"What I have to do is get in my bed and lay down. I want to fix on something harmless in this world."' "What world you talking about? Ain't nothing harmless down there." "Yes it is. Blue. That don't hurt nobody. Yellow neither." "You getting in the bed to think about yellow?" "I likes yellow." "Then what? When you get through with blue and yellow, then what?" "Can't say. It's something that can't be planned." Beloved, by Toni Morrison
What to make of the horrific deaths of Susan Poff and Robert Kamin at the hands of their own son, Moses? Susan, who spent hours calmly providing wound care to homeless youth at the San Francisco Needle Exchange in Panhandle Park, long before it was a legally-operating site. Bob, whom I never knew but who I hear was incredible in his work at jail psychiatric services in SF. --- My friend's partner D had an epiphany at the Catholic funeral service at Our Lady of Lourdes Church in Oakland, in response to this question.
"This is a test," he said. It's like this is proof that people do evil things in the world. Susan lived her life loving and giving unconditionally. She and Bob gave their lives to service to the poor and the homeless and to people with mental illness. They gave a boy love whom no one else wanted, bringing him into their home at age five. And ten years later, when his brokenness, as Susan's father said so poignantly at the funeral, seemed beyond repair, he took their lives in murder.
Yet Susan's father also said quite clearly on behalf of the family, "We want you to know that we hold no malice towards Moses. He is in God's hands now. And he needs all the help he can get." --- Susan's death felt like a test to see whether, when learning that someone who gave of herself unconditionally had her life come to an end in such a shocking and brutally violent way, we, as the people she left behind, could rise to the occasion--could focus on her life as an example of how to move through the world--and not on the manner of her death, which at first contemplation threatened to leach out all hope and inspiration from the world. If we can react to this brutal irony and terrible tragedy with grief instead of anger--and I believe we have--then maybe there is hope for us in this world. --- Neuroscientists, particle physicists, philosophers, mystics ask the same question: Who are we and what are we doing here, together? How do we bridge our interior experiences, which are very private and entirely subjective, with the physiological happenings in our brains? More critically, how do we create a shared language with which to describe our internal experiences in a way that makes clear our need for--and inherent connectedness with--each other? --- In struggling to integrate into my internal universe the information of Susan's and Bob's deaths, I realized in a moment of silence that instead of focusing on the way Susan died, I could focus on the way she lived. If, as it has been said, "the mind imbibes the qualities of the things that it contemplates," then it is crucial to focus on what we are for and not just what we are against. --- This is what Jakada Imani from the Ella Baker Center said to me when he was explaining why they were suspending their Cop Watch campaign. "Because when you win," he said, "what you've got is you looking at cops." When in reality what you should get when you win is a city without police or one in which black and brown communities aren't so heavily policed, which begs the question: What would a healthy Oakland look like? I know this question is dangerously naive but, what if we made the police obsolete not by transforming them but by transforming ourselves? (This is the conversation started in "The Revolution Starts at Home, by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, which questions whether we actually have the tools to hold each other accountable when we can scarcely be accountable to ourselves...) --- It's like what Rubin "Hurricane" Carter said on the radio, incredibly, about spending twenty years in prison on a false conviction and, during his incarceration, reading Victor Frankl's account of being at Auschwitz. Carter decided that 'if he can survive Auschwitz, I can survive wrongful imprisonment' and concluded that 'our biggest maximum security prison is our own minds.'
What I got from what he was saying was that, while our wounds, and the injustices done to us and the people we care about are real, there is no end to our suffering when we internalize these harms. And so, keeping in mind the fact that there is violence and hatred and racism and fascism and fear and delusion in the world, we can choose to cultivate our own individual and collective liberation by holding a place of compassion for each other and for ourselves. --- And so Susan's death reminds me to live and to love and to open my heart unconditionally while also holding true that loving kindness need not come at the expense of ourselves or our safety or well-being. It is okay to walk away from someone who is hurting you. As Rabbi Sofer said in the 19th Century, "No woman is required to build the world by destroying herself." The question is how to be compassionate towards someone who has done such seemingly irreparable harm. --- Moses is 15. Young people kill their parents sometimes. It is horrible, and it happens. What teenager hasn't fantasized about lashing out against themselves or their caregivers? If he had been 10 or 12 years old, he wouldn't have been strong enough to really hurt them. Unfortunately, he was. Still. What happened was a fluke; it was not a consequence or logical outcome of his adoption. And it is not necessarily an indicator of what he will be like for the rest of his life. --- In California, youth are all-too-often tried as adults. I can only hope that he will be tried as a youth. There is tons of literature showing that teenagers are not yet fully able to contemplate the consequences of their actions. I was a runaway at his age. Now I'm supporting my Mom.
Given 10, 15, 20 years, I am sure he will have matured into an adult and will regret deeply what he has done, if he doesn't already. And I can only hope that, in twenty years' time, he will get a second chance at living the life Susan and Bob would have wanted him to live, a life of fullness and hope and learning and joy. One can only that judge and jury and prosecutor alike will show him the kind of compassion that Susan and her parents showed toward their own wayward son.
October 10, 2011, Day One: Rally in Frank Ogawa Plaza, which is renamed for Oscar Grant.
November 2, 1011, Day 23, Dia De Los Muertos and General Strike: Camp flourishes, people are fed, clothed, sheltered (not in houses but in tents), transformed. Thousands march on the banks. As I ride my bike around and watch the march go by, a long-time Oakland resident says to me, "It looks like the white folks finally figured out what's going on."
The storefronts and automated teller machines of Big Banks are blocked, barricaded, taped off, and redecorated with checks demanding payment in restitution for the crimes they have committed, and imploring bank customers to take their business elsewhere.
The inevitable debate "Is non-violence a tactic or is it a way of life?" ensues. Astute observers note that buildings, like corporations, are not actually people; that predatory lending and foreclosure are forms of violence; that police killing countless unarmed black and brown people in Oakland (Oscar Grant), San Francisco (Sheila Detoy, Idriss Stelley), and elsewhere is violence; that police lobbing projectiles at Scott Olsen's head after his friends had rushed to help him is violence; and that Black Bloc as a tactic puts bystanders at risk for arrest who may not be guaranteed a quick "cite and release" if they are undocumented or have warrants, something for Black Bloc folks to consider when employing property destruction under cover of a larger march. Despite the disagreement about the appropriate range in a "diversity of tactics," later that evening, more than 10,000 people march on the Port of Oakland in support of the General Strike. The view around the curve of the bridge and at sundown is stunning.
...and reminds me of images from Egypt and, further back, the 1936 Spanish Civil War.
(Josh MacPhee, www.justseeds.org, please support this art collective!)
Around midnight, at Oscar Grant Plaza, altars honor people whose lives were lost due to a lack of healthcare. Clotheslines are put up along with scraps of paper and pens and any and all are welcomed to speak their truth. For the first time, many are questioning consumerism.
November 5, 2011, Day 26, National Bank Transfer Day: An estimated 650,000 people (including me) join credit unions in just over a month, protesting Bank of America's proposed $5 monthly fee for ATM card use-- the latest sign of hubris from one of the world's largest banks-- and grabbing an opportunity for personal action to divest from the 1%.
November 27, 2011, (Who's counting?), Squatting rights and foreclosure activism teach-in: Punks and self-study law nerds and African-American youth share detailed and practical information on property law in California. Important connections are made between punks and long-time housing rights activists from organizations like Causa Justa :: Just Cause and the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, who join forces to protest in front of the homes of people in Oakland whose houses are being foreclosed.
December 12, 2011: Another shutdown of the Oakland port is planned. Who knows what will happen next?
It's too soon to tell where this Occupy Together movement will lead and I'm not entirely sure it matters. The financial crisis demonstrated the flaws of the current political and economic system, which many of us already knew. What's exciting is the visibility not only of the critique -- media outlets suddenly using terms like "income inequality" and "corporate greed"-- but the visibility of the alternative. While the trauma of chronic homelessness and being kicked by landlords and police from camp to camp is not something I want to emulate, I do think the Occupy encampments have demonstrated that people are capable of creating spontaneous spaces in which we share food, clothing, comfort, information, opinions, solidarity, and decision-making with each other. As we said during the anti-war protests in San Francisco in 2003...
"When she had been married a little while, she concluded that love was half a longing of a kind that possession did nothing to mitigate." Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson
This blog is my attempt, in a time of growing obsolesence of zines and print publications, to search for depth via the internet and, paradoxically, to forge connections.
What to make of the horrific deaths of Susan Poff and Robert Kamin at the hands of their own son, Moses? Susan, who spent hours calmly providing wound care to homeless youth at the San Francisco Needle Exchange in Panhandle Park, long before it was a legally-operating site. Bob, whom I never knew but who I hear was incredible in his work at jail psychiatric services in SF.
The inevitable debate "Is non-violence a tactic or is it a way of life?" ensues. Astute observers note that buildings, like corporations, are not actually people; that predatory lending and foreclosure are forms of violence; that police killing countless unarmed black and brown people in Oakland (Oscar Grant), San Francisco (Sheila Detoy, Idriss Stelley), and elsewhere is violence; that police lobbing projectiles at Scott Olsen's head after his friends had rushed to help him is violence; and that Black Bloc as a tactic puts bystanders at risk for arrest who may not be guaranteed a quick "cite and release" if they are undocumented or have warrants, something for Black Bloc folks to consider when employing property destruction under cover of a larger march.
Despite the disagreement about the appropriate range in a "diversity of tactics," later that evening, more than 10,000 people march on the Port of Oakland in support of the General Strike. The view around the curve of the bridge and at sundown is stunning.
...and reminds me of images from Egypt and, further back, the 1936 Spanish Civil War.
