsthand yet. Still, the good thing about this movement, is that it could be just about whatever you wanted it to be. If you only had a few hours, you gave what you could, when you could. The idea was always to keep it going. Recruitment. Success through numbers.
I decided that I would definitely be back the next day. I had seen the encampment side of Occupy Charlottesville but now I wanted to see it's activist side BEYOND that. Did it even exist? I wanted to see the larger General Assembly which I had been told was going to be the more the norm. I wanted to feel around the edges there. Just what was the scope, reach and strength of this chapter? I wanted a three dimensional, stereoscopic MRI on exactly what was going on inside the collective head there.
And if necessary, to give them a good kick in the butt.
And if necessary, to give them a good kick in the butt.
IN MY NEXT BLOG ENTRY: "Occupy Charlottesville Part Two) I protest with a new sign on the streets during their biggest college football game rivalry (UVA vs. Virginia Tech) in the area, I attend the full General Assembly of Occupy Charlottesville, and I push them in their first march through their city streets that puts us in direct confrontation with a small army of local conservative, fratboy douchebags. Plus a HUGE twist ending! Check back soon!
