The Truth Does Matter

 Letting go is proving so much harder than I anticipated. I thought there would be relief...and there have been some moments of it, but for every piece I am glad to be rid of, there comes the realization that I no longer have any power to work on it. I can try, but clearly I let go. The bullies rejoice.

I try to be inspired by how it has been for oppressed people, for instance, and how they have never felt able to let go, and have proven to be right in that you have to stay and fight. You just have to take that stance for your lifetime and try to keep getting better at it. My issues are of course not life and death issues and nothing like the experience of watching murders and injustice and not being able to look away. Mine are much smaller concerns and there is little at stake in the real world. But they stand and fight.

I do have a lot of moments of knowing I am giving up the fight as well as giving up the stress. I may not be giving up the stress at all.

Case in point, it is clear to me that our current problem of losing spaces at the Park Blocks (it seems to be about 10 8x8s and 8 4x4s at this point) is a failure of our own organization to keep out ahead of the design process and prevent the losses to be this extreme. We only have less than 250 spaces, so it's a significant loss...and much more so to those members who held those spaces and didn't have any warning. I took a good look back at our history of handling downtown developments and I do feel like it is all on me. 

All during the past probably 10 years I stayed vigilant and attended every single City Council meeting when downtown was the subject. I participated and documented all of the phases, from the Town Square concept with all the many City Hall options, through the Public Market concept (actually that came first) when they wanted to make an indoor, year-round Market for the farmers. We inserted ourselves into the process but soon realized that it would not be big enough for us and didn't suit any of our organizational tenets...outdoors, with an important offseason to refresh, easy entry with equality for all members, and more. It helped that I was researching our history so I could pull the founding documents out and remind everyone why we decided on them, and how they have been successful for us. 

I inserted myself into a meeting with the top staff from the City and County and threw down on the table some of our promotional items, and copies of our history where all of that was explained. Needless to say, none of them had ever gone to our website to read that history and it's a fact that few city or county workers come to the market on Saturdays...they don't want to come to their workplace on the weekends. I told them that we would not buy into the development scheme that was a common solution for cities to replace their farmers markets in the Pike Place model, where space could be made for the governments to generate income for themselves. You see that model in the Farmers Pavilion, which the farmers got behind as a solution for their space issues, and which is pretty successful, but doesn't put the lie to what I said. It isn't big enough for all of the farmers, and most prefer the outdoor spaces, which the customers also prefer. It basically created new problems and I am guessing that the costs to the city are much greater than they were before. But progress had to be made and it was.

Meanwhile, all of the millions they had to remodel the southern blocks were shifted to complete that and we didn't even get any repairs to the broken concrete on our side. I spent two years with my small team negotiating through the design process, which had many excruciating turns and twists and some of you will remember all of that. It was hard, and it was hard to let go of a vision of improvement, but we were mostly relieved that it did not happen. It probably won't. But it was a burnout, and then the pandemic happened, and our management went to shit, and all of our energy went to survival of our organization.

When I say our management went to shit, I am not sugar coating it. The three people left (when our GM went to OCF) hid their incompetence and gaslit the Board and officers while they basically threw away most of what we held dear. Our trust in our staff, our cooperative relationships between volunteers and staff, and our financial oversight were destroyed. Our equality was thrown out as special deals were made on booth spaces out of point order to those who would join the cult. Key people were sidelined and passed over in the selection process. AJ told the Board that they should assign me, an officer, some help as the Secretary job had a lot of duties. He tried to take away my agency, my elected position, and my power in a public meeting, and tried to make it look as if he cared about me. The person who was GM at the time did nothing about my complaint. Looking back it is even more shocking than it was then.

When it became clear that we didn't have financial accountability, the officers tried to intervene but were told to stay out of it. We didn't, of course, but it took quite a bit of time and eventually we regained power over our organization, which belongs to the members, not the staff. When that happened, we were closed out of access to our database, our members were ginned up to revolt against the Board in defense of the staff, and we were almost prevented from operating. There's more. Money was involved. There were crimes. Because we had no clue what level of assets we had, we had to use our volunteers to catch us up and many of us put in long hours to right the ship. We were reviled and some people will still not speak to me over it. Since most of it was confidential, it was not widely known just how bad it was. Many people do not believe me, but I have the proof.

The facts are the facts, and one person divided us up and made us fight, and absconded with some spoils. That person is in power at OCF, and has divided their membership and created a cult over there. It's similar. As an officer, he has a lot of power. People may or may not be figuring it out. He continues to obstruct and divide. He says "the Board is a divided Board," instead of just saying there is disagreement. He uses DARVO and other bullying techniques to get his way, though not always successfully. But he has been successful in creating chaos which is what he did to us. That's a good way for bullies to hid their machinations.

Market has recovered, but this latest wrinkle is part of the issue in that I was so involved in managing the chaos, as well as being marginalized in what I was doing, that I totally missed being on top of this 8th Avenue Streetscape project which included these stormwater planters on our corners that took our spaces. I had always been on top of the maps, asking all the questions, getting clarification during the early stages of the projects, working with our staff to articulate our needs. If I had known that we would lose this many spaces, with their income going forward for members and the organization, I would have tried to dial it back, and I think we could have. But if there were meetings with the planners, I wasn't invited, and none of the public engagement opportunities clearly spelled out the details. I expect if I looked back I would find at least some of them. Of course now it is way too late and the deal is almost done.

I don't fault the city for doing what it wanted to do with the Park. I will always defend their right to do that. We are not the only park users and we are just a small part of the big picture of what goes on downtown. We are not always the most forward-looking org around. We just mostly want to keep doing what we are doing like we're doing it and that is sometimes to our detriment. I  personally am not a visionary. And I'm old, and I want to step back and not be the super volunteer that gives all my time away. So there was a lack of oversight, from myself and our crappy managers, and there was a pandemic, and mistakes were made, and some crimes went down. Looking back doesn't help a lot.

I mostly am resigning from my OCF volunteer position because of the time it takes to do the tasks, but also I just do not want to be at meetings with some of the people in power at OCF. I disagree with their stances, I don't like to be gaslit by them, and I find that their support and trust in people I know to be dishonest and calculating is wrong and very hard to watch. I just can't do it. It's so very micro/macro with the political situation in the US. I hope people see it and vote accordingly, but as we know corrupt people in power don't just give up. They count on being able to drive out their opposition and make them give up.

So I am letting the bullies win over there, and I am sad about that. I am not keeping in the fight. I am not feeling that I am a warrior at present. I feel selfish. But I'm not good at self-care. I'm always putting myself last and giving the one more thing past when I said I wouldn't. I'm not good at loss and I'm not good at transitions either. 

So I'm having grief. I'm grieving about so much Covid still around...feeling that fear and isolating like I was during the shutdown. I know that is when the crimes happened, when the oversight was not in place, and I am still letting up on my vigilance. I'm using my age as an excuse, I'm making up lots of excuses. It's depressing. It's making me irrational, even at the same time as I am feeling clear that it has to happen.

I do still trust, and right now I am trusting in our younger members that they will step up and pick up the slack I leave behind. In the case of Market, I think they will. When people came for the older members and removed a couple of them from power, I knew it would happen to me and my strategy has been to try to get out before that happens. It will come. I will be removed if I don't step out of the way. Change is happening and the old values become irrelevant, to some degree, and it doesn't help to lament. One of the reasons it happens is that the older people are convinced that their ways are better and deserve to be preserved. While this may be true, it doesn't matter. The old ways are old, and they stand in the way of improvement as well as just change for the sake of change. I keep saying that new is not better, but sometimes it is what has to happen. The conditions change. People like new. It is only later that they realize it is not better. We've all seen this and we all know it, and we are all incapable of making it not be true.

But I will still stand on principle for a lot of things. I may not be listened to, and I may be proven wrong or just pushed aside to mutter in the twilight, but I'll still try to stand up as much as I can. The truth matters. I will fight for the truth.

Follow Through One Thing at a Time

 Just a short post to let people know I told OCF Craft Committee I will resign after the November meeting. I committed to finishing the Permanent Placement and Guideline Change processes and we have one more Town Hall. The relief is real.

My reasons are not that I got tired of being bullied by one member of the committee after ten years of it, or that I am tired of advocating for crafters and trying to make our experience work better. I hope the committee continues to deal with the bullying and of course the work will continue to advocate for crafters.

My main reason is that over the twelve years I have been taking on and doing too many tasks. I started out just thinking I would take minutes, but the number of tasks now fills two pages. I hope other members pick up those tasks, as I still think they are all important.

A bonus is that now I will not be spending my volunteer time supporting people I do not want to support. There are a lot more bullies in the org than the one I have been dealing with...it's a whole political party of them. Two are up for election, and one, in particular should not be in power in any organization. I have the receipts of his actual criminal actions. He lies, and denies, and uses all the bullying tactics as well as taking credit for whatever remains of the diversity efforts he ransacked and destroyed, driving many fine people out of the organization. He has created a little  cult of bullies who go around the internet telling his false narratives over and over until they become the stories. That in itself is criminal.

I am grateful that Jon Silvermoon, Ann Rodgers, (who are both up for re-election) and Lisa Parker, sue theolass, and Paxton Hoag and George Braddock continue to try to do the right thing in the face of these continual assaults against the truth, right action, and progress. I still watch the Board meetings and still support change in the organization, I just no longer believe much change will happen until the bullies are out of power. 

Even if that happens, and it might, with Saskia Whitson and Cassie Esposito running, I can't support the rest of the misrepresentation of the truth that I've witnessed over the last year and a half. There's little accountability and there was a subtle shift from the responsibilities of paid staff onto the committee I served on...all of a sudden we were going to have to fix the internet, the artisan directory database, and do all the communication necessary to assist the boothpeople in this cultural shift from a personal approach to a more efficient, online interface for registration and problem-solving. Sorry, but volunteering is supposed to be voluntary. Staff is supposed to support, not shift paid work to unpaid.

I went to Charlie Ruff many years ago when Square first appeared on the stage and advised him that crafters were going to come with the expectation that they'd use the internet to process their credit card sales. He knew nothing about it at the time and didn't even believe me I don't think, but the lack of action on prioritizing artisan access to the internet is a big problem still. I am not going to help work on that anymore. I know how negotiations work...if the COWS didn't happen it was because the priority wasn't in place yet. 

And I saw all the promotional material, interviews with newspapers, local TV and online. I saw how many times the crafts were promoted. It was missing, or a few times, included in the single word ART. I'm still offended that no accountability was taken, and our committee was guilted at our meeting. I prefer honesty and accepting feedback with humility and not defensiveness and deflection. 

So for my own peace, I will step down from my responsibility for working on any of those problems. I am grateful to my committee members and hope that they are not feeling deserted as they continue to wrestle with those things. I did a lot of good work but can't continue.

There's a lot more going on in my thoughts, but that's really it for now. It might be the last day of sunshine and I have been loving being outdoors getting the houses and yard ready for rain and colder temps. I love summer. I will miss it. But I have a lot to do indoors, too, including boxing up a lot of papers. It's going to feel good to clear away some duties.