Mic Check

Chance Martin at OccupySF. Photos by Luke Thomas.

By Chance Martin, special to FogCityJournal.com

November 28, 2011

By the time many of you read this, Mayor Ed Lee and the City and County of San Francisco will have concluded a Monday morning meeting to determine the fate of OccupySF’s last remaining open encampment at Justin Herman Bradley Manning Plaza. What little information we’ve managed to gather from Mohammed Neru, our City liaison, is that the discussion will involve a proposal to offer OccupySF a location far from our corporate and financial adversaries. The other tidbit was that the long-threatened police raid will likely occur Tuesday or Wednesday night, more likely meaning the wee hours of Wednesday or Thursday morning.

OccupySF felt we could safely rely on no raids during the holiday, and Mr. Neru’s vague reassurances Thanksgiving Day provided limited confirmation for our compiled educated guesses, so we enjoyed a four day respite from our vigil against the inevitable outcome–complete with two days of hot holiday feasts kindly provided by Glide, the Interfaith Council, and other good-hearted folks. On Saturday, we began holding preliminary discussions for the urgent discussions we anticipate after we learn the City’s final proscription.

Department of Public Works interim Director Mohammed Nuru.

Will the City’s stance be all-stick-and-no-carrot?

It really doesn’t matter, at least not to OccupySF, because our Camp in the plaza isn’t going anywhere.

Similar offerings are being turned down by other surviving urban Occupations, and the writing on the wall says San Francisco will be no different. And yes, the Carrot the City dangles sounds mighty damned tempting to those of us with backgrounds in community development, to say nothing of potentials now thwarted by Winter’s arrival in the Camp, and the possibility of ongoing organizing work someplace where arthritis’s bite is not so deep or frequent.

Despite whatever starry-eyed visions such possibly-prospective submissions might inspire, the common wisdom among community organizers here is that any deal the City and County makes with a protester is only a diversion. And on those rare occasions when something does materialize, it then becomes the vehicle for co-opting the bite out of our message, or just an outright trap.

There are other factors at work as well. First off, the proposed site could only accommodate about half of our remaining Camp. Ironically, the liaisons representing OccupySF in discussions with the Mayor and City officials report no opportunity to talk about securing the additional space we need for our current demonstrators… it never even made the agenda. So we’re left attempting to make do in a camp with a reduced footprint, no hot food preparations permitted on-site, and numbly recovering from prior raids successful, unsuccessful, and postponed.

We have complied with every requirement the City says is motivated out of concern for our health and safety, at least those for which compliance is even remotely possible, yet this relentless ratcheting-down of our ability to sustain ourselves and our activities clearly indicates underlying lack of good faith on the City’s part. Any City offer can rightfully be recognized as a ploy to reduce our numbers and remove us from the 1% we seek to discomfit.

Could we really expect any different?

Then too, there’s the question of the homeless folks who’ve joined OccupySF. It’s not like we can now abandon them to the imminent predations of the SFPD and DPW tag-team that would soon follow OccupySF’s departure. The homeless population that San Francisco‘s corporate media now studiously ignores for the further reification Lt. Governor Newsom’s smoke-and-mirrors gambit in the furtherance of his political ambitions are at last revealed as the canaries-in-the-coal-mine, the stark warning that something has been fundamentally broke with the U.S. economy for far longer than it took for that story to finally rise to headline status. Many of our homeless campers are experiencing the first community and safety they’ve known for a long time. Whether OccupySF chooses to move into the Mission District or not, we will never abandon our homeless sisters and brothers. Our shared values of fairness, equality, and non-violence mean that even if OccupySF did decide to take the City’s bait, we can’t leave anyone behind. Veterans around our Camp appreciate that more than most.

Finally, there’s the prospect of convincing our growing flock to completely agree, down to the last person, that we’ll migrate to fairer conditions. That simply isn’t going to happen. By Sunday afternoon, the divide became apparent, and many here concluded that their dreams of a safe space for us to do our work—and there is a lot of work to do—isn’t likely to come at the hands of a Mayor who everybody knows first lied when he declared that he would not seek election.

Here’s where it gets personal. I’m a son and a father and a grandfather. I’m a disabled Vet. I’ve spent much of the last twenty years of my life in locations like this screaming that homeless people don’t enjoy the same fundamental Rights as the people who were lucky enough to escape the opening salvos in the economic war we Americans all now face. Guess what? We’ve gathered together down at Justin Herman Bradley Manning Plaza only to discover, just like our homeless brothers and sisters in the 99%, that those inalienable Rights of ours become the thinnest of vapors when held to the light that’s finally being cast on America’s true situation.

Our intrinsic values as human beings have been reduced to line items on the 1%’s balance sheet.

I walked away from OccupySF’s camp on Sunday deeply disappointed that we can’t negotiate in good faith with the City and County of San Francisco. I thought about that document I’ve raised my right hand and swore to uphold on at least three occasions: The Constitution of the United States of America. Call me crazy, but I still want to believe we can resurrect the promise to all Americans that quaint scrap of hemp paper enshrines.

I’ll be right here, standing with OccupySF, to defend our Constitutional Rights of Free Assembly and Free Speech. I will wait for the teargas and batons night after cold, sleepless night. I promise you that I’ll worry about my safety (I turn 57 on December 2nd), and the safety of Occupiers more vulnerable than myself, but we’ll ALL be waiting here. And after the gas clears and DPW departs with their latest haul of mostly public donations, WE’LL BE BACK.

Every police action against OccupySF has only served to increase our numbers and steel our resolve. WE’LL COME BACK STRONGER.

And we’ll continue coming back for as long as it takes to complete our work.

We will probably pay a heavy price, but not as great as those who come after us will if we don’t see this through. Along the way, we expect we will find out what it really means to be ALIVE.

Until then, we need to stay healthy, we need to stay strong, we need to stay focused, and we need to be fearless.
We are.

But most importantly, We – the Mighty 99% – must always remember to confront our oppressors in Peace.

Our only defense is our Love.

We aren’t the folks with the guns. We aren’t criminalizing anyone or taking away their rights. We haven’t put thousands upon thousands of families out of their homes. We don’t evade our responsibility to care for seniors, veterans, disabled and sick people. We’ve never used the vast reaches of mainstream media to fan the flames of fear and hate. We aren’t poisoning the planet to improve a quarterly statement. We don’t prioritize building atomic submarines over building low-income housing. We don’t want to sacrifice 10 to 20 American lives daily colonizing Afghanistan for the sake of an oil pipeline, and then pass the bill on our children and grandchildren.
We don’t author human suffering for wealth’s sake.

We have simply determined that we refuse to surrender our rights or our dignity. We will not disappear or cease to exist.

We will Occupy.

Peace.

We are the 99 percent!

FCJ Editor

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