Back in the House, No Escaping Ourselves

It wasn't easy to break isolation to sell at Market. I still don't know if it was the right thing to do, but of course finding the right choice out of the many these days is exceedingly complicated. My loyalty to the survival of the Market pushed me to risk my own...I bought in a little to the idea that it was safer out there than I imagined it to be. I gambled.

It was a good day...just being back in the routine was strengthening, and seeing people I love was overwhelming. I think now that I didn't really look at anyone. I am not easy with eye contact anyway but I don't remember a single person's eyes. It's strange to notice that, when all we see of each other is our eyes now. I guess I was trying to keep emotional distance. I sense people...I feel their presence with all my little tendrils of consciousness but I don't really look at them when we are close. I feel somehow that should disqualify me from being a good person but people seem to forgive it. Maybe they are just as busy not looking at me.

Many things were as normal...Willy and I trading stories and forgiving each other for repeating ourselves. Watching each other's booths, running over to the farm as we call it. Cherries and polenta and tamales and plants and all the things I was out of, and a few more. Farmers on the Butterfly looked good. I thought it was pretty functional, much more so than it could have been with some of the other solutions to their space problems. The parade happened as I scrambled to get set up. I had to wait in line for a space...but I was number one with all my points, so I got Raven's space.

I set up sort of skewed with my back to the fountain to widen the aisle and I liked it, of course missing him a lot. Having the parade without him was a little hard...but they all managed. I got interviewed by the RG during set-up which was rough as always, since there is so much to do to be ready by ten. I wasn't. My plan was to have a table as a barrier so no one would touch anything and before I got that set up a guy came and touched all the hats...he wasn't wearing a mask and he was in my space! He said he had used hand sanitizer but I was completely freaked out and didn't find the wherewithal to tell him my rules...so felt like I had immediately blown my safety plan.

It took a long time to recover from that. My set-up wasn't that functional with all my stock in tubs that were underfoot and disorganized immediately. I quickly put bungies all around the legs of the popup to create a safe space inside just for me. People seemed able to view the items and I would put them out on the table for them to choose the one they wanted. It was awkward but not terrible. I sold a good amount of hats but almost no bags. People need to get closer to the bags. People want to try on the hats. I sort of tried to pressure them to only try one on if they really intended to buy it, but that was not my style and I don't know if I'll do that next time. I might just put the tried-on ones in a tub to quarantine. Or I might give up the notion that cloth items are not safe.

People seemed to feel so much safer than I did. Probably 25% of them did not have masks or didn't keep them on. It does hurt your ears to wear one all day...I tried a few different ways and it was never great. Plus it was rainy and kind of cold so I was just a dumpy old white lady and nothing glamorous. Lots of people visited and some parts of the day were slow and most were fast.

I brought my sign and hung it up, saying "Stop Police Brutality, End White Supremacy." I knew I was risking virtue signaling but I had to have a sign. The protest didn't come, but it was the right thing to do. I didn't see many reactions (because I never look at people...) but I did hear one white lady harrumphing about it. I didn't confront her though I wanted to say, "What? You think we should keep white supremacy?" No one else said much or anything about it. I didn't really do it to open any dialogues, just to make it clear that at least one person at Saturday Market was working on her stuff. At least to make a statement. It's not all just selling things in my Market world.

I am working on my stuff. I squirmed through 13th tonight and will make myself uncomfortable a lot more. I am wondering what level I can go to that is more than watching a movie and trying to integrate new knowledge into what I already know. There is an overwhelming amount of new knowledge, and yet, not that much. It's kind of simple at core. Do I honor the humanity of every other person and fight for justice for black people right now? Hell yeah, no question. Can I stay in it for the long haul? That's a given. I am not going anywhere near complacency.

The questions are deeper. How have I bought into colonialism? I know I was really uneasy about helping shut down the drug dealing on my street, and it played out badly. A young black man was caught up in it. I tried to protect him some, but not as much as I would do today after watching 13th. I feel extremely terrible that he will be in the prison system. I wonder if I would rather have talked the neighbors into tolerating the dealing. We probably weren't in danger, just inconvenienced, and it didn't occur to us that the white guy who is really the guilty one would gaslight the cops and not be busted as well. It should have occured to me. I wonder if I should wade in deeper and if it would be worse if I did. He wasn't innocent...but I didn't protect him either. I actually feel quite sick about it. I'm not quite a Karen, but I sure am an old white lady. I think we did it wrong.

So now at minimum I have to fight harder for better policing. For sure we have some racist cops here and for sure if he goes to prison there will be racism there. I will have to make amends somehow. I don't even know his name, it all happened so fast. Maybe I will talk to my neighbors about it. They are very compassionate people and maybe they can help me figure something out. Sure brings it home.

So, vulnerable, getting down deep into my sins and regrets, feeling the weight of the time and the reality we can't ignore. We aren't safe, and we are a danger to each other. We all have weapons with which we can accidentally kill. We can't really save ourselves and we can't save each other, we just can't be too careful. I never want to leave the house again. I'm guilty, and I'm stupid, and I'm being fooled most of the time. And then there is politics, and Facebook, and the collapse of the republic. I feel like there is no future. It's fairly devastating. So getting up and moving forward is difficult, to put it mildly. I don't want to do anything though I managed to wash dishes. I stayed awake and didn't stay in bed. I didn't fix anything today. 

But I will. I will push myself to go to Market again and do better. Try to look into someone's eyes. Try not to repeat myself. Try harder to forgive, and above all, to learn. Try harder. It's a life and death time. We're all on the edge. Any one of us could fall off, so we had better take a step back and reconsider. Reconsider everything we thought we knew. And keep working. Work deep. Then deeper.

Up all the Time

Power is in the people. They're sharing it around, so generously, and it's hurting out there, but not as much. I've been obsessed and triggered with the news, with the simultaneous uprising of the loving people and the crumbling of the corrupt and hating power structure. They are moving apart in the most possible opposite directions.

He says dominate, and the people sit down and ignore him and get to work. Down at the protest tonight, some truth came out. They have been marching all day, for days, losing track of time. I watch as much as I can. They walk for miles and miles, repeating themselves into openness. If you say it enough, you start to understand a little bit. "Say his name: George Floyd!" Say her name: Breonna Taylor! Say their names: Too many!

Enough is right. These kids can't get enough. I remember it so well, fifty years ago now, when it was me in the streets, me sitting at the table with actual Black Panther Party members, me at a party in Westport with the Chicago Eight. And I was a little white college girl, just starting to learn, and when they told me how to help, to organize, to be powerful, I knew I could not. It was all I could do to be there at all. I was only there because my roommate's father was their lawyer, and worked with their other lawyer, Charles Garry. Those were the most powerful people in the world right then, in the world of trying to make justice in the stacked system that was falling on them, and on all of us, and in the world of social revolution.

I wasn't up to the challenge, but I tried my best to keep up. She and I decided to go to New Haven, all the way from our college in DC, because that was where it was going to happen. The student  strike was about to be called, and we decided to go see it for ourselves. it was dark, and foreboding and grim. By that time, we'd been teargassed on our campus for yelling at Melvin Laird as he drove by daily on his way to engage in killing the young men of our generation. We yelled loud from what we thought was safety. It hurt to be gassed, and I remember walking around in the back of the crowd one of the times, telling people to get out if they didn't want to be sprayed. I didn't want any innocent people to get caught up in our serious business. I didn't know enough to be a medic or anything truly helpful. I only knew what it felt like to be caught up in something dangerous when you were innocent. We were shocked that the police could come on our campus and gas us.

We went to lots of demonstrations, from the first Moratorium, when all we did was stand still, crushed in a huge crowd blocking the street. We didn't hear Pete Seeger or Joan Baez but we all sang together. We noticed how it was all ages, all nationalities, all of us in the street. We all wanted the war to end, we wanted peace, we wanted justice, and we wanted with all our hearts to be part of making the world better. Once I took my little sister, who must have been fourteen if I was twenty, to a big march. We were just walking around when a phlanx of cops on horses came out from behind the Washington Monument, swinging clubs, and we ran like hell. We walked all the way home, miles and miles. We wer scared that time, but a lot of the transgression was fun. The Yippies were crazy, and we ended that goddamn war, after a few years of relentless protesting. We gae up our lives for it, but until Kent State we didn't really think they would kill us. That was then.

The chronology is a little confused in my mind, because right then, as if the world crumbling wasn't bad enough, my dad killed himself. My emotions weren't regulated at that age, so I can't separate the various traumas, which of course were already in place from the things that happened at home before his suicide, and from being away at college all alone, and from all the ways a 20 year old girl wakes up. The political part helped, I think, though it came with the hippie movement, the sexual revolution, and women's liberation all of it at once. The late sixties and early seventies were, on the scale of traumatic times, over the top. Maybe a lot like it is now.

Kent State was May 4, my 20th was the next day, and Dad's death was May 17th, 1970. I was on strike, visiting friends at Purdue, where I had gone the year before. I transferred to AU in DC in the fall of 69, and immediately had my political awakening and huge life change internally, just beginning the decade or so of reeling and careening that landed me here in Eugene in March of 1976. There was a lifetime packed into those years. I remember them vividly. I was traumatized the whole time, but the hippie life saved me. I went to the woods in Colorado as Nixon fell, and with the help of kind people and other more thoughtless ones, learned a lot of what I would need when I finally landed here.

I left DC politics behind, not living up to the expectations of David Hilliard, though I don't suppose he really thought more than a few seconds about what I might do for the movement. But I did pursue a life of working for peace and justice, and equality, and fearless emotional exploration. Trauma will do that to you.

My favorite reading has always been narrative nonfiction. I will read the rape stories, the confessions, I will watch all the videos. I want to see the true emotions. I want to know the motivations, the thought processes, the decisions that got people to their moments of truth, of strength, or of despair. I don't want it as fiction, I want the real thing. That is the way I am fearless. But I'm no good in person with that stuff.

I went downtown to the bank and Kiva today, one of only about three times I have been out in the last three months. I nearly cried several times. Masked up, I know I looked hungrily at people. I wanted to walk through Kesey and see what was to be seen, if anything, but I stayed away. I saw it last night on the livestream. I watched the young people walk all over town and end up there. The movement wanted to go to the jail to cheer up those who had been arrested, but they decided to celebrate instead. They danced and drummed. No doubt they got high. I switched over to the livestream from DC, watched the park get cleared for the Bible photo op, watched Colbert and Fallon as they respectfully drew out W. Kamau Bell, Leslie Jones, Keisha Lance Bottoms, Keegan Michael Key, watched how these white guys asked for the real. Seth let Amber speak first. She told her stories. Her way speaks to me, her unflinching honesty, her ability to find laughter and humbleness in it.

I counseled someone in emails who was having a racist reaction but didn't know it. I was too easy on her, but she still didn't accept what I told her, to just listen, to put her fears where they belonged and let someone else take the emotional stage. She didn't get it. She hadn't been watching, reading, or listening. That doesn't make me great, it just makes me obsessed, but I have to lose my own racism, that I know, that is the first and best thing I can do. I'm working as hard as I can at it.

Even as obsessed as I am, what I want more than what the movement is asking for, is for it to take down this regime. Those aims are connected, but I admit I was missing the focus. I'm getting it a little better, the urgency of this wound, the absolute limit people have reached. I certainly can only feel the edges of it. As someone feeling targeted and disposable by the regime, as far as coronavirus goes, I got it a little at first, but there's a lot more for me to feel yet. I honor those who are willing to speak.

Tonight, sitting in front of the jail, the white kids had to listen. The black kids yelled and cried and spoke softly and asked and demanded and let out their disgust with us. We deserved it. If I had been there I would have been hanging my head. If anyone started to argue, they were shouted down. The white kids sat or took a knee, the black people stood. It was honorable. It was a much better education than those kids would have gotten in the last months of senior year. It was real.

I'm so glad people shared it with people like me, stuck at home, chicken and trying to stay alive and not get sick. I was lucky to see and hear it. I honor those who cared to share it. I have hope for us, white people. If we work really hard, we might be able to help someone. We might be able to deserve to know these people who are rising. They leave us far behind.