Nights in Tents

by Laura Love

  When I got home from my last planned action, (Twattergate—July 2012) I had what can best be described as a combination of PTSD, withdrawal, and a general feeling of letdown and sadness. I felt rudderless and adrift—almost as if I’d just broken up with a long time lover or prematurely lost a treasured friend. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I was financially broke, having spent many thousands of dollars racing across the nation from one hotspot to another, foregoing my musical career by not writing songs, rehearsing, or touring with the band. I felt as if the critics, in some respects, may have been right in telling us to go home, take a bath, and get a job. We were said by them to be lazy, bratty, and spoiled—unlikable and ungrateful for the opportunities this country had given us. We had goaded law enforcement into action and gotten what we asked for when we were beaten, sprayed, locked up, and fined. It took me awhile to shake myself out of those doldrums. Punkboy and I spoke on the phone every so often and I never lost my constant Twitter and Facebook contact with almost all of my coconspirators, from livestreamers to street activists and Anons worldwide. I owed them an unpayable debt for not only keeping me safe when the tear gas and rubber bullets started flying, but also teaching me how to use my smartphone by scrupulously honoring my repeated requests to “tell me, as if I were a two-year-old,” how to perform such mundane tasks as sending out a tweet, or posting a video to YouTube or Facebook.

  But little by little, I started to pick up the pieces and reconstruct my life. I spent a lot of the following winter thinking about what I’d learned and what to do with that information. It was hard for me to focus on any one thing and compartmentalize all the knowledge I’d gotten about how our country and the world works in the realms of banking, farming, the stock market, big business, branches of government, etc. I was frustrated that we hadn’t come away with a tidy, quantifiable victory that could be summed up in a few pages of a history book—that encapsulated our entire struggle for social, economic, and environmental justice. I yearned for a clean sentence that sounded similar to: “The Civil war ended slavery with the Emancipation Proclamation, or World War II defeated Hitler and freed the Jews.” Perhaps, “The Occupy Movement ended corporate corruption and saved the world.” I moped about that for awhile, until I was sick of myself, and then began taking inventory to see what others were doing to move on and make sense of what had happened to us. In essence, it looked as if many viewed their days in Occupy foxholes as a smorgasbord to sample areas of activism they wanted to acquaint themselves with or already felt passionate about. They floated around, as I did, from issue to issue, march to march, throwing themselves into whatever worthwhile cause was being protested right then, but filing the most compelling things we learned and people we met to revisit and get to know better when things calmed down. We were all fed up and angry about a host of worrisome conditions that exist today, and none of us seemed inclined to limit ourselves to any one concern. They treated the experience as a primer in civil disobedience and personal empowerment.

  One such individual was Kshama Sawant. After Seattleites set up their own OWS encampment at the downtown campus of Seattle Central Community College, Sawant, who’d already been a long time social/economic justice advocate, showed up to join in the struggle. She did the same things most of us did—marched against capitalist excesses and the corporatocracy, risked injury and arrest, and spoke with all walks of life from the downtrodden to the wellheeled. Wherever she spoke, she put her own socialist beliefs front and center, in an attempt to enlighten and enroll others to the manifold benefits of governments based on equitable distribution of wealth, rather than personal acquisition and overblown displays of military might. Kshama grew up, middle-class, in India, observing the painful injustices of the caste system there, which she found abominable and unacceptable. After graduating from the University of Mumbai, she moved to the United States and was shocked to encounter the depths of poverty and inequality here as well, which had many parallels to that of her home country. These images affected her deeply and she decided to abandon her training in computer science and pursue answers to her newfound interest in systemic denial of access to social justice, both in America and points beyond. To that end, she earned a PhD in Economics from the University of North Carolina, followed by a move to Seattle in 2006, where she began teaching at Seattle Central College shortly thereafter. It was there that she surrounded herself with others who wholeheartedly rejected our country’s pathological obsession with wealth and status and replaced them with her own brand of compassionate advocacy for all citizens, not just the top 1%.

  My path to revolution may have been markedly different from hers, but I’d reached the same conclusions that she had: tax the rich! Eliminate special privileges for corporations and billionaires, and demand sweeping reform to how business is done in the United States. Her incredible journey toward becoming what some have described, “the most powerful socialist in America,” was predicated, in part, on her remarkable conduct in the days leading up to her victory. She cut her teeth in the trenches of Occupy Seattle and then went on to launch an outrageously successful campaign to become a member of the Seattle City Council, whose most compelling hue and cry was to increase the minimum wage in that city to fifteen dollars per hour, which she deemed to be the lowest reasonable amount to compensate a full time worker, in order to elevate them above poverty level. And then, against all odds, she won! Not only that, she unseated a longtime encumbent, Richard Conlin, who was viewed by many to be untouchable in the race. By doing so, she became one of only a handful of socialist candidates to ever win council posts in the entire history of the United States. Then, she took her heartfelt commitments directly to Seattle voters, who agreed with her position and, in May 2014, became the first to adopt the fifteen dollar minimum wage ever seen on our shores. We who Occupied for this too, lit the Twittersphere up like a Roman candle when the votes were finally tallied and we realized one of our own had accomplished the impossible, so quickly. And it was not just OWS supporters who took to the streets and danced with joy, it was labor rights advocates across the country, many of whom I witnessed, clapping each other on the back and tearfully embracing, even as they wielded their FIGHT FOR FIFTEEN signs in front of WalMarts and McDonald’ses nationwide.

  We saw Kshama’s spectacular gains to be Occupy’s as well, but there were scores of others who did not attain quite that level of fame, who also discovered superpowers and found their capes along the Occupy Trail. Consider Dorli Rainey, the tiny, 84-year-old, Austrian-born grandmother who was pepper sprayed by Seattle police as she joined in a protest there on November 16, 2011, along with hundreds of others. I ran into her at Occupy the Rose Parade weeks later, where we spoke before her scheduled appearance there. She told me that many of her friends who were in nursing homes and assisted living centers thought that she was both crazy and heroic. “They ask me—they say, ‘Dorli, aren’t you afraid that you’re going to be hurt or arrested with these people’ and I say no! This is what I must do—This is what all of us must do. Why would I want to be sitting around, playing cards or watching TV and waiting to die. This keeps me alive!” A photographer named Joshua Trujillo captured the agonized look on her face—dripping with chemical spray, as two younger protesters came to her assistance and held her steady. Shortly afterward, she told MSNBC interviewer Keith Olbermann, that the pain and stinging were gone from her eyes, but she still felt a heaviness in her chest and was battling a persistent cough, which I was all too familiar with. After that incident, which was blasted all over the Internet, she became the face of Occupy Seattle, and as such, found a much wider audience for her message than ever before. Around that time I also heard her talking with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now about her Occupy experiences. Go Granny, go!

  And as for me, here in Okanogan County, Washington, halfway into my fifty-fifth trip around the sun? I am a little more arthritic than even three or four years earlier, and perhaps a little less inclined to walk headlong into a hopped-up army of militari
zed police than I was then. It’s been ages since I’ve seen so many colorful and intriguing humans gathered together, as I did on that adventure. When I first came home from my time with Occupy, I’d been confused by the volume of conflicting feelings I was having. There were days when I found it difficult to fold back into my normal, ordinary life, filled with normal, ordinary people. Certainly few people in my present could lay claim to explosively inspiring the kinds of questions and deep internal dialogues that many larger-than-life OWS cohorts sparked within me, then, though at the time, during the height of my fear and discomfort, it had been hard to come up with something even moderately attractive about some of the characters surrounding me, and I desperately craved normalcy and civility.

  But, that was then and this is now—and these days, it’s no trick at all to come up with dozens of things I can not only tolerate, but even love about virtually all of them, even the red-eyed, foul-mouthed litterbugs; pitbull possessors; mentally ill; tone deaf midnight serenaders; the chemically dependent; and chicken wing combatants. And after all, wasn’t that one of the main points of Occupy—to push the boundaries of understanding, compassion, and tolerance way out, in order to create new visions of what was possible? No small part of the original appeal of joining OWS had been the certainty that I would be exposed to people and situations that would expand my worldview, shake up my reality, and force me to encounter opinions and personalities that challenged my narrowing notions in my staid existence at Pagan Place. Living in the country and learning how to get along with people of differing political stripes had been mostly marvelous, but I’m not proud to own up to the ignoble encroachment of some degree of provincialism and small-minded judgments, which had somehow managed to creep into my psyche during my time away from the liberal bastion of Seattle, no matter how hard I’d tried to resist them.

  One of Occupy’s greatest gifts to me was the way it made me embrace some of the glorious contradictions I encounter all the time as I move through time and space. It meant relying on tweakers and crack addicts to warn me when trouble was nigh, tweeting out dog food requests for snarling canines who wanted to tear me to pieces, and sharing a laugh with a policewoman who’d just had a breakthrough about our shared goals, shortly after calling my friend and cellmate a cunt. I’d even shaken my head in wonderment when pondering how one of my fellow incarcerees, a six-foot-something white male with a low voice, high heels, miniskirt, and sharp adam’s apple, had not been beaten to a pulp by the OPD, who seemed eager to do that, for any reason, at all times. He had shaved his face and legs, applied makeup, and insisted to arresting officers that he was a woman. I didn’t have much of a problem with that, or sharing a cell and exposed toilet with her, but it knocked me off my feet to see Oakland Police be so evolved on this particular issue, while so backward on the rest. It gave me hope that even they could be trained into behaving with a modicum of civility and sensitivity if the majority demanded it. The Occupy Movement also facilitated my reaching the uncomfortable conclusion that I, even as a gay, black woman, am sexist too. Not only that—I’m racist, homophobic, looksist, ageist, and all that. We all are. It is impossible to grow up in America, be hammered with all the spurious, reprehensible messages we are inundated with, and be anything else. Yet and still, most of us doggedly refuse to acknowledge this disquieting fact. Instead, we have whittled the only responses to this inconvenient truth down to A) admitting we are these things, and being stoned to death; or, B) denying we are these things, when accused, and then being stoned to death. It is only because we stopped defining them as just plain bad people, that it is now perfectly fine to confess that some of us are alcoholics. Indeed, it’s common knowledge that the first step to recovery is admitting we have a problem, followed shortly thereafter by getting treatment, learning more about the disease, and finding ways to manage the unfortunate condition and stop offending. But we’ve never come up with realistic, kind, gentle ways to cope with our ongoing battles, as flawed human beings, with the “isms.” I was mortified when watching NPR’s Juan Williams being summarily dismissed, thrown under the bus, if you will, when he admitted to feeling nervous when seeing people in “Muslim garb” boarding the same flight he was booked on. Ashamedly, I thought, “there but for fortune go I.” If every one of us told the truth and were dealt the same consequences, there would be millions more people out of work than there already are. I, too, was something other than perfectly okay with the fact that Williams had been doing double duty as a commentator for both NPR and Fox News, and was not entirely happy with some of the comments he’d made prior to the career-derailing gaff that got him canned, but I was utterly baffled by how so many NPR listeners instantaneously stuck him right up there with Clarence Thomas, Herman Cain, Ben Carson, and Condoleezza Rice, as one of the most detestable Negroes in America. Millions of them could not fathom how he, a person of color, could harbor such unevolved notions. And he stayed canned, even after he went on to try and make it “clear that all Americans have to be careful not to let fears lead to the violation of anyone’s constitutional rights, be it to build a mosque, carry the Koran, or drive a New York cab without the fear of having your throat slashed.” I could be dead wrong here—I don’t know all that went on behind the scenes—he may have been a real backward, hate-spewing pain in the ass to his co-workers, but I’m trying to give him the benefit of the doubt by surmising that much of his ignorance could easily be interpreted as a predictable response to the barrage of hate propaganda that followers of Islam received after 9/11. Can’t we just admit that we are all, to some degree, influenced by the crap that hits us 24/7/365 in the Land of the Free/Home of the Brave Melting Pot we reside in? And then, after we do that, can we reasonably conclude that it’s not up to Muslims to disavow their religious beliefs, or look and act in ways that put our istic, phobic selves more at ease. It’s up to us to grow the fuck up, learn some shit, and go out and make some Muslim, black, gay, transgender, crazy, homeless friends. What is evolution anyway, but a naturally occurring anomaly/abnormality, or mutation, that winds up redefining a species in ways that increase its future odds of survival? The first guy who rejected the plumbing he was born with, placed an “s” in front of “he”, and insisted that psychology trumped physiology, changed us as a species forever. As did the first cop that broke with tradition and understood the rightness of allowing a person to be accepted as the gender s/he-they identified with; or the drug-addicted homeless vet who recognized he had a right to protest the pretense that thrust him into an unjust war, crippling him physically and emotionally for the rest of his life. These rogue individuals set in motion the future-altering butterfly effects that are necessary for us to progress, and thrive. The eighty-four-year-old woman who chafed at the idea of resting in a home until she died—who chose instead to risk her safety by rallying against injustice, was also one of those rare mutations that may be our only chance (as life-forms capable of rendering the planet to rubble at the touch of a button) to survive our own propensities. These exotic examples have the anomaly/abnormality thing in spades, and as such, should have spawned crazy adulation in me straight away for offering the only shred of hope I see for ferrying homonids safely through climate change/religious wars/nuclear proliferation/genocide, etc. In order to get to the point of gratitude and fondness, I had to take a few years to mull them over and deconstruct the quandaries they unleashed in my mind. Wouldn’t it have been so much better if I had gotten there right away? The beautiful thing though, is that I did get there. I did finally discover that one of my superpowers was adapting to those whose methods, madness, and message did not precisely mirror my own. They had undoubtedly stretched me, and helped me to rejoice in diversity, while strengthening my conviction to only use my newly discovered powers for good. And, as has been said, “with great power comes great responsibility,” and knowing what I now knew, made me feel more motivated than ever to dedicate myself to changing, at least some of the things I could no longer accept.

  In order to do that,
I knew I’d have to make some hard choices and decide on the one or two things I most wanted to do, and could pull off in the near term, that wouldn’t cost a lot of money, or involve risking life and limb. It was my friends at Occupy the Farm that hammered home the criticality of taking back control of our food supply by avoiding genetically altered produce like the plague, and never using chemical fertilizers or pesticides. In years past, I simply visited the nearest chain store that had garden seeds or plant starts on sale, be they hybrid, GMO, or whatever—paid my money, and put them in the ground. #OTF drilled into me, the radically revolutionary aspects of planting only open-pollinated crops, which would allow me to select the best and brightest producers in my garden to go to seeds, which could then be harvested, dried, and planted the following year. “Save Your Seeds,” was their mantra, and it has now become mine. They said that huge agribusiness and chemical companies, like Monsanto, had so compromised the food supply that ancient varieties of common grains and vegetables were going extinct and being replaced by toxic, “Roundup Ready” strains that did not produce viable seeds, but rather had to be purchased each year from these companies, who controlled the prices, quality, and supplies. Food crops in America, like corn and wheat and soybeans, were being genetically engineered to withstand the chemical onslaught of Roundup weedkillers and insecticides, that corporate farms drench our food in, and contained (among other really bad stuff) neonicotinoids, which kill pest insects and bees (and other pollinators) alike by making their stomachs explode when they are ingested. They are making people (particularly Americans, who’ve not banned them as many other countries have) very sick too, and account for untold illnesses that are associated with their consumption—everything from cancers, to Crohn’s disease, gluten intolerance, obesity, allergies, birth defects, autism, heart disease, diabetes, infertility, and the like. The list is long and being added to regularly. These and other depressing realities about how the planet has devolved and the 1% come to control everything we hold dear, continue to make me angrier than ever, even after my adventures with Occupy. However, at a certain point, I had to take inventory of my talents, tolerances, and weaknesses to decide what I could do to give meaning and purpose to those hair-raising experiences and put that sacred knowledge to the test. If I couldn’t compel Monsanto to label their deadly produce, I could refuse to buy it. Even though the conscienceless corporation had spent millions to defeat initiatives requiring them do so, I still had options to avoid and thwart the poison peddlers.