by Various
It had only been a few days since we’d last been to Oakland, but things had sure changed in the interim. The worst-hit sites were now partitioned off with hurricane fencing bearing day-glo orange WARNING ribbons. When we’d left there’d been ad-hoc tables and tents with a mix of medics, chowlines, and all-purpose chill-out zones where there was WiFi, power outlets, and a mixture of donated clothes, toys, and furniture. Now there were two camps, and they couldn’t have been more different.
On one side, in what had once been a parkette between two tall housing projects, there was the FEMA camp, where shuffling lines of people queued for hours to talk to various people sitting behind desks in smart, official-looking tents. On the other side, where there had once been a couple of basketball courts, was the Occupy Seneca operation, which was a lot less, um, official. Instead of burly guys in matching raincoats with FEMA and OPD in big reflective sans-serif letters on the back, the Occupy side was a patchwork quilt of people in outdoorsy high-tech nylon stuff, Army surplus ponchos, improvised rainwear made out of heavy nylon shopping bags, and a guy in a huge, trailing coat that seemed to have been improvised from part of a giant, screen-printed vinyl advertisement—maybe a billboard or a banner that had come down with the quake. All the colors of the rainbow were there, but they were all desaturated and waterlogged by the driving rain. They were working out of a set of yurts, camping tents, jerry-rigged shelters, and lean-tos. Kids ran around between these shelters, not caring about the mud spattering up their legs and covering them to the waists. It was warmer on this side of the bay, the kind of freak weather we’d been getting more and more frequently. With the rain and the mud, it gave the whole thing the feeling of a jungle.
We waded into the Occupy camp. An older African American woman, maybe my mother’s age, smiled and said hello.
“Hi there,” I said. “Um, we wanted to help out, okay?” I felt weirdly tongue-tied. When we’d gone from the airport shuttle-bus to the wreckages, we’d been doing what needed to be done. Now it felt like we’d come from Away to Provide Aid, which was a bit weird, even though Away in this case was just across the Bay.
“My name’s Esther,” the woman said. “What’s yours?”
Ange stuck her hand out. “Ange,” she said. “And Marcus.” She pointed at me. We shook all round, solemnly.
Esther looked us up and down. “All right,” she said. “what can you do?”
I opened my mouth, and then closed it. What could I do? Whatever it took, right? That’s what I’d been doing in that long-ago time, a couple days back.
“We were coming in from Oakland Airport when Seneca hit. We spent a week digging and helping out on this side, then went home to San Francisco a couple days ago to see our folks and rest up. Now we’re back to help out however we can.” If I’d said it, it would have sounded all defensive and boastful, but when Ange said it, it just sounded like a statement of fact. I was a lucky, lucky guy.
Esther nodded. “Not much of that now, thankfully. Everyone’s accounted for, one way or another, and now that they’re here, we can’t even go into our homes to get our things.” She cut her eyes toward the FEMA camp and gave a minute shake of her head. “But that was the easy part, as I’m sure you understand. Now we’re figuring out where everyone’s going to live, what they’re going to eat, where they’re going to go to school—” She waved her hands at the tents. “The real work. The hard work.”
I opened my mouth and closed it again. I hadn’t really thought this far. What would you do after the digging in the rubble part was over? I felt remarkably useless. I wasn’t a carpenter. I couldn’t build a house. I wasn’t a lawyer, I couldn’t sue to make the City of Oakland provide housing. I wasn’t a teacher, I couldn’t run a classroom for these kids. What was I really good for, when it was all said and done?
Ange, though, didn’t seem to share my anxiety. “We’re here to work with you however we can. We’re all in this together, right? Neither of us have a job. Neither of us can afford a place to live. We’re one earthquake away from living in a tent. So what do we do to start doing something?”
Esther grinned and clapped. “I could hug you. ‘What do we do to start doing something?’ That’s the question, isn’t it? Let’s see what we can find for you.”
Thus began the second phase of our lives in Oakland after Seneca: I washed dishes and then I carried the dishwater a whole block to the nearest working sewer. I helped organize piles of donated furniture and clothes. I rehabilitated a hexayurt made from chipboard that had been assembled and disassembled so many times that it had gone crumbly around the edges and needed to be reinforced with strips of 1x4 lumber I cut with a handsaw, giving myself a nasty scratch or two. One of the medics checked me out and made me text my mom and make sure my tetanus shot was up to date.
Then someone stuck a duct-taped laptop in front of me and told me to start going through a bunch of random files where people had listed clothes and furniture needs, descriptions of lost heirlooms, offers of places to sleep, offers of donated labor, and a million other details, and asked me if I could make sense of them. Four hours later, I was reinstalling the laptop’s crashy operating system, and that was probably the moment that cemented my destiny as Occupy Seneca’s IT drone.
Here’s where the movie of my life will feature a montage of me fixing computers, making the WiFi work, putting together a simple database program where all the different needs and offers could be listed. A woman from Craigslist emailed me and offered to set up an interchange so that people could post offers and requests to either the Occupy Seneca site or Craigslist’s Seneca forum and the two would synch up automatically, so I spent a couple days getting that to work.
Once word got around that there was someone at Occupy Seneca who’d get old computers running again and find them a good home, the semi-busted machines came out by the dumpsterload. It got so that I had to recruit a couple more volunteers to help with the work, and one of them, Kadisha, had the excellent idea of immediately wiping the hard-drives of any machines that came in, because none of us wanted to be responsible for whatever data people stupidly entrusted to us. Weirdly, that got us mentioned on a bunch of cable news shows and went national, and the next thing we knew, we were practically drowning in PCs. Luckily we also got tons of volunteers who were willing to put them together, too, and before long, a whole section of Occupy Seneca was just devoted to teaching people to put together their own computers or picking up computers someone else had put together. Pretty much anyone who wanted a computer could get one just by walking in and taking one off a stack. Some of the kids I had working with me were crazy about it, tried to see how many machines they could do in a day. One guy, Thien, managed 21 working, tested machines in one day, working on them in batches of seven. By the last batch, we’d all stopped work to watch him dash from one machine to the next, swapping in parts from huge plastic tubs full of stuff he’d looted from unsalvageable machines. When he finished, we cheered loud enough to bring the whole camp running, to find Occupy’s nerd squad surrounding Thien’s prone form, fanning him with hankies and bandannas and plying him with my special brew coffee: dark and fragrant as licorice.
Why all the PCs? Because they were the lifeblood of Occupy Seneca. A couple years before, Occupy had been a place: a camp with a bunch of tents where people drummed and protested and, well, hung out.
Occupy Seneca was an activity. We weren’t there for disaster relief. We were there for mutual aid, like it said on the banners and t-shirts and stenciled on the PCs we built. Some of us had jobs. Some of us didn’t. Some of us were homeless because we’d lost our houses to Seneca. Some of us were homeless because we were homeless. Some of us weren’t homeless. Some of us were on drugs. Some of us were straightedge. What had started as a weird mix of crustypunks, project kids, sixties throwbacks and random junkies had turned into something more like a cross-section of Bay Area humanity, like someone took an N-Judah car at rush-hour and upended it at a semi-random, semi-destroyed spot in Oakland.
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The thing that bound us all together was the realization that taking care of each other kicked ass. Seneca had knocked a ton of local businesses flat, literally and figuratively, and it had left plenty of people without schools, homes and jobs. But that was just an accelerated version of what had been happening to this part of the east bay—and across America—for years. Pretty much everyone I knew was either out of work or only half-employedd, from my parents to all the kids I went to school with.
But we were Americans. By global standards we were rich. Not with money, but with stuff. The economy had tanked, the spreadsheets said that there was no more value left, no reason to put people to work making things and selling thing because no one wanted to buy them because no one was being put to work making things and selling things. Lather, rinse, repeat. But everyone I knew wanted to work, and everyone I knew wanted to buy stuff, and so clearly it was time to stop listening to the spreadsheets.
Instead, we listened to the database. While the politicians were pounding the podium about finding housing for Seneca’s victims, we were taking a page from AirBnB’s book and building tools to help people find neighbors who could take them in. We even found people—qualified teachers!—who wanted come down and give lessons to kids whose schools had been shut due to structural damage and hadn’t been assigned a new school yet. I’d grown up with online communities, places where the conversation was great but you never got to meet the people you were talking to. And I’d grown up with real-world communities, the people around me, my neighbors, friends and family. But with Occupy Seneca, it felt like we’d finally married them. When online discussions got too heated, someone would always suggest meeting up on one of the sofas at Occupy and talking it out face to face. When face to face discussions seemed to be going in circles, we’d take them online. It was the best of both world. Maybe the best of all worlds.
So, of course, it wouldn’t and couldn’t last.
Afterward, the Oakland PD swore that they’d given notice to vacate, “working peaceably with the Occupy Seneca leadership to ensure a smooth transition.” Only one problem: we didn’t have leaders, we had online forums, and no one ever from Oakland PD ever posted there openly. Maybe they had undercovers on the message boards. It was pretty obvious, later on, that they’d had them in the camp, probably from the start.
Also, “a smooth transition?” To what? After the midnight bullhorns and the shouts and barked orders, they threw up a fence around Occupy Seneca, a fence with a gate that admitted a bulldozer that smashed the whole thing in ten seconds flat. Yes, flat. Our gaily decorated tent-city, with its donated porta-sans, its computer workshops, its meeting areas and shades and kitchens and safe spaces—all of it pancaked in an eyeblink, shoved rudely into a giant, undifferentiated pile of belongings and projects and work and love that was now just junk. Maybe that’s what they meant by a “smooth” transition, because when it was over, the ground certainly was smooth. They’d turned our camp into a “smooth transition” to precisely nothing
Some people refused to budge when the cops announced that we had five minutes to vacate. Those people went to jail. The rest of us—a skeleton crew of people who were spending the night in the camp, maybe a tenth of the people you’d find at morning rush-hour, when everyone came by for hot breakfasts and my totally, utterly amazing coffee—stood miserably in the ruddy dawn and watched them destroy everything we cared about and worked for in less time than it takes to describe it. Then we watched the cars with our friends in them drive away to jail. Then we raised bail and called lawyers and uploaded videos and made as big a stink as we could.
Everyone was suitably outraged, of course, but not enough to, you know, do anything about it. We kept things going as much as we could: after all, we were online, so who needed to actually physically see each other anyway?
Us, as it turned out. So much of what had made Occupy Seneca work was in the place. A place where we could meet, where kids could be brought for classes. Where we could look each other in the eyeballs and solve our differences. A place where you could get a free computer, or learn to build a computer out of garbage. A place to keep garbage from which to build computers, along with a million other kinds of donated stuff that was carefully cataloged and available to anyone rebuilding their lives to get along.
Occupy Seneca had been the physical embodiment of mutual aid. It didn’t matter if the disaster that clobbered you was an earthquake, the economy, your deadbeat ex-husband, or something weird with your own brain chemistry, we were all there to help each other get through it all. When I told my parents about it, my Mom told me it reminded her of the stories her own mum had told her about living through the Blitz in London, everyone helping everyone else get on with things. Mom and Dad had even been down a couple times, and they’d helped cook meals and then hung out in the evening to talk with the rest of the Occupiers until late.
We’d felt so resilient, but losing out place smashed us flat. Goddamn them, why? All we were doing was helping.
It didn’t take long to learn exactly how and why Occupy Seneca got “smoothly transitioned.” Say what you will about the City of Oakland, it leaked like a sieve. Less than two days after the eviction, I was just about to head out to a contract job when my phone went crazy with DMs on Twitter. I checked in and saw that half the world wanted me to look at a paste-dump from one of the Anon factions: correspondence between various levels of Oakland city government, FEMA, and Oakland PD, the upshot of which was that a private contractor had successfully bid on the megacontract to begin a “renew and rebuild” project for Oakland. A separate thread suggested that the total value of the bid might run to the billions, if they met all their milestones and leveled up by winning the bids to knock down and rebuild all the housing projects that had been damaged by Seneca. Somehow, there was plenty of money for that. Then there was the smoking gun: a three-way round-robin between the city manager’s office, Oakland PD, and the contractor’s PR people, about how much of an eyesore Occupy Seneca was, and how getting us out of there before we became a “permanent, established presence” was a “top priority.”
My first reaction wasn’t anger. It was, “When the hell are these idiots going to start encrypting their email?” I mean, seriously. Here we were, living in the age of the leak, a time when even the goddamned Director of the CIA gets his email splashed all over the newspaper, and these dorks couldn’t be bothered to download a copy of GNU Privacy Guard and generate a keypair. Of course, they’d probably pick “password123!” as their passphrase, so whatever.
But that was only reflex, the reaction I always got when I heard about what a total derpfest computers were for the people who were supposedly in charge of the whole show. It passed quickly, and left behind a kind of cold fury. They’d destroyed everything we’d built, the thing that had given us hope, because they didn’t like the appearance of a disorganized camp of people helping each other out.
The thing became actual news a couple if hours later, when the same cable news show that had covered our little build-a-PC project called me up and asked me if I’d come down and talk about what had become of it all. I said yes, though I hated doing this sort of thing, and then they announced that they wanted me at their studio downtown in, like, fifteen minutes. It was one of those rent-a-studio places with a bunch of small, spotlit black rooms with a camera and a monitor and an engineer, where you’d go and sit on a stool and talk back to a face on a screen, some cable newsdroid in a distant city like Atlanta or New York. I’d done it twice before and both times it had felt absolutely and totally weird. There was a little table with a vanity mirror and a spotlight and half-dried-up pots of makeup and concealer, but no makeup artist. So apparently there was a sort of person for whom this was all normal, someone who’d just show up in a black box, apply makeup, and then talk to a mystery face on a screen as naturally as you’d talk to someone over the breakfast table. I wasn’t that kind of person. I couldn’t even imagine being that kind of person.
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�d had me rush like a crazy person to the studio, but once I got there, I had to wait in that weird black room for two and a half hours, because other stuff that was more important kept coming up and they couldn’t spare a news anchor to interview me. I’d planned on this, based on past experience, so I had my laptop with me, and I was just able to get Internet through my phone, so I tethered up and read the Occupy forums in slow motion. I kept getting fed up with the drip-feed network access and I’d close the lid and just sit there for a while, until I got bored enough that experimenting with the makeup started to seem like a good idea, then I’d get back to the net. Eventually the voice in my headphone said, “Marcus, they’re ready for you now,” and I found myself suddenly, inexplicably in tears. They welled up without warning, and I swallowed hard three times, swiped at my face savagely with the back of my hand, and told the nice newsdroid about what they’d done to the place I loved, trying my best to pretend that there weren’t tears slipping silently down my face while I spoke.
I got outside and wiped at my eyes over and over again until they stopped watering. I felt shaky as I walked down Market Street. I stopped in my tracks when I realized that my traitorous feet had walked me directly to the spot from which I had been kidnapped by the DHS after the bombing of the Bay Bridge. It was a spot of power for me, the place where it had all started, the place where everything changed for me forever.
Of all the ways that my life changed that day, the most profound was the understanding that when things got too screwed up, I couldn’t, shouldn’t and wouldn’t just suck it up or shrug it off. I would do something.
As usual, I was the last person to figure out what the rest of the world had already realized. Occupy Seneca was worth fighting for. By the time I checked my phone and got back on the feeds, it was already full of pictures of the crowds massing at the site of the former Occupy camp. I called Ange and got sent straight to voicemail, four times in a row. I sent a text and it bounced. Sent an email, and my heart thudded. Ange would have seen this kicking off, would have tried to call me while I was out, gotten sent straight to voicemail after I parked my phone to keep it from b0rking the studio gear. And she would have headed straight over, figuring correctly that I was a big boy and would see what was going on and get there when I could. Which meant I needed to get back to the ferry docks, right now. I spun around, stuck my phone in my pocket, and starting jog-walking toward Embarcadero. After five minutes, I started to run.
