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Off to interview on my first morning

I don’t want to be blindly supportive of the Occupy movement.  I don’t want to blindly condemn it.  I don’t want to be blind at all.  In a movement as experiential as this one, joining in is the best way to learn.  I’m describing myself as an embedded journalist-activist, and, while I largely support the movement’s (ethereal) goals, I’m retaining some measure of aloofness.  From a journalistic perspective, this lets me critique the movement while being involved enough to feel like I’m part of a real and constructive conversation, rather than acting like a distant analyst with little connection the emotions and ideas this movement is bursting with.

My friend Noa and I arrived at Burnside Park at about 3:00 AM last (Monday) night, and after several interviews, fell asleep to the sounds of laughter and walkie-talkies, in a seven-person community tent (open to all; first come, first served).  As early as 5:00 AM, cars drove by honking in support of the signs all along the fence around the park.

I’ll be staying here for the rest of the week.  I’m posting now from the tent I’ve set up for myself and other Brown students.  Noa took all of the pictures here, as well as more which can be found on my Flickr.

Artemis: The Red Tape Army

Artemis (known to all here as “Ma”) is coordinating the Red Tape Army, which began as a small corps of medical volunteers, and has expanded its duties to include general hospitality tasks such as distributing blankets and food.  Another one of Artemis’ stated goals is to hug every single person who comes through the park.

Artemis, or "Ma," as she's known here and among the homeless

From 1999 to 2001, Artemis was homeless, living on Thayer Street on College Hill.  The Finlandia co-op often provided her with food, and she also recalls sleeping on their couches regularly.  From our conversation, it was readily apparent that she remains highly aware of the unique challenges the homeless face; much of her work here is in a sort of unofficial homeless-outreach capacity.  She buys the homeless “kids” $1 pizza at the nearby 7-11, and has brought a lot of them into Occupy Providence by helping them out in this way.  Her compassion for the many homeless who were already living in Burnside Park when Occupy came in, as well as for those who’ve joined after, is readily apparent.  She told me of a homeless man whom she helped out one night; he returned the next day to tell her “Because of you, I didn’t commit suicide.”  She says “That’s what it’s about – I don’t care about the political end.”

It would be easy to decry the members of the Providence homeless community as free-riders; they’re benefiting from the donated tents, blankets, and food and drink that Occupy is collecting and distributing.  However, the Occupiers consistently show an impressive amount of camaraderie with the homeless, who otherwise remain invisible to society in many ways.  This kind of solidarity through cohabitation and direct action is a testament to Occupy’s willingness to live out its principles of inclusion.

In yet another display of the pragmatism I’m discovering in all corners of Occupy, Artemis fully understands that we’re in a tenuous situation here.  Of the future of Occupy Providence’s physical presence, she remarked “The cops have been great, but we’re pushing it now.”

Felicia: “We need to be heard.”

Felicia, of the Red Tape Army

Felicia is a member of the Red Tape Army.  She was working the 2-8 shift when I talked with her outside the main medical tent.  She’s in business school, and got involved in Occupy on Saturday night.  She came back after church on Sunday, and has been here ever since.  I started to ask her about some of her reasons for being here, but was interrupted by a squawk from her walkie-talkie; all the medical volunteers carry one.  Once she confirmed that she wasn’t needed, we continued.  ”I can’t really pick one thing,” she responded when I named a few of the reasons others had given for their involvement.  ”We need to be heard.”

Felicia, too, underscored the message of respect for the police.  ”If it wasn’t for them, we wouldn’t be here.”  She also spoke about respecting the park and keeping it clean.  I asked her about next steps – she wants Occupy to start talking to politicians, joining and organizing rallies at the statehouse and City Hall – to be heard everywhere possible.

Going forward, a focus on visibility of the kind Felicia expressed will be vital.  If Occupy doesn’t continue to expand into new areas, to bring in new attention, energy, and ideas, it will stagnate.  To really be heard, we need to constantly look for new ways to express ourselves.

Dave Taveres: “I am a capitalist, but at the same time, that doesn’t give you the right to take advantage of people.”

Media & food tents

I stopped Dave as he walked along the edge of Burnside Park, observing the signs and the tents clustered inside.  He works in Pawtucket (he described his job as “blue-collar”), and has seen Occupy’s presence here when he takes the bus at Kennedy Plaza next to the park.  He’s worked a lot with the homeless in the past, and agrees with Occupy’s messages of opposition to corporate greed – he feels that the government doesn’t care about this problem.

His quote above is reflective of a lot of the sentiment I’m picking up here.  Many Occupiers communicate a genuine sense of betrayal – they really feel that they’ve worked hard and that society has failed to recognize and reward them for it.  Occupy is far from the only movement to hold this sentiment, but it’s a powerful one.

Annie: “These things take time.”

Annie has been homeless for the past 3 months, and declined to have her picture taken.  She became closer to Occupy last night, through Artemis.  She doesn’t know many of the Occupiers or the other homeless, and rightly observed that Occupy Providence is “a fledgling group.  It takes time.  These things take time.”

The homeless community seems to be a much bigger part of Occupy here than they do elsewhere.  I was particularly interested in hearing more about what they need from the movement.  Annie said that she could use help finding housing – but she acknowledged that Occupy has a lot of other priorities as well; “the peace movement, and social justice.”

“Winds of change.  Winds of change going on,” she told me.  ”I think a good socialist movement is necessary here in RI and throughout the country – it’s time for change.  It’s a movement whose time has come.”

I spent about an hour on Sunday afternoon at Occupy Providence in Burnside Park, interviewing occupiers, taking pictures, and trying to get a general sense of the tenor of the movement.  I was motived by dissatisfaction with most of the reporting I’ve seen on the Occupy movement.  The tendency seems to be to do some obligatory man-on-the-street interviews, and then turn the footage back over to in-studio talking heads to make points they were going to make anyway.  In other words, Occupy is being used to reinforce existing narratives about politics, social issues, and class.

Michael McCarthy speaks to the Occupy Providence General Assembly

Signs on the statue of General Ambrose Burnside

However, most social movements have compelling narratives of their own.  Occupy is no exception.  I encountered a multitude of viewpoints on a variety of issues.  Perhaps most informative were the responses that Occupiers gave when I asked for their opinion on potential problems with the movement.  I decided to do this because I wanted to break the paradigm whereby protestors state goals and pundits critique them.  I wanted to hear the movement’s critiques of itself: what might go wrong, what needs to happen to “succeed,” what “succeeding” will actually look like, and so on.  I didn’t get answers to all of these questions, but I’m planning to go back, and hopefully to camp out for at least a couple nights in the next few days as an embedded Occupier-journalist.

Here are some of the stories of the people I met today.  All photos are mine, except where otherwise noted, and are available under a Creative Commons license (details).

Gretchen and Arrash Jaber: “More than just politics”

Gretchen & Arrash Jaber with son

Gretchen didn’t specify her education level – she’s currently employed full-time as a mother (the couple’s son was at the tent with them).  When I asked why they were there, Gretchen told me she wanted to “be a part of making a change.”  Arrash has a bachelor’s degree and is currently employed.  He feels that the Occupy movement isn’t a purely political one – he listed “cleaning up the city [Providence]” as one of the things he thought local Occupiers could organize around, in addition to some more hypothetical concepts like uniting globally with the working- and middle-classes.

In my experience, when a nonviolent demonstration begins to treat the police as its enemies, it immediately begins to lose both moral and practical high ground.  During the hour or so I spent at Occupy Providence today, I saw Providence police officers engaged in friendly conversation with various organizers.  Arrash put words on this phenomenon: he wanted the demonstrators to respect the police and to talk to them.  I pointed out that the police are often part of the very same working class that liberal social movements commonly try to represent – he agreed emphatically.

The Providence Fire Department has also lent material support to Occupy Providence – they donated three tents, which were at the time of my visit being used for media.  The fire department had even gone so far as to label one of the tents (click for larger images):

Jonathan Lewis: “This is what an activist dreams about.”

Jonathan Lewis (front right) with associates | Image from Positive Peace Warrior Network

Jonathan is self-employed in nonviolence training.  He’s the founder of the Positive Peace Warrior Network.  After driving by Occupy Providence yesterday, he decided to return to camp out.  I asked him about the way forward – could Occupy’s success in physically bringing people together be translated into legislative action?  Would the movement’s grassroots energy need to be sacrificed?  He replied that it’s “not an either-or” – that it’s about “displaying unity” between these two fronts.  His enthusiasm for in-person organizing was balanced by this pragmatic approach to the messy process of electoral politics – another good sign for Occupy as it progresses.

Kyla Coburn and Andy Trench: “Targeted change”

Andy Trench and son

Kyla and Andy work together as interior designers.  They’d just arrived at the park with their two children when I met them.  Andy was largely on kid duty, so Kyla did most of the talking – Andy said they shared the same brain anyway.

One of Kyla’s primary concerns was message clarity – she believes it will be absolutely vital in order to move Democrats.  She expressed a personal desire to see Occupy coalesce around a message of “targeted change” toward corruption, rather than descending into a fiasco of “shaking a stick at the haves from the have-nots.”  As we talked, she repeatedly underscored that she wasn’t there in support of a platform of anti-capitalism, but one of anti-corruption.  This stands in strong contradiction to claims made by conservative media figures implying (or explicitly stating) that Occupy is a cover for socialists (gasp!) or something else equally scary and “un-American.”

I pressed Kyla on the details of message centralization.  By what process should this be accomplished?  At what level?  She wants to see Occupy’s message unified nationally and articulated into ten points to be disseminated, and is concerned that Occupy’s potential, namely its grassroots nature and wide appeal, could also undermine it as the “Republican media” (she named Fox News in particular) use soundbites to discredit the movement as a whole.

In too many cases, movements become bifurcated as organizers attempt to control the message while members seek to retain individuality.  The fact that the individual members of Occupy are concerned with this issue is a very good sign.  If Occupy does begin to articulate a national platform, I hope that individual members of the movement will be as receptive as Kyla was hopeful.

I’ll wrap up with a quote from Andy Trench, which was echoed by Michael McCarthy, one of the main organizers of Occupy Providence:

People can’t take for granted that other people are going to do that work for them.  They have to come down here and actually put that time in.

Occupy Providence is on Facebook and Twitter.  Connect with them there for ongoing updates, and stay tuned here for more interviews, photos, and thoughts on the movement as a whole.  I’ll also be tweeting during my camp-out in the park – follow me on Twitter @renaissanceboy.

I took this video at SlutWalk Providence on Saturday.  We gathered in Burnside Park and marched over I-95, ending on Broadway.  I was also fortunate enough to be quoted in the Brown Daily Herald:

Harpo Jaeger ’14 attended “in support of other people’s right to call themselves what they want and do what they want,” he said. He added that he thought it was important for men to attend the event because “there’s a perception that feminism is only for angry women who don’t like men, but it should be possible for everyone to support women’s rights.”

I’d worried about going to SlutWalk as a man – that it might seem to the non-men there that I was cashing in on the excitement/activism/sexiness or trying to prove my feminist cred.  I won’t even attempt to pretend I didn’t enjoy getting interviewed, but I was a bit worried that that too might be seen as stealing the stage.  After all, most of the people there were female, queer, or otherwise less privileged than me, the upper-middle class straight cisgendered white Jewish guy who showed up wearing a t-shirt for a privately-funded elite political institution after taking school-subsidized public transportation down the hill from my Ivy League university.

So I felt a bit extraneous.  Here I am, in just about as great a position in society as anyone can be, listening to queer speakers, speakers who make seventy-seven cents to my dollar and speakers who are victims of rape and domestic abuse.  What on earth can I contribute as an activist?  Isn’t my presence insulting to people who actually deal with gender discrimination and sexual violence on a daily basis?  I’m no doubt guilty of some of the things that we were protesting!

Feminism, like any movement for social change, is constantly derided and marginalized through the use of distortions of fact and motive.  Conservative media, anti-feminist figures and institutions, and the day-to-day sexism in our society conspire to denigrate feminism as the last refuge of a man-hater (does that make me a self-hating man?).  SlutWalk is part of a rising tide of new feminism, completely outside of that false zero-sum paradigm.  The theoretical and academic infrastructure has existed for a while, but it’s only recently that I’ve started to see the philosophy playing out in real life, especially outside of the realm of “materially, financially privileged white women.”  But it’s happening.

So:

I SlutWalked in place of those who could not be there.  Victims of domestic or sexual violence.  Victims of pay discrimination who have to work extra time to make the same money as their male colleagues.  Victims of informal and formal structures that devalue women for being women.

I SlutWalked in support of slut self-determination.  The only person who can decide whether to call someone a slut is that someone themself.

And I SlutWalked because this is everyone’s feminism.  This is your feminism, his feminism, her feminism, hir feminism, and my feminism.  This is what a feminist looks like.

About 30 minutes after writing my last post, I got mugged. On the side of a busy road, in broad daylight.  Ciertamente, soy un gringo!  I was using my phone outside the Instituto Cultural for a few minutes, and a dude ran up to me, flicking a switchblade out of his pocket.  Dame , dame el teléfono! — Give me the phone! Obviously, I did.  I’m mostly glad that he didn’t take my wallet or stab me – plenty to be grateful for.

A good friend of mine got me the book Whatever It Takes for my recent birthday. It’s about Geoffrey Canada and the Harlem Children’s  Zone, an organization he created that takes a fundamentally different approach to fighting poverty than any other I’ve ever heard of.  The book is a) incredibly well-written, b) dealing with subjects that are both fascinating and vital, and c) the only book I brought on this trip, so I’ve now read it cover-to-cover 3 times.

HCZ was created out of a frustration with the way that existing social service organizations intrinsically single out subgroups within poor populations to receive aid.  This is especially true (and especially problematic) in education.

For example, I grew up attending two wonderful charter schools.  I wouldn’t trade the education I received at them for anything, but it’s a huge privilege to have attended.  Despite the fact that charter schools are open to anyone, it takes a certain kind of parent to investigate alternatives to a district school, to enter the charter school lottery, and to commit to the extra work that attending a charter school often entails (transportation, etc.).  At their best, charter schools are laboratories for new ideas in education, prioritizing community outreach and underserved populations, but at their worst, they reinforce existing class and race divisions.  Dedicated administrators, like those at the schools I attended, have their work cut out for them in trying to avoid the latter.

This dynamic is present in lots of organizations, and Geoffrey Canada wanted to change it.  HCZ is comprised of a series of programs (parenting help, preschool, elementary, middle, and high school, and more), designed to provide a seamless “conveyor belt” of social improvement programs for children from before they’re even born to the time they graduate high school, and beyond.  It’s based on the substantial research showing that the earlier you intervene in an underserved and underskilled child’s life, the easier it is to get them back on track.  Canada wanted to change the lives not just of a few kids who he happened to reach, but of the entire population of Harlem, in a rigorous and scalable fashion.  HCZ gets far closer to that goal than any other organization I’ve ever heard of, and is likely to be the only way to make any kind of serious headway on urban poverty.

So once the initial shock of being on the wrong end of a knife died down (and after realizing that my mugger probably needs the phone more than I do), I got to thinking about the sort of society that creates people like him.  Obviously, being poor doesn’t excuse turning to crime — but lecturing about the moral failings of the poor doesn’t do much for society either.  In Mexico, as in Harlem, there are probably specific interventions, especially in the lives of children, that could drastically transform the way society treats its poor, and drastically increase their upward mobility.  Effectively, HCZ is a systems thinking approach to poverty, and it marks a much more realistic way of looking at the problem, one that we upper-middle class white Americans should try to internalize.  Given the amount of resources we have available to deal with poverty, we should be doing a much better job of thinking about how to allocate them effectively.

I arrived in Oaxaca later yesterday afternoon after a 7-hour bus ride from Mexico City.  I managed to get to my host family’s house pretty easily, although it was a bit nerve-wracking to knock on the door of the place I’ll be living for the next month, without knowing anything about them.  They’ve turned out to be wonderful, though – a big family with plenty of little kids, who I’m told are the best Spanish teachers one could ask for.

The student who was staying with this family before I arrived (we overlapped by a day) remarked that it seems Oaxacans never sleep – it seems like there’s always some sort of celebration going on.  Based on last night, I’m inclined to agree.  I had an outrageously comical “first-night-in-a-new-country” experience.  Since it was a Friday night, folks were out on the street pretty late, but I was exhausted, so I went to bed around 10.  Pretty much as soon as I closed my door, an entire parade went by my window, complete with mariachi band and police cars.  They were even shooting off fireworks in the street!  And of course each time they did, every car alarm in the city would go off, and then all the dogs would start barking at the car alarms, and then parrots would start shrieking at the dogs.  It was about the noisiest welcome to Oaxaca I could have asked for!

We had orientation at the ICO this morning, and I had a delicious lunch in the Zocalo, a big open pedestrian square, with a lot of shops – somewhat touristy, but really fun (and made infinitely better by the two men playing ‘”Dance the Night Away” and Coldplay’s “Clocks” on a marimba the size of my bed).  I also got a chance to go inside the church of Santo Domingo, which is covered almost completely with gold leaf, and is just about the most beautiful building I’ve ever seen.

Tomorrow, to an archeological dig.  Classes start on Monday.  Vamos!

For the next month, this blog is going to focus primarily, if not exclusively, on my travels in Mexico.  I flew into Mexico City today, and will remain here until Friday morning, when I’ll be taking a bus down to Oaxaca.  I’ll be studying Spanish there at the Instituto Cultural for the month of July.
It’s been a whirlwind afternoon – Mexico City is huge and confusing, especially since my Spanish is pretty abysmal at this point.  I’ve seen some pretty desperate poverty so far, but I don’t think I’ve seen enough of the city to have a good grasp of it as a whole.  The neighborhood I’m in also seems to have some fairly affluent folks as well.
This should be a very interesting month.  Stay tuned…

Dave Weigel:

Many pro-life activists consider their work a continuation of other movements that protected human life and elevated the status of people whom the law doesn’t consider “human.” In the 19th century, it was African-Americans; in the 21st century, it’s children in the womb. This is a common point at the annual March for Life. In 2009, Rep. Jeff Fortenberry told activists at the pro-life event: “You are the new abolitionists. You are the new civil-rights movement.”

I think this is a deceptive metaphor.  Giving blacks full civil rights was a recognition of the fact that the government had no business permitting their status as second-class citizens.  Individual citizens are obviously free to think what they want about racial equality (being racist isn’t illegal), but in conducting business or public affairs, they have to treat all people equally.

Laws permitting abortion don’t require anyone to 1) believe that abortions are okay, or 2) have one.  In this way, the right of citizens to make private choices about a private matter (analogous to one’s right to believe black people are inferior to white people) is left intact.  But the fundamental difference between the two cases is that no one’s life is threatened by their being forced to treat blacks and whites equally in public.  They may not like it, but they can (and have) learned to live with it (one of the many sacrifices people have to make to live in an at least somewhat cohesive society).

Forcing all people to recognize an unborn child as deserving of the same Constitutional status as the woman who’s carrying that child ignores the fact that having a baby has a huge impact on people other than the baby, primarily the mother.  While I wouldn’t claim that anyone who’s anti-choice is automatically anti-feminist, this is the reason I can’t totally shake the feeling that refusing to allow a woman a choice that is at its core about her own body and what she wants to do with it is tantamount to declaring that her only function is to have babies (and that someone else gets to decide when she does it).

Law enforcement keeps the streets safe.  Everybody knows that.  We grow up learning that the police’s job is to put bad guys in jail, and that the streets are safer because of it.  And in popular media, the public defense system (in my opinion, one of the most important services the government provides) is treated solely as an obstacle to putting the bad guys in jail.  Police have to “get to” criminals before they “lawyer up,” as if getting a lawyer was somehow a shady move on a criminal’s part, just one more step in their deceitful lifestyle.  No, actually getting a lawyer is a right.  And getting a fair trial is in the constitution.  But to see the way public defenders are portrayed – underhanded characters who wear bow ties and will do anything to help a rapist walk free – you’d never know it.

There’s a certain type of law enforcement or prosecutorial worldview that I see as the root of that disparagement of the public defense system.  It’s the tough-guy attitude to law enforcement – someone did something wrong and we’re gonna lock ‘em up for it.  There’s no room for analysis or understanding of why they did something wrong, or what the best solution might be.  Nope, we’ve got firepower and sentencing requirements (which, aside from taking away an important tactical tool from prosecutors – the ability to bargain with defendants using sentences – leave no room for nuance), and we’re going to use them.

While I have infinite respect for the work that police do, and I believe that the law is the law, no matter how much we’d like to change it in some ways, we have to notice that there are other things going on.  The crime-and-punishment loop has done nothing for this society.  While our incarceration rate is higher than anywhere else in the world, our society is a far cry from crime-free.  We breed criminals by inducing poverty (particularly along racialized lines), making guns easily available, and refusing to address the negative social impacts of gambling, drinking, and the ramifications of heavy-handed drug policy.  And as we privatize more and more prisons, offloading the work of handling rising numbers of inmates to private corporations, we waste more and more resources on a penal system that hasn’t delivered the results we need.

Lots of smart people have called for a better way of doing things.  So how does this relate to the hotly-contested race for District Attorney in Massachusett’s Northwestern district?  Well, electing one particular Democrat over another here won’t single-handedly bring about the necessary penal reform.  But that’s precisely the point.  The way to change these things is from the bottom up.  Gun control laws won’t be coming out of Congress any time soon because the NRA is way too powerful.  Neither will penal reform, for the same reason.  It’s up to us to elect lawmakers and law-enforcement officers whose view of law-enforcement’s role in combating crime is more grounded in reality – that is to say, who recognize that there’s more to safety than arresting criminals and putting them in jail.

Dave Sullivan is that candidate.  He has the necessary legal and managerial experience to run the office, and he has lots of ideas on how to make it better.  While it’s easy to just stand around and criticize people for not doing their jobs, Dave has concrete ideas on how to improve things.  He’ll assign community prosecutors to work locally with various agencies and institutions, create civil and human rights advisory boards in the DA’s office, and issue an annual report and citizen’s guide to the office, so that the public knows where resources are being allocated.

Dave understands that crime prevention is also an important part of the DA’s job.  He has fresh ideas on how to engage with the community to help prevent crime and report signs of it before it begins, breaking out of the crime-and-punishment paradigm.  This sort of approach is necessary in order for the DA’s office to have a positive impact on people’s lives, and I just don’t see the same commitment to it from his opponent.  Obviously, others may disagree on how best to respond to and deal with crime, but I believe the data supports my viewpoint that putting more people in jail doesn’t address society’s problems.

We need a DA who understands not only the power of our legal system, but its drawbacks.  This well-rounded view is emblematic of someone who is ready to use all the tools at his disposal to improve public safety, not just the conventional ones associated with prosecution.  It’s clear to me that Dave Sullivan is best equipped to take on the responsibilities of the DA and to carry them out in a sensible, nuanced manner, and, in doing so, to effect the sort of change that’s necessary to move beyond our broken view of law enforcement.

Make no mistake, there genuinely are people who need to be prosecuted for crimes.  But there is also danger from an unequal or unfair application of that prosecutorial power.  Dave’s ideas on reforming and improving the office will result in better allocation of resources and better partnership with the community, two things we can’t do without right now.

For all of these reasons, and more, Dave Sullivan is clearly the best candidate for Northwestern DA.  I’ll be voting for him tomorrow, and I hope you will too.

My latest Jewschool post was inspired by my rabbi’s sermon from services on the first day of Rosh Hashanah.  Check it out!

Just a teaser for my most recent Jewschool post.  One of these days I promise I’ll write something here.