One thing that is psychologically jarring for me, here in Los Angeles, is to see the extremes of wealth alongside deep poverty and brokeness. I see it most acutely when I am downtown. You can buy a $6,000 suit on one block, and two blocks from that you can mingle with the desperate junkies.
I’ve heard an interesting story about Sitting Bull. Later in life, he traveled with Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show as part of the cowboys vs. Indians routine (where, of course, the cowboys always win). Sitting Bull made a good bit of money from he show, he was immensely popular; however, he gave almost all of it away. He would give his money to all poor white people who asked him, and he couldn’t understand why there were people who were not taken care of. Native tribes are far more communal than white Europeans, each person is cared for.
Today I was eating a sandwich at a Subway restaurant in downtown L.A. I usually don’t eat at Subway – I would normally support a local cafe, but I was given a gift card at Christmas by a very kind person. I was nearly to the end of my sandwich, and I was quite enjoying it, when a Hispanic man came in, a street person. He came in the door and walked straight to me and began to gesture that he was hungry, saying something that sounded to me like he was asking for some change. I was a bit taken back by his demeanor, because although he was not demanding or forceful, neither was he merely voicing a typical hey-man-can-you-spare-some-change query. He had an edge about him.
I handed him a dollar, and he snatched it and immediately began gesturing at the last vestiges of my sandwich. “Sure,” I mumbled, after taking a few seconds to let it sink in. “You can have it,” I replied, feeling like it took three years to respond. He grabbed the sandwich, was back out on the street as quickly as he had appeared, and was probably finished with my sandwich before he was gone from view.
Note on photo: taken today at the studio where our Occupy Education group meets for classes. The gallery is 118 Winston, and the current display is an Occupy theme.
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Most of the times we fail to take action because of the virtually infinite amount of work to be done. Congratulations on managing to ignore the infinite and respond to the particular facing you.
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Thank you ionetecatalin.
Peace.
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The $6,000 suit makes me more sympathetic to the idea of looting as a form of political protest.
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“Now here’s something astonishing. While the camp was in existence, crime went down 19 percent in Oakland, a statistic the city was careful to conceal. “It may be counter to our statement that the Occupy movement is negatively impacting crime in Oakland,” the police chief wrote to the mayor in an email that local news station KTVU later obtained and released to little fanfare. Pay attention: Occupy was so powerful a force for nonviolence that it was already solving Oakland’s chronic crime and violence problems just by giving people hope and meals and solidarity and conversation.
The police attacking the camp knew what the rest of us didn’t: Occupy was abating crime, including violent crime, in this gritty, crime-ridden city. “You gotta give them hope, “ said an elected official across the bay once upon a time—a city supervisor named Harvey Milk. Occupy was hope we gave ourselves, the dream come true. The city did its best to take the hope away violently at 5 am on October 25, 2011. The sleepers were assaulted, their belongings confiscated and trashed. Then, Occupy Oakland rose again. Many thousands of nonviolent marchers shut down the Port of Oakland in a stunning display of popular power on November 2.
That night, some kids did the smashy-smashy stuff that everyone gets really excited about. (They even spray-painted “smashy” on a Rite Aid drugstore in giant letters.) When we talk about people who spray-paint and break windows and start bonfires in the street and shove people and scream and run around, making a demonstration into something way too much like the punk rock shows of my youth, let’s keep one thing in mind: they didn’t send anyone to the hospital, drive any seniors from their homes, spread despair and debt among the young, snatch food and medicine from the desperate, or destroy the global economy.”
– from this article
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I read the article, and I think I’m going to repost some of it.
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