Nights in Tents

by Laura Love

  A few seconds after his departure the sound of seventies disco music blasted into the airspace and instantly we rose to our feet for an impromptu disco party. “I Will Survive,” was assaulting my receptive eardrums when I saw the first fully erected dome tents being lifted overhead onto the plaza in front of the Hall. “This is AWESOME!!!!!” was all I could think as I decided right then and there to spend the night and help defend the resurrection of the village at Cal. Maybe fifteen or twenty structures went up as the music kept thumping and the party raged on.

  About 1:00 a.m. the PA system got packed up, while those of us planning to stay began hunkering down for real to brave the cold, damp air and hold down the fort all night. I hoped to get in a few Z’s before boarding a 9:00 a.m. bus with students, bound for a big demonstration against University Regents in the financial district of San Francisco. Not coincidentally, many of those regents, who regularly voted in recent years to increase tuition, also had offices there, where they served on the boards of major financial institutions such as Wells Fargo, Chase, and Bank of America. Before then, I didn’t know this obvious conflict of interest was common practice at state universities all over America. The largest banks in the world, which had caused the collapse of the American financial system by gambling with the bad loans they made, were now enjoying even greater profits by manipulating the exploding cost of getting a college degree. I already held considerable dislike for big banks, but this additional bit of information pushed me over the edge and I was completely down for this action, which I hoped would reap some concrete benefits for the planners and participants. Because my own tent was still at Snow Park, I dragged over some loose cardboard I’d found in the soggy grass, curled up in a ball, closed my eyes against the drizzle, and tried to go to sleep.

  I was still awake when a dozen campus officers sauntered over, palming their billy clubs, and parked themselves in front of our remaining group of thirty-eight Occupiers. I was the oldest person there, save for an elderly man, whose ready smile endeared him to me each time I noticed him chatting avuncularly with students or showing them card tricks he’d learned over the years. One of the policemen put a superfluous bullhorn to his lips to advise us that we were in violation of a campus law prohibiting camping, and would be subject to arrest if we didn’t leave. In response, the students called an emergency GA, where it was determined that we should pull the tents closer together in case we needed to link arms and physically defend them later. Not wanting to be snatched from the fringes and again hauled off to jail, I relocated my cardboard home in the midst of the tents and shivered there for awhile, still listening to the repetitious drone of the dispersal order. I conjured up the privation endured by Lewis and Clark, along with (new mom) Sacagawea, her worthless husband, Charbonneau, and the rest of the Corp of Discovery, whose journals I’d read years ago, to put my own discomfort into perspective as I mentally whined for my down comforter and memory foam mattress. The impending raid did not allow me to drift off for even a moment as I checked the time, (4:30 a.m.) and waited.

  Just as I thought I might freeze to death in the wet predawn air, the first streak of light finally pierced the sky, signalling that our defiance of orders had been successful. Stiff as a corpse, I clung to tent poles to stand upright. Limping the soreness away, I hobbled out from Sproul Hall and entered the closest coffee shop, across the street from the square. I don’t think I’ve ever appreciated a heated building quite so much as I did then. Since I was the first customer of the day, I selected a warm spot, plugged my phone in, and ordered a latte with a pastry. Moments later, one of my former Santa Rita cellmates, Andrea, a Cal student who had also spent the night outside, walked in and sat with me. She, a high-performing, hard-working postgraduate student, underemployed, living with her parents and drowning in debt, was a perfect example of why the student body of UC Berkeley was so upset in the first place. She had helped to organize the Cal Occupation and was as cold and sleep deprived as I was when she said, “Hey how ‘bout Mister Pentagon Papers himself, Daniel Ellsberg, spending the night in a tent with us. Did you love the magic tricks or what?” That was my first inkling that the only person there older than me, was the historical figure who’d revealed this country’s buildup to the Vietnam War to be an absolute sham, thereby making the case to end it. It was Dan Ellsberg who, in 1971, decided to sound the alarm by publishing nearly seven thousand pages of high-level, top secret documents detailing his work with the CIA during the Johnson Administration. By outing himself in this way, Ellsberg proved that he and his former employers, President Lyndon Johnson and the CIA, had deceived the American public by overstating (even manufacturing) the threat North Vietnam posed to our capitalist democracy in its plan to conquer South Vietnam and spread Communism throughout Southeast Asia. In those days the word “Communist” inspired the same sort of reaction that “Muslim” does in some circles today, and its very utterance often triggered irrational fears and jingoistic nationalism, especially from elected officials eager to attract new voters. By the time the Pentagon Papers were published, the United States and its Western allies had been in a longstanding “Cold War” with Russia and its Communist allies dating back to the end of World War II. The Cold War was characterized by a chilly ideological disdain for Communism which manifested itself in intensive efforts to contain its influence by the West, countered by a push to expand its reach in the East.

  No shots were ever fired during the Cold War, due partially to the fact that both sides knew that each possessed enough nuclear weaponry to obliterate the entire planet, yet there still existed a good deal of mutual hostility and distrust. The West conducted a pitched campaign of fear mongering with its assertion that a “domino effect” would be brought about by the fall of even one seemingly insignificant country (like North Vietnam) to the doctrine. The conflict between North and South Vietnam has sometimes been viewed as a proxy war between the United States and the USSR. At the center of it all was Daniel Ellsberg, a single high-level official in the CIA, who ultimately did more perhaps than anyone to expose the false premise which resulted in the death of over fifty-eight thousand American soldiers. Daniel Ellsberg has since dedicated his life to encouraging whistleblowers everywhere to stand up and resist the pressure to be complicit in a system they know to be doing the wrong thing. In one famous quote he warned, “Don’t do what I did and wait till the bombs start falling, to speak up and practice civil disobedience if necessary to advocate for what’s right,” even though doing so had made him a political pariah and caused a great deal of enmity between him and the Nixon administration.

  So, how had the upper levels of authority handled the students’ expression of anger and discontentment? Cal chancellor, Robert J. Birgeneau, defended the campus police choice to beat students with batons the week prior, by saying, “It’s unfortunate students chose linking arms to protest … that is not nonviolent protest.” In response to this, students printed and distributed leaflets on campus bearing an iconic image of Martin Luther King linking arms with Mario Savio and other justice workers in front of Sproul Hall in the 1960s, along with Chancellor Birgeneau’s suddenly infamous quote. And the regents themselves dealt with the students’ concerns by postponing a planned meeting, where it was expected that they would vote yes on the proposal to raise tuition by 81% to be phased in over the next four years. The students did not take kindly to the delay that was seen by them as a stalling tactic to let tempers cool before jacking up rates as initially planned. Not to be distracted, Occupy Cal organized a cooperative march with Occupy Oakland through the financial district of downtown San Francisco where the regents had chosen to lay low in their offices on the day that was originally scheduled for the tuition hikes vote. At 9:00 a.m., I boarded one of the waiting buses the students had hired to take us there and dozed most of the way, surrounded by union workers, students, and Occupiers from the night before.

  We were let off right across the street from the Embarcadero BART stop, where Occupy San Francisco was sti
ll operating in the last remaining days of its tent commune. Lots of OSF members joined in the parade, which began at the Federal Reserve Building across the street after some speeches were made by experts on the topic. It was early afternoon and from the outset I gauged our numbers to be around six hundred. We promenaded past many of the greatest offenders in the financial collapse and paused in front of each one to chant slogans like, “Banks got bailed out—We got sold out.” Some among us had megaphones and read the names of the regents with offices in each bank. The route took us deep into a canyon of tall buildings, where suited office workers pressed to the windows to record the spectacle, which had by this time grown to nearly three thousand demonstrators.

  We were flanked on both sides by motorcycle cops who looked pissed as we clogged the streets for blocks brandishing our MAKE BANKS PAY signs and beckoning onlookers to join us. Our chants reverberated off skyscrapers as we raised our voices under the TransAmerica Tower, then Wells Fargo, Citibank, Chase, and others. We finally wound up facing the Bank of America, only this time, instead of pausing to chant outside, the vanguard of our procession marched us right into the foyer of the building, holding the entrance doors open while beckoning us to enter. The unscripted detour instigated a free-for-all romp inside the bank, whose manager chose, unwisely, to ignore our approach, perhaps hoping we’d go away. A teller finally noticed what was happening and ran to the door trying to pull it shut against the hundreds of us who were charging in.

  Most of the startled employees ran back to their cubicles, grabbed their personal effects, and bolted out the back door, abandoning their posts. Gleefully I stood gaping in disbelief at the unfolding scene. Kids danced wildly atop desks that held computer monitors that stayed running the whole time, frozen onto the pages their operators had last opened. Bank documents were being grabbed and flung riotously into the air, landing like confetti wherever they may. Someone tilted back in an office chair, propping his feet on a plastic keyboard while he lit a cigar. Another Occupier busied himself resetting the system’s screen saver and soon all the monitors began flashing, “MAKE BANKS PAY,” in seventy-two-point bold red type. Another still, pushed the print command on a machine he’d commandeered, ordering it to produce hundreds of multicolored copies of the message onto the floor beneath the removed receiving tray. I knew it would be dangerous to linger since the cops weren’t going to let this tomfoolery continue forever, but I did not want to take my leave. I turned my head toward a faint trickling sound to take in the silhouette of a bookish youth wearing a cardigan sweater, who was quietly urinating into the back corner of the room. I admired the carrying capacity of his bladder and the impressive stream volume as his urine splashed gaily from the wall onto the carpet, eventually seeking places to pool and call home.

  Just as I was threading my way to the exit, a tiny, auburn-haired sprite, who looked to be twelve or thirteen, grabbed a dormant bullhorn, mounted a desk, and began to deliver a powerful address. She hoisted the speaker with trembling hands as she began, “My friends, colleagues, fellow students, and comrades in struggle.” She went on to summarize the academic journey that brought her to this improbable present. Despite earning outstanding grades, devoting countless hours of free labor to internships, and receiving numerous accolades for community service, she’d been left virtually bankrupt, living at her parents house, trying to pay off student loans, and working at Starbucks for her effort. Throughout her speech I found myself fighting a gnawing sense of futility in trying to go up against these huge institutions and their fortresses. Even though her advanced intelligence and capabilities were obvious, how was this person ever going to dig out of the cavernous hole she was in? When she finished there was a reverent hush of sorrow and empathy that held us all for several seconds, even as I feared I’d tarried too long.

  On my way out, I scurried past a glass-enclosed side office, where I noticed a lone employee who’d been trapped by the melee as we rushed in. She was hunched over her business phone, head down, talking anxiously into the receiver to someone, probably a police officer, on the other end. Our eyes met for an instant as she risked a furtive glance into the room where all hell was breaking loose. I guessed that this frazzled creature, who bore a passing resemblance to Mayor Jean Quan, was likely the branch manager. I’d love to have been privy to her conversation as she described her odd predicament to whoever was listening. I hoped she’d get a raise for her valor, even though she seemed in no particular danger from Occupy Cal, whose members paid her absolutely no mind as she did what she felt was her duty to the Bank of America. I also hoped the police would spare her, along with everyone else, when they stormed in, guns blazing.

  Once on the outside, I pushed through the crowd of two hundred or so, and pressed myself against the window, to film the thirty or forty students who’d made a conscious decision to subject themselves to arrest. Inside I saw a boy of nineteen or twenty sitting at a computer, staring intently at the screen as he moved the mouse to scroll around. Minutes later he grabbed an empty sheet of paper and found a pen. He wrote the words: Monica Lovano/BofA Regent to UC/213-622-8332. As he finished writing the last number, a young woman standing next to me fished her phone out of her purse to make a call. “Yes, I’d like to speak to Monica,” she said assertively. “Who’s calling? … Yes, tell her the people are calling.” She waited a few minutes and then said, “Oh, she’s unable to come to the phone at this time? Yes, well can you please tell her that there are Cal students here in San Francisco Occupying the Bank of America close to her office and we’d like to know why she thinks it’s appropriate to raise tuition 81% on us while the bank is making record profits and education is unaffordable for most of the people in California. Thank you, oh and can you also tell her that we aren’t going away anytime soon. Thank you.”

  After she hung up I began eavesdropping on another phone conversation from a copper-skinned, raven-haired boy with fine features, standing on the other side of me. He was talking to another boy with a similar profile, sitting cross-legged inside the building, just on the other side of the glass. “That’s my little brother in there,” he intimated to me. “I gotta make sure he’s okay—or Mom’s gonna worry.” As I continued peering inside the bank, some enterprising individual began erecting a tent he had stuffed inside his backpack, between two teller windows up front. I admired the heck out of his preparedness for this moment. The police did arrive shortly after that, and used uncharacteristic restraint while making their arrests before dozens of filming onlookers.

  That evening I headed back to Snow Park in the rain and spent another night sleeping uneasily against my tarpmate, who was proving himself to be harmless. Since this determination, I had decided to make peace with him, even though we’d never spoken a word or looked directly at each other. He was, in all likelihood, a hapless hobo, just trying to stay dry as he crowded my back, shifted occasionally, and snored from time to time. The next morning the sun shone brightly on me once more, as I roused myself and greeted the new day. Two policemen strode by in the warmth and began distributing newly minted eviction fliers telling us our days at Snow Park were numbered too. I wasn’t sure what to do with my tent, but left it up for the time being while I tried to figure out how serious they were this time. I circulated around the sparsely populated park to learn that Occupy Oaklanders had identified a great big fenced vacant lot nearby at Nineteenth and Telegraph where there was ample room for us to re-establish our Oakland Commune. I walked over to OGP to see what was happening and on the way poked my head into a tiny art gallery on Fourteenth and Franklin. It was packed with people who were listening to Harvard graduate, and Princeton Professor, Dr. Cornel West, speaking. I had heard of him before but had to google him while standing outside in the overflow crowd, to get some background and find out that the body of his work had been on issues of race, gender, and class in this country. I could just make out the salt and pepper tip of his afro as he said, “I am not a supporter of the Occupy Movement, I am a part of it.” He went on
to assert the need for activists to, “stay focused on personal commitment to the movement rather than on creating consensus.” I didn’t stay because so many others wanted to get closer, but I did hear him advise that “we should use the diversity of the Occupy Movement to build and strengthen it instead of letting differences weaken it.”

  When I got to OGP I saw that Quan Lake, which was now also being referred to as Quantanamo Bay, had risen by a few inches and was threatening to flood the sidewalks of City Hall. I decided to sit down inside the Rising Loafer bakery whose owner supported Occupy Oakland and didn’t mind if you took up a seat for awhile. I browsed the printed materials looking for news about Occupy. I learned that the tent village on the Berkeley campus had been torn down again, and that students vowed to put it back up as they could. Then I read a tweet that said Occupy Oakland would definitely be taking over the vacant lot at Nineteenth and Telegraph in front of the Oakland School for the Fine Arts on Saturday, the 19- of November. Another tweet said that OPD wasn’t planning to raid Snow Park before then so, while I drank my latte, I decided to stay put the next two nights until the move to Telegraph. As I sipped, a woman of about sixty came in and sat at the table next to me. She searched the room as if she was meeting someone, so I took a chance and asked her if she was with Occupy. She said “yes,” so I went over and sat with her. As we talked, I told her of my recent experiences with the OPD and Bank of America and she told me that she sang with a vocal group called Occupella, that went around performing topical songs for the Movement. Her name was Nancy Schimmel and she showed me lyrics for some of their parodies. I commented on one that was taken from a Malvina Reynolds song I’ve always loved called, “Little Boxes.” “I’m so happy you’re doing that tune,” I said. “Malvina Reynolds rocks. What a great pioneer of feminist folk.”