I Love History

 I'm the kind of person who has bits of research on little slips of paper on my desk, notebooks filled with careful notes, and piles of documents and files of things I am working on. I researched my house and neighborhood and all of the people whose names came up, and do plan to put that in better order someday for the next owners of my house and the History Museum. I have several side projects connected with that, maps and research on historic houses in our city and region, copies of newspaper articles, and many details that are only tangentially related to my actual house and property. I have always planned to write two books about it, one about my remodeling project that uncovered the provenance, and one about the people and events that formed this little neighborhood in the West side, which includes the Fairgrounds, and the early white settlers who came in the 1840s and 50s and left their stamp on where I live now.

That's a drawer and I always want to get back to it, but it's a project. I have another drawer of just personal mementos and artifacts that won't mean much to anyone. I have boxes and boxes of journals as I write every day and a lot is in there that could be written about, and some was. I have boxes of short stories two novels, and memoir that probably will not see the light of day. Some of it is hard for me to read now but I don't really want to destroy it. 

Another drawer is my history with the Radar Angels and Jell-O Art, which is historically and culturally significant at this point of almost 40 years...plus I have a lot of Jell-O pieces I made and am keeping in my "project room." I have a tub of all the t-shirts I made for the show. Maybe a book there, though the history of the Angels is not quite believable and lots of the stories can't be told publicly without hurting some of us. We were in our 20s and 30s when that history started, and you know, mistakes have been made. But it's a rich history. Careful editing might be the key to sharing that someday.

I have another drawer that is full of OCF stuff, and several boxes of the shirts I made for that over the years, posters, and little things. OCF has a great archive of its own but I do plan to hand over the shirts at some point, once I catalogue them with years they were made, anecdotes related to them, and so on. Probably not a book, for me, but a project that needs to be done so those things can find their new homes or be discarded.

I have t-shirts and art from many customers and I have started to give them to those people and groups, to do whatever they want to do. It's so many shirts...they will have to go. The art is just going to get junked, most likely, unless I decide to catalogue or compile some of it. The past is interesting to a lot of people and I've been a screenprinter for more than 40 years now. Who knows where all that will go.

There's more. Family of origin history, photos, letters, mysteries to be solved. Fortunately my sisters and now one of my nephews are doing that research and writing. I still look for it. I'm reading a book that mentions one of my cousins, "Free Frank" McWhorter who founded a town in what was a frontier at one point, in Illinois. Yes that branch came from the formerly enslaved members of my Dad's family. There's a lot I could learn about it. 

The biggest piles, and the project I am actively working on still, takes up half my living room and it is way more than a book. I used to think I would write that book, and still might, but my relationship with Saturday Market has changed so much in the last few years I am not sure how to do it. I never expected that market would be a hostile and dangerous place for me and my skills. Almost all of my 50 years there were as a highly supportive member who pitched in on everything. I served in nearly every way I could, beginning in the 80s and extending into now, although the nature of my service right now is...complicated. I took on the archives project in the 20-teens I guess, not sure when, as the many boxes got to be a storage problem in the "new" office once Beth got us moved out of the Broadway location where we had a basement filled with stuff that had been saved. I tried to help pack it up and made myself not attend the garage sale, as I knew how painful it would be to watch things go away. Kim assured me she would not let anything go that needed to be in the archive, and I trusted her. I started bringing things home to sort, preserve, and put in order for the future. 

I met with Lotte's family after she died and they gave me what she had saved, which was amazing and so valuable. She was a good saver. They also gave me things from her personal life that they thought should be saved, but the UO didn't want them at the time, and they weren't organized. I think at some point, a museum will want them, but some of it would only be useful to someone who wanted to research her life, and that's not all that likely to happen. There were some things that I thought would be inspiring for our members, so I put together some displays for Founder's Day and for a few years I took it down to market so people could come and talk about her and the other people involved in those early years. That's all in the market office where I thought it would be safe for the future and people could access it and appreciate her. Some of it was not organized, but just in boxes. I took it because Renee had an interest in it and I was sure she would treat it as the treasure it is. I don't know who is keeping that interest in the archives alive in the market staff...they don't really have time. It takes volunteer energy.

I worked hard to finish up the 70s and 80s but kept finding things in random boxes that needed to be included, and it was frustrating to have to go down to the office, see if the thing had already been included, and redo the portfolios which can't just have pages put in that need to be in chronological order. A writer in our membership pressured me to make that accessible to him and I did the best I could to do that, and still honor the need for it to be done well. I'm an amateur archivist but I think I did a pretty good job. He wanted the rest, and didn't seem to understand what the project involved, and got demanding and rude about his right to it. I wanted to finish it, but not for him, just to avoid doing it over or doing it badly. He wrote one book about it but included me after I asked him not to, in order to make a derogatory remark about my craft, so we're not working together at this point. 

I took the time to  put together the archive of the LCFM history that we had also saved, as they were part of us for the first 15 years or so, and not fully separated from us for longer. I went in to meet with them to give them a summary so at least they would know that they are not really 100 years old as they had been saying. They really began in their present form in 1979. Still supported by us. But that's another story.

I also put together all of the materials from the process we went through with the city regarding the future of the Park Blocks, which actually happened at least three times, the last one being in 2016 to 2020, more or less, resulting in the Farmers Pavilion. Our part of the project was derailed for several reasons, one being the City not having the money to do it all, so deciding to do the most pressing, which was creating a better site for the farmers, who had been asking for decades. Our site was working for us and we were pretty happy to keep it intact, though we did still need them to address the deferred maintenance and a few other things, like a food court that is too small. But it's a complex issue and needs careful and skilled management so we don't lose what we've built. I could talk about that for hours and if you are interested, I recommend asking to see that archive, which is about six volumes of research and documents and newspaper articles in the archives room. Most of it is still going to be relevant if the project resumes, which I have heard is maybe going to happen. I don't expect to be involved.

And the rest of the archives, up to the present, are in my living room, my project room, and my head, most of the time. I have notes that I can refer to when I am asked, such as the history of Holiday Market, the ins and outs of particular issues, and so much more. I wrote several essays on things like the 70s, whatever. I have the digital archive going back to 2009 that, as Secretary, I knew to keep as things stopped being always on paper that could be saved. I print a lot of it out, like the member emails we all get, as historically, those will be relevant to anyone who wants to know what all happened. I keep a box for every year of newsletters, Board packets, and so on, though since I resigned as Secretary in 2024, it is generally woefully incomplete. I trust staff is still saving everything, but Renee was my connection for that stuff and it stopped coming my way. 

I wouldn't say the project is blocked, as I hope it isn't, but it's stalled. When I stopped being welcome in the office I stopped going in to get it and it's no one's job to get it to me. Every time I try to engage with anyone about it I experience gatekeeping, control tactics, and even derision. I put together 2019, as well as I could, as that was our last really successful year and I thought the Board would value what they could learn from it. They took the opportunity to be disrespectful to me and I haven't heard from anyone who looked though it. It got tucked away under lock and key so I don't know if anyone will. There is a lot in there that would be useful to the current Board, but they have made it clear they don't want to hear from me.

Except I did occasionally get asked for things, the last one being the history of fees, a little scrap of paper I found today. So here is what I sent back to them:

The membership fee started in 1984, as a way to make money when we were $25,000 in the red and needed income. It was $5. Here's how it progressed:

1984  $5

1985 $7.50

1987 $10

1993 $15

1998  $25

1999  $30  (There is a gap in my notes until 2014 but I guess it went up to $40 in there)

2014 $50 

2023 $60

2026  $85

That's just the membership fee. The space fee started at a dollar in the beginning, went to $2 in the first two years, and when I joined in 1976 it was $3.50. I would need to look back for the percentage but what this scrap says is:

1984 $5 plus 10% with no reserve fee. We had just moved to the Park blocks in late 1982 and there was plenty of space, so we didn't need them, and I didn't fully research that part, but I know that in

1987 it was $7 plus 10% with a $10 reserve fee. Annual.

1993 4x4s were added at $3.50 plus 10%

1996 $8 plus 10%  It was raised to $10 plus 10% sometime between then and the next note I had

2016 $13 plus 10%  and $8 for a 4x4. At some point strollers started paying $5.  

I need to go look again, but it got to $15 plus 10% sometime around 2019-2020, not sure.

Now as you know in 2024 it went to $20 plus $10% 

I didn't research the progress of the reserve fee, but I do know in 2022 it was $150. It went to $200 in late 2023. This is incomplete, obviously, but it does show that we always tried to keep costs as low as possible. There was no culture of regular increases...it was based on the actual budgetary needs. Which some would argue it still is, but that would be an argument we won't be having. The excuse for raising fees is "inflation" but even at it's highest point post-pandemic, inflation was 8% and normally it is around 3%. So that was meant to be a "it's not our doing" kind of excuse. 

We do have increasing costs, all of us, and the market does too, but it is the job of the management and Board to contain those by cutting expenditures. There is some effort to do that, but we have been told a lot about so many "fixed costs." It's deceptive. The $70,000 deficit in 2024 was from overspending and not sticking to the budget. There will be another from 2025 which is not yet disclosed. We haven't heard about any cost-cutting measures, like changing staff insurance from a fully 100% paid Gold plan to some other arrangement. I know members of the Budget Committee tried to make that happen. 

I'm not here to have a full discussion of what I think could be cut. I have my opinions, but of course it is a complicated tricky process to craft a budget that will work, pay the bills, and honor our commitments. It's not my job to figure that out, but I've been in the room many times when things were weighed and calculated and hard decisions were made. That's the job of the Board, the administrator, and the members who are in the room. I'm just here to share the history. It is relevant. 

Your Voice Disappeared

 Yes, I saw that. A member asking about the fee structure on the members' group started a little discussion, to which I added some facts: In 2022 we paid $50 membership fees and $150 reserve fee. In 2023, the membership was raised to $60 (20% more) and later in the year, season reserve was raised to $200, a third more. We got the ready, willing and able membership structure, which was thoughtful in that if you wanted to pay more, you could, and many did. It preserved that affordable entry for a minute. That's still in place, but the bottom threshold is now $85. From $60 to $85 is a 42% increase. 

The post was removed overnight...which I expected, as we have all seen that the site is no longer a welcome place for discussions. There's no place to discuss your issues with having to come up with $285 minimum to start the year in a reserve space, plus that doesn't even mention the increase in the daily fee from $15 to $20 which is also a 33% increase. This is genuinely hard for people! But it isn't up for discussion. Stuff your feelings.

We will see a membership decrease. You can't make a real payment plan if you have added to that late fees, the percentage on everything you sell, and no income for the last three months. Oh, you can just sell at farmers in the rain for a minimum of $35. It looked like there were at least six members who did this past Saturday. I sincerely hope that worked out for them. It is hard to sell in the cold rain though. If you are disabled, or don't have some kind of help, setting up for 5-hour selling window is far from easy.

There is also the First Friday opportunity and the DAZ permit program for you, which costs $25 annually but does have rules. I don't know if that FSP market was open this weekend, but I presume it will be any day the farmers are there. Without the customer draw of an established market, it is likely not viable, but it's something. And the First Friday booths are free...I don't know if they require things like insurance or something.

Point is, you don't have a place to discuss this. In the beginning, the market structure was that the members, called the Saturday Market Committee, could get together and decide to overrule the Board if they wanted. As you could predict, that went away pretty early, as I recall in a quiet way without much notice. The Bylaws were rewritten to eliminate that option, as it was way too messy and it is hard to make rules with 300 people in the room, each with a vote.

It has been a long journey to this era of no opinion is wanted. Just pay your fees. And don't think being a volunteer, committee chair, or even just sitting in a meeting listening will give you any power. You will just be bypassed and marginalized if you don't go along with the company line. Decisions are made by one person and then everyone else is manipulated into going along with it. That person has no empathy for you. I hear you.

 

We Will Keep Trying

 Still working along on re-educating myself out of racism and being a child of the 1950s. I rarely read back to my previous posts but a couple of things have surfaced for me. One, on the day of my father's funeral and aftermath in May 1970, I was molested by an old man neighbor when my Mom sent me over to pick up some of his flowers he'd offered. He made it his business to envelop me in a groping hug that didn't even have the pretense of comfort. And then two men who worked with my Dad made lewd comments about what I was wearing, which was hippie clothes that didn't include a bra.I'd stopped wearing bras earlier that year, at college. I was 20, and probably seemed flirty, from the male perspective. But seriously? I had just lost my Dad. I was prey. 

I told my Mom but she was not present at the time to take over the role of protecting her four daughters, but obviously those men knew that my father was no longer in that role, and they felt empowered. it was beyond disgusting and is seared in my memory. There were other things that happened at that time but it didn't occur to me that the timing was cultural and not accidental. Women, especially young women, were prey. That cultural truth stayed constant all through those liberation movements and even our young male allies had to learn a lot to not treat us that way. Much of it is still in place, as we all know and are fighting every day to unveil right now. Not everyone is being triggered by it...just nearly all the women and half of the men. The good people are fighting. The bad people are lying. 

And we've internalized that sexism and predatory behavior, and exhibit it ourselves in subtle or overt ways, when we gang up against each other (those Mean Girls) and do that thing where instead of elevating other women to share whatever success we've had, we try to dominate them. Being evolved is not doing that anymore. It takes work, and removing ourselves from that dominating culture. Bringing each other along. Not taking away what we resent seeing in others. I used to find that in my market community but I don't find it as reliably as I once did. 

These things intersect, as we've learned. The dominant culture of whiteness lets women get into spaces only if they dress and style themselves in acceptable ways. We all feel that pressure and it's hard to resist. I just finished a memoir called The Family Outing by Jessi Hempel that brought back lots of the scenes from childhood that stuck with me like that day in 1970 did. So many scenes I don't want to relive.

In learning to be anti-racist, I have to remember those things I was taught and put them together in a new way. In my schools, (the public ones; there were no Black kids in the Catholic school) the Black kids hung out together and we assured ourselves that was their choice. They didn't want to sit with us. And I'm sure that was true, for the most part. But my sister was dating an athlete and although he was white, they often socialized with the other athletes, the best of whom were the Black kids. She got lectured by my parents and the school officials that she had to stop doing that, for purity, though they didn't use that word. They suggested that her reputation would be ruined and not only hers, but the guidance counselor told her I would not get into the college I'd applied to (Purdue) if she didn't stop being friendly to those kids. I'm pretty sure we recognized that it was a preposterous thing to say, but he was probably capable of not recommending me or some evil thing, looking back. All the adults agreed that it was not "good" for her to be that naive. We always tried to be good girls, but somehow, we never were good enough.

I have a better understanding of all of that now that almost 60 years have passed, after I found out we lived in a restricted neighborhood, after I found out there had been a lynching within a few miles of our house. The adults knew about those things, and knew that the kids didn't sit by themselves because they preferred it. They could have told us the truth, but they didn't. 

And after reading more about the settlers in Nebraska, (in another book, The Antidote by Karen Russel) which included my Mom's family, clearly the Pawnees hadn't left those lands happily by choice, as she learned as a kid and didn't question. Her family, from Poland, Austria and Czechoslovakia, were used in a war to destroy those cultures and claim their land, even though they didn't know it and were lied to. It's possible it never occurred to them, or if they questioned it, they were told lies that were easy to believe.

The deal is that people who use power over others will lie to do it. They will feel justified in doing so. And most of us just follow along in confusion and in wanting safety and acceptance. And often we let those lies go unchallenged. Not right now though.

I know I do a lot of the things racists do during their transition into better awareness. I give my credentials (I met and hung out with Huey Newton and other Black Panthers when I was in college.) It's a good story and I have a lot of kind of amazing stories from my twenties that ought to be told, maybe. They all make me feel very uncomfortable now. I was also being used and put in danger by the culture while it tried to make the huge changes toward real justice and equality, and for some of it I was willing. 

I wanted, and still do, to be one of 'the good ones." I'd grown up learning and loving the music and dances of the mid-to-late sixties when so much great art was coming out of the communities of color in my area (near Philadelphia.) I envied that rich culture and as a hippie, I stole whatever parts of it I wanted to. Most of us swore we were re-incarnated dead Indians, something deeply embarrassing to me now that I know more about native cultures. Um, no way they would want to come back as some little privileged white girl, sorry. I made jokes about the lack of culture I came from...Polack jokes were popular, and my Dad's Kentucky origins were no higher in status. We were just working class people who refused to accept our reality. We bought into the status aspirations coming at us from advertising, TV, and everywhere.

I remember two big fights I had, one with my Dad and one with my affluent roommate, about whether or not I could tell the difference between butter and margarine, and how that mattered. A very hidden metaphor in there. We were middle-class but thought we were poor, as my Dad valued his sailboat a lot more than our braces or what we needed to be acceptable. He didn't really care what other people thought,  except he really wanted to win all of those sailboat races. And sleep with those married women.

Predators. They're everywhere, and that is why we try so hard not to be them. We try hard to figure it out when we are bodying those behaviors. We try to train ourselves to stop. I remember during the pandemic, when people were getting off the sidewalks for each other, but I was also trying to train myself not to get off the sidewalk for men, something women routinely did then, still. I started getting off the sidewalk for Black men, though, once I realized that other layer. I was performing, but at least I was heading in the right direction.

Performing anti-racism is part of the transition, as we learn how to counter the programming we learned so well. Loving Black  and Native art and music and fashion and traditions and foods and cultures is good to do, when we get there in an authentic way and not as copycats, appropriators, and thieves. It takes some practice, and it's going to be awkward. I remember in my first discussions of CA and LGBTQ+ policies and practices, I insisted that women were also oppressed, so...

Well, they are, but that was not what the conversation was about right then, so that needed to be set aside. As a white woman, I was trying to center myself, as usual. I needed to be important. I didn't know how to use my power, or even that I had any. I didn't think I did. 

So even if I only do deep educating for one month a year, or when I occasionally read a new book or article, I have to keep doing it. I'm just not there yet. I don't know if I'll get to the place where I am authentically operating in justice and equality with other humans. I'll still do and say things I want to take back or apologize for, things that hurt people out of my ignorance. I'll still sit in my selfish desires to be safe and joyful while other people carry a bigger load. But I'm going to keep trying. There is so much to do, so many ways to work at it, that anything I do will help, and it gets easier. We can get better at it. We have to keep trying. 

We can't just pay more

 Here's a little thing bothering me that is a result from changes to the market schedule. I don't know if the one remaining November market has also been eliminated, which was proposed. Ending on Hallowe'en was posed as good for our customers, because it would be less confusing than some date in November. And of course taking three weeks off from their regular duties to focus on HM would be good for staff, because HM makes money, and November markets sometimes do not. 

No cost-cutting for those November markets was proposed, though it may have been discussed. I won't go to Board meetings, so while I trust that some issues are still being fully discussed at several levels before policy is changed, unless it is in the minutes, which I get a month later, I don't know if they are. But with this one, I hope someone in the room brought up some points that were not included in the proposal.

Eliminating the three markets in November eliminates our paydays, our selling opportunities as members. Sure, those days are not the best, and now some of us have the option to sell with farmers, which is not a bad opportunity, just not ours. And it gives away our community gathering function, which is a huge part of why we are successful. No one in the community has a vote on it.  

Last year, though one weekend of HM was cancelled, the price did not go down. We just paid more for less. Every remaining day got more expensive. And we all know prices do not go down, just up. I don't even want to figure out the percentage increase, which was 10% on top of the hidden fees like the corner tax. The lost weekend was not even figured into the 10%. So was it 20%? I'd have to dig through some boxes to figure it out, but I think in 2024 I paid around $1200 for 15 days, and last year, $1350 for 13 days. You can do the math. We've had many years when costs did not go up...budgets were trimmed. Budgets just have to be trimmed, every year, that's how to deal with increased costs. I know the Budget Committee tries to do that. But in 2025 we got the additional costs of a dysfunctional website and minimal promotions, which were the result of poor planning. Managing our market takes skills. 

Furthermore, people who paid a season reserve got less for their money, with one month of payment only covering one day, November first. So every other month got more expensive, a sort of hidden fee raise. But for those who paid monthly for their reserve, people who presumably couldn't pay the $200 all at once, they apparently had to pay for a full month for that one day in November, whether or not they used it, or they could have their reserve space taken away. I don't know how much they pay monthly. Two hundred divided by eight is $25 a month...so they probably pay $25. 

In a way that fixes a problem, the temptation for someone to release their reserve space early in the year, if they don't want it anymore for some reason, or want to change spaces and they have the points to do that. I'm sure it used to happen that people stopped paying their monthly reserve, when they had to find a way to reduce costs for themselves or wanted to get out of that level of membership. You can still sell without a reserved space, it's just a little harder to do. Reserving is a way to increase your ability to thrive, as you have a consistent location and a lot more time to set up, so you can bring more, and sell more. Even at $25 a month, it can be worth it, though not for everyone. 

But an adjustment needs to be made in that November cost. It just isn't fair to require members to pay for days they cannot sell. Your reserve doesn't give you any advantage if you decide to sell with the farmers...they assign you a space and you can take it or leave it. You don't get much of an advantage from them in setting up early, though you do usually know your space in advance, a few days, but they can still move you. They wanted me to move the first day I set up there, due to a mistake they made, but as I had brought a set-up specific to the space I was told I would have, and I bring my goods and set-up on a bike, I asked for that to not happen, and they allowed me to stay, but I was right next to the driveway and had to accommodate some vehicles whose drivers did not want me there. It worked out. But my point here is that selling at farmers is really not a substitute for selling at market. This year the day will end at 2:00. So instead of the six hours we get on the Park Blocks (or a little more if you can be ready before 10), you get 5 hours at farmers. And you pay a flat fee, so it is a gamble depending on your location, the weather, the football schedule, or whatever. Maybe your support system. You are not a member of LCFM, so you do not get the full benefit of membership on those days. You're kind of a guest. And you can't sell plants, or be a food booth. So not every market member can even sell over there. Your cost will be a minimum of $35, $25 to farmers and $10 to market. $10 more if you want a corner, $10 more if you want to be inside the pavilion (if that is allowed) and $10 more if you want electricity. All of the $10 charges go to market. Sure, some of it is your choice. Sometimes it works out fine. But I don't think you can cancel without paying if you don't want to sell for whatever reason...like the rain expected tomorrow. 

I know people don't actually complain about these things, they just feel lucky to even have a market space in the more competitive atmosphere, but the way it feels to members is we just continually pay more for less. We members do, as our services are cut, our fees continue to rise, and we are told that costs are fixed, that nothing can be done. Our staff is protected from those cuts. They still get paid when market is closed. They don't experience a loss in benefits. It's nice. We want them to want to work for us. But they won't have jobs if we aren't solvent, which we are not now. This will be our second year of operating in the red. Last year, $70,000 in the red. This year, we won't know until the final day of March, or whenever they decide to tell us. Quarterly financial statements won't give us any warning to engage in solutions if we have any ideas. The losses will just be taken out of savings, the money our members put away carefully over decades, so we could navigate real crises, things like earthquakes and months with no sunny days at all, or fire emergencies. Not overspending. 

The truth is that many things can be done. We all want to pay our staff a living wage, with some job security, some benefits, and some incentive to happily work on our team. We want the costs to be spread evenly and fairly among us, but we definitely need some cost savings to get through this very tough economic situation. All of our artisan costs have gone up too...our supplies and materials are higher, if we can even get them, our insurance is higher, our vehicle costs increase. Everything anyone else experiences, we do too. But when we lose selling days, our ability to make enough money is limited. We can't just raise our prices without some subsequent drop in sales. I didn't even raise prices last year but my HM income was down 15% and my Park Blocks income was down too. This year will likely see that trend continue. Shared sacrifice, at least is needed.

Our staff gets Gold level health insurance, paid 100% by market. I don't know anyone who has Gold level health insurance...I sure don't. And as an old person, my medical costs are going up without a doubt. I live a frugal life. I don't pay for any streaming services, have slow internet, don't eat at restaurants, don't order delivery food, and don't consume concert tickets. I try hard to rein in my utility costs especially in weather extremes. You won't see me getting any mani-pedies to make me feel better about what's happening in the world. Sure, most of that is my choice. I don't expect other people to be forced to make any of those changes, and I hope they don't have to, but I do expect our Market Board to make the hard choices to cut costs for us members who must struggle to make ends meet.

Most, at least many, market members are self-employed for reasons they don't have to explain to anyone. An overwhelming number of us have health issues that demand it. We can't compete in the job market and many of us have no financial security at all. If our earnings were low, our social security is low. If our health costs are high, we can quickly run our of resources. So a reserve space might be out of reach. A few bad days, with late payment penalties, can quickly put us in the category of people who have to drop their reserve spaces, not come on days when sales might be marginal (like ones with early games or iffy weather.) Or just not be able to stay members of the market.

The business incubator model is not just for new crafters starting out, it is wrapped into the model that costs for all members are kept as low as possible so everyone has a chance to thrive. It's getting so survival is also in question for some of us. Where is the safety net for our lives that we created together? When will we be priced out so other people can continue to get raises, bonuses, and top-tier benefits? That's just not a sustainable system, and it feels wrong. The Board needs to find a way to deal with that. 

We've seen it before, in the recession of the 80s. We lost members in droves and it was only by moving to the Park Blocks and creating some balance that we survived it, that and a whole lot of volunteer fundraising to cover the $25,000 in the red that our managers put us into. We had to bail ourselves out, for the future. Now, with the exodus of volunteers we're experiencing due to weaponized incompetence, we don't have those volunteers. Nobody is going to save us from ourselves. It has to be our Board, who were elected to manage our organization, who does the hard things and gets us back on our feet. 

Whatever the cost-cutting involves, it has to be done. Members cannot absorb pricing assaults from every direction. We need support from our organization. Do the hard things. For our future. For our members. That's your job.  

 

I Rarely Sleep Soundly

 Writing three days in a row is not my usual habit, but the world is at a tipping point. What will work, and what will fall?

I had a complicated dream last night about a house, which in my dream language usually represents a relationship, some person's life, but last night represented an organization, one which I have been building along with a community, for 50 years. 

This house was in the middle of a remodel, with many unfinished details, and it seemed I had just bought it and was going to have to finish it up. There were disconnected and randomly placed toilets, as the most prominent unfinished features, and you can make up your own more explicit references for toilets if you like. There was a big facade of windows looking down the hill at Eugene. It had an air of elegance from that view, but the rest of it was not really inhabitable, though there were renters in it, and I was going to be living in it while I somehow finished it up. It was a huge project, that would take me years, but I had signed up for it with my investment.

Suddenly I was in it before that remodel. It sat close to the ground, with small spaces, all on one level, no giant windows and no facade. The various occupied rooms were solid, well-built, and the tenants were happy there. There was not one thing that needed to be rebuilt or fixed. But there I was, looking through it, ready to tell the tenants about their futures. 

I knew I wasn't going to kick them out, and I didn't feel like I was going to do any remodeling. I was going to live in it as it was, maybe with some small improvements, maybe. I knew what was going to happen, though, having just bought it in its future form. (time is generally fluid in dreams, of course.)

It had lovely gardens, nice inside details, working toilets where they were supposed to be, everything just fine. 

And that was basically the dream. I felt that I would stay in that recent past, and didn't need the facade, the big dominating windows over the city, the multi-thousands of dollars of cosmetic, status-seeking improvements. I preferred the solid, practical life it was already living. I could even accept those roommates, who all seemed like good humans with good pets.

So can you understand the metaphor? Do you already know that new is not better? It might be, but that is not a guarantee.

I recently learned, not in a direct way, that the city is planning to reboot the Park Blocks redesign this year. I haven't heard anything as a member about that, but I do know a lot about how it works. They got the design to its final form in 2019, with all the required public engagement, with all of our negotiating for the things we felt were essential. We even got them to agree not to displace us but to do the work in our offseason. I never actually thought that was an assurance they would keep, because it would be a lot more expensive, and it is too short of a timeframe to do the kinds of things they wanted to do, but they claimed they would. However as we saw, the farmers were displaced for two seasons and came back to something completely different. 

I'm not necessarily against the remodel. having worked for several years on the last process, I feel that there are parts of the Park Blocks that have not been properly maintained, and that the city has lost interest in maintaining, like the fountain, which is not really the type of fountain that is safely useful these days. The original redesign shows a splashpad kind of thing, which we would turn off on Saturdays and put our booths on top of, a dubious situation but it took up a lot of my west block neighborhood and we would have to use that space, as we couldn't afford to lose it. So we'd be sacrificing our microclimate of coolness that comes from the water, but there didn't seem to be a better way to preserve that. 

We were gonna get hotter, and some trees would be lost as well, but that was just one of the ways we would have to adapt. I fought for quite a few of the individual trees, and there is even a map showing each one. We hung identifying signs on some of them so people would realize their value to us, but there are some, like the beautiful American Elm and Locust trees around the stage, and what we call Teresa's tree, a weak maple, and a lot of the ones around the perimeter that were going to go. Some are already gone, replaced or not. They said they would be planting for a more sustainable future and of course, as a city, they have to stay out in front of liability issues from things such as trees. And we would lose the hated deck, which never fit well into the park, and we would get a more useful and better stage and a bigger food court. 

But we carefully rejected a LOT of what they wanted to do. The first map eliminated my booth and my neighborhood and had seating and boulders everywhere. I was shocked and silent when I saw it, but my team encouraged me to let them know how I, as a sample member, would feel about that. I cried at them, couldn't help it. I told them how we earn our spaces with years of effort, and how each one fits our specific needs and that's why we chose it, all the things. It wasn't about me, and as a member of the team, I was willing to take the hit for the members, but they needed to know all about it, and the rest of the team felt they had done it on purpose to find out how we would react. 

They used consultants from New York to "bring us along" into their vision and we had a 15-member team to meet with them and tell they how we had used the space for 35 years, in the beginning. They sent us a straight-rows map that displaced everyone. We told them how our customers like to wander, how it slows them down, mapped our traffic patterns. You can go look at the 6 notebooks and portfolios that document the process in our archives. I saved everything. I even showed it to the current DT manager and made sure he knew that we were educated about their processes, cared a lot about them, and our preservation, and planned to stay involved. 

My role was the member liaison, answering the specific questions everyone had, assuring the members we could do it, that we were fighting for them in every meeting and sending weekly emails about what was happening or going to happen next. The GMs during those years welcomed me and consulted me about every part, along with the other member on the team. It was extremely collaborative, and I think I had the trust of the members. I thought that with this trust, we could get through it and remain an intact community so we could get the benefits.

Then, as you know, the pandemic happened, there wasn't enough money for the whole project, the World Games (a big part of their motivation) got put off a year, and they made the Riverfront the downtown location they needed instead of us. They put our $11 million into finishing the farmers' block, which was kind of a relief. And our administration changed from someone who knew how to collaborate into someone who knew only how to manipulate. 

I was carefully disenfranchised from the process of interacting with the city until I dissolved the Downtown Developments Task Force and gave up trying to be included. I gave up monitoring the City Council and the Development department and the Planning Commission and the City budget. The Stormwater catchment process was bungled and we lost 10 spaces, the street was remodeled and the process of adjusting the remapping became the work of two people even though ten of us showed up to see that our opinions and ideas would not be important, and the pandemic forced a ton of changes in location for a lot of members until it became a change in our culture. 

The point system was routinely bypassed for "reasons" and the members lost the conviction that when changes happen, our needs would be honored. The coverings disappeared with no accommodations for the members affected, as I had insisted upon when the deck changed people's experience with their reserved spaces. We submitted to the concept that one or a few would be autocratically in charge  and if you didn't like it, you could accommodate or leave. Or...get trashed for your "negative complaining."

And that is where we are, mostly unaware and not included in the planning that is now happening. If the members are being fully represented, I'm not hearing about it. It hasn't been in any minutes or Town Hall transcriptions and I would venture to say that a minimal number of members are toeing the company line right now, judging by the protest election totals (many of us did not vote for the first time in our history, as we saw it being managed inappropriately for a specific outcome.) 

We can expect to be manipulated through the process and lied to about the benefits, just as we have been about the HM map, the parking ridiculousness and the website. We don't expect to be treated with honesty and respect anymore. 

There are disconnected toilets and big, window-filled facades, in our reality. Unlike in dreams, we can't magically drop back in time to an un-remodeled solidity. How will we navigate this, this year, in the middle of protest central and the threats of repression, economic recession, and unacceptable extra costs? 

The relationships I built with the city representatives, the architects, and the power structure of the city are gone. Is the market still beloved? Let's hope so. Clearly that will not be enough. We have to be understood, we have to be articulate about our needs, we have to be led with vision and integrity, and we have to be together.  

I'm just one of the tenants now, waiting for my eviction notice. I don't know a single person who will be free to fight for me. Staff clearly showed me that they will join in bullying me and my reputation as a leader has been attacked and destroyed. I do not think I am going to be able to be much help. 

I have this little tiny platform, and my intact ability to recognize patterns and speak about them here. I have my vast amount of knowledge which has been dismissed. I hope that is going to be enough to support somehow, the people who will fight for us and our specific needs.

I still have some faith. I know many of our members are good, generous and compassionate people. But we are weak, divided, and soon to be broke for the second year in a row, propped up by excuses. I do not think it is going to be enough to save us from what is on our plates. We will need our best minds working together. And we will need real, dynamic and skilled leadership. With capacity. And compassion. And integrity. And trust.  

 

Exploitation hurts everyone

 Sure, yesterday's post was mighty serious...I've been sticking to the microcosm for the most part since what's happening in the macrocosm is so fucking vile that it's extremely painful to see the images, read the stories, and know that nearly all of it is true, and yet hardly touches the actual reality. For everyone, and of course, for women and men who have had bits and pieces of similarly culturally vile experiences in their youth, or in some ways throughout their lives. I'm not going there with my history, just because I've processed it endlessly already and "it wasn't bad" compared to what we're now trying to address.

Like racism, sexism and exploitation hurts everyone and that's another thing that gets a wink and nod when it happens in "polite societies" like ours. But our microcosm is not free of these exploitations and  crimes and you can ask nearly anyone about what they've seen and heard. It is rarely addressed. 

We have not yet gotten to the point of not blaming the victims. When you look at a festival of excess like the one we (some of us) call "essential" you can see that it is untouchable and efforts generally only go so far as patching things over so they won't seem too scandalous and prevent others from attending. But we've all heard about men to avoid, ways to protect your kids, legendary spaces used for sexual crimes, and I have heard actual discovery of trafficking that was enough to make many people leave. Not addressed. Yes it is hard to address. 

There are people in our community that love telling disgusting jokes, and men who have secret names among young women who have experienced harassment. I know several women who could testify to this. I've seen the tolerance and I've seen shameless flirtations designed to get favoritism that have, sometimes, worked.

The one place I have felt safe about zero tolerance for inappropriate behavior is the sauna...because I know the staff there and the policies in place. I've lodged a complaint and seen the man removed. Of course there will be some things that go unseen, but you'd be surprised by how many people there are on staff there watching and looking for transgressions, and then following through. Still, many young people will not go there and will not go to the event at all, and plenty of careful parents and small communities who protect and intervene.

I myself have intervened at times when something is sexualized that shouldn't be. Like calling a first-time seller or attendee a "virgin." I tend to jump right on that one, directly if possible or indirectly if I'm not close enough to it. Everyone deserves to feel safe. I stop some people from sharing jokes with me...they're not funny. 

Sexism is tough to identify and address, but this is the time. Let's change the culture on that right now, today. It's not harmless fun, and everyone knows that. We have lots of Bill Clintons and others and the whole consent issue has faded from importance somehow. I do think our kids are doing better than my generation with it all, but there has been regression, and all of this disclosure about these people in the files ought to result in changed behaviors all the way down to the most minor of transgressions. 

There are plenty of good, respectful people who do not think these minor transgressions are funny or excusable, and I see those good people all the time. Safety demands it. Let's work harder at it. Let's all speak up more and make sure the culture does change. Permanently.  

We know thousands of people have been trafficked from these prisons and concentration camps and that has to be exposed and stopped. Do the big things, and all of us, do the small things too. We can't be well when we are not safe.  

History Lessons

 Sadly, I don't want to write about personal things here now that I know there are people who will absolutely use them against me, which I used to be somewhat braver about. My bravery responds to danger...or shall we say my body does, and after many risky times in my life I have learned that I have to listen to that body, as the costs grow with every episode. If I want to stick around long enough in this body to see some restoration of rights, I'm going to have to work at it and protect myself.

I'm kind of happy to see how much people are learning to extend their understanding of White Supremacist Culture to include the ways people have been included in its reach, specifically right now white children, and white women. It's easy to see that white women have upheld it more strongly even than many white men...we've benefited from it, at least until we didn't. It took me personally a long, long time to find my work and the ways it had permeated my thinking. I had the privilege of taking my time.

The 15 tenets have been a good tool, as I argued with them and heard me using them in my life to justify my actions. The ones like Worship of the written word, Objectivity, and especially Individualism have taken me forever to see and stop trying to prove wrong. I don't trust help and don't want help and think I can do everything without help, which of course is actually another one, Defensiveness, and Only One Right Way, and truly all of the tenets bleed into each other, because it is a system, a way of being in the world, that is hard to examine when you don't have the time (Sense of Urgency) to pull out of survival and work more deeply than usual on your thinking and your assumptions. So I generally immerse as much as possible in Black History Month since so many resources are being made available during February. I read a lot. I read a lot of substacks, essays and watch a lot of posts on FB, which keeps me from throwing out FB though I want to, often. 

I settled for blocking a whole bunch of people and if you want to "friend" me and those people are in our mutuals, I'm not gonna respond. I sense a motive in there that is not just wanting to get to know me. I'm such an introvert (and do so much self-protection) that reading even disturbing material is easier for me than RL relationships, and right now reading and watching PBS is about all I'm doing. I'm glad I can type, but I can't do any work for a couple more weeks and that is really hard for me. 

I'm a worker. It's an addiction I can admit, but one that keeps me soothed in this era where the veils of "everything is fine" are shredded and we all have a long way to go before we will feel safe again, in so many ways. It is great that WSC is getting exposed, that white people are getting used to the idea that we actually are not benefiting from it, never have, and our main job right now is to quit enabling and promoting it. And do what we can to destroy it.

My parents signed a deed for our house in 1955 that had a covenant in it, and while I felt safe in our neighborhood, I had no knowledge that we were "protected" by that. We had scary people, in my case a dark Italian young man who just terrified me though I don't think he actually ever did anything to me. He threw something at one of my sisters once but I am sure now that we were all just playing with sharp sticks we shouldn't have been and it was an accident. We played lots of Cowboys and Indians back then and he was no doubt one of the people chasing the white women. I remember being tied to a tree and escaping so I also have no doubt that I was some kind of Annie Oakley character. But anyway, it was the 50s and these things were deeply embedded in us with the early days of TV, westerns and shows about Roy Rogers and Dale Evans and all kinds of romantic dramas where all the good guys wore the white hats. Symbols were so clear in those days, even though what stood behind them was still obfuscated.

We knew a lot of Italian people and Catholics but no Jewish people, to my knowledge, and as it turned out my Mom was not all that racist, but my Dad was from Kentucky and he was not hiding his racist leanings. I remember him complaining that he was supporting a Black family with his taxes, at the same time as my Mom hired a Black "Cleaning Lady" who we treated with disrespect without even knowing we were doing it. I'm sad she had to clean up after me, as I was a really messy little scientist who collected bones and feathers and did not care who was offended. After a certain point I got my own room because none of my sisters liked my style. But yeah, we have a photo of my Dad with a soapbox racer he built and it has a KKK symbol painted on it. That was around 1930 maybe, but when my brother pointed it out a few years ago, I was all "No, that must mean he wanted it to look like an ambulance..." Nope. Part of why he exited in 1970 was that he didn't like the way society was changing and taking his daughters with it. We were hippies (my older sister and I) to a degree, and we were in college and my roommate at the time was the daughter of a prominent law family who was defending the Chicago Eight. She was the first Jewish person I got to know and because I was 20, my understanding of everything was minimal, but I at least could tell who was promoting equality and justice and who wasn't. We were in the streets and having lunch with Black Panthers but when I look back at myself, I was so white and innocent and in need of protection I know I embarrassed myself daily with these good people. I did not really get so many things, and took in a lot of damage from my Dad, his culture and his own damage that I'll never really get out from under. Life isn't long enough for that. So I have a bit of a Sense of Urgency going on. But I still try to look at and think about those 15 tenets every day. And by now I have learned that WSC and the KKK also hated Catholics, Italians, and the Jewish people. Everybody but themselves, basically. 

Once in awhile I inadvertently do something right, but it's not significant in this fight we are all in now. Hippies got some things right, but in a superior way, and hippie men were mostly just as sexist as the rest of the culture. Still, to be in my twenties and thirties during many of the liberation movements at the time helped me at least develop some critical thinking skills that are useful every day. 

So every year about this time I watch and rewatch a lot of documentaries and try to learn all of the new things presented from history, which generally have that "oh, what?" feeling attached. I try not to shame myself too much for what I had to learn and still do, and I try to find ways to make reparations within my ability to do so. It's always complicated by my trauma and my imperfect efforts to manage that, and it really can be exhausting. But I am not going to be a white woman who echoes "I'm tired."

I do not know how so many people survived to this day with what this WSC culture did to the world, is doing, and will do. I listen to every word from Henry Louis Gates and read Stacey Patton and our local educator Kokayi Nosakhere, just a few of the many, many people who are articulating things for us as we drag our feet and take our time. I don't always get it, but I keep my damn mouth shut until I do. 

And I call it out when I see it. Marginalization in our microcosm is alive and well. We have a ton of WSC going on in our current little power structure, and you can easily apply many of those 15 tenets to what has been happening. Cultural appropriation is supported, we never make any statements in political crises (except don't bring your politics into our commerce,) and while I tried to speak to the Board about equity a few years back, I was cut off (for taking more than a "moment") and my efforts were then used to oppress people in a perverted use of the concept, to make new rules with no exceptions no matter what that meant for people who needed accommodations. Many of our current policies are based in this reverse equity that, along with gatekeeping and obfuscation, insures that people in power are supported and those without it are driven away. It's covert, as most types of oppression have traditionally been until recently when some bandages are being torn off. Not in our microcosm though, where is it just business as usual. Pretense. 

We used to spend a lot of time crafting solutions to address needs and carefully making inclusive rules that allowed for diverse circumstances. You won't see that happening with this admin. You will comply or else with this power structure. And members are walking away. There is not one intact committee at this point, and no one points out why. Instead of a members' bill of rights we get no access to our fellow members (I no longer get the packet with all the emails, as I am not encouraged to contact any fellow members.) People are encouraged to join committees but if you are captured, your good intentions will find you doing the work of paid staff without the benefits of payment. Actually the benefits now are negative. Toe the company line or you will be pushed out or even attacked. You've tried not to see it.

In a healthy membership organization people are happy to serve, the work is fairly distributed with people's capability in mind, and their contributions are honored. We left that territory in 2023, after erosion for the previous five or so years. Some people experienced that health, so they were unable to see and believe that others were not experiencing it. Same situation now. Until it happens to you, you just can't, or won't see it. And when it happens to you, you are shocked, look around for justice, and realize we didn't think we lost that. We had trust. But trust can be perverted. We had honesty. Now we have lies.

But in this time of great awakening and diligent witnessing and a different type of honesty being demanded in the world, our microcosm is still sadly behind the times and not even participating in the times. This economic crisis is not resulting in the strengthening of our safety net, the one we created together, dedicated our lives to, and thought we made strong and durable enough to handle whatever came along. We just didn't think it would be sabotaged. We just didn't think hard enough about what we needed to do when things got this hard. 

And now the good people have walked away and all the jobs are "too hard." The solution is simple but it's not happening. Everything is great. 

Sorry, sugar coatings are not going to happen anymore. Better get used to it. Standing next to a predator does not make you safe. Eventually they will turn to you.